The Lotus' Chat : Silence

"A lecturer called one of his new students and asked, 'Why is your paper completely blank?'

With a straight face, the student responded, 'Sometimes, Silence is the best answer!'"

"And getting here, getting hither, here I am again," Lotus carried on, "still, sitting cross-legged on the pond, waiting for the Moon, who hasn't arrived. I can see clearly from here, out there, some men, who were bare-chested, wearing black pants, covered in black and white checkered cloth up to their knees, had just finished performing the amazing wild Kecak, 'Monkey dance', a chattering male chorus 'cak cak cak'. From here I can see, the White Monkey is crossing the embers.

The modern form of kecak, now seen by virtually every tourist. A smaller version of the hissing, chattering male chorus had previously been part of a ritual purification dance form known as sanghyang. In 1931, Walter Spies was serving as technical advisor for Island of the Demons, a German-made film about a village threatened with destruction by Rangda, the witch. Together with Wayan Limbak, an artist, they had the idea of expanding the kecak chorus and combining it with a plot drawn from the Ramayana, creating what is now the standard version. The result was a purely secular dance quite different from anything in the previous Balinese repertory. As I have seen, kecak was also being incorporated into janger dancing.

When the performance was over, and even though Noise could not disappear completely, or although several surveyors may conceal the truth, Silence is still wanting to share. Always ringing in my mind, the words of the Divine, 'Do your standing and prostating, in the last-third part of the night, because I will come.'

When Silence arrived, she became an antidote to worries. Worry, of course, has long been critical to our survival, says R. Reid Wilson. Our cavemen ancestors who took leisurely strolls down by the stream, enjoying the pleasures of a beautiful fall morning, were eaten by the saber-toothed tigers—not dinosaurs, 'cause they were mainly vegetarians. Their genes were lost. Our paranoid, 'there could be danger around any corner', 'defender of the family tribe' ancestors lived to procreate, passing on to us that ever-present protective mode of worry.

Wilson then suggests that some degree of worry is actually good for us, for it can help jump-start us out of our denial, and it can drive us to prioritize our tasks. Most important, worry is designed to be an initial response, as Step One in the problem-solving process. It should initiate our efforts to find solutions by triggering our analytic process: evaluating the current situation, generating response options, choosing among them, selecting one, and then implementing it. When this progression works well, we get to conclude our analysis with a message like, 'I’m worried about finishing this project, and now I’m going to take action. This is how I’m going to get it done—here’s my plan.' See, that’s the usefulness of worry.

What happens if we don’t place our worries within the problem-solving process? When we start paying a high emotional cost for unnecessary worry, and when our worries pop up in our minds too frequently, then those thoughts hurt us. Worry leads to anxiety. The more we worry, the more anxious we will become, whether it’s about family, financial issues, work or school, or illness. If we don’t address this type of worry and find ways to control it, we will continue to be anxious.

And worry will absolutely inhibit our performance. During any project, we should focus our attention on the task. But when our attention keeps getting redirected toward unhelpful worry, we become selfabsorbed. 'How will I do? What if I fail? That will be too painful for me. Must avoid failure!' These are compelling thoughts, and anyone would have trouble disengaging from them.

The world is getting louder, because emergency vehicles have to be loud enough to break through the surrounding din, the volume of their sirens is a good proxy for the loudness of the overall environment. We know; it’s cliché to muse about the loudness of life. We imagine that people have always expressed the same exasperation.

Emily Thompson looked to early Buddhist texts that describe how noisy life could be in a big city in South Asia circa 500 BCE. She describes 'elephants, horses, chariots, drums, tabors, lutes, song, cymbals, gongs, and people crying ‘Eat ye, and drink!' In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the deities grew so tired of the noise of humanity that they sent a great flood to wipe us all out. Just over a century ago, J. H. Girdner cataloged 'The Plague of City Noises,' including horse-drawn vehicles, peddlers, musicians, animals, and bells. If there’s such a thing as a perennial grumble, noisiness might be it.

And yet something right now is different from at any time in known history. These days, it’s not just loud. There’s an unprecedented mass proliferation of mental stimulation.

All things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at various frequencies, says Tam Hunt. Ultimately, all matter is just vibrations of various underlying fields.

Everything in life is vibration.” So goes the pithy and poignant, though possibly apocryphal, Albert Einstein quotation. Whether or not the master said it, the frontiers of modern physical sciences are showing the statement to be true. Which raises a question: If this is the nature of reality, can anything be perfectly still? Is there even such a thing as silence?

Our conception of silence isn’t the total absence of sound. It isn’t the total absence of thought. It’s the space between and beyond the auditory, informational, and internal stimuli that interfere with our clear perception and intention. Quiet is whatever someone thinks quiet is. There is such a thing as silence. It’s brimming with life and possibility. It naturally inhabits a universe where everything is pulsating, oscillating, and buzzing.

Noises cause stress, especially if we have little or no control over them, explains Mathias Basner. The body will excrete stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that lead to changes in the composition of our blood—and of our blood vessels, which actually have been shown to be stiffer after a single night of noise exposure.

'Learn to be silent,' Pythagoras advised his students. 'Let your quiet mind listen and absorb the silence.' Some say Pythagoras was the first person to fulfill the formal vocation of philosophe, 'a lover of wisdom.' Pythagoras meant something specific by the term 'wisdom' : 'understanding of the source or cause of all things.' As he saw it, attaining wisdom required 'raising the intellect to a point where it intuitively cognized the invisible manifesting outwardly through the visible,' reaching the point where it could become 'capable of bringing itself en rapport with the spirit of things rather than with their forms.' Pythagoras pioneered understanding of numerical proportions and the five regular solids in geometry, still foundational concepts in modern-day math. He invented a system of musical tuning wherein the frequency proportions between notes are based on a three-to-two ratio—a system that many scholars consider uniquely harmonized with proportions in nature. Pythagoras was the first person to divide the globe into the five climatic zones that are still used in meteorology today. He correctly identified the morning star and the evening star as the same planet, Venus. He is widely believed to be the first person in recorded history to teach that Earth is spherical rather than flat.

Why did Pythagoras see silence as the key to wisdom? Why did he require his inner circle of students to spend five years not talking before beginning their formal studies? There’s no known record of his exact thinking on the topic or the specific rationale behind the requirement for members of the inner circle of the school. But let’s see if we can home in on his reasoning. In meditation retreats, extended times in nature, and other periods of contemplative practice in silence, we’ve gotten some clues. Silence, of course, forces us to face ourselves. Without distraction, we have to learn how to deal with our own internal noise. This enables us to tune in to what’s really happening both within ourselves and outside ourselves. In the absence of judgment and conjecture and performance, the mind turns magnetically, like a compass, toward the truth.

But we don’t want to imply this is an easy process. In profound silence, we first burn through heaps of habitual patterns and thought forms and fantasies and ambitions and lusts and delusions. In silence, we’ve both felt an intense desire to run away, to do anything to fill the space.

To get comfortable with deep silence is to sit in a room alone with all of these discomforts and pull energy away from those parts of the brain—like the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex—that specialize in protecting and decorating the distinct sense of 'me.'

You must have heard the maxim 'Speech is silvern, Silence is golden,' or 'Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity'. While the talk of silver and gold, of time and eternity, might sound like a comparison—as if one were more valuable than the other—that’s not necessarily how we understand it. Just as silver is a precious metal, time is a holy mystery. Yet time is a mystery that we human beings measure and manage, in practical ways, in the course of our day-to-day lives. Speech, like time, is immanent. And silence, like eternity, is transcendent.

Today, amidst the mass proliferation of mental stimulation, it’s clear that we’re facing a deficit of silence. Throughout the world, spiritual and philosophical traditions emphasize the balance of speech and silence as a state of flow between the worlds. While religious traditions often hold that written scriptures—like the Bible, Quran, and Buddhist sutras—are sacred, the vast majority also recognize the sacredness of the space where words and concepts dissolve into unknowing.

Many of the great religious and philosophical traditions don’t just look to silence as a path to wisdom. In the deepest contemplative practices across traditions, we find a recognition of silence as the essence of wisdom itself. Rumi called silence 'the voice of God' and all else 'poor translation.' Black Elk, a great visionary medicine man of the Oglala Lakhota people, asked, 'For is not silence the very voice of the Great Spirit?' The Tao Te Ching says that 'the name you can say isn’t the real name,' and analysis of the Kabbalah speaks of the 'silent, fertile void' as the 'Source' and 'the divine womb of all being.'

Silence is often described as the absence of sound, yet it’s also a very powerful sound. We spend a lot of time looking for happiness when the world right around us is full of wonder. To be alive and walk on the Earth is a miracle, and yet most of us are running as if there were some better place to get to. There is beauty calling to us every day, every hour, but we are rarely in a position to listen.

Even if we try to be in the present moment, many of us are distracted and feel empty, as if we had a vacuum inside. We may long for something, expect something, wait for something to arrive to make our lives a little bit more exciting. We anticipate something that will change the situation, because we see the situation in the present moment as boring—nothing special, nothing interesting.

The basic condition for us to be able to hear the call of beauty and respond to it is silence. If we don’t have silence in ourselves—if our mind, our body, are full of noise—then we can’t hear beauty’s call.

And finally, as you can hear the call, you can find the Value.

We'll talk about the Vakue on the next session. Bi 'idhnillah."

Wulandari hadn't appeared yet, so before moving on to the next session, the Lotus sang,

As I watched your vision forming

Carried away by the moonlight shadow

Stars move slowly in a silvery night

Far away on the other side *)

Citations & References:

- Robert Pringle, A Short History of Bali: Indonesia's Hindu Realm, 2004, Allen & Unwin

- Reid Wilson Ph. D., Stopping the Noise in Your Head: The New Way to Overcome Anxiety and Worry, 2016, Biblica

- Justin Zorn & Leigh Marz, Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, 2022, Harper Wave

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise, 2015, HarperOne

*) "The Moonlight Shadow" written by Michael Gordon Oldfield

Bahasa