Wednesday Wonder
The Stages of Quietude
We live in a world of increasing noise, both outside our heads and inside of them. Every data port is occupied, receiving a never-ending stream of information, sound, communication, entertainment and commerce. And noisy minds fire with excess and unimportant noise to a degree that it is impossible to give real and sustained attention to the pressing matters of life, love and the transcendent dimensions of being. We are crowded out of our own space by ourselves. And we accept this as inevitable.
The first stage of aspiring to quietude is to come to terms with the culture and what it has and continues to push at us. It is not hard to know, when we stand back enough to see it. The ever-present TV with more channels than varieties of trees, the radio, the constant computer ring notifying us that we have mail, frenetic texting in which we somehow feel obligated to return each and every message within seconds, the tweets and twerts and twinkies. Too much and too irrelevant, the data stream that we allow, that we participate in as consumers, crowds out all else. And this digital flood is reshaping our minds and consciousness in ways we can’t begin to comprehend.
If we are processing ordinary, everyday reality in these ways then it is a reasonable response to think that these same modes of access might also take us to the deeper reaches of ourselves, to the sacred underpinnings of life, and clear ethical reflection. What we soon find is something that flies in the face of our assumptions: we must actually swim upstream against the data barrage to access the thinking, knowing and being they can’t unlock for us. And that recognition forces us to take control of the noise, in so far as we are able. To appeal to an ancient spiritual practice, we must learn how to fast from the noise.
The first essential step is to limit what we formerly thought to be essential. It is not necessary to watch 24/7 news, answer email every five minutes or respond to texts every ten seconds. It is not necessary to instantaneously monitor every social tweet of our friends or the stars. To do so spells a kind of technological slavery, an electronic ball and chains.
Without becoming hermits, it is possible to declare a moratorium on an always connected life. Being always electronically connected is keeping us from being connected … in other organic, natural, interpersonal, and spiritual ways. Our technological illusion of power is rendering us powerless in the places that matter most, in the realm of perception, creativity, problem-solving, and most of all in the capacity to become wise, compassionate and non-compulsive. It is impossible to attend to the one greatest thing when we are beholden to the thousand things.
As I wrote these words the first time, before I keyed them into my laptop and send them off for electronic distribution, it was with pen and ink and paper. The mindful practice of writing, of watching the hand move an idea onto the page, such an old time thing, slows me down and takes me away from a machine that wants to make me go faster because I can. Slowing down is often the first requirement of being real in the world, of focusing less on quantity and more on depth.
If we mindfully unplug, take back control of something that easily gets out of control, it will not be because the culture around us has encouraged it; quite to the contrary. There is nothing in our environment that will do this for us. In fact, external influence will take us in exactly the opposite direction. But if we accomplish that, if we are able to determine when and how we are connected, we will become ever more reacquainted with our primary relationship to the natural world and intimations of a never-ending stream that bubbles up, not of data, but of spirit. What we have yet to quiet, however, are the noisy places within us.
The surface of our consciousness is like a noisy sea storm on the surface of the ocean. All of the currents, forces, debris and consequences of past movement come together in a jangling collection of thoughts, impulses and feelings. A quiet space and time – what the ancients called the gift of Sabbath – safeguards our consciousness, allows it to quiet, focus and purge unwanted contents. The introduction of deep truths, sustained and repetitive reflection on sacred stories, poetry, the telling of our own stories, render the storm ever more inconsequential as we swim beneath it.
Detox might be the best way to describe what we experience as we let go of our addiction to both the external and internal noise. It feels unsafe to let go because it has become a kind of anchor for us. But this anchor is a false one, however attached we have become to it.
Silence is both a great test of our dependency on noise and the foil that can undo its grasp on us. Silence of our lips and our mind is a state of being that makes room for things of the spirit. Inner quietude is claimed and relished so that the words and thoughts coming out of it are significant, and the more inner stillness becomes a part of us the more it becomes portable, traveling even into noisy places.
In the story of Jesus in the home of Mary and Martha we don’t simply discover two different kinds of people, two personality types before Jesus, one compulsive and one not. No, we find different aspects that live inside all of us. There is Martha, worried and troubled and preoccupied with many things. And there is Mary, collapsing before her Lord in wonder. We live somewhere between these two and them in us. Somewhere in the chaos of the world, the chaos inside us, there is this still point.
Men and women must find their ways down this labyrinthine passage of the spirit, giving up, embracing, drawing together, and peeling the onion of the spirit one layer at a time. And there is a kind of dance that takes place between our communal life and solitary life, as one informs, checks and enriches the other.
To rephrase the prologue of John’s Gospel, and replace light and darkness with silence and noise:
The silence comes into the noise,
and the noise has not overcome it.
