In Pursuit of Silence (5 page)

The precursors of the contemplative monks were the men of Egypt who left home in the fourth century to dwell in the desert. This was the great era of perching in silence on top of poles under the burning eye of the North African sun, and fasting sleepless in Tora Bora–style caves while assailed by noisy visions of jeering demons, inviting maidens, and various upsetting combinations of the two. Since the withdrawal from the world that gave the Desert Fathers their name was intended to promote self-transformation, the type of silence with which they were most concerned was that which came when they shut their own lips. As Abbas Diadochus, fifth-century bishop of Photiki, remarked,
“Just as, if you
leave open the door of the public baths the steam escapes and their virtue is lost, so the virtue of the person who talks a lot escapes the open doors of the voice.” One hermit
spent three years
with a stone in his mouth to help him
learn to stay quiet. How he managed to eat enough to survive without swallowing the rock is a matter about which the chronicles remain silent.

When people managed to track down a Desert Father in his desolate lair, they would stand before him to beg, “Abba, a word!” (“Abba” is the Hebrew and Aramaic term for “father,” from which the words abbot and abbey derive.) After one anonymous fourth-century truth-seeker had traveled deep into the desert of Scetes to plead for a word from Abbot Moses, the old man dismissed him with a single sentence:
“Go and sit in thy cell
, and thy cell shall teach thee all things.” The parable suggests some of the great questions surrounding silence: How much does our pursuit of silence require us to withdraw from the world? To what extent is silence experiential in a manner that can be neither explained nor conveyed? To what degree must we remain literally still in order to experience the truths of silence?

All of us have intuitive formulas for gauging the point at which silence has been attained. The study of the human reception of sound moves quickly from the realm of physics and physiology to that of psychology and psychoacoustics. Mental associations that we bring to sounds along with intricacies of how the brain maps sound waves define our experience of what we hear.

A sniper named Robert
who served with the U.S. military in Iraq described for me the experience of silence in battle. One listens, he said, “for anything that will keep you alive, orienting to any sound that may be a threat, just like an animal.” It is in those moments of silence, he explained, when he is maximally focused, before the “fireworks begin and while the silence is everywhere, that the weight of the silence is almost too much.” He compared
this to an animal trying to orient itself to a threat when there is nothing visible, and nothing to be heard—yet the threat is certain and everywhere. It’s in those states, he believes, that we fall within ourselves, our vision narrowing, our hearing becoming fainter. “The more we hear nothing, the more nothing we hear,” he went on, “while we wait for … for death really. And, maybe, like the animals on the plains in Africa when they are rolled on their backs by the lion and enter some trance-like state before being eaten, I would, in these still moments, feel the weight of silence pulling me into myself, and I would fight against it for a chance to live.”

Theologians push the origins of the pursuit of silence far back in time. The
doctrine of
tsimtsum
, developed by Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-century Jewish mystic, makes the pursuit of silence nothing less than the foundational act of the universe.

Luria began his own pursuit as a young man in a series of solitary retreats to islands in the Nile, where he gained renown for being able to interpret the language of birds, swishing palm-tree fronds, and burning embers. (Certain kabbalists thought that after the destruction of the temple,
guardian angels used
birds as a kind of remote storage for some of the deepest secrets of the Torah, hence their chirping was full of wisdom. Luria kept mum about what the leaves and coals had to say.) Eventually he moved to Safed in Palestine, and there developed the body of mystical thought for which he is most remembered. He himself wrote almost nothing, being constrained by the vastness of the truth he wished to articulate.
“I can hardly open up my mouth
to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed,” he explained.
Tsimtsum
(roughly translated as “contraction”) is also premised on a problem of space. If God is everything—infinite and all-filling—how could there be any room for God’s creations? Thus, the first act in genesis had to be God’s withdrawal of Himself into Himself in order to make space for anything else. This withdrawal—a kind of inner retreat of the Divine—has been described both as a self-limiting and a self-silencing. (The Jewish identification of God with language makes any pullback on His part a retraction of the Divine tongue.) In Luria’s vision, God becomes the original monkish pursuer of silence, retreating into the dark, secluded depths of His nature so that creation would one day have the chance to sing in the light. Early commentators on Luria’s theories likened this process to a kind of cosmic inhalation:
“How did He produce
and create His world? Like a man who holds and restricts his breath, in order that the little may contain the many.” Each new expression of God’s creative force had to be preceded by another withdrawal, another self-emptying.

A humanistic reading of Luria’s myth might lead us to reflect that when we shut up and yank ourselves out of the picture, the world rushes vibrantly into the gap we leave behind—springing into fresh visibility and audibility. The eighteenth-century Hasidic master Nahman of Bratslav, however, invested the lesson of
tsimtsum
with a further mystical twist. Nahman argued that mankind had to reproduce the steps the Divine had gone through in His self-silencing so as to make contact with God’s essence. A process of emptying and quieting takes the pursuer deep into an inner void that opens onto the emptiness left behind by God.
Yet once inside what Nahman described as the
“mazes of silence
,” the righteous one discovers that in some inexpressible fashion God exists within the void as well.

What I read about Luria and Nahman called to mind several conversations I’d had with people in which silence triggered a kind of exfoliation of the everyday self. An artist friend named Alfonse, who is also a devout Catholic, told me,
“Sometimes when I’m silent
and alone, I’ll have this feeling of layers of my identity just peeling away, emptying, until I’m down to the core. And when I get there, to that silence, I’m meeting other selves I’ve loved. All of a sudden, I’m back with my mother and father. They’re still here and I’m still with them.”

A Buddhist friend described her experience of silent meditation as a never-ending process of emptying herself of thoughts.
“By the end
of the retreat, the process of getting rid of all this stuff in your head becomes physical,” she said. “People are crying—they’re coughing—they have colds.” The experience has changed how she deals with different situations outside the meditation room. “Whereas before, my mind was constantly vibrating and making noise, I’m much more nonreactive now, which means I see the way everything around me is constantly changing and don’t take every little decision I make as life or death. It’s like a mental cleansing.”

What actually happens inside the brain when we concentrate on experiencing silence?

The neuroscientific study of the effects of silent meditation is still in the early stages. But fMRI studies (imaging studies that
can track blood flow through the brain) of people involved in vipassana and similar practices consistently show that meditation enhances the ability to make discriminations between important and unimportant stimuli. This translates into a reduction in overall brain activity. Lidia Glodzik-Sobanska, a researcher at the New York University Center for Brain Health, described for me the chain reaction that’s set in motion when an individual embarks on an unfamiliar task. Neurons start firing. Glutamate receptors get involved, triggering a process that eventually allows calcium to flow into the cell and activate various enzymes, which in turn initiate other reactions. There is, she said,
“an enormous downstream
range of events, in which new synaptic connections and branches are being formed.” When you’re first learning a new task, these patches of intense activity are a sign of healthy brain functioning. But gradually, with training, the network should become more refined. When you don’t see that refinement, in which less brain network is engaged to perform a familiar activity, the broad range of downstream events becomes a cacophony. “In Alzheimer studies,” Glodzik-Sobanska said, “what shows up in imaging is that certain brain regions vulnerable to the disease reveal a complete absence of activity, while elsewhere in the brain the individual might manifest enhanced activity not present in normal people.” Though this other activity is considered compensatory, it doesn’t actually compensate for anything; it’s just a desperate loudening of brain noise. “The goal over time,” Glodzik-Sobanska said, “is always reduced activity. You want to see impulses travel more quickly through certain more limited numbers of synapses to make the whole thing more effective.”

The drop in brain activity that’s been recorded among experienced meditators seems to be one from which they can quickly snap over to high, concentrated activity. It’s comparable to an athlete whose regular pulse rate is very low, but who can smoothly get the rate of blood flow up where it needs to be to perform some challenging physical activity; once the activity is over, the rate rapidly drops back to its baseline of minimal exertion. The brains of individuals who’ve made deep commitments to silence seem to enjoy its very character on a metabolic level, themselves becoming more still and quiet—less likely to amplify neural responses willy-nilly in a purposeless static when some chance stimulus calls out.

Despite the bitter cold, after my initial conversations with the New Melleray monks and a few hours of reading, I wanted to stretch my legs before night descended. It was absolutely still outside. The wide sky was iron gray; the earth was a white blank. Trappist monasteries are traditionally situated in flat landscapes, where the repetitive monotony is supposed to turn one’s thoughts to mortality. Though snow was forecast for later that night, none had fallen for several days and the path was now packed firm. The deep silence was instantly broken by the
squitch, squatch
of boot tread on snow. “Feet, stop making so much noise,” I thought.

The frozen road dipped toward a creek. As I neared the water, a great blue heron suddenly lifted off the brown ripple of water, flapping soundlessly as it rose high above bare branches. After the streets of New York, it seemed magical to have that
motion without a soundtrack. I remembered a Brazilian friend telling me that in her country, “everything screams,” and that when she eventually traveled to Japan she found the sight of the cityscape “like watching a silent film.” The streets and the buildings rose before her without the noise she had always attached to those sights.