In Pursuit of Silence Read online

  For the first year after his diagnosis, he struggled with fear. Then, as his odds for survival began to improve, he started a gradual return to the church that brought him, eventually, to visit a monastery near Atlanta. He got lost on the way and arrived at night, just before compline. The church, when he entered, was quiet and dark. Then the monks walked in, their white cowls falling all the way to the floor. “I was transfixed,” Alberic said. “I saw the truth about myself. I saw my monastic soul externalized. There was no sound, just the vague rustling of robes as they came in one or two at a time, to kneel or stand in their stall. All my life I’d met priests who tried to evangelize, but nothing came close to that moment. I had a sense of God walking right up to me.” The experience, he said, “hijacked my life. I realized I’d always been a monk, and now I was home.”

  “Monks live in the desert,” Alberic told me, after we’d driven back to the monastery and had a chance to sit down together. “These giant, snow-covered fields are the desert. It’s where monks have always been drawn. We come for a radical confrontation with ourselves. Silence is for bumping into yourself. That’s why monks pursue it. And that’s also why people can’t get into a car without turning the radio on, or walk into a room without switching on a television. They seek to avoid that confrontation. I think this may be one reason for the incredible violence of that final surge during the Gulf War.” I stared at him in surprise. He lowered his eyes. “You remember there were those long, long delays before the last invasion, with waves of troops going over there and just sitting in the desert, week after week. The soldiers just sat and waited in more silence than many of them had ever experienced. And then, all of a sudden there was that huge, violent surge—the Highway of Death. Americans don’t sit in a quiet, solitary place and flourish. They were starting to have a monastic experience. And that doesn’t jibe well with the military’s goals.”

  Explaining the carnage on Highway 80 en route to Basra was, at the least, a provocative claim for the transformative power of even short-term exposure to monastic silence. But Alberic is clearly not alone in his belief that a taste of monk’s life can wreak meaningful changes on a person’s mind and spirit. Like many other monasteries around the world, New Melleray Abbey has something close to an all-time low in terms of permanent resident members—and a constantly overspilling guesthouse. Brother Neal, the monk in charge of bookkeeping at New Melleray, told me that whereas even five or six years ago if someone contacted the abbey during the workweek saying that they wanted to make a retreat or just visit for a night or two there was always room, now it is often booked solid long in advance. “There’s much more hunger,” he said. “People just looking for quiet.”

  There are now silent retreats offered in the name of almost every belief system, and at least one interfaith silent retreat, in Virginia, in which a swami, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and a sheikh work together to guide retreatants, as the description reads, to “their own unique experience of inner peace, joy and spiritual unity at the heart of all the faiths.” Spas are increasingly promoted as a retreat from the overstimulation of everyday life, as much as for their treatments and aesthetic services. (“Our philosophy … is simple,” begins one advertisement. “Soothe the spirit and beauty will follow. We intend to be a quiet refuge.”) The same longing for respite is driving people into the jungles of Thailand to visit Buddhist monasteries, sometimes for months at a time. The numbers of ten-day silent vipassana retreats offered in Southern California are multiplying, and there has been a recent surge in shorter “McRetreats” for teenagers—along with meditation classes for children as young as eight years old. Gene Lushtak and some of his fellow silent-meditation guides in the Bay Area are now being enlisted by the public school systems to provide sessions in “mindfulness and concentration,” a stealth way of introducing silent meditation in the classroom. “Teachers are scared,” Lushtak told me. “They can’t get the kids to settle down, and silent meditation is one of the only things that helps.”

  At one point, Lushtak put me in touch with a woman named Kris, whom he described as having great insights into silence—someone who had spent considerable time living as a monastic and many years practicing silent meditation. When I called her, Kris spoke to me of how the hunger for silence is “hunger for the thing that silence facilitates or acts as a catalyst of,” rather than for the silence itself. “Silence,” she continued, “is one experience of getting in touch with that which is. The practitioners and teachers I know who have practiced for many years can walk into a room full of chaos and be as kind and gathered as though they’re with a baby, or a lizard.” I asked her whether her own experiences with silence had drawn her to devote more and more of her daily life to meditative practices. “You’re speaking to me through a speakerphone,” she snapped. “I’m a corporate lawyer sitting on the twenty-ninth floor of a downtown skyscraper! But even if I’m not spending as much time with it as when I was wearing little robes in Burma, it’s still a key part of my life.”

  IDENTIFYING WITH SILENCE

  When I retired to my plain but pleasant room in the guesthouse of New Melleray, I picked up a few volumes from the mini-library I’d brought with me and sat down in a chair by the window overlooking the courtyard, where a modest stone fountain and a few sprays of black branches thrust up through deep white snow. The room was completely quiet, except for a bar radiator by my feet that made a constant crickly-crackling, as though a microphone were being held up to a bowl of Rice Krispies.

  When I had told friends that I was going to spend a little time in a Trappist monastery in Iowa, they responded with professions of envy. “You’re so lucky! The peace, and quiet …,” they sighed. Yet the hope of finding a walled-off spa of rest and relaxation was not what drove people to visit monasteries in the past. In earlier ages, when people sought out the ascetic monks they did so to be enlightened as to why we live and die. Just as Benedict thought of the monk as a disciple commanded, above all, to be silent and listen, worldly sorts have always sought out those who cut themselves off from the rest of humanity to hear what they had to say. There is an abiding popular sympathy with the notion expressed by contemplative monks to a synod of bishops after Vatican II, that the monk withdraws from the world not to indulge a lust for ascetic martyrdom but rather “to place himself more intensely at the divine source from which the forces that drive the world onward originate, and to understand in this light the great designs of mankind.”

  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 mo
nks 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.