Tag Archives: silence

Ground level

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The ground of being is simply what is, at its deepest level: Eckhart’s istigkeit. All that is rests in the ground by its own nature, and that includes us. But we are conscious; more than that, self-aware. In being aware of our own being, becoming truly aware in silence of our own isness as not separate from what is, we realise that the ground of our own self is not other than the ground of all that is.

Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “Mystical hope would simply be what happens when we touch this innermost ground and it floods forth into our being as strength and joy. Hope would be the Mercy – divine love itself – coursing through our being like lightning finding a clear path to the ground.”

She goes on,

You may have noticed that those three experiences Bede Griffiths mentioned as “pathways to the center” have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come hack from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore-only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

This realisation of our own identity with the ground (it reminds me of the Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā) seems to me to be precisely Bourgeault’s “back staircase.” It is only in the total poverty of silence and stillness that we can find it, but it is our only home.

What is present

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The present is unconditioned, radically permeable; you could call it eternity. So little of the activity of the mind appears to be concerned with the present – there are worries about the future; regrets at the past; what-ifs, endless what-ifs of every colour and condition – but actually to keep still in the present, that is more difficult, and yet it is our only solace, our only freedom.

Of course this is why we practice, really. There is nothing in our mind, not in our thoughts or our imaginings, not in our desires or our interpretations of what we sense, that is truly now. By the time we perceive, by the time we identify and analyse what we see or feel, it is already past.

But suppose we could just sense – not remark upon, identify, classify – just sense. Whether we sense our own body and its autonomic systems – breathing, sitting, even digestion – or whether we simply register the input from our senses as it is (sound without its being the sound of anything, light without anything lit up) perhaps we could be as close to the present as it is given us to be in life.

Now is not then, nor is it to come: it is not even the space of some minute fraction of a second, it is infinitely thin – and so it is infinite, without time. It rests in the ground directly, and so it is our true home. For us, though we cannot know what it is, perhaps it alone is true.

I do not know

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“The apophatic denial – I do not know – humbles us and leaves us vulnerable, certainly. At the same time, it can be a tool of resistance and subversion.” (JP Williams)

To understand that we do not understand doesn’t just call into question what we think we know, but all that we have been told. The old names will not do; the familiar roles will not play out any more. And yet even to say this sort of thing contains its own risk: Kipling’s The Cat That Walked by Himself can seem a romantic figure, and can draw attention to what he seems to be, rather than what he is not.

So Williams’ “resistance and subversion” are not merely to tradition and dogma, but to ourselves: to what we think ourselves to be, certainly; but also to what we would like to be. The ground of being is no thing; to be still enough to hear its silence (1 Kings 19:12 NRSV) we must become what we are, empty of self. Not knowing, without substance, no things ourselves. I suppose all this fuss about practice, and wayfaring, is no more than that.

Silence

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I have loved silence as much as or more than I have loved music – and of course music is only what it is by virtue of the silence that comes with it, both the kind you can write down, that is threaded all through it, and the kind that underlies it, an open ground beneath the whole structure of sound.

Contrary to our common imagination, our solar system, and the space beyond our heliosphere, is bathed and criss-crossed with unheard, magnetic sounds, that can can even be converted to audio waves that we can hear with our human ears. ClassicFM has some samples, and NASA too has shared some from much further away in the depths of interstellar space. But under these too is silence: a silence bright with starlight and seamed with barely imaginable gravitational waves.

The fertile stillness that silence is seems very close to the dark transparency that sometimes one can touch in contemplation. It seems to me that in contemplation perhaps all we are doing is stripping away the accretions of thought and habit, draining the mind’s default mode that tries to fill our resting moments with its lowest common denominator daydreams. All that we are, all we have come from, rests in the ground of being itself, and it may be that we can touch the edge of that ground itself in silence, in the resting place between breaths, or the quiet of sitting still.