I’m looking out over the snowy hills this morning. The sun is peering meekly through the graying cloud layer; it looks like it might snow.
I’m not thinking as I’m writing these words. I’m feeling as opposed to planning what I need to write. A phrase, “I’m looking out over the snowy hills” comes to mind and with it comes a vaguely directional feeling. That means, I know, that it’s time to start jotting down.
Writing here is more like listening than creating. What I feel is a kind of poise. I pause, listening for what seems real to be present. In such a poise I seem to be able to remain connected with the quietness that is nudging me. I think a sentence, but stop—it too clever—then wait again for what is true to waft up. Mostly I find myself in a kind of alert patience, settled, largely without words. So I sit, the clouds grey and the day chilly, my pen in hand, waiting patiently still into this kindness of love.
When I entered graduate school the dominant approach was the post modernism I learned so painfully at the feet of Professor Proudfoot. In the realm of religious experiences, that meant that we encounter what we expect to encounter. The main exponent of this doctrine in the study of mysticism was a fellow named Steven Katz, whose Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis had just come out.50 Into everything we see, think or do, his argument ran, we carry our enormous set of assumptions, beliefs, habits and expectations. I simply assume that the liquid in the cup will be warm but not scalding, that the pen in my hand will not break into pieces and that the lady in the cottage down the hill will not suddenly lob a grenade my way. We learned to expect such things are from our cultures, our parents, our experiences and our teachers. We need to, so we don’t have to figure out again and again what a teacup or a pen is for or how to use them. When we want to use them we can just pick these things up, barely notice them, and drink our tea or write. I both see and don’t see most of my world, really, for I assume a great deal about things. As Coleridge put this, the mind “half sees and half creates.”
Like that we learn about Brahman, God or the Tao at the feet of our teachers, rabbis, texts and ceremonies, Katz’s theory goes. When we have a mystical experience we will encounter just that which we’ve learned from our religious or spiritual traditions. A Catholic, for example, hears about Christ, sin and salvation, a Hindu about colorful gods, formless Brahman and worshipful gurus. And bingo bango boggin, when each has a mystical moment, they’ll encounter just these “things.” Our expectations help create not just the way we talk about our experiences, but very contours and content of our experience itself. A spiritual person’s
experience itself as well as the form in which it is reported, is shaped by concepts which the mystic brings to, and which shape his experience.51
We actually see Christ or formless Brahman, not just talk about our experience in these terms. Or as Katz’s colleague Robert Gimello put this, we build up our expectations and then we psycho-somatically “enhance” them into what we see:
[A] mystical experience is simply the psychosomatic enhancement of religious beliefs and values or of beliefs and values of other kinds which are held ‘religiously.’52
Our long history and training and expectations prepares the ground for, and probably even shapes the neural pathways, that create our religious experiences.
In my own case, I had been trained to expect such things as inward silence, meditation, a shift into enlightenment, etc. And with a slight of brain-hand, I then encountered just these things.
One day, while I was pondering all this, I was sitting on the grass of Columbia University’s quadrangle, watching a robin peck after some tasty morsel. I’m something of a birder and I’ve watched a zillion Robins, so I knew in a quick glance it was a Robin. They have dusky orange breasts, I knew, straight backed posture, and bob at the ground. I didn’t need to look at him very carefully to know he was a robin. In fact he was pretty far away and I was no doubt “filling in” most of what I couldn’t actually see. I was indeed “half seeing and half creating” him, I thought, something I do whenever I see something familiar: grass, the student union building, my sneakers.53
But, it occurred to me, I’m not so familiar with every bird I encounter. Sometimes I’ve seen new birds: a Yellow Rumped Warbler, say, or a Harlequin Duck. When I see one of these tasty little morsels I have to look at him or her pretty carefully, checking back and forth with my Birds of North America, if only to figure out what I’m looking at. I don’t fill in nearly as much of a rare Harlequin Duck. I have to attend pretty carefully to his color, markings, beak and quack to distinguish him from other ducks. I don’t supply as much from my background expectations.
Then I went on to myself: let’s say I see a bird that no one has ever seen. Let’s say he has the beak of a duck, roars like a lion and flies like a jet. To that speedy little bugger I’d have to pay very, very careful attention. I’d fill in virtually nothing from my past experience, or anyone’s for that matter.
There seems to be a continuum here, I thought. To some perceptions I will supply a lot from my side. To others I’ll supply less. And when I look at something truly new, I’ll supply virtually nothing. The more I supply, the less I actually see. And vice versa.
But what I encountered on that loveseat in the Hotel Karina was utterly unlike whatever I had come to expect. Even today it’s hard to understand. So whatever it was, it was too queer and unfamiliar to be the kind of thing that I could have cooked up with my psychosomatic enhancements. Similarly for Bernadette Roberts; what she encountered was so off her expectation grid that she could never have pre-formed it. I suspect that the sense of novelty and surprise is almost always part of these transformations. Whatever wrong-headed expectations we come with will create something else. Wrong expectations will do a crummy design job.
So no, I don’t cook up every experience, I thought as I watched the Robin fly away. Some experiences I shape a lot, some less, and a few are genuinely unexpected. When we encounter something off our chart, our prior expectations just can’t be creating it. We cannot cook up what we cannot imagine.
That insight became the core of the argument that drove me to write or edit four books between 1982 and 1995, some 30 articles, and deliver more than 50 professional talks, not counting endless classrooms.54 That’s about as much excitement as we academics get!
This argument, if you think about it, is basically negative: spiritual experiences are not created by our expectations, not by our assumptions, not by our language. To some extent, this is the only way I could make such a point. For the emptiness itself is not in language, not within our thought system. What I was doing, I now see, was to make the only space I could for the very wordless emptiness that had planted itself my life.
But I had to. I could do nothing other than to try to make such an argument, now that I think of it. When I read the post modernists, it was just obvious that I hadn’t created the silence; it had planted itself in my life. I could do nothing else than harness the philosophical tools I was learning to make room for what was obvious to me. Or rather, silence was making room for itself, in some sense through me. I was in effect working to allow it to winnow itself forward into my academic world.
“Knowing this, the wise can speak of nothing else,” says the Upanishads. I could do nothing else than try to give the sacred in my life a voice, however flawed and halting. I simply can’t imagine having some permanent experience of the vast openness and not trying to “speak it” in a way that felt deeply right to me.55 Every generation has its own context and language, and we all have to speak it out in our way.
This didn’t mean I was, from my side, confident. I didn’t have much trust in my abilities. I wasn’t sure we’d win the day (which I like to think we have in the long run). But I never doubted the real point, that the vastness is the real deal and beyond what we can know or shape.
As a result, speaking and allowing silence to grow into my life has become my life’s work. Making philosophical space for it, writing books about it, learning to live and to teach others how to live it in their everyday lives, etc. Indeed it has led to this book. Speaking silence in the soul has become my life’s calling.
Finding a life’s calling, at least in the way I understand, is more like listening than creating. You listen for that which wants to be spoken through you. You allow it to emerge, listening for what the Hindus call your “dharma”, your deep and natural calling. If you’re lucky, you come to orient your work around what is most deeply true, allowing it to do its work through you.
There is a kind of ease and freedom in doing this. Work takes on a deep soul resonance. Doing work that reverberates the truth allows you to do your days with a kind of depth that I doubt can be there without it. The sense here is of being a kind of tube, the energy from what is deepest coursing up through your torso. It’s like all your cells are aligned, down to your core. Because there’s no interior struggle about it, no deep doubts, working with coherence around what is most deeply true brings a sense of ease and freedom with it.
Of course, I’ve worked my tail off. Lots of long days, endless editing, years and years of organizing and teaching. To rise to a calling requires effort as well as listening. But working with nearly cellular alignment with what is at my core, has had, I think, a resonance and an ease beyond what I could have otherwise known.
I couldn’t have said any of this back then. I was too busy learning the material and making the arguments. But here, perhaps, was the first hint of an answer to my question, of what use, really, is silence? For what was driving me to do this work, I feel just now, what became the general direction of my thoughts, wasn’t me. It was the silence itself. I don’t know how, exactly, but it was nudging me all along. “Say it,” it whispered. “Say it in a way that expresses what is so. Don’t be satisfied with someone else’s version of what is so. Don’t stop at a partial answer. Speak it so that you can stand in effortless and full-bodied alignment with what is deepest. Say it as well as you can in a way that others can understand. But say it.”
If silence is to part of our everyday lives, we have to somehow learn to work from within it. Our work is too important, our workdays too many, to do anything else. There is a calling for each of us, I think, to speak what is deepest, in our way. It nudges and pushes and calls until we answer. And then it nudges some more.
Sometime in the middle of developing my philosophical arguments, roughly eight years after the bottomlessness had established itself as a sliver in the back of my neck, it had grown. It thickened, as I’ve mentioned, to now fill the back half of my head. By about 5 years more, well into graduate school, it had come to fill up my whole skull, as if that wormhole to infinity now filled my cranium, from eyes to the nape of my neck.
This slow growth of silence was more physical than anything else. It became more tactile—a velvety, cottony translucence. It was not an emotional shift though. I still got dangerously anxious, for example, while dealing with some imperious professor. Yvonne and I still collided over one triviality after another. I still fretted endlessly over money, always a problem in the graduate student’s life, still fantasized about women, still got impatient at cash registers. Whatever this slowly expanding openness might have been, it sure wasn’t that personality transplant I’d wanted.
Yet it did seem to be having effects on more than my head or my philosophizing. I could focus on my reading a little longer. Perhaps this was because I was actually interested in the history of Buddhism or in answering post modern philosophy. But the quieting of internal chatter couldn’t but help.
It seemed to be getting easier to sit down to study, and to write my seminar papers. I wasn’t quite so panicky when I looked for part time teaching jobs. And when I finally landed my first teaching job at The New School, my teaching was surprisingly easy and, I believe, effective.
Things were improving, in part no doubt, because I was developing professional skills and slowly becoming more of a contributing member of society. I was starting to give papers at professional conferences, starting to get articles published, was writing two books and was by now raising two kids. The confidence I was feeling was no doubt in part because I was now actually doing life. But I can’t help believing that the slowly expanding silence was helping.
Then one day, as I was walking across 114th street towards Columbia University, I suddenly realized that I was not anxious.
I hadn’t just received an A on a paper. Some cute girl hadn’t just flirted with me. Nothing had changed at home. Yet just for a few seconds, with no obvious cause, I felt, to some real surprise, neutral.
For most people, I suppose, a few moments without anxiety is nothing special. But to me that moment was astonishing! I still find it hard to believe, but up until that instant, ever since I’d been a kid, I had felt the pull of that mewling sinking feeling every waking moment of every day!
Anxiety at this level, with you no matter what you are doing, sucks the air out of your lungs, pulls at your thighs, shrivels your heart. I was worried in the 7th grade whether Stewart C. liked me. I’d freeze utterly in the 9th grade, unable to dial that last digit of Peggy K’s phone number. I was terribly anxious in college, worried constantly about the next class, the next grade, or whether I would ever get off my orange naugahide chair. I was anxious about love, anxious I was too fat, worried about money, afraid that I’d miss the subway. Anxiety like this, steady, generalized and pointless, hovers around like a pathetic beggar, stealing your life.
But there I was, for just a few astonished seconds, without any anxiety. It’s amazing to say this now, but honestly, I didn’t know it was possible.
“Hey,” I said to myself, “I’m not anxious!” And of course, I immediately got anxious that I’d get anxious again. And so I was.
Perhaps two or three years later, it occurred to me that, “you know, I don’t think I’ve been anxious all morning.” Again, no new job, no article accepted, no stock market killing. Just a whole morning, untroubled. And, I sensed, it hadn’t been the first.
Around the end of my graduate career, 1988, it was, “you know, I don’t seem to get anxious much these days.” It was slow. But it was real.56
By no means were all my troubles resolved. Papers, worries what I’d do after graduation, Dr. Proudfoot’s respect, marriage tensions, parenting issues—all were, alas, still very much with me. It was more that the background tone of my life was softening. Not that I was actually happy, mind you. Just no longer always afraid.
Here again was a hint of value in what had befallen me years before. It was as if that unflickering candle-flame beneath my life, imperceptible though it was, was helping to slowly melt the ice within which I had been frozen. Just the tiniest warmth. But even a Candleflame, if steady enough long enough, can melt an iceberg.