The subtle spaces of silence and solitude

From Dearest Friends, Laurence Freeman, Mediatio Newsletter July 2017

Average city noise today often reaches 70 decibels which is equivalent to being in a room with a loud vacuum cleaner. As most people in the world now live in cities, we are becoming acclimatised to noise, just as animals like foxes, which used to be entirely rural, are now becoming urbanised.

Urban evolution means accommodating ourselves to the noise of traffic, planes, subway trains, construction, fridges, leaf blowers noisy neighbours and ever-louder muzak in elevators and restaurants. Research indicates that getting used to such noise levels is harmful. It is a form of pollution causing insomnia, depression, aggression and isolation. Noise is more than a nuisance. It is a serious problem – and not only for meditators who naturally seek quiet and generally feel a deep appreciation and need for silence.

I have been leading several long silent retreats recently. Travelling between them, I became more than usually sensitive to the noise in modern life that we take for granted. Exposure to it also effects us when, like Jesus, we withdraw to a quiet place to pray. Arriving in a truly quiet place, like Monte Oliveto where we have just finished the twenty-seventh annual weeklong silent retreat, can at
first be a shock. We wait for familiar levels of loud noise and, at first, can
feel a sense of absence, even of loss, when they don’t come. Then we notice
there are sounds. Not noise. But sounds, natural sounds. There is birdsong, a quite excited sound when you really listen to it and full of meanings we can’t decipher; and insects, the constant background sounds of summer days and nights; and the wind in the trees; and the church bells that sound loudly during some of the meditation sessions but surprisingly don’t distract or annoy the roomful
of meditators. Then there are human sounds, a sneeze, cough, physical movements, which also don’t bother you provided they are natural and considerate. Noise is unnatural and doesn’t care what it disturbs. It feels it has right of way and always claims it. Sounds reach us subtly from the great silence of nature and then draw our attention to it.
As we adjust to a silent place and its natural sounds, we become aware, in the absence of outer noise, of the constant level of our own inner noise. We can’t blame the neighbours or the traffic for that. This is the point where the work of silence begins. We are so habituated to our inner noise that we unconsciously seek to sustain it. We reach out for new input and sensestimulation. The most obvious sign of this is the psychic umbilical cord we have grown with our mobile phones. We turn our attention to them addictively for stimulation and distraction,
to keep on consuming. If there are no messages we play a game. The subtle spaces of silence and solitude that existed in the past, when we walked down the street or waited for a bus or a dentist appointment have been sucked away by the daimon, the other self we think we find in the phone.

Distraction has always been with us in the human condition. The Desert monks thought of it as our original sin, the fall from pure attention. It is the growing intensity of inner noise that is our present crisis. We are worse off, not completely different from our predecessors; but this means we can find in the past a wisdom to apply to the conditions of modern life. God is delight and those who are faithful are in God, called home from the noise that is around us to the joy that is silence. (St. Augustine, De Trinitate) Augustine asks ‘why do we rush
around searching for God who is already here at home with us? If only we would be with God’.