Something about this stone drew me in, enthralled me, took me to a place of stillness beyond thought. It was a transcendental moment. If I could crystallize the spirit of this profound stillness with words, I would look to Native American myths, which emphasize silence as a path to spiritual wisdom and greater truth. As the Lakota medicine man Black Elk famously said, “Silence is the voice of the Great Mystery.”
Just as the celestial pull of the moon induces the ocean to refresh itself at each change of the tide, stillness does the same thing for our minds, returning us to a place before thought, before words.
As Larry Rosenberg wrote this month in the Buddhist publication Tricycle: “Silence has nothing to do with your conditioning, family, job, or bank account. It is opening up to what is before culture, before thinking.” That’s what Buddhists call mindfulness, which only happens in the present moment — like when I was standing in the swirling tide, transfixed by a burrowing black stone.
Seeking silence has been crucial in maintaining my sanity during these chaotic times, as our democracy teeters along with much of life on our precious little blue planet. I believe that silence could be a lifesaver for us, serving as a bridge to a new spirituality — one that can heal not only our hearts but also our society and the natural world.
I have quoted the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr before in my columns. I consider him to be a very wise man. He considers silence to be “the very foundation of all reality.” He tells us it is from “stillness that all being comes and to which all things return.” Unless we learn to live there, “the rest of things — words, events, relationships, identities — all become rather superficial, without depth or context.”
Of course, it is not only Rohr but religion in general that considers God to be “the foundation of all reality.” Taking it a step further, I’m uncertain if all religions view God as a personification of a universal consciousness. However, I believe Buddhists and Indigenous folks do.
In what seems like an unlikely twist, over the past 100 years, science has been converging on the same conclusion. It started with Max Planck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for radically changing our understanding of matter and energy by laying the foundation for quantum mechanics.
Sounding like the Franciscan Priest, Planck issued the following declaration: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Since then, Planck’s idea has gained support from an increasing number of scientists. In a recent book, complexity theorist Neil Theise offers a poetic description of this new perspective: “Our brains aren’t fleshy computers that create consciousness but, instead, act like transducers that connect us to a single, all-encompassing consciousness in the same way my tiny transistor radio could link up to a rock and roll radio station when I was a teenager.”
Science has also discovered that silence is foundational to our cosmos. Mark Whittle, a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, has studied the origin of the universe. Contrary to our preconceptions, he has determined that the sound of the first moment of the Big Bang “would not, in fact, have been a big bang at all, because the initial explosion consisted of a perfectly balanced, radial release of energy. The Universe was born in silence.”
These scientific breakthroughs collectively provide compelling evidence in support of spirituality. They align with the indigenous worldview that through stillness, we can access a higher realm. I believe this preconceptual wisdom must be integrated into a new myth for our times.
A new fable that causes us to quake at our insignificance before the grand mystery of the universe, while being eternally grateful as sentient beings on Earth that we are all interconnected as one.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.