Forget About Total Noise. Silence Is All We need.
Our contemporary felt reality is constantly threatened by the abysses of what writer David Foster Wallace defined as Total Noise.
If this is the universal landscape in which the lives of most humans in the 21st century dwell, a partial escape to this impasse could be reached if we could genuinely choose, at any given moment, what to pay attention to and what to ignore, preserving our sanity vis à vis the ‘glut’ of information with which we have to constantly battle!
To remind us the prophetic genius of Foster Wallace, if our reality is overwhelmingly huge and complex, then the dilemma opens of how are we bound to make sense of our perceived reality when the astonishing quantity of information (and its contradictory quality) we have at our disposal at any given moment appears to completely inhibit the capacity that each one of us has of framing reality in a narrative that has coherence and sense.
I believe that this is an existential condition that we might be able to overcome, by actively and consistently seeking, searching for, and even consciously creating for ourselves a space for silence, like an energetic well to dive into when the overstimulation of the physical and energetic environment surrounding us has taken its toll on our nervous systems and souls. However, creating this sacred well is less easy than we might think, and not only for those of us living in metropolitan environments.
Unless we are as brave as Norwegian explorer Erling Kragge, who spent 50 days in complete silence skiing to the Antarctic at minus fifty degrees below freezing – on a journey that more than a century before Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott endured – or fortunate enough to fly off to the other side of the globe to enjoy a silent retreat in luscious tropical surroundings, we need to come to terms with the fact that creating silence in an otherwise noisy and distracting environment requires a conscious act of disengagement from a broad field of visual and auditory attractions that we are constantly seduced into.
Sociologist Jonathan Crary explained in his book, Suspension of perceptions, that Western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of their capacity to ‘pay attention,’ labelling as dysfunctional or even abnormal the personalities of those individuals who are unable to properly pay attention to the world around them. It was in the late 1960s that Attention Deficit was formally diagnosed as a neurological disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.
But what might happen if we could consciously choose not to pay attention to the many seductions of the information age and decide to simply to cut off from the narratives that we are often paid to be participants of and simply keep silent, unengaged for some time? Will we face the risk of being labelled as abnormal, or simply detached, distant and indifferent?
In his publishing sensation, Silence in the age of noise, Kagge tells of having taken a long sailing trip as a youngster across West Africa, the Atlantic ocean, the Caribbean and then back again over the same ocean. This was in the 1980s, before the invention and expansion of the internet, therefore in the old days. Kagge recalls that, having got back home to Norway, after 8 months spent without any communication input from the outside world, he came to realize that the news and debate programmes in his native country were broadcasting almost exactly the same content as they did when he had set sail the previous autumn. ‘Politicians were almost debating the same questions with one another. Even the arguments were the same,’ he comments.
But this was in the 1980s, before the advent of the internet, but I guess if any of us could live through a similar experience, unlikely as this might be, we would be induced to reflect on the necessity vs. superfluity of many of our common behaviours.
Beyond all the ‘noisy’ narratives and dramas in which most of us keep our time and lives continuously engaged in, an often untapped, and overlooked, dimension of experience opens: silence. And the good news is: you can get this silence for free.
Kagge talks in a hearfelt way about the blessings that cultivating silence has brought to his own life, as an explorer, a father, a writer and a publisher. Silence, he explains, is where questions and answers are interrupted, judgment is suspended, and we are catapulted back in time to our younger, freer, still unconditioned self, a time when we used to genuinely wonder, be curious and question the world around us, without being caught up in narratives of like and dislike, agreeing and disagreeing, consuming and producing.
From a materialistic perspective, silence is ‘nothing,’ so perhaps, not very interesting, especially if we are constantly on the lookout to be entertained or to get something ‘out’ from our activities. According to a purely economic grammar, silence might be called an ‘austerity measure,’ because indulging in it – as in an almost luxurious activity or in-activity – we refuse to take part to our too familiar role as observers, consumers, or producers of information and stimula. This, for some people, is scary and de-stabilizing, as it opens a new, less comfortable and familiar dimension of experience.
As his deep and touching personal exploration of silence unfolds, Kagge enters the domain of Buddhism.
Within Zen Buddhism, he explains, ‘one goal is to challenge what you see, the visible world. The most well-known practice, a koan, is to sit quietly and imagine the sound of a single hand clappling. The point is to imagine the one-armed clapping– which is impossible – and to dwell on what it means to move beyond that which is logical and sensible.’
Moving beyond that which is logical means moving beyond the conceptual mind, which for sure tells us that ‘a single hand can’t clap’ or that ‘not to think of an elephant’ is impossible. Overcoming the boundaries of the conceptual mind is something that silence deeply encourages us to do when we dive into it through the practice of meditation. Meditation teaches us to simply be present, to simply be awake.
In Buddhism, Plain and Simple, Steve Hagen explains that, if you want to awaken, you have to forget about the outcomes, in other words, you have to resist the narratives of the purely economic drama that contemporary marketing and cognitive psychology teach us that we are constantly forced to buy into. You have to resist boredom, to resist thinking, to resist overstimulation, and, instead, simply ‘observe your own inclination of mind.’ The effort to awaken is like aiming at a ‘reverse’ target. We all would like to hit the bull’s eye, we know that! We all expect a direct outcome for our activities, and, if this is economically negotiable, then, all the better. But, in the case of awakening, we can’t aim towards it with the same leaning, calculating mind that we would use for more worldly pursuits.
The teachings that the Buddha transmitted 2,500 years ago are well represented by the metaphor of the horse who is being led to water by the awakened. The awakened points to the horse the way, but it is then up to the horse who, relying on his own power and resources, has to make the conscious effort of drinking from the river. ‘Our ignorance is that most of us don’t realize that we’re thirsty. Or, if we realize we’re thirsty, we look for water in the wrong place.’
A similar argument could be applied to our need for silence, which could be equated to the water in the metaphor of the horse in the buddha-dharma. Silence might be exactly what we are most in need of, although it might be not so easy to recognize, especially when we are kept in the dopamine loop in which the information age keeps our minds strongly tied.
Dopamine is one of the neurotransmitters that is responsible for transmitting signals in between the nerve cells of the brain. As this chemical ‘does what you desire, seek and crave,’ it is the answer in terms of modern neuroscience to the working of what the Buddha over two millennia ago called the ordinary mind, that is the mind of craving, wanting, discerning, fixing. The problem is that ‘dopamine is not programmed to release a feeling of fulfilment, even if you have achieved what you sought: as a result, you are never satisfied.’ The problem about dopamine is that this chemical – just like noise as overstimulation – is addictive, therefore the more we are inundated with it, the more we wish to be.
Silence, on the other hand, works differently. Silence is not about feeding, it is rather about taking something away. It is a means of creating coherence and sense in an otherwise chaotic world, just as the able sculptor needs to remove the excessive material from his piece to create something that has beauty and harmony. ‘It’s about getting inside what you are doing. Experiencing rather than over-thinking. Allowing each moment to be big enough. Not living through other people and things.’
Silence helps us to unlock new ways of thinking, to find unexpected solutions to problems and dilemmas, or even to experience spiritual epiphanies. It is the water we, as thirsty horses, long to immerse our dry manes into from the buzz of the information age. We can use it as a tool to turn up and down the ample volume of our lives without being passively subject to it.
Written by: Ambra Guarnieri