awakening the subtle senses
‘Silence is ecological, our natural habitat, not the world of noise that surrounds and stresses us,’ says Martha Reeves, the professed Anglican solitary who writes under the pen name of Maggie Ross. (1)
She continues: ‘I have spent a lot of time in Alaska, out in the wilderness alone, traveling by kayak. You have to save your VHS radio for emergencies, so you count on your skin’s sensitivity to humidity and barometric pressure to let you know when a storm is coming.’
Sensing the sacred through silence
Once, not far from the Arctic Circle, as she was picking blueberries, her body alerted her to something. ‘Suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck prickled and I got out of there, fast. When I reached the bottom of the hill my friends were hugely relieved because a very large grizzly bear had also started picking berries on the other side of the bush where I couldn’t see, hear or smell it. But clearly my body had picked up his presence.’
Perhaps, she reflects, this was another example of the profound interconnectedness of the cosmos that reveals itself in silence: ‘I would not be here talking to you if I hadn’t been picking berries in silence.’
‘The same is true of fishing,’ she continues. ‘Some young people take radios out on their boats when they are fishing, but they aren’t the people who catch the fish. Those are the old timers who will tell you, “I don’t know what I mean but the only way I can say it is that I listen for the fish.” These are very practical silent ways of knowing that we have forgotten to our detriment and that of the planet. But all is not lost: it is possible to take the most die-hard city slicker out into the wilderness of a place like Alaska and these subtle senses that are out of sight of our self-conscious minds will come alive.
‘But you don’t have to go all the way to Alaska to practice silence. It can be done anytime, anywhere, even in the noisiest contexts. I knew one novice-mistress who used to take her novices to the airport and the subway to teach them this.’
In our survey last year looking at the impact of meditation in our practice community, we asked if people had a greater sense of connectedness with others and nature. ‘Absolutely,’ someone replied: ‘I am struggling to put this into words, because it is like I am experiencing this in a whole other paradigm outside of language. It feels like it is a deep feeling, as sense in the core of me.’
There are many ways to enter the silence which is our natural habitat. Meditation is one way, a simple way that allows us to wake within it, which allows our subtle senses to awaken.
To echo John the Baptist, for God’s to increase in our awareness, we must decrease (John 3:30). Our self-consciousness, our self-focus, must recede. We must become self-forgetful. Stepping back from the chatter and noise of our mind in meditation, letting go of the thoughts and images which arises within us moment by moment, we discover the silence which is not an absence of anything, but a boundless fullness, holding us and everything.
An inexplicable sense of presence
The Carmelite Mary McCormack writes about this very simply, very beautifully. (2)
‘It may happen during prayer, or even when we are engaged in our everyday activities, that a sudden hush falls upon us, an involuntary silencing of thought, as the mind’s powers are caught and held in an inexplicable sense of presence.
‘It does not last long and cannot be recaptured at will, but it is usually the prelude to a simplification of our prayer.
‘Prayer gradually becomes characterised by the ability to rest peacefully in a loving sense of God’s presence, without desiring anything else. Words and ideas give way to silent communion.’
Note her comment, ‘it…cannot be recaptured.’ The silence in which ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), the silence which is God’s presence, is here. We are within it. There is no need to try and get hold of it. It is holding us.
A path of self-forgetfulness
‘Precisely because of its simplicity it can sometimes seem elusive, says McCormack. ‘There is literally ‘nothing’ to get hold of, and it is difficult to stay with that. I have learned, though, that only that which is sought after is elusive, and it is the very condition of this prayer that it can only be received. To seek it is immediately to define it to oneself, to give it a form, a name, a limit, and so to make of it something other than the boundless simplicity of God’s gift.’
In meditation, we turn, we open to that which is so close, so intimate, that to look for it is to overlook it.
‘When we learn to stop struggling to recover what we feel we have lost, we will begin to be aware of the startling simplicity and immediacy of God’s oneness with us.’
Our practice is a path of self-forgetfulness, a path which teaches us to trust, to ‘walk by faith [trust] and not by sight’ (2 Cor 5:7). Little by little, without us knowing how, the time we give to silence helps us awaken within the silence that is our natural habitat, and our home: the silence of God’s presence.
This blog is based on one of the teachings given in a recent online meditation group gathering. You are warmly welcome to join one of our future gatherings.