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Transcript

Inhabiting Silence · Infinitely Precious

• 0:00
  Intro: Welcome to the Infinitely Precious podcast produced by Infinitely Precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.
• 0:12
  James: Hello, beloved. It's me, James, and I'm glad to be with you for another episode of the Infinitely Precious podcast. We have been thinking about together, sharing thoughts about what it means to inhabit as opposed to ripen, which is a movement. What does it mean to inhabit the space in which we find ourselves? And we've talked about everything from inhabiting our preciousness, which beginning in a more internal understanding of inhabitation to moving to an external one.
• 0:50
  This week, I want to invite you to inhabit silence. Now, I want to say some things about what I have been discovering for a while, thinking for a while, experiencing for a while as I try to inhabit silence. First of all, when I came to begin to think about silence, I sought to achieve silence. So when I began a meditation practice, particularly one that began in centering prayer, It began in other more mantra based ones before that. But as I entered Centering Prayer, I was seeking to achieve a kind of inner silence as if it was something to be achieved, something I would ripen towards.
• 1:42
  And perhaps the experience of learning to live in the silence might be a ripening process, I suppose. But when I began to think about what it really was to be in silence, I you know, I think that the general conception about it and even mine was really about learning to block out the sound and the noise, the voices that we might hear, whether it be our own internal sort of argumentation or whatever it may be to learn to get beyond that as if silence is something to be achieved above and beyond the noise and the words. What if silence is before all of that? When I read the first chapters of Genesis, and let me just say this is not a scholarly exposition, but when I read the first verses of Genesis, it begins with the divine sort of beginning the process of creating the heavens and the earth and that the spirit, breath, wind of god was sort of over the waters. And we get to a place where in the midst of what I see as kind of an eternal silence, there is a word spoken, let there be light in English.
• 3:32
  And rather than interrupt the silence, those words that I hear there are a movement from the spaciousness that silence creates. That what silence does, it's not something to be achieved. It's not something on the far side of noise and sound, but it is rather that spaciousness within which arises sound, arises noise, that long before there was ever the language that is heard, the vibrational energy that we hear in terms of sound and noise, long before there was that, there was soundlessness. And that soundlessness created a kind of space. One of the things that I have learned through years of practicing, I don't know, twelve, fourteen years of practicing Centering Prayer is the kind of spaciousness I feel that is generated by that falling into silence, slipping into the silence that exists below all the noise that my brain wants to create, that the noise of the world around me.
• 5:06
  To hearken back to last week when I talked a little bit about simply being present in the places that we sat in Portugal at a cafe and people passed and I drank coffee and watched and was just present. There was a kind of silence underneath that all, an internal silence. Silence is something that we actually carry with us at all times. And because it is perhaps the foundational piece of all that is, underlies all that is, every opportunity to create the to be a part of the spaciousness that silence creates gives me the space to create the very words, the expression that is born in the spaciousness of silence. So learning to inhabit silence then is learning to let that silence rise from within and to be with us.
• 6:15
  It can be so in a busy crowded mall. It can be with us at a loud concert. It can be with us when all we're trying to get past is all of the various argumentation that happens in our head, the problems that we create and solve constantly, the constant inner dialogue that's going on, that silence is there in those moments. And learning to inhabit it is to slip into that silence that's already there and let it provide for us the spaciousness we need to be, to create, to love, all of the kinds of things that we talk about inhabiting. I think silence is before all of that.
• 7:11
  It s interesting that one of the teachers, I consider a teacher, I never got to meet him, Thomas Keating. He was a monastic who sort of was part of the team that revived what we think of as centering prayer today. And one the things he stated was that silence was God's original language. And perhaps learning to inhabit silence, to truly be present, to silence even in a sound filled, noisy world, is learning to listen for god's most original language, the language of the divine of silence. We are so used to communicating in words in sounds.
• 8:11
  Sometimes we write them down and we read them, but even those make kind of a noise in our brain. But what if God's original language, that divine language is silence. And if we can learn once again to perceive it, it's not that the silence isn't all around us, the spaciousness because the process of creation was not a one time, a one and done kind of deal with God. The implication of those first Hebrew texts at the beginning of Genesis imply the beginning of a long process of creativity that still is ongoing. And in the spaciousness of the infinite divine silence, the divine has the space, the spaciousness to continue to be created.
• 9:04
  And perhaps if I fall into that, the creativity that is reflected from the divine in me has a space to emerge? What if listening for that language gives me access to things, to myself, to the world in ways perhaps I haven't seen it before, haven't heard it before because the silence is not something we seem to seek. Even in the world in which we live that is so noisy, so loud, and constantly pushing that sound is pushing on us. If I say to you that you can cultivate that space, you can learn to inhabit silence even in the noisiest spaces you could find. I don't know if you'd even believe me.
• 10:01
  I don't know if I, at one point, would have believed myself. And yet, there are moments when I feel myself slipping into silence when around me the world seems quite loud. Silence creates that space within so that I can receive what the world offers me, what the divine offers me. What I have to offer has space to be created to arise from the silence. I invite you this week to give it a try to practice inhabiting silence.
• 10:43
  Now, I think that the way that oftentimes we learn what silence even feels like or looks like is born in a meditative process, not when we're trying to speak a lot of words or filling the space with music or other kinds of bits. And even when we turn off all the music and everything else, there is always a sound. I sat down right here at my computer just a little earlier and I felt the sound rising just as my as the fans clicked in to cool my computer so I could record this podcast. There is sound all around, but there is also silence. And I think silence is the origin space.
• 11:32
  I think silence is the spaciousness that gives room for creativity, for the arising of form and beauty and understanding of the vastness of all that is, Even if it is only a finite understanding of the infinite, only the beginnings, only a taste is that. So I invite you to perhaps take up meditation, whether it's an active form of meditation in which you use a mantra, a simple mantra repeated to yourself to clear your mind. That's a very active form of meditation or perhaps a more passive form of meditation, centering prayer. I don't want to reexplain centering prayer but in centering prayer, you have a sacred word but the sacred word represents your intention to to be present and to let go of any thought that arises. And a thought is not just what you think, it's what you feel, it's what you hear, to let it go, not to pursue it, not to figure out what it is.
• 12:45
  Oh, that was a bird. Oh, that was a plane flying over. Oh, that was a car driving by rather than naming. We recognize that we are distracted. It comes.
• 12:58
  We use our sacred words simply to let it go and then we stop. We only use the sacred word when we feel it's when we feel when we sense something is rising and then we begin to practice the presence of being there It's not an achievement. It's not one more thing. Oh my gosh. James has given me one more thing in my spiritual life that I have to work hard to achieve.
• 13:23
  It's not about achievement. It's not about judging yourself whether you get there or not. It's about learning to listen for something beyond the noise and sounds that arise in your life because underneath it all, perhaps, is the silence. Now no matter what happens, no matter what you do, whether you learn to inhabit the silence or not, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are just because you are. It's not about achieving.
• 13:59
  It s about being. You are already a gift. You are already precious. You are already loved. Thanks so much for joining me today.
• 14:08
  I wish you all the best, my friends.