It is one thing to see the unity of silence and sound when our teachers are birdsong and the sea’s breaking waves. But what might Wallace Stevens or Robert Penn Warren say about unpleasant noise? Can noise also be a vehicle of that “peace after perfect speech”? Does the sound we would prefer not to hear have anything to reveal? Can noise, too, be a teacher pointing to the Silence that is the ground of all? Is noise also (like everything else that exists) a spoke leading into the hub that is the Center of us all?
The measure of our ability to live in silence is our reaction to noise (whether external or internal) and not the length of time we go without hearing anything or hearing only what we like to hear. As contemplative practice matures, we begin to relate to disruptive noise differently. We learn to meet sound that displeases with the same stillness with which we meet the sounds that please us, as the following account reveals.
Gareth had been drawn and dedicated to the practice of contemplation over many years. He heard about a weeklong retreat on contemplative prayer and thought this would be a good way to deepen his prayer life. The small retreat house was situated in a mountain village that overlooked a valley. The silence that pervaded the whole place was indescribable, and he settled easily into the spirit of the retreat along with al1 the other retreatants. They all sat together in silent prayer for a total of about seven hours spread throughout the course of the day. They combined this with manual work as well as some free time for napping or walks in nature. The retreat ended up being a pivotal breakthrough for him, not because of the prayerful silence and beauty of the mountains but because of the outrageously annoying buzz of an electric saw.
For about an hour in the afternoon over three consecutive days, the neighbor next door to the retreat house would saw timber with his electric table saw. Gareth thought his fillings were going to vibrate out of his back teeth, and he seriously considered either skipping that period of prayer or simply returning home. He just could not believe that this sort of disruption was happening during his retreat. The retreat guide advised him just to stick with it and to use the ordeal as an experiment in cultivating interior stillness in the midst of irritating noise. Apart from this hour there was virtually complete absence of irritating noise. To the retreat guide’s amazement, Gareth decided to try to adopt a mature attitude and follow this advice. He ended up discovering something important about silence.
Coping with disruptive noise that we simply cannot do anything about does not so much call for praying to the patron saint of noise reduction as for being resolved that it’s okay for the noise to be there if it happens to be there and nothing can be done about it. To get caught up in a buzzing commentary on how irritating the noise is makes for a noisy relationship with noise. The irritation is something the mind adds. We need a simpler relationship with noise. Instead of meeting an irritating buzz saw, we just want to let the buzz saw be there if nothing can be done about it. For this to happen, two things are required.
First, if our practice has been deeply established, we are in a position to learn something from silence and its generous way of allowing noise to be present when it happens to be present. To get caught up in commentary on the noise will not make it go away but will only tighten the clenching of our jaws around our preference that the noise be gone. Our own generous release our practice mirrors what silence does all the time; silence is wide and gracious enough to allow sound, even irritating sound, to be present. Second, instead of trying to push disruption away, we shift our attention away from the disrupting noise to our prayer word or to whatever our contemplative practice is. The return is not a pushing away or a reactive clinging, but a generous release into our practice. We will soon begin to see that the noisy disruptions that we cannot control become an exercise, a training that strengthens us in our practice, the way a challenging terrain strengthens the distance runner. But again this return to our practice will not be a pushing away or a flight from the disruption. Deepening immersion in contemplative practice is simultaneous with allowing the disruption to be present; we just become better at not letting it steal our attention. And when it inevitably does, we simply bring the attention home without comment. This is what Gareth needed to learn.
He preferred to have no disturbance. But through a gift of insight he saw that the silence was actually receiving the sound of the saw, and he released himself into his practice instead of reacting to the irritating noise. He let the sound be, simply because it was. He could soon see that the sound of the saw was simply the sound of the saw. The sense of irritation was supplied by mental commentary.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
