Returning to Silence
The Openness of Not Knowing
This touched me very deeply and woke me up. Maybe it will touch you as well:
I know people are feeling many different things after the election. Many conflicting opinions about what happened and what's coming next are flying around. I waded into post-election political opining myself on Facebook and in a few Notes here on Substack, and it put me into some agitated and dark moods.
As I’ve said before, I'm always of two minds about whether to venture into political topics or stay in my lane as a nondual spiritual person. It’s all what is, and in that sense, it’s all nondual and spiritual, but my nondual spiritual writing and work with people (and my inner work) emphasizes the common ground, the wholeness, the undivided ocean, whereas anything political (in expression or thought) is always on the level of the churning waves. It inevitably brings forth agreement and disagreement, and always some degree of conflict, opposition, resistance, defense, offense, fear, anger, animosity, identification. No two of us will agree on everything, so it feeds the imaginary sense of separation and division.
While I got many positive responses to what I wrote and shared, reading some of the negative responses was hard. It brought up loneliness, feeling misunderstood, frustration, anger, sorrow, upset, fear, tightness, contraction and reactivity. And I saw that it stirred up other people as well.
Of course, all that can be fertile ground for looking, awaring, listening—inwardly and outwardly—seeing where we get triggered.
I sometimes seem to feel a responsibility to speak out about what I see. But then I hear an inner voice urging me to stay in the silence. Offer only the silence (including with words), not the noise of opinions and judgments.
Then tonight I stumbled upon that Charles Eisenstein video and it woke me up, returned me to the silence, the not knowing, the open space, the stillness, the heart, the unconditional love. And so, I share it with all of you.
This seems like a good time for not knowing. Because the truth is, we don’t know what the future will bring. And how we are NOW will have a lot to do with how the future unfolds. How we meet others has a lot to do with how they move. I know in my heart that love has more power than hate or bitterness. So my aspiration is to focus on the wholeness, the presence, the open space, the unconditional love that holds it all.
Love to all…
"If only there were evil people out there insidiously committing evil deeds and it was only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?"
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thank you for this. The sentiment and perspective you describe, and that Eisenstein describes, is one that I share.
FWIW, a series of exercises recommended by the late, great Robert Anton Wilson in his classic book PROMETHEUS RISING — published all the way back in 1983 — is directly resonant with Eisenstein's recommendation to immerse oneself subjectively in different and opposing viewpoints and ideologies. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Eisenstein were influenced by it. Wilson recommended these exercises as a way to gain some distance and perspective on your own intellectual imprinting, in order to recognize the relativity of the things you believe, right up to and including your entire worldview or reality tunnel:
1. If you are a Liberal, subscribe to the National Review, the country's most intelligent (and witty) conservative magazine, for a year. Each month try to enter their reality-tunnel for a few hours while reading their articles.
2. If you are a Conservative, subscribe to the New York Review of Books for a year and try to get into their head-space for a few hours a month.
3. If you are a Rationalist, subscribe to Fate magazine for a year.
4. If you are an occultist, join the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and read their journal, The Skeptical Inquirer, for a year.
5. Buy a copy of the Scientific American and read any article in it. Ask the following questions: Why do they sound so sure? Does the data support dogmatism at this point, or is dogma a primate habit (defending head-space)? Will these theories still be believed in 2011? In 2593?
6. Get into a discussion of philosophy with an educated Marxist, an intelligent Moslem and a Japanese businessman at the first opportunity.
7. Buy some ZOOM or LIFT (two names for the same caffeine- high stimulant) at a Health Food Store. (This gives a close approximation of the effects of illegal cocaine.) When you are Zooming or Lifted and your mind is racing, find a victim and explain the universe to him or her, until they are able to escape you.
Others have updated Wilson's exercises with some additional ones in a similar vein that are pointedly relevant to collective concerns these several decades later:
- Imagine that you are Reverend Jerry Falwell, a mullah in a theocratic Islamic nation, or another conservative religious moralist. Explain to an imaginary homosexual why his or her sexual orientation is sinful and must be changed, including instructions on changing it. Now, imagine that you are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or another fervently godless rationalist. Explain to an imaginary 60-year-old nun (preferably of an extremely charitably-inclined and humble order) why her religious devotion is idiotic and must be changed, including instructions on changing it.
- Read an anthropological study about a tribal group different from your own culture. Compose your best serious argument for why your culture’s taboos are objectively more sensible than the taboos of the tribe. Now, do the same from the viewpoint of the tribe, as seriously as you can.
- Imagine that you are a conspiracy theorist (you can pick your favorite conspiracy theory; some possibilities include One World Government/New World Order conspiracists, or the people who believe that most of the world’s leaders are actually evil reptilian aliens). Do your best to get into your conspiracy theorist’s headspace. Now, spend as much time as you can stomach watching 24-hour news channels in that frame of mind and look for all the evidence that each newscaster and talking head is either a conscious or unconscious dupe of the conspiracy.
- Become a Nazi for half an hour. Believe that might makes right, and that some groups (specifically, yours) are destined to rule or crush other groups. Plan a campaign to take over the world by force and fraud. This exercise is extremely trying, for obvious reasons, but it tests the extent of your ability to reach beyond your own reality tunnel, even into something horrifying.
- Become a pious, strict Roman Catholic and compose a serious argument for the Church and Pope’s infallibility and holiness, despite what you know of its history. If you are Catholic (or otherwise religious), compose an argument for why science holds the answer to every question in the universe.
- Now that you have spent some time in the reality tunnels of others, come back to your own reality tunnel, whatever it may be or have been. Examine it fully. Does it seem as objectively truthful as it did before you started tunnel-busting? From now on, when you are confronted with new, strange, “stupid,” or “evil” belief systems, try taking on their viewpoints for at least a few hours.
Here are some of Wilson's very helpful words on the mutable nature of what we call "reality," from the introduction to his classic autobiographical and philosophical book COSMIC TRIGGER:
"Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, 'My current model' — or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel — 'contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.' In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude....
"The only 'realities' (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced realities, existential realities — realities involving ourselves as editors — and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler.
"Alan Watts may have said it best of all: 'The universe is a giant Rorschach ink-blot.' Science finds one meaning in it in the 18th Century, another in the 19th, a third in the 20th; each artist finds unique meanings on other levels of abstraction; and each man and woman finds different meanings at different hours of the day, depending on the internal and external environments....
"Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest, and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends. I feel sorry for people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless reality tunnels, and try to show them how to break the bad habit, but I don’t feel any masochistic duty to share their misery....
"My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended."