Speaking as one possessed of a talkative Western mentality, I find relief in the experience of the living silence which characterizes the Quaker Meeting for worship and described in the passage below by Rufus Jones. The relief includes for me a humbled mood of Quaker worship as a primitive beginner in comparison to other cultural traditions. That mood finds some articulation in the passages relating to Native American and early Chinese traditions. Quaker philosopher Rufus M. Jones, 1937: “Early Friends made the discovery that silence is one of the best preparations for communion with God and for the reception of inspiration and guidance. Silence itself, of course, has no magic. It may be just sheer emptiness, absence of words or noise or music. It may be an occasion for slumber, or it may be a dead form. But it may be an intensified pause, a vitalized hush, a creative quiet, an actual moment of mutual and reciprocal correspondence with God. The actual meeting of man with God and God with man is the very crown and culmination of what we can do with our human life here on earth.” Joseph Epes Brown in his collected lectures “Teaching Spirits”, 2001: “For many Native American cultures, words are not the only mode of communication, for silence itself constitutes language. In Western culture, we often fear silence. We are so uncomfortable with it that we fill it up with all kinds of insignificant noise and words. We do not let the power inherent in silence communicate with us. Cultures based upon oral transmission, however, recognize that without silence, there can be no language. They recognize that in silence there are profound moments of sacred, humanizing communications. As Black Elk said, “Silence is the voice of the Great Mysterious.”” David Hinton in the introduction to his “Mountain Home”, 2002, translates tzu-jan as “The mechanism by which being burgeons forth out of non-being” and then has this to say of the poetic language used in Early Chinese Zen Poetry: “The language tends to focus on descriptive words, that attention to tzu-jan [The mechanism by which being burgeons forth out of non-being], rather than function words (prepositions and conjunctions) that situate the empirical within the human mental constructs…. In reading a Chines poem, you mentally fill in the grammatical emptiness, and yet it always remains emptiness. This means participating in the silence of an empty mind at the boundaries of its true, wordless form, an experience you can know directly in the depths of consciousness through the practice of meditation…”
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 13:37:49 +0000
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