Silence and Solitude

This is the second of three posts in a series inspired by the Irish poet, author, and Priest John O’Donohue. 

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I love sound. My Walter Mitty job would be a sound engineer in a recording studio. I briefly considered the profession until I learned of the math involved. Instead, I became an audiophile.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the very best audio amplifiers are extremely quiet. That sounds counter-intuitive until you consider that music is defined by the silence between notes. Silence, it turns out, is very beautiful. 

A few years back, I discovered that the quietest place on earth (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) is at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis. I contacted them, and Steve Orfield was kind enough to give me a tour. As an aside, Orfield Labs was the site of now-defunct Sound 80, the world’s first digital recording studio. Prince and many other artists you would recognize recorded there. I actually stood in the same room where Bob Dylan recorded “Tangled Up In Blue.” Be still my heart!

The tour’s highlight was the anechoic chamber, which, according to Guinness, measures at -9.4 dbA, meaning it’s over 9 times quieter than the threshold of human hearing. After a few minutes in the chamber, my body became an orchestra, composed of a thumping heart, swooshing airways, and a gurgling stomach. Frankly, it was uncomfortable.

I used to have somewhat of a phobic fear of the workings of my body.  Feeling my pulse made me queasy. Ultimately, I figured out this anxiety probably originated from a latent fear of mortality. Everyone knows how their song ends. I preferred not to be reminded of it. Sometimes, it’s more comfortable just to be busy. Maybe that’s why people avoid silence and solitude. Sadly, many of us never experience our true inner being due to the world’s distractions. 

Lately, I’ve been reading Anam Cara by John O’Donohue. The idea for this post came from the chapter, The Body Is In the Soul. The title sounds backward, which invited me to pay attention. 

“You need very little in order to develop a real sense of your own spiritual individuality. One of the things that is absolutely essential is silence, the other is solitude.”

O’Donohue continues:

“In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. It is fascinating and frightening. It means we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for things we need from within.”

A few pages later, O’Donohue quotes 14th-century Dominican Priest and mystic Meister Eckhart:

“There is a place in the soul that niether space, nor time, nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us. It would be a lovely gift to yourself to go there often.”

Amazingly, these quotes describe my experience practicing meditation.

At first, I practiced in a dark room with noise-canceling headphones. I didn’t know how to find silence and be with it. Eventually, meditation became more natural and I discovered I could let go of thought and become immersed in the moment almost anywhere without distraction. A dark room and noise-canceling headphones were no longer necessary. 

Over the years, I’ve found there is an indigenous wisdom that resides within us in the eternal now. I don’t have a name for this force, but I’ve learned to pay attention to it. In doing so, my phobias disappeared. According to O’Donohue, my experience is not unique:

“As your body ages, you can become aware of how your soul enfolds and minds your body; the panic and fear often associated with aging can fall away from you…The destination of human time is death. Eternal time is unbroken presence.”

Mortality no longer concerns me. Our body is in our soul. We don’t find peace until our soul is at rest. Fortunately, this inner being is always present, waiting to be discovered. How the discovery is made is up to each of us.

Eternity, rather than a distant place, is an unbroken presence. Silence and solitude are the doorways.

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