I often hear silence in nature. It is a wonderful, soothing silence that I experience very consciously. It touches me deeply and I enjoy it. It also makes me quiet inside, I feel the silence going inside and I'm in the middle of it. I then realize that listening to the silence around me evokes the silence within myself, because only by being silent inside can I become aware of that silence. There are no thoughts running through my head. At that moment, the silence and my consciousness have become one in a formless space without dimensions, where it is also good to live. I cherish that, because without going out, I know of myself that from here often raids and creative thoughts emerge. Eckhart Tolle, known for his book ‘The Power of now’, writes about this that we come to our deep self in that silence and that we are then completely in the now. As soon as I am distracted in that moment by thoughts, which are almost always about something from the past or about the future, then the inner silence is disturbed and I see that my I, my ego, begins to take control. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as I am aware of it and can edit it. Listening to the silence brings me back to the present.
In English, there are two words for silence: silence and stillness. We don't have that, we only have the word silence. Silence is what we call the measurable, decibelless silence, and stillness is what I would call the inner silence. Stillness, inner silence, is inside - with true and complete attention-waiting for what is to come, however, without expecting anything. In English we also see this in the use of the word ‘still’: Still it could happen. Guard, it can still happen. Waiting with attention in silence. The French philosopher Simone Weil points out that the word attendre, waiting, is very close to the word attention. So don't react immediately, but maybe reflect first. With this I come across the concept of ’time’. Time also has a measurable meaning. That's what joke Hermsen says in her book "Quiet the time”, the clock time, Chronos, calls. It is time as we have divided it into equal parts, seconds, minutes, linearly for several centuries. But there is also an inner time, time as expensive, Kairos. We sometimes even experience it as timelessness. This subjective experience of time also brings us to our deep self.
This inner time and the inner silence as formless space are a rich source of inspiration, renewal and creativity.
Especially in nature, for example during a trail, we learn what silence and timelessness are. How? By looking at a landscape, a tree, a flower and seeing how still they are, how deeply rooted they are in their being. And then the music. Isn't it the silence between the notes that makes the music so beautiful? Not to mention the silences that fall in an in-depth conversation. Isn't much said in those silences? The silence speaks.
Silence, and I mean the absence of sound, can be helpful, but I don't need it to find the inner silence. When I walk along the sea, I am simultaneously aware of the silence under the sound of the rustling of the surf and the screeching of seagulls. It is this silence from nature that connects with my inner silence and timelessness. The inner peace and tranquility, which floods many with me during a walk along the beach, must spring from this.
It brings me to The phenomenology of perception from Merleau-Ponty where he argues that the openness of the human being is a situated openness, which consists in the fact that we respond to invitations that proceed from what the perceived reality has to offer us. Nature and the silence during a trail then invite us to answer in a new way instead of being trapped within our prejudices. Nature and silence lead us to the source of our ‘inner knowing’.
Boy Van Droffelaar, PhD
