The Three Marriages - Page 7

 

The Need for Silence

All of our great contemplative traditions advocate the necessity for silence in an individual life: first, for gaining a sense of discernment amid the noise and haste, second, as a basic building block of individual happiness, and third, to let this other all-seeing identity come to life and find its voice inside us. In the Buddhist tradition the ability to be happy is often translated into English as "equanimity," roughly meaning to be equal to things, to be large enough for the drama in which we find ourselves.

Almost all of our traditions of instruction in prayer, meditation or silence, be they Catholic, Buddhist or Muslim advocate seclusion or withdrawal as a first step in creating this equanimity. Small wonder we feel it goes against everything we need to do on the outside to keep our other commitments together. Intimate relationships seem to demand endless talking and passing remarks; work calls for endless meetings, phone calls and exhortations. In the two outer marriages it seems as if everything real comes from initiating something new. In the inner world we intuit something different and more difficult. It can be disconcerting or even distressing to find that this third marriage, this internal marriage, calls for a kind of cessation, a topping, a fierce form of attention that attempts to look at where all this doing arises from. For the busy mind, for instance, it is almost impossible, or even painful, to stop and read the following:

In the beginning of heaven and earth

There were no words,

Words came out of the womb of matter

And whether a man dispassionately

Sees to the core of life

Or passionately sees the surface

The core and the surface

Are essentially the same,

Words making them seem different

Only to express appearance.

If name be needed, wonder names
them both:

From wonder into wonder

Existence opens.

Tao Te Ching

(translation by Witter Bynner)

Existence opens. "Thank you," we say, "but I don't have time. Please give it to me in three bullet points that I can look at later, when I get a moment, when I retire, when I'm on my deathbed or even when I'm actually dead, surely, then there'll be time enough to spare." Trying to be equal to Lao Tzu's opening remarks in the Tao Te Ching when we have no practice with silence and the revelations that arise from the spacious sense of reality can be like a novice violinist trying to play the opening notes of a Bach concerto. We can be so overwhelmed by the grandeur of the piece that we give up on our beginning scales.

The third marriage to the internal self seems to be to someone or something that in many ways seems even less open to coercion or sheer willpower than an actual marriage or a real job. Not only does this internal marriage seem to operate under rules different from those of the other two outer contracts but it also seems to be connected to the big, we might even say unbearable, questions of existence that scare us half to death and for which we have no easy answer. Like a skittish single unable to commit to the consequences of a full relationship, we turn away from questions that flower from solitude and quiet. n

From the book The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship by David Whyte. Copyright © 2009 by David Whyte. Published courtesy of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Books (USA). All rights reserved.

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