Beyond Silence

Reverence for the Beautiful Noise

I protest and reject this quote, usually attributed to Rumi. The notion that silence represents pure, undiluted divine communication, while all other forms of expression constitute degraded approximations, strikes me as weird, wrong, and pretentious.

This quote proposes that the Divine Source, which I personally call the Goddess, speaks most authentically in the void between sounds.

Everything else is somehow inferior, a corruption of the original silent message: the cry of a newborn, the song of a mockingbird at dawn, the crash of waves against rocks, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “I love you” between partners.

I reject this mystical elitism.

The ranking of silence over sound rests on a dualism I distrust, in which spirit is purer than matter and the ineffable outranks the effable.

Nope. This is the old transcendence trap, the notion that we must escape the messy, noisy realm of embodied existence to access authentic spirituality.

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The opposite is true. The language of Goddess is the entire spectacular, multitudinous symphony of life.

When have I felt most connected to the life that’s larger than myself, most touched by the sacred? Sometimes this miracle has happened during silent meditation, but on other occasions, it has arisen when I’ve heard music that made me sob with reverent joy.

The sound of rain falling or my partner laughing can give me the same startled gratitude for being alive that may arrive when I’m floating in a sensory deprivation tank.

The natural world, recipient of so much of my worshipful adoration, doesn’t privilege silence. As I walk through a forest or stretch of wetland, I’m immersed in constant sound: wind through branches, insects humming, birds calling, streams gurgling, and the rustle of small creatures in the underbrush. This is the Divine language made manifest.

I don’t believe that the Goddess is trying to say something really important in the silence between bird songs, but the stupid birds keep interrupting.

Human language is our amazing capacity to transform interior experience into communicable form. The irony is that mystics who praise silence typically do so using words, often carefully chosen words arranged in precise patterns. If silence is the only authentic divine language, why bother?

Words create worlds and forge connections. They wound and heal. They make the invisible visible and the ineffable slightly less so.

Many religious traditions share the theme proclaimed in the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, Logos. The creative principle first itself expressed through articulation.

When Rumi (the actual Rumi, not the New Age ghost of him) wrote his ecstatic poetry, he was celebrating divine intoxication, exulting in the fecundity of a life that aches for expression. His poems are the universe speaking itself into being through a human throat.

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I’ll correct the record about who actually said the quote at the top.

The line is a paraphrase of Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk in Colorado who popularized a practice called Centering Prayer. In his book Invitation to Love he declared that silence is God’s first language and everything else a poor translation.

Keating was elaborating on St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish Carmelite friar, who taught that God the Father spoke one Word in eternity, spoke it in silence, and in silence we hear it.

So the meme’s genealogy runs like this: Spanish mystic to Trappist monk to New Age poster to the imaginary mouth of Rumi. The internet borrowed a glamorous Sufi to sell a piece of austere Christian metaphysics, because “silence is purest” plays better in an ecstatic desert than in a monastery down the road from the Aspen ski lifts.

The misattribution is a confession. People sense the doctrine needs a wilder, sexier sponsor than the one it actually has.

And it is a doctrine, not a mood. It belongs to what the contemplatives call the via negativa, the way of negation. This is the conviction that the Divine is the formless No-Thing hiding behind all the noisy somethings, and that we draw near to it only by stripping away every image, name, and sound, until nothing remains but a holy emptiness.

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You see the apostles of this doctrine everywhere, and they share a peculiar affliction. They can’t stop talking about how we ought to stop talking.

Ramana Maharshi, the renowned sage of Advaita Vedanta, taught that silence is the highest instruction, superior to any spoken teaching. He sometimes, not always, “taught” simply by sitting wordlessly in a room with his seekers.

We know this because those seekers wrote down every syllable he uttered and bound them into fat volumes of Talks. The wordless master survives entirely as words.

Meher Baba went further. In 1925 he took a vow of silence and kept it for 44 years, until his death, communicating first by pointing at letters on an alphabet board and later through an elaborate sign language. All the while, he promised that one day he would break his silence and speak the single Word that would transform the human race.

He never did. Yet during those four mute decades he produced books, God Speaks and the Discourses among them, dictated letter by laborious letter. Half a century of not-talking, and a small library to show for it.

Eckhart Tolle has built an empire on the gap between thoughts. The mind is the noise; the still space behind it is the real you, the doorway to Being. It takes him hundreds of pages and a permanent world tour to deliver this news.

Every apostle of wordlessness arrives lugging suitcases of words.

The performative contradiction is fun to point at. The metaphysics underneath is the harder problem.

When nondualists rank silence above sound, they state the entire architecture of their cosmos. Silence stands for the formless, changeless, unmanifest Absolute, the Real.

Sound stands for form, multiplicity, movement, matter, body: the realm of mere appearance, of maya, of the not-as-real and the not-as-pure.

The manifest world is a veil to be seen through, a degraded copy of a perfect, unsullied original.

All of this gets filed under static interfering with the silent signal: the cricket’s chirp, the lover’s laugh, the newborn’s first cry, and Beethoven’s Ninth.

In this curious philosophy, the bustling body is a problem. The restless Earth is a way station. The goal is to dissolve the noisy, particular, gorgeous, changing self back into the undifferentiated hush from which it supposedly leaked.

I want a different life. I experience our riotous, sound-drenched world as a beautiful treasure. The Goddess sings through creation, in the wind and the insects and the gurgling streams and the human throat raised in song. The Real True Actual Deep Reality doesn’t shut up.

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The elevation of silence as spiritually superior has caused a lot of trouble. Throughout history, the powerful have often told the powerless that their highest calling is to be quiet.

The New Testament’s First Letter to Timothy instructs women “to learn in silence with full submission.” America’s antebellum catechisms written for enslaved Africans made obedience without murmuring the road to heaven, while the white “masters” kept the franchise on speaking for God. In Canadian and American boarding schools, Indigenous children were not merely discouraged from speaking; they were often explicitly forbidden to speak their languages and punished for doing so.

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I’m not belittling silence. I treasure contemplative practice and the ability to still my mind’s constant chatter. I’ve spent my entire adult life cultivating the discipline of listening deeply rather than always broadcasting.

I love both silence and sound. Silence gives meaning to sound, and sound gives meaning to silence. They define each other.

I prefer to understand the language of Goddess as the dynamic interplay of expression and receptivity. In my celebration of life, the Divine is equally present in the cricket’s chirp and the pause between chirps.

As a lover of ineffable mystery and a celebrant of embodied life, I know that the sacred is right here, embedded in the gorgeous, terrible, beautiful mess of incarnate existence, including all the ways the world expresses itself through sound.

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I want a mysticism that doesn’t rank-order the modes of divine communication. Yes, there’s plenty of toxic talk, harmful language, and destructive sound. But the remedy is speech that celebrates connection rather than separation.

The universe isn’t trying to shut up and contemplate itself. It’s bursting at the seams, eager to communicate through every available channel.

Outside my window this morning, the mockingbird is running through his entire repertoire, car alarms included. Whatever the silence between his phrases is trying to tell me, I’d rather hear him.

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CODA: THE NOISE I’VE MADE

Most people who know my work know me as a person who arranges words on a page. But before I was a writer, and all through the years I was becoming one, I was a noisemaker.

I’ve been a musician, songwriter, and bandleader, most joyfully as the co-founder of World Entertainment War, whose fusion of rock, funk, punk, spoken word, and social commentary earned a devoted cult following, a contract with MCA Records, and management by Bill Graham.

I’ve also had another parallel career doing solo spoken-word shows with lots of music. My main contribution has been Sacred Uproar: A Pagan Revival Show, where poetry, storytelling, philosophy, music, humor, and ritual merge in a phenomenon that’s equal parts sermon, cabaret, and prankful spiritual insurrection.

I have six albums out in the world. They’re my exuberant personal evidence for the themes I’ve argued here.

Every live show I’ve done, well over a thousand, has been an experiment in these hypotheses: that the Divine can be summoned into a room by a holy racket; that hundreds of people dancing and breathing in the same rhythm at midnight are engaged in a liturgy as legitimate as any silent vigil.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of July 30

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Neurologists say that when you vividly imagine performing an action like shooting a basketball or playing piano, your brain activates many of the same networks it uses in real practice. In other words, mental rehearsal can measurably improve your actual performance. Many athletes use this trick. But here’s an interesting twist: Such visualizations work for emotional and social skills too. We can enhance our resilience and better regulate our moods if we practice doing so in the privacy of our imaginations. I bring this to your attention, Leo, because you’re in a period when your fantasy life has extra-robust practical power. I invite you to rehearse being who you want to be in the theater of your mind.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Your assignment: Compose a vigorous prayer in which you ask life for something you fear you don’t deserve or are not supposed to want. What is the blessing, healing, or freedom that feels “too much,” “too selfish,” “too late,” or “too impossible” for you to yearn for? Name this prize and how you imagine it might allow you to give more, love more, or live more honestly. You could begin your appeal with these words: “Dear Great Mystery, I’m nervous about asking for this, but I will ask anyway,” and then let your heart speak without editing. Do this at least once every day for ten days.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In 1848, a Libra-born carpenter named James Marshall discovered a few glittering flakes of gold floating on the American River in California. His find ignited the Gold Rush, drawing hundreds of thousands of people westward. Alas, Marshall himself never became rich from the discovery, though many other people did. I’m hoping and predicting a different outcome when you locate treasure in the coming weeks, Libra. In this instance, you will share in the spoils.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The lyrebird can imitate almost any sound, including chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters, and other birds’ songs. But they don’t just mimic sounds randomly. They compose elaborate performances, weaving a variety of imitations into complex acoustic tapestries. In a sense, they are remix artists. During the coming weeks, Scorpio, I hope you give yourself permission to resemble a lyrebird. Sample freely from everything you’ve absorbed. Weave your influences into new configurations. Express your imaginative concoctions of repurposed ideas and enchantments. The voice isn’t less yours because it borrows from other voices. Originality is in part about arrangement, not just source material.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Astronauts who have orbited Earth describe the “overview effect.” Viewing the entire globe from high above triggers rich epiphanies and cognitive shifts, providing a visceral sense of the planet’s fragility and unity. Borders dissolve. Conflicts seem absurd. I surmise you are ripe for a similar blessing, Sagittarius. You’ll be able to see your current dramas from expansive vantage points that make their true scale and significance obvious. Armed with these perspectives, you will naturally clarify your priorities and allow petty concerns to fade away.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You are the result of an ancestral crowd: two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Without these 14 lives weaving together in the precise ways they did, your unique destiny would never have taken shape. Their choices and challenges helped sculpt your gifts and your rough edges, your cravings and your turn-offs. The coming weeks will be a ripe astrological moment to get more intimate with this lineage. As you delve into your family’s stories, you may uncover vital clues for refreshing your views on dilemmas that have dragged on for a while. Are you daring enough to let your sense of “where I come from” evolve—and, with it, your sense of what kind of future you want to create?

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): According to my investigations, there’s a place you need to go, but fear or timidity is holding you back. Where is it? Is it a physical location, a creative risk, a complicated conversation, or a spiritual threshold? Visualize it. Who would you be if you appeared there in your full glory? What do you worry might happen if you do? What interesting future might never bloom if you don’t? I hope you formulate a feisty plan. To begin, write these words: “If I decide to go there anyway, acknowledging my fear but not being controlled by it, what first step will I take and what help will I seek?”

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Professional athletes sometimes talk about “winning ugly.” That’s when they achieve a victory even though they haven’t played their very best. I foresee you using that phrase for yourself soon, after you notch a less-than-pretty but undeniably real success. There’s another expression you might also exemplify, too: “ugly ripe.” Officially, it’s the name of luscious heirloom tomatoes whose lumpy, offbeat forms contrast with the smooth, bland specimens stacked in most supermarket bins. In the coming weeks, it will describe the nonstandard yet succulent flavor of your life.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries artist Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles, France, for 15 months in 1888 and 1889. It was the most prolific time of his career. His buoyant genius overflowed, pouring out over 200 paintings, including the lavish *Sunflowers* series. I suspect you will enjoy your own surge of splashy productivity in the coming months. It may not be as manically generative as van Gogh, though. I think your creativity will be rather relaxed and deeply healing. Start planning now for how you want to channel all this imaginative exuberance.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I invite you to clear out every fixed idea your mind carries about where you are “supposed” to be. Once you have made that inner space wide and uncluttered, begin a fresh inquiry into the nature of your real home. Use questions like these to navigate: 1. What’s the first place you think of when you come across the word “sanctuary”? 2. Which environments reliably bring out your brightest, truest qualities? 3. Do you have what you would call power spots? If so, how do they make you feel in your body and psyche? 4. Which locations on Earth fascinate you, even if you have never visited them? 5. Could there be a future dwelling that offers a more peak-level experience of home than the familiar place where tradition now soothes you?

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The brain doesn’t literally multitask. It rapidly shifts attention between tasks, creating the illusion of simultaneity. For many people, each interchange costs mental energy and reduces efficiency. But some brains can switch faster with a lower energy cost, making them better at sustained task-switching. I’m sure you can guess the identity of the zodiac’s number one task-switcher: you, of course! And the good news is that in the coming weeks, you will be even more adept than usual in wielding your superpower. One implication is that you will know when not to overdo it and when not to use it trivially. You will be a master of seamless, effective, and meaningful transitions.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Astronomers know that many stars don’t travel alone. Binary stars orbit each other for eons, their mutual gravity shaping each partner’s destiny. I propose we make this your featured metaphor in the coming months. It will be a favorable time to de-emphasize the notion that strength and creative power require complete autonomy. I suspect that flexible, spirited interdependence will generate far better results than lonely self-sufficiency. Which alliances and relationships will expand your orbit rather than shrink it? Invest in them.

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