Imagine – you are in a room together with fifteen others sitting or standing in a circle, waiting for the philosophical session to begin. The room belongs to an old restored house on the marvelous hills of central Italy, which belongs to Andrea, a sculptor who kindly invited us to stay there for a few days. Only a wooden door and a small window let the light in. The wind is almost unnoticeable and yet keeps the air moving.
You look around the room, and you see a table laden with many small sculptures of human faces and bodies. Each of them tells you its own story. Are you able to listen and understand their language? What do they tell you? Do they reveal hidden secrets about reality? Every single sculpture has its own individual facial expression, and each of them carries you away to other worlds. Facing them, you feel as if time stands still. You cannot avoid looking at them.
I am one of those who is gazing at them. “What are they for?”, I ask myself. They remind me of the fairytales I used to watch or read when I was little. In some of these fairytales there was a mirror, and the mirror reflected the surface-appearance of the face of the person looking at it, but it also revealed a hidden reality from beyond the visible surface. The sculptures on the table are like these mirrors. They reveal a hidden reality in which time and space do not function according the known physical laws anymore. I examine them one by one and remember that I used to wonder what reality is, and desperately searched for ways to find answers to the miracle of existence.
I also remember that my classmates at school didn’t want to study with me for exams, because I distracted them with many big questions about the material. “We will never finish this course if we start discussing your ideas!”, they said. And so I was left alone with my studies, thoughts and questions.
Now I am here, at a Deep Philosophy retreat in Italy, staring at small sculptures. What do I really hear from them? It is only my own voice, I admit. What I hear is my own voice talking to me through the sculptures. How can I get away from this inner voice that fascinates me?!
In the meantime, the others have already taken their seats in the circle of simple but comfortable chairs, and are waiting for the facilitator to start the session. The facilitator is me – it is my turn to lead the session. It is my task now to lead them in the contemplation of a philosophical text, and inspire them with the wisdom of the past. The text is from the book The World of Silence by the Swiss philosopher Max Picard (1888-1965), a poetic thinker and writer.
The gap which I feel between myself and the message of the text could not be bigger: How would I ever be able to contemplate on the magic of silence when I am so preoccupied with the many voices in my head? How could I possibly bring a sense of silence to my companions, when I myself do not feel the pure silence within me?
And yet, the miracle happens, and once I start reading the text, the journey to the universe of silence begins. Because silence is not the absence of words. You don’t have to reject language in order to reach a silent state of mind.
“Silence is not simply what happens when we stop talking. It is more than simply abandoning language. It is more than a condition that we can produce at will. When language stops, silence begins. But it does not begin BECAUSE language stops. The absence of language simply makes the presence of silence more apparent.”
And now silence appears in the room, manifesting itself among us. It comes from a hidden place, acting freely and independently from our thoughts and wills. I now understand that, as Picard says, silence is the foundation of our human existence: “Silence belongs to the basic structure of the person.” The power of silence is omnipresent, and it is present even in the words that we pronounce: “There is something silent in every word … And in every silence there is something of the spoken word”.
Silence came to the room as if by itself. It is not something I can force to happen. It is an inherent power that flows within everything. Its reality is the foundation of my reality, and of my essence. It is the foundation of everything even before I become aware of it. It is the secret key to the gate that leads to infinite vastness, to the universe to which I connect at this very moment.
I am, of course, still sitting in the common reality of the retreat, yet there is also something greater in the room beyond it. The companions are reading together from the text and expressing their insights, and at the same time carrying the silence within them – it is the hidden source to which we all yearn to return.
At this very moment, Picard’s sentences move me to a transcendental experience. The voices in my head, my internal commentators, stop. A vast empty space opens within me, and in it I can finally get a glimpse of the silence of the universe:
“Silence is a basic phenomenon. That is to say, it is a primary, objective reality, which cannot be traced back to anything else. It cannot be replaced by anything else; it cannot be exchanged with anything else. There is nothing behind it to which it can be related, except the Creator Himself.”