“If you believe the noises of the world, rather than the silences of your soul, you will be lost.”
Neale Donald Walsch
Winter, Belgium, February 2016
Dear Friends,
First of all, I wish you once again a beautiful, fulfilling and healthy 2025, with much beauty, happiness, love, hope, and all the good things in life shared with your family and friends. And also, as I mentioned last week, lots of silence.
I wanted to start the new year with some more thoughts about silence, and what it means to me.
I need silence very much, and have been seeking out the company of silence pretty much all of my life.
Now that I have been dealing almost non-stop with the ecological “meta-crisis” for several years, people sometimes ask me if that doesn't make me depressed.
The answer to that is: absolutely not. Very sad sometimes, yes, but never depressed or despondent. One of the things I always get energy, hope and inspiration from (besides nature and the living planet itself), is silence.
In fact, it has never been any different. Also as a painter, I used to love the silence in my studio. I never listened to music when I painted or drew for hours, only exceptionally when I was doing little chores or stretching painting canvases. But otherwise, silence was very important in my 30-year studio practice. Music would have brought too much of a different kind of energy into that, and would not have benefited my focus. I also never ever found that silence boring, oppressive or threatening; on the contrary, I found it to be a very important and nourishing aspect of my studio practice, as I have always sensed silence as something full of energy and potential, as I pointed out last week.
I have also introduced more and more silence into my daily life over the years. I stopped listening to the radio about a quarter century ago, I don't watch television since then either, and I don't read printed newspapers. We sometimes watch a movie or series on a streaming service, and I periodically listen to music. But the things we call “radio” or “television” are somewhat different in nature to my mind, to the extent that they constantly put forward a certain image of our society as “real,” but end up containing a lot of “noise” that brings little real information. Not that there is nothing interesting to see or hear on radio or television, quite the contrary. But the interesting things that can also be heard or seen on those platforms are part of a constant stream of undifferentiated, noisy and often irrelevant 'data input,' a stream that for me was too much and made me feel trapped by those recurring patterns of information that were different in nature from the information I needed at the time (and now), and thus did find in the silence.
And radio and television, like the printed press, are also very powerful feedback loops that constantly endorse and promote the validity of our collective narrative. In a sense, the whole eco-system of radio, television and newspapers forms a kind of echo chamber, constantly validating a certain worldview, and keeping that worldview pervasively present in our collective space. The ubiquity of that narrative makes it easy to forget that very different stories and viewpoints are also possible, and that our current collective narrative is not necessarily an accurate representation of reality. By the way, it doesn't matter if we’re talking about “left” or “right” media outlets, or “conservative” or “progressive,” because if you distance yourself enough and observe them with a wider lens, you're going to find that, on some level, these actually all endorse the same worldview. But more on that another time, because there's a lot to say about that.
So our collective story or narrative as expressed in our media is a time-bound reflection of a time-bound worldview, and that has good sides and not so good sides. While that story does evolve, and must evolve, and while media can indeed play a very positive role in that evolving social dialogue, the genesis of a new and necessarily very different worldview is in a sense also hampered by the continued overwhelming presence of that current collective story through so many media channels. And that overwhelming presence can also be a real hindrance in keeping in touch with ourselves (and with silence), or in exploring one's own new paths concerning imagination, creative energy or intuition. At least, that's how I experienced it very often, which is why I said goodbye to it a quarter of a century ago. And also on my current path it is still necessary to keep some distance from that current collective story (and the worldview of which it is an expression) as it is endorsed by our media, just because I am exploring other possible stories. (See the musing 'What’s your story?')
I needed and still need a kind of 'story-silence', which creates space for hearing the other possible stories about our world that are now mostly being ignored, and about a possible other kind of world that awaits us, which will probably be very different from anything we can imagine now. And I experience that “story-silence” as something very nourishing and healthy, and I would very much recommend that you also start such “media-silences” on a regular basis, periods when you expose yourself less or not at all to the constant and ubiquitous flow of news, talk shows, game shows, reality shows, quiz shows, and so on.
Just to allow more silence, in which possibly that other, more universal form of information can come through more again. Silence in which you can feel your own roots more powerfully once again, or in which you can remind yourself that all those things you see and hear in the media represent only one storyline, and show us only a very limited spectrum of all possible interpretations of the world. But so all that can require a certain amount of discipline, as Thich Nhat Han said. Because when you turn off the television or radio for a moment, the smartphone or laptop is already beckoning, you can start scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed, or check Instagram.
That distance from the media frenzy is also beneficial in order not to drown in the bad news that is so prominent in our media. Because the continued focus on war, violence and misery, can make one feel that there really is no hope, and that everything can only get worse. And that's not true, I can tell you. All over the world, wonderful things are happening every day that already herald a different and more beautiful world, and millions of people are sowing the seeds of that new world. There is much cause for hope, but many of these processes still remain under the radar of the media. Good news is often no news.
But the more beautiful world does not await us on the path on which our global industrial machine (the “superorganism” as Nate Hagens calls it) is now speeding full steam ahead on, and in order to begin to sense a direction for the other possible pathways to a different kind of future, we also need a lot of silence.
The information contained in the silence seems to me essential to stay centered and grounded in these times that are beginning to look more and more like a collapse of our shared reality and collective narrative, and the increasingly psychotic-looking intentions of many nation-states and societies that do seem bent on destruction AND self-destruction.
By the way, I am not burying my head in the sand regarding the pressing problems of the world, the inequality, the wars, the fate of the increasing flow of refugees, and of course the ecological meta-crisis. I do follow the news, but selectively and within set boundaries in terms of time and focus. I have several digital subscriptions to world media like The Guardian and The New York Times, and I follow a lot of other alternative media as well as social media online to keep experiencing different viewpoints. And for the research for A Biosphere Project I obviously follow a lot of news channels as well, especially online and mostly specialized media. But I dose my exposure to them carefully (or at least, I try to because sometimes things go wrong for me too). On the whole subject of media and our dealings with it I want to share a bit more soon, because it is an important point: information is an essential formative energy, which we often deal with thoughtlessly and 'on autopilot', surrendering to the dynamics of choices made for us by editors, 'opinion makers' or algorithms.
So “media silence” is a very important form of silence as far as I'm concerned, perhaps one of the most important in this day and age. Yes, many challenges and crises await us, not least the biosphere crisis that threatens all life forms on this planet.
But silence always brings comfort, energy and information of a different kind and rank. Information that we need as much or much more than the news reaching us through the media. Information that has no editor, no political or philosophical belief system, no identification with nationality or race or gender.
Information that we can allow in or not, that choice is ours. But perhaps it really is our responsibility to listen to what silence whispers to us. As the great Rainer Maria Rilke said in last week's quote, “Our task is to listen to the news that always arrives out of silence.”
Next week I'd like to share a few more thoughts about the role meditation has played in my life in the past fifteen years. And meditation and silence are, of course, close relatives.
Thanks for reading, and until the next installment,
All the best to you,
Filip
