Silence: The Essence of Perfect Meditation

Originally printed in the January - February 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Conwell, Alistair. "Silence: The Essence of Perfect Meditation." Quest  90.1 (JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2002):9-11. 

by Alistair Conwell

Let silence take you to the core of life.

—Jalaluddun Rumi (1207-1277)

MEDITATION is a categorical imperative for our spiritual evolution—a point once made by transpersonal psychologist and author Ken Wilber. If the statement is true, then meditation has a significance that is unwise to ignore.

But what exactly is meditation?

When asked that question, Sufi Master Hazrat Inayat Khan replied: "Concentration is the beginning of meditation, meditation is the end of concentration; it is an advanced form of concentration. The subtle working of the mind is called meditation. It is more profound than concentration, but once concentration is accomplished fully it becomes easy for a person to meditate" (Khan 1996).

Naturally, what one concentrates on in meditation is very important because we are a product of our thoughts. Everything we do or say springs from a thought, although sometimes we may not be consciously aware of it. Moreover, if we intensely concentrate upon something for a sufficient period of time, we can lose our sense of identity in the object itself. The following story from ancient India illustrates this point.

Eagerly seeking instruction in meditation, a young farmer named Krishna went to see a sage. The sage advised the youth to recite aspecial mantra while visualizing his namesake god seated on a lotus. Hearing this, the young man became suddenly despondent. "Please forgive me," he said, "but I am only an uneducated farmer, and so I am unable to follow your instructions. They are too complicated, so I won't be able to remember them."

Being in a lenient mood and since the youth was a new student of his, the sage then suggested an alternative, which was to only visualize an image of Lord Krishna without anything else. However, again the young man took on a look of despondency, saying, "Master, I don't think I will be able to do that either. I would have to sit very still and look at the image at the same time."

The master was a little perplexed, yet his immense patience was resolute. In a sympathetic tone he asked the man what he was most fond of. With little hesitation he replied, "The cow on my farm. I love her and constantly think of her because she provides me with milk, curd, and ghee."

The sage then told the man to sit down and meditate on the cow to his heart's content for as long as he could. The man was elated and happily obeyed.

Three days later, he was still sitting on the same spot, his mind firmly attached to the object of his meditation.

Finally, the master decided that enough was enough, so he called his neophyte to come indoors and take some nourishment. Rousing from his meditative equipoise, the man responded with a loud "Moo!" and added in a tone too serious to disbelieve, "I am too big to fit through the door!"

Humor aside, in highlighting the power of our seemingly innocuous thoughts, this old story also is a poignant reminder about the highest purpose of meditation: to dissolve the ephemeral ego-based sense of self into the divine Great Self that some call God, others Buddha, Allah, and so on. The name, being a mere label, is unimportant. With this purpose in mind, sages agree that proper meditation must include another important aspect, the act of listening.

The French ear, nose, and throat specialist Dr. Alfred Tomatis was the first to draw a clear distinction between hearing and listening. His research into sound and the ear is so highly respected that some of his colleagues regard him as the "Einstein of sound" and the "Sherlock Holmes of sonic detection." Born in Nice in 1920, Tomatis conducted research that distinguished two processes. One, which he called "hearing," is a physiological process because it relates to the ability of the auditory system to receive sound. The other, which he called "listening," on the other hand, is primarily a mental process requiring concentration to focus selectively on, remember, and respond to sound.

Arguably the most common advice in all scriptures across the world is to listen. For instance, musicologist Joachim-Ernst Berendtob serves that the word "hear" (meaning in context "to listen") isreferred to at least ninety-one times in the five books of the Torah (Berendt 1992). Also it is no accident that the verb obey comes from the root of the Latin word audire "to hear or listen to." For to listen is to obey. Thus, the act of obeisance through listening is really an exercise in selflessness. Selflessness, of course, is the death knell of the illusory ego. Hence, ancient sages and philosophers tell us that our ego is the greatest barrier preventing us from experiencing union withthe Divine.

Therefore, if listening is necessary to destroy the ego, then meditative listening can be seen to be the direct route to Divine union. In fact, listening is an important aspect in many forms of meditation. For instance, mantra meditation is a popular way to concentrate on a seed syllable like aum, which is consciously heard as it is repeated over and over again. The utterance of the word may be accompanied by the repetitious sounds of musical instruments. With or without the musical accompaniment, clearly the concentration and listening aspects that make for proper meditation are present, and as a result many people around the world have derived immense benefit from practicing this form of meditation. However, a more subtle variation of mantra meditation that involves concentration and a more introspective form of listening is koan meditation as practiced in the Japanese Zen tradition.

A koan is typically a succinct question or problem put to Zen students, which seems unanswerable because it is illogical. The seemingly irrational element of the koan is supposed to make the meditator so focused in search of a "solution" that a fixed point of concentration is attained. So just as the mantra is chanted continuously (usually aloud but also silently), the koan is repeated over and over again in the mind of the Zen student. Being the silent repetition of a question, the student seeks an answer within, expecting at any moment the solution to spring into the mind like a flash of enlightenment. This expectation draws the neophyte further and further inward, to the point where an answer is not found but rather the object of meditation is finally achieved: single-pointed concentration, perfect listening, obedience, the death of the ego.

Ancient Zen masters valued the koan precisely because they believed it made for the perfect listening that enabled the neophyte to face a symbolic death of the ego. Hakuin, the eighteenth-centuryJapanese Zen master, explained: "When you take a koan and examine it persistently, your spirit will die and your ego will be destroyed. It is as if a bottomless, empty pit were to open up before you and your hands and feet can find no hold. You feel as if you were looking at the face of death and as if your heart were going up in flames. Then suddenly you are one with the koan, and you are freed of body and spirit" (Berendt 1991).

The most famous koan, which no doubt has occupied the minds of millions of Japanese and Western Zen students in meditation, is this: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Obviously it takes two hands to clap, and only when two hands clap can any sound be produced. Since itis impossible for one hand to clap then logically there can be no sound produced, only silence. So it seems that the esoteric meaning at the heart of this ancient koan is the profoundly theoretical and practicalact of listening. For the "nonsound" produced by the one hand clapping creates the ideal atmosphere for perfect listening—silence.

Dying to the ego in a sacred silence and being born in Spirit is a fundamental message of all spiritual traditions in the East and West, and not something particular to Japanese Zen or the Indian tradition of mantra meditation. For example, the first rule of the Christian Benedictine Order established in the sixth century is "Listen, my son, to the Voice of your God and open wide the ears of your heart."

Although not itself a question, this Benedictine precept has a koanesque feeling to it because it raises questions that have no immediate answers, such as: What is the Voice of God? And what are the ears of the heart? Just like the Zen koan, these questions entice the monks to listen within for the "answers," and in doing so they naturally follow the Order's rule of obeisance. The result is that, once perfect listening in perfect silence is achieved, they move toward an ego death.

Yet koans and monastic rules, like other contemplative mechanisms found in various traditions, seem to be really only the means to a more profound spiritual end. For in silence there is also Sound that makes for perfect listening in an entirely spiritual context. This is certainly what many great mystics believed. "Nothing in the universe is so like God as silence" (Berendt 1992), wrote the thirteenth-century German mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart.

Indeed, all ancient mystical traditions from around the world believe there is a soundless Sound that can only be apprehended when we truly listen in meditative silence. In India, mystics have called this Sound Shabd or Nada, meaning the Divine Sound. It is the "Voice of theSilence" H. P. Blavatsky (1889) referred to. Believed to be found only in the sanctity of compete silence, this soundless Sound is regarded as the manifestation of the God principle and, therefore, the quintessential object of concentration for proper meditation.

In their different ways, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Zen Buddhism, and Christianity all tell us to listen for the Divine Sound by going within and knowing the Self. Listening in silent meditation to this Sound, which the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras referred to as the "music of the spheres" because of its harmonious tones, one inevitably dies to the limiting ego-self and dances to the Song of the infinite Spirit. This then, sages conclude, is true meditation, for which the essential ingredient is perfect silence.

Alistair Conwell was born in India and grew up in Australia, where he is completing a degree in psychology. He has traveled extensively through Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. He has published on spirituality in international journals and has in preparation a book about preparing for death spiritually.