noted, ‘ Reliance spoke in a multitude of tiny voices from behind bulkheads, under floorboards, everywhere all around, chattering, gossiping, gabbling incessantly and shrieking with gnomish laughter.’ 26
I do not think that understanding the voices that people hear in silence as effects of a specific function of the brain is a reductionist ‘explanation’, because of course the content, the meaning , of what such voices actually say is going to depend entirely on the individual and their moods of the time. What I want to do is clear away some of the negative associations of silence with insanity and make it possible to listen to these interpretations, the meanings of the heart and the ‘silent mind’. It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly obvious that the sorts of interpretation the brain will come up with under the pressures of great fear, or loneliness, are rather likely to be more malevolent than an interpretation made in peace, joy or a sense of union with the universe.
A fourth sensation very commonly reported by people who have enjoyed the silence they chose (not everyone does) is that they have experiences of great joy, which feel as though they came from ‘outside’ themselves; a strong sense of ‘givenness’.
Several times, especially later on in the six weeks on Skye, my journal recorded moments of intense happiness, followed by a powerful conviction that the moment was somehow a pure gift – that I had done nothing to deserve it and could do nothing to sustain it or repeat it. My only option was to enjoy it.
On one unusually radiant day, with a sort of golden brightness and lovely complex cloud formations, I took a walk up the burn above the house. It was sharply cold but there was less wind than usual. At the top of the valley is the watershed between Glenbrittle and Sligachan. I always found this a strangely haunting place; thewater from the hill above collected in two tiny lochs, then flowed out at both ends, north and south. Over the years, walkers have piled up a large cairn here, a sort of mute witness to everyone who has enjoyed this silent space; and far below the river ran down towards the sea in a series of theatrical silver loops. Instead of following the path on down towards Glenbrittle, I climbed on up into the steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – almost vertical mountains on both sides – a mixture of shining rock and loose scree, and below, tiny stands of water that looked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed casually down. I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches – and thought I was perfectly happy. It was so huge. And so wild and so empty and so free.
And there, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear, or something like that. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief, but it was a total moment. I cannot remember feeling that extraordinary sense of connectedness since I was a small child.
This feeling of being connected to the universe, and particularly to natural phenomena within it, was central to the sensibility of the Romantic Movement, and appears over and over again in the poetry of the period, nearly always linked to places or experience of silence in the natural world . A well-known example is from the famous English romantic poet William Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’:
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees. 27
This ‘gift’ is experienced both as integrative – the whole self is engaged and known to itself, to the subject, in quite a new way – and as connecting that self to something larger. This would, of course, bean expected feeling from anyone who had a strong religious
I do not think that understanding the voices that people hear in silence as effects of a specific function of the brain is a reductionist ‘explanation’, because of course the content, the meaning , of what such voices actually say is going to depend entirely on the individual and their moods of the time. What I want to do is clear away some of the negative associations of silence with insanity and make it possible to listen to these interpretations, the meanings of the heart and the ‘silent mind’. It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly obvious that the sorts of interpretation the brain will come up with under the pressures of great fear, or loneliness, are rather likely to be more malevolent than an interpretation made in peace, joy or a sense of union with the universe.
A fourth sensation very commonly reported by people who have enjoyed the silence they chose (not everyone does) is that they have experiences of great joy, which feel as though they came from ‘outside’ themselves; a strong sense of ‘givenness’.
Several times, especially later on in the six weeks on Skye, my journal recorded moments of intense happiness, followed by a powerful conviction that the moment was somehow a pure gift – that I had done nothing to deserve it and could do nothing to sustain it or repeat it. My only option was to enjoy it.
On one unusually radiant day, with a sort of golden brightness and lovely complex cloud formations, I took a walk up the burn above the house. It was sharply cold but there was less wind than usual. At the top of the valley is the watershed between Glenbrittle and Sligachan. I always found this a strangely haunting place; thewater from the hill above collected in two tiny lochs, then flowed out at both ends, north and south. Over the years, walkers have piled up a large cairn here, a sort of mute witness to everyone who has enjoyed this silent space; and far below the river ran down towards the sea in a series of theatrical silver loops. Instead of following the path on down towards Glenbrittle, I climbed on up into the steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – almost vertical mountains on both sides – a mixture of shining rock and loose scree, and below, tiny stands of water that looked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed casually down. I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches – and thought I was perfectly happy. It was so huge. And so wild and so empty and so free.
And there, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear, or something like that. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief, but it was a total moment. I cannot remember feeling that extraordinary sense of connectedness since I was a small child.
This feeling of being connected to the universe, and particularly to natural phenomena within it, was central to the sensibility of the Romantic Movement, and appears over and over again in the poetry of the period, nearly always linked to places or experience of silence in the natural world . A well-known example is from the famous English romantic poet William Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’:
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees. 27
This ‘gift’ is experienced both as integrative – the whole self is engaged and known to itself, to the subject, in quite a new way – and as connecting that self to something larger. This would, of course, bean expected feeling from anyone who had a strong religious
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