disconcerting to read the matter-of-fact ease with which so many of these adventurers report a parallel experience. Often they sound mildly surprised or even offhand – although it is more usual for them to sense that this is a deeply precious and important moment, born out of an odd mixture of courage and silence.
If you are experiencing a profound level of oneness with the cosmos, you are very likely to experience boundary confusion as well. This was a fifth sensation that I became aware of. If an individual is one with and a part of everything , then it is not going to be clear where the self begins and ends.
In La Nouvelle Héloïse , Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the influential French philosopher and autobiographer, describes what I mean here very effectively:
There is something magical and supernatural in hill landscape, which entrances the mind and the senses. One forgets everything, one forgets one’s own being, one ceases to know where one stands. 33
I In a sense this is nothing more than an extension of the connectedness or sense of givenness in silence that I have just looked at, except that is usually less ecstatic and more conscious. As the six weeks went by my sense of difference from everything around me began to dissolve and with it accurate perceptions of all those external factors that shore up our sense of boundaries.
For me the clear, if artificial, demarcations of passing time were among the first to break down under the ‘pressure’ of silence. As I went further and further into my silent time, I found it harder and harder to maintain a sense of time passing. I ceased to have a ‘normal’ sense of how long I had been doing something or why Imight continue or stop. This did not feel like absent-mindedness and was probably exaggerated because of the amount of the day that was dark, but it did make me realise just how clock-obsessed we have all become, marking our days ritually and shaken by anxiety, like Alice’s White Rabbit, if we ‘lose’ time. It is salutary to recall just how modern a concept this is: until the railway network spread out across Britain, with its need for timetables, there was no ‘accurate national time’ – the hours were fixed by the daylight and Oxford time, for example, was five minutes behind London time. Once I recognised what was happening, I found it very liberating; it gave me a sense of freedom coupled with a sort of almost childlike naughtiness or irresponsibility. Initially I had removed the clock from the room I spent my days in because its rather loud ticking seemed to break into the silence. For the first couple of weeks I was constantly popping next door to find out what time it was, but gradually it ceased to matter.
Of all the sensations I have been discussing, this loss of time is one from which sailors seem to be more exempt than others – I suspect that this is because navigation, particularly before GPS (the global satellite positioning system that can locate a small boat with pinpoint accuracy, from the boat and from a distance), requires a constant awareness of time and place. Donald Crowhurst, in his final days, more or less abandoned navigation and immediately, judging from his notebooks, became obsessed by the feeling that time was getting away from him. In Rousseau’s words, he rather literally ceased to know where he stood.
This sort of confusion is clearly something that a lot of people in silence and solitude find difficult to cope with. Over and over again I found accounts of people going to remarkable efforts to keep time in its place – ordering their days with extreme rigour, appointing precise moments for various activities and finding ways to replace clocks and diaries – marking each day as it passes with a notch on a stick or a stone on a cairn, inventing or at least contriving ‘tasks’. However, I particularly enjoyed this sensation. I think there were two reasons why I found it not just interesting butalso immensely
If you are experiencing a profound level of oneness with the cosmos, you are very likely to experience boundary confusion as well. This was a fifth sensation that I became aware of. If an individual is one with and a part of everything , then it is not going to be clear where the self begins and ends.
In La Nouvelle Héloïse , Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the influential French philosopher and autobiographer, describes what I mean here very effectively:
There is something magical and supernatural in hill landscape, which entrances the mind and the senses. One forgets everything, one forgets one’s own being, one ceases to know where one stands. 33
I In a sense this is nothing more than an extension of the connectedness or sense of givenness in silence that I have just looked at, except that is usually less ecstatic and more conscious. As the six weeks went by my sense of difference from everything around me began to dissolve and with it accurate perceptions of all those external factors that shore up our sense of boundaries.
For me the clear, if artificial, demarcations of passing time were among the first to break down under the ‘pressure’ of silence. As I went further and further into my silent time, I found it harder and harder to maintain a sense of time passing. I ceased to have a ‘normal’ sense of how long I had been doing something or why Imight continue or stop. This did not feel like absent-mindedness and was probably exaggerated because of the amount of the day that was dark, but it did make me realise just how clock-obsessed we have all become, marking our days ritually and shaken by anxiety, like Alice’s White Rabbit, if we ‘lose’ time. It is salutary to recall just how modern a concept this is: until the railway network spread out across Britain, with its need for timetables, there was no ‘accurate national time’ – the hours were fixed by the daylight and Oxford time, for example, was five minutes behind London time. Once I recognised what was happening, I found it very liberating; it gave me a sense of freedom coupled with a sort of almost childlike naughtiness or irresponsibility. Initially I had removed the clock from the room I spent my days in because its rather loud ticking seemed to break into the silence. For the first couple of weeks I was constantly popping next door to find out what time it was, but gradually it ceased to matter.
Of all the sensations I have been discussing, this loss of time is one from which sailors seem to be more exempt than others – I suspect that this is because navigation, particularly before GPS (the global satellite positioning system that can locate a small boat with pinpoint accuracy, from the boat and from a distance), requires a constant awareness of time and place. Donald Crowhurst, in his final days, more or less abandoned navigation and immediately, judging from his notebooks, became obsessed by the feeling that time was getting away from him. In Rousseau’s words, he rather literally ceased to know where he stood.
This sort of confusion is clearly something that a lot of people in silence and solitude find difficult to cope with. Over and over again I found accounts of people going to remarkable efforts to keep time in its place – ordering their days with extreme rigour, appointing precise moments for various activities and finding ways to replace clocks and diaries – marking each day as it passes with a notch on a stick or a stone on a cairn, inventing or at least contriving ‘tasks’. However, I particularly enjoyed this sensation. I think there were two reasons why I found it not just interesting butalso immensely
Similar Books
