A Time for Deep Listening

In ‘The Voice Within’, an essay in a collection called Crossing the Stream, Bhante (Sangharakshita) talks very powerfully about how we’re all constantly assailed by the external world, everything from the media to the expectations of others, advertising, religion and education which he goes on to describe as ‘the intolerable weight of the external.’ 

I was reflecting how much of the mental content that I experience in meditation is made up of this external content and just how hard it is to recognise what may be coming from within and what is really going on in terms of my heart wish, what we really want and wish for ourselves. 

Bhante’s response to the experience of externality is to invoke the kind of voice that is more authentic and is fundamentally a creative force. In The Drama of Cosmic Enlightenment, Bhante’s commentary on the White Lotus Sutra, he describes it as…

‘...the call of the divine, sounding from the very depths of existence. In fact, most of us hear such a call at some time in our lives. It may come from a moment of quietness when we are out in the country, or through an experience of great art, literature or music. Perhaps we may hear it after some tragic event, or perhaps when we are just rather weary of life. At such a time we may hear the call, the call which is sometimes termed the voice of the silence, the voice of something beyond.’

So with this in mind I’d like to introduce a poem which formed the basis of a talk I gave at the centre a couple of years ago. It’s by an American poet, Wallace Stevens, who was active in the first half of the twentieth century, a poet I first encountered in my late teens. I came across this poem in an anthology and have gone back to it throughout my life. 

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

What really attracts me about this poem is that it engages the conceptual mind of language and labels and uses that faculty to point towards and access the world of symbolism which creates for us a direct experience of the imagination at work. Maybe we think we know what these words mean but as the poem progresses we are drawn into a world of symbolism where it isn’t entirely clear what the bird means. The language here talks of the beyond, a place on the edge of where we most often find ourselves but one that doesn’t offer a threat or a nihilistic nothingness. It is a place where beauty has the greater reality and may in fact represent a new way of being. 

There seems to be something here about being open to the symbolic language of the world, a world that is rich with a meaning that is around and within us, always and everywhere. 

Another piece of writing that has affected me a lot lately is the short, strange essay ‘The Mirror of Enigmas’ by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. On first reading it seems to be an account of the translation of a verse from St Paul (1 Corinthians, 12:13) which describes the nature of divine love as perceived by humanity. But re-reading it, it seems to be pointing at a deeper and more symbolic truth about how we perceive our world. He goes on to quote numerous writers who all point to the idea that we are living in a world which is speaking a language - the weather, the cycles of the moon and the seasons etc. - a symbolic language that we have largely forgotten or maybe can no longer hear amidst the materialist clamour. 

What seems important for me here is that Bhante’s ‘intolerable weight of the external’ describes a world disconnected from the voice within, the part of ourselves which is connected to and seeks out the truth and beauty of the Dharma. Borges describes how maybe all beings and all moments are inscribed with a kind of divine cryptography. 

It may be that when we are able to read this language we will be able to read the world as it appears in the register of light. 

Richard Penrose