Beyond Words — Be Still and Listen.
~ Photo: Vintage Circa 1910 ~
By Tennet Semmes.
Within the womb of our deepest imaginings, is it possible to imbue ourselves with certain shadows of the future? Adumbration of worlds yet to come?
In the same way that the past can, at times, become indistinguishable from dreams, so too is it conceivable for certain futures to mingle briefly with the present. Just as a woman, in her deepest intuitions, may see the lives of her unborn children foreshadowed in sleep, so too is it possible for us to experience the prescience of worlds to come.
There are many of them. And while the present may appear to dictate any number of nightmare scenarios, let it be said that nothing is written. The potential we hold is unlimited. There is nothing we cannot do, nothing we cannot discover. We can unlock the aging process. We can fare the void.
We can define our place in this universe. We can find meaning, purpose, enlightenment and life as we have never before imagined possible.
There is a way.
Yet doing so requires something we have yet to master — something we have barely even begun to muster. The greater future we hold inside wants to be fulfilled, but it will not push, fight, beg or cry for its release. It will not even attempt our noticing. It will simply, endlessly, await our surrender.
Only from there will we find the path that forges the New World each of us intuitively desires; only from there will the experience of the life each of us knows we deserve come finally to arise.
This is the provenance of every true revolution — the mind. Lasting action cannot happen without first a permanent and profound change of mind, for it is our state of mind that undoubtedly defines our experience here on this earth. The mind is the birth canal, the parent, the informer and the creator of the human world.
Everything we have ever brought into existence began as a thought. Out of this thought came words, and out of those, action. The world we inhabit is a reflection of the mind of humanity.
Given this, what can we honestly say about the quality of that mind?
It is fractured, uneasy, ignorant, violent — insane, even.
It is an unbroken animal, a beast, lost and hunting in an overpopulation of the same game.
It must be caught, it must be tamed.
Not until we do so, not until each of us learns to train our thoughts under the firm but caring hands of kindness, compassion, truth and forgiveness, do we have any hope of moving into the greater world of which we dream.
One of the most fundamental steps in doing so is learning to truly listen.
Language is magical. It is a rudimentary form of telepathy, of true emotive transfer. The idea that the body carries the ability to create sounds, as it were, that are representatives of a concept grown of the mind, that then travel through the air, are received and translated by the listener, and then assimilated into their final form within their minds, is incredible.
Listening intently gives you a very clear feeling for the quality of that transmission, puts you in mind of the state of the speaker.
So open your ears, be still… and listen.
What you will hear is that our language has indeed lost control of itself, run rampant with the same garrulous madness that marks the minds of the greater collective. And as with any phenomena that comes to continually dominate the senses, it has long since lost its magic.
While it is undoubtedly an integral building block of the society we’ve created, and an essential part of its on-going function, the spoken word has come to grant itself far more importance than necessary. Far more.
There is a terrible lack of silence in our world.
Only when properly imbued with space can any sound be truly heard, appreciated and understood. Yet we are accosted with an incessant need to fill that silence with our words, as if, somehow, in so doing, we might be able to fill each other up, to convince others that we ourselves are full. Yet after everything, very rarely is anything truly said.
This too was foreshadowed. Upon the landing of the colonial Europeans onto the vast and then unspoiled stretch of land known as the Algonquians, it is said that the natives were quick to recognize this infection. Wendigo, it is called, and it is marked by an inability to experience stillness.
The Algonquian Peoples considered it a form of cannibalism, and were thus able to see clearly where things were headed with these new settlers. The minds of the men from lands afar were distracted, troubled, unable to experience silence.
And it is those minds that we’ve inherited, those minds that have come to dominate the so-called civilized world, those minds that have so desperately eaten up the old earth, in a frenzied attempt to cure themselves of the affliction that haunts them.
So we must revolt. And we do so by becoming silent.
Only then will we develop the ability to truly listen, and only then will we come to hear just what it is we need to know.
We must let ourselves go, we must relinquish what we think we know. For only then will we learn the soft art of speaking lightly, of speaking rightly, of coming to carry ourselves into the minds and hearts of others with the dignity we’ve developed inside.
Out of this state of grace will arrive many things:
An immense understanding of ourselves and our co-existence here on earth;
A deep reverie for nature and all of the wonders it holds;
The clear knowledge of a nearly unfathomable potential within the mystery of consciousness as we experience it.
And out of this will flow the actions from which the new world will flower.
Generations will pass, then, and we will grow in our power.
The ineffable state of silence will continue to deepen our experience of grace, within which we will come to know the essence of the earth and its own indescribable expression within that place. An endless stream of worlds will slowly begin to unfold all around us then, not because we have found them, but because we have come to find ourselves within them.
It is then that our spoken language will truly begin to lessen, the definitions it presents unnecessary in the ever evolving face of the knowing, the ongoing emotive growing with which we will wend our way further on, into the meaning and the mystery, the wonder and the fire of the life that will unfold in time.
What we will then come to uncover will undoubtedly be an enigma of the most potent kind: no longer will the sounds we make be necessary for us to communicate; they will instead be used only in music and celebration…
… and in our incredible gifts of co-creation, for we will have arrived, finally, in a world beyond words.
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{Photo: Lenny Bruce, via Tennet Semmes}
Tennet Semmes is the creator of Metanoia, a blog focused solely on the experience of awakening. As with all of us, he has been, and will be, many things. And, as with all of us, he would like to be granted the freedom to continue being those things, and hence the writing, the work, the widening of the self to the world. He is honored by the allowance of his words into your head. It is an invaluable place to be. Tennet could be contacted via Facebook or Twitter.
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Read more: 10 Signs You Are Holding People Prisoner (With Your Voice).
{Listen to the silence.}
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