I am groping about here trying to conceptualise a very vague idea, but one that I believe is fundamentally important. There seems to be a deeply ingrained feeling that human nature is fundamentally flawed – with Christians it is the Original Sin syndrome, for Hindus and Buddhists it is due to ignorance of the true nature of things. There is something wrong – with me, with others, with life in general. Happiness, equanimity, peace are attainable only for fleeting hours or days. Good times are constructed on the thin ice of an impersonal and indifferent reality. The three brute facts of existence are an ever-present backdrop to everything we do but they do not fully explain the negative bent of our existence. They do not explain, for example, why relatively poor people are often happier and more content than those who are wealthy with their greater ability to insulate themselves from the three brute facts. Our expectations always exceed our grasp and what we do manage to grab hold of never lives up to expectations. This almost permanent state of discontent is not helped by our living in a consumer oriented environment awash with advertising.
The trouble is we are too complex. Unlike animals, who have no choice but to be what they are, we come with no blueprint other than that imposed by the culture into which we are born, a culture which no longer has a firm grip on us, living as we do in a pluralist global village with instant communication. The various cultures vie with one another, seeking the political and economic advantages which dominance brings. We are besieged by self-appointed gurus marketing their recipes for personal happiness and fulfilment – hedonism, enneagrams, aroma therapy, meditation, magic, born again fundamentalism, crystals, pyramids, tarot cards, etc., etc. The list is endless. How is one to choose? What guides are there?
The comforting religious worldview has been superseded by that of science. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena … their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s irremediable currents of events.” William James
The response to all this, I think, is not to be found in books, or in rational arguments, but within. We need to stop. We need to be still. We need to listen to the silence. As Thomas Merton put it –
Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall
Be silent, they try
To speak your
Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?