After I wrote that last post, I went to bed. When I woke up, it was Nyepi.
Nyepi is a day of silence, fasting and meditation that marks the start of the New Year in the Balinese lunar calendar. It’s serious business: in the strictest interpretation, it means no fires, electricity, talking, travel, work, entertainment or eating. Not everyone follows all of these restrictions, but everyone has to stay at home. Streets are blocked off [exceptions are made for emergency hospital visits] and the pacalang, Balinese civil security, are out in force gently explaining to any errant tourists that they are not exempt and need to go back to their homes.
There aren’t many places in the world that successfully maintain their indigenous culture in the face of the mighty tourist dollar. But Balinese culture is rooted in the philosophy of Tri Hita Karana - roughly ‘the three harmonies’, an ideal of maintaining equally good relations with other humans, nature and with the Gods. Everyone likes to make money, but there’s still a sense here of Something Else looming over the human world, with a different set of considerations and imperatives.
Once upon a time, the idea that there might be communal spiritual responsibilities that took higher priority than individual preferences was not alien to Western societies. Before the breaking of the Latinate collective culture, before the Puritan turn, before the Royal Society and Cartesian rationalism and the deification of the ego and the Victorian mass culture of materialism, people would accept religious and cultural bounds to their individual freedom, recognising that each psyche developed as part of the collective culture and did not achieve its level of development in a vacuum.
It would be glaringly false to suggest that we would accept no such restrictions today. Evidently, we’ll willingly lock ourselves in our homes out of fear; in the name of Science; to avoid confronting our own mortality. It is, however, difficult to imagine any such collective self-restriction being adhered to in a Western country to achieve a positive, idealising goal; and the greatest resistance would arise precisely from a societal adjuration to Go Inside in the psychic sense. The West’s chronic extraversion does not lend itself to a day of collective meditation. It is impossible not to wonder, though, what good it might do us if it did.
The problem with words is not that they are not a useful tool - it’s this Saturnalian master/servant confusion we’ve got ourselves into. This is true of the conceptual mind in general - it is supposed to be in service to Being, but in the second half of a Culture it has a marked tendency to act like an end in itself. It is no coincidence that most lineages of self-transformation [or at least those that come down to us from the Civilisation phase of various cultures] seek to draw the attention back to the heart, the body, the non-conceptual mind or to the life-current of Being itself. [or, if we are to believe Franklin Jones, all at once: ‘Surrender as the total body-mind into the All-Pervading Life-Current via the Radiant feeling-attitude of the heart.’]
We can observe small children learning to control themselves through introjection of verbal structures - telling themselves ‘put the drink down carefully now’ in their grandmother’s exact words before they learn to re-grammatise the instructions in the first person - to the point that later many can only think in words. Seekers are astonished to discover, on doing deep work into their own psyche, the degree to which old ‘instructional tapes’ have been running in the background of their mind their whole lives - and are often further surprised to discover that the tapes are not in their own voices but in those of some of their early childhood caregivers [it is interesting to speculate to what extent the ‘hearing voices’ of schizophrenia is merely an extreme version of this universal phenomenon].
When we are forced, or force ourselves, to slow down, we do not merely become less agitated; we do not simply think the same thoughts, but slower. Instead, we discover that there is an opposition between hypercognition and feeling. Slowing down our thoughts increases the emotional affect we can experience across them; increases the ingress of the body and the heart into our ken; eventually allows us to begin to perceive the unstitched material between and around and behind the words we habitually think in.
But the transition is rarely comfortable - we would not have fled into hypercognition if it were - and often people need [or think they need] a trained professional in the room with them to help them across the boundary. Without human accountability, without sufficient understanding or motivation, it is all too easy to reach for more words, more thoughts, more stimulus - the latter nowadays carried in your pocket, only a swipe on a screen away. The fear and resistance to experiencing silence/slowness/being is everywhere once you look for it.
It’s easy to over-romanticise other cultures in comparison to the West. My Balinese neighbours did not take Nyepi very seriously, which left me in the interesting position of meditating in silence amidst the more-than-usual next-door yelling and cooking of a family stuck in their compound for the day with nothing else to do.
But the hardest thing about trying to deepen into silence on Nyepi was knowing I was likely to end up writing a post about it. Every time I absorbed a little deeper, to the extent that something notable happened, it would trigger a ‘how would I verbalise this to my audience[sic]?’ reaction. Eventually even the ‘introverted writer’-type has to admit they are really an inverted extrovert, communicating in fantasy or secret with half-real, half-projected ideations of external others, but still never Being with uninterpreted Reality.
Uncle Al calls this fantasy of passing on Wise Wisdom to imaginary individuals ‘Playing the Role of the Knower’. I’ve recently noticed that the problem with playing this role is not just one of dishonesty or inauthenticity [though the pretence of Knowing is certainly both of those things]; more invidiously, the fantasy of Playing the Role necessarily also traps you in a subordinate realm - rather than addressing the live reality in front of you, a part of you is always rehearsing, imagining How Good It Will Be when you finally manage to perform the part of Wise teacher successfully. It is not unlike those existential films we used to like in the ‘90s, or that mad Masonic dream thing by that guy - so long as you are invested in the fake reality of the simulation, you can never Wake Up.
How much worse must this effect be for kids raised amidst the wasteland of social media - gifted ‘an audience’ from birth, always aware of the potential of posterity, of posing, never knowing unmediated existence? There’s a reason the first post of my first blog was Chuang-Tzu-as-reminder-to-self:
Do not seek fame. Do not make plans. Do not be absorbed by activities. Do not think that you know. Be aware of all that is and dwell in the infinite. Wander where there is no path. Be all that heaven gave you, but act as though you have received nothing. Be empty, that is all.
And yet… either side of Nyepi is a week of festivals. Whatever is touched upon in the day of inner silence is re-extroverted, given shape and form, shared in a common symbolic language amongst the community. The image at the top of this post shows an ogoh-ogoh statue - they are built in the weeks before Nyepi, paraded around the village to absorb nefarious energies and then burnt in the graveyard to cleanse the community in preparation for Going Inside. Then, immediately after Nyepi, the fires are ritually relit and the community comes back together to renew its connections.
When things are set in order, when connection with the non-verbal Real is re-established, words are no longer a problem - they flow out from the centre like sunlight taking on form in the photosynthetic playground of the Earth.
My Nyepi day practice ended up taking me into a territory more interesting than either speech or silence. I began to see how that para-verbal Presence was as present and real while my monkey mind was chattering away as it was in the brief moments of partial cessation. There was a part of me beyond the preference for deepening or diversion, beyond words or feeling, that encompassed both, that did not need assistance to be Real and Present in every moment of my experience.
The barking dogs, the shouting neighbours - all began to feel like a benediction, a gift from the chaos of Bali to remind me that the Something I am - apparently - here to Seek is not limited by my ideas of purity, not dependent on slowing down, not conditional in any way whatsoever. Each bark became a practice bell, recalling me to the truth at the heart of Being: This, and This, and yes, even This.
***
If I’d had my wits about me I’d have posted on schedule last week with a completely wordless Nyepi post. Consider the missing entry a bonus message from the dark heart of the Yin.
Next week: I’ll stop talking about talking and get back to that frog…
Crammed full of silent gems, particularly "to begin to perceive the unstitched material between and around and behind the words we habitually think in."
There is something deeply seductive in being the knower... the part that (sometimes) leads me away from it, as you mentioned, is the eventual boredom with constantly rehearsing explanations.