In Pursuit of Silence

I was lucky to live in a house

when I was growing up as a child

that was located in quite a silent location.

There was also a good view out of my bedroom window.

And I guess, as a young child, I fell in love with it.

But I didn't know what that meant at all.

I didn't even know what it was, to be honest.

So, how do you talk coherently about silence?

You could talk about silence...

Does it exist in a decibel sense?

A noise sense, or a lack of noise sense?

And the literature is clear that

silence doesn't exist in that sense.

The etymological roots

of the word for silence are somewhat contested.

There are two words in particular

that people go back to.

There's the Gothic term ana-silan,

and then desinere.

One of them has to do with the wind dying down

and the other has to do with a kind of stopping of motion.

They're both to do with an interruption, not just of sound,

but the roots of silence are also to do with

the interruption of our own...

The imposition of our own egos on the world.

Almost all of the early theologians

talk about the ultimate worship of God is silence.

And that God dwells in the silence of eternity.

The history of monastic life

is as old as the history of the human race.

I think the whole history of shamans

is a history of a kind of proto-monasticism

where someone in the tribe has clearly, evidently,

a facility with silence and a facility

with understanding the unspoken processes of the world.

Retreating from the cacophony of the world

is stepping towards everything that's essential.

It's about stepping towards the world

and really about learning how to love the world again.

Historically, solitude has always had

an exalted place in our culture

and it's really only recently that it has fallen from grace

and now needs to be restored to its rightful place.

You look at all the religious traditions,

Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, Moses,

these were all seekers who would go off into the woods,

think their thoughts, have their revelations,

and then come back

and share those revelations with the wider world.

We lose a lot when we don't allow people...

Not just allow, but encourage people

to go off by themselves.

You know, whether literally into the woods, or metaphorically,

to just go and chart your own journey

and do it by yourself.

There are certain paths in this life

that you've got to walk alone

and that's the only way to do them.

Through Zen, you need to feel the silence with your body,

experience it every day,

and then it becomes part of you.

That is what practicing Zen is about.

That is the life with Zen.

You honestly

and genuinely

live everyday life

through silence.

It's not like you are just being silent and do nothing.

Would you tell our panel, please,

what your name is and where you're from?

My name is John Cage. I'm from Stony Point, New York.

He is probably the most controversial figure

in the musical world today

and when you hear his performance,

if you'll forgive me, you will understand why.

The instruments that he will use

include a water pitcher, an iron pipe,

a goose call, a bathtub,

five radios all hooked up and a grand piano.

Between 1950 and 1952,

when Cage created his most important piece of music,

Cage had a series of revelations.

And the revelations informed the rest of his life

and they informed the rest of his music, too.

He'd been interested in silence for a long time

and he had been appreciating noise for a long time.

So, he had this dualism about silence versus noise.

So, he was looking for silence as an alternative to noise.

When he ventured into an anechoic chamber in Boston,

he was looking for the quietest place on Earth,

because Ramakrishna had said,

"Find the silence and you will find God."

And I heard, in that room, two sounds.

One was high and one was low.

And I thought there was something wrong with the room.

I went outside and found the engineer in charge

and he said the high one was your nervous system in operation

and the low one was your blood circulating.

He realizes that silence is an abstraction,

it's a human concept,

and what's actually happening is that

Cage and his own body and his own being

are completely interconnected with all beings

and all bodies of beings, everywhere,

and that everyone shares the same ground.

Then it became clear that...

That the function of art

is not to communicate one's personal ideas or feelings,

but rather to imitate nature in her manner of operation.

Cage's most important piece of music is,

as many people know, actually not music at all.

It's four and a half minutes of silence.

When Cage first performed that piece

with David Tudor as his pianist,

he performed it in Woodstock, New York,

at a little barn called Maverick Concert House,

and the audience went berserk.

This is 1952. August 29, 1952.

They were incensed.

They were in an uproar over the performance.

And afterwards, John opened the floor to questions.

One of the artists got up and said,

"Good people of Woodstock,

"I think we should run these people out of town."

That was the reaction. (LAUGHS)

Silence is where

we hear something deeper than our chatter.

And silence is where we speak something deeper than our words.

All of us know that the most essential things in life

are exactly what we can't express.

Our relation to faith, our relation to love,

our relation to death, our relation to divinity.

I think silence is the resting place of everything essential.

For the first, I don't know how many,

hundred thousand years of human life,

when we were out on the savanna,

learning about the forest,

silence was essential to our survival.

So, silence is our natural milieu,

and the farther we get away from silence,

the more we lose our humanity.

I want you to answer the questions!

I want you to answer the questions!

- Was there... Do I believe...

- I'm giving you an opportunity. - This is how to ask it.

This is how you need... I'm giving you an opportunity.

I'm doing the interview, Dana.

- But you weren't there... - I don't need to...

American individualism now has become

more and more associated with

our right and our almost social obligation

to impose our will on the world,

to get out our thoughts, to not hesitate, to not be shy.

In race after race, bottom line...

- In race after race... - Third card trick...

In race after race, Democrats...

- When it comes to women. - Winning over women...

There is such an intense, overwhelming drive

to contribute our little ricocheting response

to this soul-crushing din of the moment.

- ...over me. You're not... - (INDISTINCT)

- One of the specific plans... - You're not gonna filibuster.

- I'm not going to let you do it. - Ed, Ed, Ed!

Let me answer your question you asked me earlier.

- (CONTINUES TALKING) - I'll go back to this question.

Throughout Japanese history,

there has been an appreciation

of softer, quieter registers of being.

One of the most signal instances of this

is really in relationship to the tea ceremony.

One of the most important masters, Sen Rikyu,

lived at a time of incredible martial activity

among different samurai groups.

And part of his interest in developing the tea ceremony,

in the ways that he did,

was to cultivate an appreciation for silence

and silence's relationship to a more

pacific environment in general.

When guests entered the tea room,

they would remove their katana swords.

All of the participants leave behind

their social status, distinctions,

and other such concerns when they enter the tea room.

The participants concentrate on the moment,

finding awareness of how each of them

is contributing to this singular, living experience.

That is what's being experienced

amidst the silence of the tea ceremony.

As a result,

there are no selfish desires or thoughts of personal gain,

only the peaceful world inside the tea room.

Silence allows everybody to have

equal platform and equal voice

because if nobody is talking, nobody is dominating.