Ode to silence

My brain has been full of philosophy lately as I have decided to read or shall I say re-read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s collected works. A lot of people think his writing is too heavy, and I agree to a certain extent, but his writing is also very rich and when I read some of his essays I often get a similar feeling as when I read the Bible or other spiritual book. I’m not blaspheming the sacred; I just mean that you can really glean off of just one page or even one idea or thought of his for a long period of time. I have always loved his essays “The American Scholar” “Self Reliance” “Politics” and “Nature”. He writes different from anyone I have read really. It sounds strange but he seems to pull some kind of natural wisdom from out of himself, almost like an impressionistic painting. I think with a lot of writers it is the opposite, they pull wisdom from outside and make it theirs. I guess what I am trying to say is that he listened to himself, to his heart, and to his spirit. With that being said, I guess it makes sense that he was also a true poet. He said, “To believe that what is true in one’s own heart is true for all men, that is genius.”

This got me really thinking. It seems that us humans are always looking at certain people as somehow better than us or different from us. Many of us have idols in our lives, people that we look up to and wish that we could be more like. We say, “if only I had their talent” or “if only I had their discipline” or “if only I was as brave as they are”. Yadda yadda yadda. But if you cut all of the fat off and get to the bare bones aren’t we all made of the same stuff? Don’t we all have essentially the same template? I think a lot of times the reason that we look up to others is because they have the courage to voice or express their innermost being and that resonates with our own innermost being. The beautiful prose that Shakespeare wrote, don’t we essentially have access to the same inspiration that he had? I want to pose a question. Instead of wishing to be more like others, why can’t we just wish to be more like our self? Isn’t that essentially what those we look up to do anyway?

So how do we attain this…this fullness of self? I am not really sure. I certainly don’t have all of the answers, but my intuitive thought is pretty simple: silence. I mean isn’t silence so under-rated? Americans are so busy all of the time; we are constantly over-stimulated with technology. It seems we have something in our eyes (phones, computers, televisions) or in our ears (music, talking, etc) from the moment we wake up until the moment we sleep. We don’t listen to ourselves much. We don’t listen to our intuition much. We don’t listen to our hearts much. We don’t even listen to our minds much. I would go as far to say that this could be the root of MANY problems in today’s culture. I’ve heard people say that American’s are self centered, but I disagree. We are not centered in ourselves at all. We are self un-centered. When do we have time to be centered in ourselves? In my experience, some of my greatest epiphanies or revelations came in moments of complete solitude. Perhaps if we weren’t constantly stuffing ourselves with false substitutes we would find within in us everything that we already need. Just a thought.