The question of Jesus is significant because it touches the heart and wholeness of human experience, all our aspirations and deepest concerns. Listening to it can make us fully human. It simplifies us without the loss of human dignity.
His question rises out of silence, the still consciousness of his prayer. It stills the mind and awakens the human capacity for faith which is the door to knowledge of the Self. Stillness is not rigidity as when we become fixated on ourselves. Stillness is the condition of unselfcentered attention. It is inherently compassionate and agile. Whatever is still is also silent, therefore, because it communicates directly and not through the medium of any language. We make a serious mistake by thinking that this state does no good for others. Sri Ramana indeed said that silence is the most potent form of work.
However vast and emphatic the scriptures may be, they fail in their effect. The Guru is quiet and grace prevails in all. This silence is more vast and more emphatic than all the scriptures put together.
Today we listen to the question of Jesus in a culture that can make little sense and gives even less time for silence. Technological society is infatuated with the audio-visual and the tangible. It confuses the transfer of information with true communication. It tries to reduce consciousness to mechanics, prayer to positive thinking. It no longer allows the human mind and heart to be expanded by faith that sees what is ordinarily (to sense or thought alone) unseeable. Only faith understands the productivity of silence and the efficiency of stillness. To listen, to be silent, to have faith does not come cheap as the call of Jesus makes crystal clear. Modern spiritual practitioners or disciples may seem to conform to the values of their society but, as we will see in Chapter Eight, they will have to embrace the detachment of an outsider. Discipleship, too, does not come cheap. And if you think the first step is not easy, the demand does not let up.
Jesus’ question and its orientation to silence put us into touch with ancient wisdom. The great spiritual cultures of the world, which materialistic technology so easily discounts, treasured the knowledge that silence is a truly great and beneficial human work.
I will teach thee the truth of pure work, and this truth will make you free.
And know also of a work that is silence: mysterious is the path of work.
The person who in his work finds silence, and who sees that silence is work sees the Light and in all his works finds peace.20
The question of Jesus is all-important for contemporary culture precisely because it recalls us to silence. He does not shout this at us. His silence says it:
Indeed it is better to keep quiet and be than to make fluent professions and not be. No doubt it is a fine thing to instruct others, but only if the speaker practices what he preaches. One such teacher there is: ‘he who spoke the word and it was done’; and what he achieved even by his silences was well worthy of the Father. A person who has truly mastered the utterances of Jesus will also be able to apprehend his silence and thus reach full spiritual maturity, so that his own words have the force of actions and his silences the significance of speech.21
Jesus speaks by silence throughout the gospel: the preverbal silence of the newborn child; the look he passed into peoples’ souls to set them free from fear or ignorance; the stillness when Pilate was questioning him and he declined to be enticed into the word games that might have saved his life; the post-verbal silence of the crucifixion. So too in any life today that is guided by the gospel we meet his silence in thought, word, deed and prayer in the Spirit of truth he sent to be humanity’s guide.
We are silent whenever we pay attention. We pay attention when there is no ‘I’ thought, no self-reflective consciousness, no thought that we are the observer. This attention is the essence of prayer. Whenever we are in this state we are in prayer whether we are in church or supermarket, bedroom or boardroom, making love or making money. The dimension of our being that is addressed by the question of Jesus is perpetually in this state. When we pray, we return to prayer. When we listen, we return to silence.
All images echo some original reality. The original always has a silent presence which purifies and energises those who meet it. To encounter the original Jesus, however, means more than contacting the historical Jesus. The original Jesus manifests when we allow the countless images which religion and culture have accumulated to slip aside and be, at least momentarily, silent. A clear reading of the gospels and the work of silence in meditation prepare us for this.
Self-Knowledge and Friendship
It was one of the long golden summer evenings on Bere Island that made one forget the usual wind and drizzle. I was spending some weeks of solitude there. I had come down from my simple one-cold-tap cottage to give my cousin John a hand with putting a new roof on his barn. Though by nature, as I thought, more genuinely solitary than myself he had asked for some unskilled assistance in moving the timber beams. He was a couple of years older than me, healthy looking and handsome, extremely silent and reserved. Like his father he never stopped working. He had an Irish temper which could flash from his quiet depths like storms on the Sea of Galilee but he loved his chirpy ever-sociable wife and two boisterous little boys who all seemed to know how to handle his moods.
We were working on the roof and in my leisure moments I contemplated the slow gorgeous sunset over the sea. Evening was dying peacefully into night. I was gazing contentedly at the merging of the lines of sky and sea. Suddenly I realised John was calling me to help move some wood and I turned towards him. Our eyes met and there was an affectionate, amused look on his face as he caught my absent-mindedness. It was a fleeting personal connection but, for me at least, a moment of immense depth. As our two attentions met each other I saw our family likeness with a shocking, strange and impersonal kind of clarity. For a second I felt the presence of the bubbling soup of DNA that we all splash around in and from which our treasured individuality arises. It was quite different from any conceptual knowledge that could have been expressed as ‘he is my mother’s brother’s son’ or ‘there is the O’Sullivan look in us both’. The self-awareness was sharp and sudden; different from the way my self-absorbed ego usually tells me what I am feeling and what others think of me. It was not an emotional moment, not sentimental anyway, but it was painfully tender. It reassured me for an instant with a taste of the kind of human friendship that is deeper than we make merely as individuals. It takes longer to describe than it did to feel. It passed instantly and John pointed silently to the end of the piece of wood I was supposed to pick up and withdrew again into his hardworking solitude.
St Irenaeus and many others in the Christian tradition have said that ‘God became human in order that humans may become divine.’
Does nonduality and union mean that Jesus is really after all just me, my ‘true Self’, whatever that may be? Am I his true Self and is everything blurred into one like the sky and the sea at dusk?
Christian faith does not claim this. It is not the experience a person has of the risen Jesus. Yet non-duality was at the heart of his teaching and it is what he shares with us now. From the beginning Christian thinkers have reflected on the meaning of Jesus’ sayings about his union with the Father and their union with us. They have thought hard about the experience of faith