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0:01:19 how often do you find silence? I mean real silence. It’s always been hard, but in today’s world the clamour of technology and distractions is unrelenting. And there’s a part of us that likes this, that wants to be distracted, wants to be diverted, wants to be occupied by someone or something. Which means that when we do actually find a bit of silence, we don’t always know what to do with it. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s have a moment of silence
0:01:20 together.
0:01:52 So what happened? Did you think about your to-do list? Did you worry? Did you panic? Did you almost switch to another podcast? Or did you enjoy it? Regardless, that moment in which seemingly nothing happened was an experience. One that could, if you let it, affect you as profoundly as any other experience.
0:02:15 So what would happen if we allowed ourselves to sit in silence more often? Could moments of silence be restorative or exploratory? Could sitting in silence prepare us for the times when we can’t block out the noise? Let’s try it again. This time I’m not springing it on you, so maybe it will feel different. I’ll try to do it for the same amount of time.
0:02:28 I’m Sean Ealing and this is The Grey Area.
0:02:38 Today’s guest is Pico Iyer. He’s the author of fifteen books and a long time columnist for many publications around the world.
0:02:48 He’s also spent decades travelling with Adhavi Lama as a friend and travel writer. His latest book is called A Flame, Learning from Silence.
0:02:53 The book is what it sounds like, a meditation on silence.
0:03:22 And it’s based on Pico’s experiences over thirty years at a Catholic monastery on the coast of northern California. Pico isn’t a Catholic or even a Christian. In fact, he’s not a religious person at all. But he is a curious open-minded writer with a deep interest in spiritual and religious experiences. And his work, this book in particular, reflects that. So I wanted to speak with him about how we can all find silence and hopefully benefit from it.
0:03:30 Pico Iyer, welcome to the show. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:32 I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Sean. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:00 I’m happy to have you here. It’s such a curious thing about you that you’re not religious, you’re not a meditator or anything like that, and yet you’ve spent so much of your life inhabiting these spiritual spaces, living among monks, uh travelling around the world with the Dalai Lama. I mean how does all that happen? How do you make sense of that tension? Or do you even see any tension in that? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:30 Yes, I don’t think I see attention. I think I see a complementarity. It feels to me like breathing in and breathing out. And I don’t think my travels or experience would begin to make sense unless I had enough stillness and peace to to try to put them in perspective. And I’ve always, I think, or not always, but since a fairly young age, I’ve thought I don’t want to neglect the inner life. And the external is becoming so deafening and overwhelming, as you know, that I feel y
0:04:45 I almost have to take conscious measures these days to ensure that I’m putting things in perspective and that my inner life is not neglected, because if the inner life is gone, then it’s like a car without an engine. In other words, all the travel in the world makes no sense at all. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:49 Did you grow up in a very religious home? What did your parents do? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:19 probably did actually, which sent me in the opposite direction. You’re running away from religion. But I I know you’re a political theorist and philosopher and that’s exactly what my parents were. They were both philosophers um, both teachers of comparative religions, which means that they were interested in all religions personally as well as professionally. Uh and I suppose beyond that I maybe ha had the advantage of being born to two Hindu parents who’d grown up in British India
0:05:47 and therefore knew the Bible back to France. And I was born and grew up in England and so I went through very classical Anglican schooling, so by the time I was in college um I probably had some kind of grounding in the Christian world and I had you know my Hindu genes and D_N_A_ too, and my first name is actually Siddharth named after the Buddha. So I think my parents were equipping me for uh being conversant with lots of religious traditions. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:14 I wanna get into the book a little bit. Um i people may not know this about you, but you lost everything you owned, including your home and a fire, something like thirty years ago, give or take. Um you say that wasn’t exactly what brought you to the monastery in the first place, but you write that it did clear the way for many things. What did it clear the way for? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:45 Well, it left me in something akin to a desert, a vast open space from which I had to begin crafting my life anew. So I was caught in the middle of that fire, which was the worst in Californian history at the time, for three hours. And when finally a fire truck could get to me and say it was safe to drive downtown, I went to an all-night supermarket, I bought a toothbrush and the toothbrush was the only thing I had in the world, and then I was sleeping on a friend’s floor. And had I not
0:07:15 in that somewhat diminished state. I don’t think I’d have been so responsive when another friend came and saw me on the floor and said oh why don’t you try going to stay at this Benedictine hermitage um up the road. Uh I don’t think th I ever would have thought of going to stay in a Catholic monastery otherwise as somebody who’s not a Christian and who also uh spent fifteen years going through Christian schools and I thought oh I’ve had enough of that tradition, I was more interested in the traditions I didn’t know about. But uh my friend uh told
0:07:39 me that this hermitage that if nothing else would give me a bed to sleep in and a wide desk and a private walled garden above the Pacific Ocean, all the food I could eat for just thirty dollars a night at the time. So I thought well, if nothing else, that’s going to be to sleeping on the floor. Um so I tried it and as you know, that was thirty four years later and I’ve been more than a hundred times since and it’s really become my secret home.
0:07:49 Well tell me about that monastery up in the Big Sur area in northern California. What was it like, how did you spend your days there? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:08:19 I suppose the first thing to stress is that although it’s a Catholic monastery, and there are fifteen monks there and ten workers who live with them sustaining the community, they’re open to everyone. And really um the monks are responding to St. Benedict’s call to hospitality, and so there are no rules. Everybody is welcome, you don’t have to do anything, uh they provide you with all that you want, and I think they have the confidence to know that whoever
0:08:49 you are and whatever you’re longing and whatever your background, just three days in silence, without distraction, free from cell phones, uh in this radiant stretch of coastline above the ocean will help you find what is most sustaining. And some people would call it God and others would give different names to it, but I think it comes to the same thing. So just to give um our audience uh a sort of visual, you drive along Californian highway one which grows emptier and narrower and you’re
0:09:19 just in this vast elemental landscape with golden meadows running down from the hills to the one side and the flat blue plate of the Pacific Ocean on the other. And then you come to this even narrower road that snakes and twists for two miles around turns to the top of the hill uh where the retreat house um stands. And so everybody who goes to stay has either a trailer on the hill or a very simple room, but with your own garden twelve hundred and fifty feet with a
0:09:42 unbroken view over the ocean on nine hundred acres of uh glorious natural landscape. So between the nature and between the silence that’s been constructed by years of prayer and meditation, um and between the freedom from all that usually cuts us up into many pieces, um it’s hard not to be transported there. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:09:50 How different is the Christianity practiced by those monks from the Christianity practiced by most other Christians? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:10:21 So these monks belong to the Kamaldalese congregation within the Benedictine order, and that is the most contemplative uh congregation within the Catholic church. So it’s closest to Zen meditators and people who meditate in every tradition. And so just as you say, I think one of the first surprises for me is that the monks I meet there are much more open-minded than I am, much less dogmatic. When I went and have uh dinner one evening with a prayer who runs the
0:10:51 On his wall there’s a picture of Jesus in the lotus position meditating. Uh they actually maintain a Hindu ashram in southern India where the Catholic priest wears a doty, sleeps on the floor, eats with his hands, and the motto for that Catholic Hindu ashram is we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness. So I love that. If you were to ask me why I go there, I would say it’s to wake up wake up first and to cut
0:11:21 through the illusion of separateness and to feel closer to everyone and everything around me. And of course they are trying to cut through the illusion that they are separate from the other traditions of the world. So it seemed to me the perfect motto. And then I found out that we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness actually comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, and I thought how wonderful that these Catholic monks are open and wise enough to take as their motto the sai saying of a contemporary Vietnamese
0:11:51 That openness is what is so interesting to me. I mean I I’ve never liked conventional religion because, I’ve never liked dogma. I I think r I think religions often lose their connection to the experiential roots of faith and instead become these dogma enforcing institutions. But the fact that these monks seem to have no need for dogma at all is so surprising. O w why do you think they have no need for that? I think it’s
0:12:21 because they’re so deeply rooted in their own tradition and commitment, that they’re open to learning from everyone. Because they know where they stand, they’re not defensive, they’re not protective, and they’re n the last ones ever to say that their religion is the best or the only one. So I think it’s people who are uncertain of themselves or their faith who are likely to cling to it uh tenaciously or or belligerently, and it’s those who know who they are who are at least
0:12:51 to do that. But I I love what you say, and I think that’s the reason after thirty four years that I decided to publish a book about these guys and their silence, because I’ve never seen the world as divided as it is right now. And as you say, I think it’s divided because of our words, our beliefs and our ideologies. Uh and the ho the more fiercely we hold to them, the more we’re cutting the world up into us and them. So I was keen to shine a spotlight both on these monks who are so open to
0:13:21 and and not making distinctions, and are cutting through the illusion of separateness. And I was so eager also to shine a spotlight on silence, because it’s it’s the place that doesn’t ask us to prove or disprove a thing. I think silence lies on the far side of our beliefs and ideologies. And so I find if I start to talk with anybody, however sympathetic that person is, maybe after forty five minutes we’ll find that we’re on different sides of some important issue. But when we’re joined in a moment of
0:13:36 silence, I think we’re united in that part of us that lies much deeper than our assumptions and our ideologies, and that silence that actually is a bit of a corrective to the divisions that are cutting us up so violently across the nation and across the world right now.
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0:18:08 You refer to the monastery as a in the book as a a a place beyond divisions. Um and you know, it’s something I think about a lot as a political theorist is how these deep psychological needs play out in our social world, you know, as powerful as the ego is, as much as we all want to be recognised as individuals
0:18:37 We also have this longing to lose ourselves in the whole, and this is part of the appeal of tribalism in some of our darker political movements, but the kind of self-emptying you describe in the book, the kind of self-dissolution that these monks practice is very different from that, and it feels much more like a kind of love and attentiveness. And it’s it’s honestly awe-inspiring. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:19:08 Oh, so so beautifully said. Um and I loved it when you were talking about losing the self in the whole, because I think that’s pretty much my definition of happiness. My sense is that we’re happiest of all when we’re deeply absorbed in something, and we lose ourselves, we forget the time, in an intimate moment with a lover, in a conversation, in a concert, suddenly w we’re gone. And we’re filled up with something much richer than we could ever be. And and and we’re
0:19:38 without even knowing to use the word or to think in those terms. And that is actually what I experience every time I go on retreat. And all the agitation and all the thoughts of um my fears, my deadlines, my resume, it’s all left down on the highway, and I’m just open for once to everything that’s around me. So I’m in a state of wonder both, as you say, at the monks and seeing their life of devotion and at the fact that I found something
0:19:50 that is lost, that is there in me and in everybody in the core of our lives, but as we’re racing from the bank to the supermarket, we misplace and then we feel this emptiness, but we don’t know how to address it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:19:53 We’re so conditioned to think of freedom as
0:20:22 a freedom to. Free to do this, free to do that, free to pursue whatever I want, but this kind of spiritual freedom you’re talking about is a freedom from, right, freedom from constant striving, freedom from the never-ending push and pull of distractions, freedom from ourselves really, I mean I maybe that’s the kind of freedom T_S_ Eliot had in mind when he talked about the life we lost in living, which you quote in the book. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:20:54 Exactly. I was just going to cite that very line. And yes, freedom from the need to make anything of yourself in the world, freedom to decorate your C_V_, freedom to make an impression on anyone. And the interesting thing is that deep radiant freedom that they’re experiencing comes through a vow of obedience. Because when you look at them, they they a vow they vow to l obey their God, obey their prayer, and obey everybody else in their community. So to
0:21:24 initially it looks like the opposite of freedom, because they’re living within circumscribed limits in very simple rooms with a strict regimen. But that very s very strict regimen is precisely I think what gives them a certain freedom, because they know where they’re going to be and what they’re going to be doing every day of their lives. And they’re freed again from a lot of the clutter that confuses us. And I think the biggest freedom maybe, which I find in my life, is that in the w age of acceleration and information
0:21:43 There’s so much com coming in on me every minute. I can’t dis distinguish the trivial from the essential. I can’t put my hands on what really matters and what I care about They. have consecrated our lives only to what they care about. And so I don’t think they have any of the the confusions um or doubts that the rest of us have. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:02 you know the this era is defined in so many ways by our our our technology and the attention economy that drives it and you know a a tension I struggle with in my life and I know I’m not alone is this dual impulse to
0:22:23 on the one hand you wanna pay attention to all the news happening all the things happening in the world you wanna care about the problems and the existential threats and all of that because on some level being a responsible citizen means caring about the world. But on the other hand there’s so much noise there’s, so much nonsense there, are so many
0:22:53 problems that I as an individual cannot fix and paying attention to all of this makes my life less satisfying and less silent. Um so how do you decide when to retreat into silence and when to open yourself up to the noise and the clamour of the world because you are of the world and you’re responsible for it and our own little ways and you care. So how do you how do you walk that line?
0:23:24 Yeah, such a good question. I would say I’m responsible for those things that I can affect. And so to speak to the the example you just gave, I remember during the pandemic, I thought every day when I wake up, I can either attend to what’s going to cut me up or I can attend to what’s going to open me up. And I felt that if I were to go online or take in the news, I would hear about morgues being over-full in Bolivia and a thousand
0:23:54 just dying in Iran. And it’s really tragic, and of course one has to care for it, but I really thought there was nothing I could do about that. And conversely, I would look out of the window this radiant spring afternoon, and I would think about the friends and families and neighbours nearby, and I thought that’s what I can really affect positively. Sadly, there’s very little I can do about most of the external world, but my immediate world is really what I have to attend to, and I don’t want the news to take me away
0:24:24 from the parts of the world I can positively affect. So I think being a responsible citizen really means thinking about the people whose lives you can positively affect and how you can gather the strength and resources to be a help to them. And I find I don’t gather those resources by uh w reading The New York Times, driving the freeway or watching C_N_N_, and I do gather them by going for a walk or sitting quietly or most of all by
0:24:25 on retreat. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:32 I found myself wondering uh when I was reading the book and just now listening to you, what the monks
0:24:54 would say to someone who accused them of defeatism or quietism who said you know you’ve abandoned the world and gave up on it. I don’t think that’s quite fair, but I I’m sure it’s a common critique and I just wonder how they would respond to that. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:25:25 I think they would respond much as the Dalai Lama does. You can only change the world constructively by having dis the discernment to see what would be good for the world. If you just blindly race in um and try to tend to the world, you’re often going to make it worse than it was before. It’s like if suddenly I see somebody fall down on the sidewalk, I will race to help her, but it’s much better if I’m a trained physician who races to help her and can s exactly assess the situation and know what is
0:25:55 best response to it. You know, I mention in the book I see the Dalai Lama as an a physician in the emergency room, and I think that’s what my monk friends are too. Um they’re not stepping away from the world, they’re stepping into a deeper reality, so it’s better to understand the world. The monks um that I spend time with live for only one thing, and that’s to help others. Um and I think therefore they’re more engaged with the world than many a CEO
0:26:03 even many a a a a politician. But certainly um they’re not they’re not abandoning the world. I think they’re trying to tend to the world. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:08 And have you come to think that kind of attentiveness is only possible after
0:26:12 spending a lot of time in silence?
0:26:15 In solitude perhaps? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:46 Yes, I think meditation is famously um the means for gathering the resources for reple replenishing the inner savings account. And it takes v many different forms. It can be silent. Um but I do find that it’s those people who’ve taken the time to develop themselves inwardly, who have the most to give to the rest of the world. You know, the great German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart said as long as the inner work is strong, the outer work will
0:27:08 never be puny. In other words, as long as you take care of what’s inside you, then your career, your relationships, your l life as a responsible citizen will take care of itself. But if you don’t do that, it’s questionable how much you really have to offer to the world. Um good intentions perhaps, but not um the discernment to turn those good inte tensions into fruitful results. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:27:38 We imagine silence and solitude as as kind of inseparable, but it is fascinating how much actual deep connection is possible in sharing silence with other people. You you put it, I think, quite beautifully in the book You. um you say I’m reminded that the best in us lies deeper than our words. And so th again we think of these monks as like o like the hermits and recluses, but it’s such a wonderful little community and it doesn’t
0:27:43 require a lot of chatter, and yet the connections are are as deep as any. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:28:13 Yeah, I think that connections are maybe deeper because they’re not simplified or reduced by words. So in answer to your observation, I would say two things. First is another beautiful surprise uh for me was that as a bit of a loner who loves being by myself, one surprise of going to this place was that every time I walk along the monastery road, I’ll meet a fellow traveller, another retreatant. And we’ll stop and we’ll talk for maybe two minutes, three minutes. And I’ll quickly feel this is one of
0:28:43 closest friends. And that what we’re engaging in exchanging is really rich because we’re not joined by the fact we work in the same business or we come from the same town or we went to the same college. We’re joined by the fact we’ve responded to the same longing. We’ve both come in search of the silence. So we’re both in search of our deepest lost selves. And what we say to one another arises from silence. And so even the briefest interaction there is very rich. And I trust those people that I it’s strange as
0:29:12 I meet along the road, in a way sadly I wouldn’t trust the stranger I just bumped into on Fifth Avenue in New York or if I’m walking down the street in Santa Barbara. And secondly, as you said so beautifully, the monks are essentially living to look after one another. And as you know in the book one of the things that moves me more and more is how because they’re in this remote location um they’re often cut off from the world entirely by winter storms. And since many of the monks are quite elderly, they have to be
0:29:43 And the prior, who became a very good friend of mine, would tell me that there was one secret back road only open between eight in the evening and five in the morning. And he would drive five hours through the dark, through the night, night after night after night, just to be with one of his brothers in the hospital. The hospital’s two and a half hours away um by road. Uh so a monk would get helicoptered out and then the prior every night would make the long drive through the dark just to sit by the side
0:29:58 of his fellow monk. And he said, I am their father, I am the only family they have, I am their brother, literally as a monastic brother, uh I’m their mother in a sense. Uh and to see that degree of service and compassion is really humbling. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:30:14 All these trips to the monastery over all these years, have you ever thought about just not coming back into the world and just staying there to to stay in that silence and and and stay in that that space cut off from from all the the craziness? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:30:44 uh much too often and much too powerfully. And one good corrective um was when I started s staying with the monks in their enclosure I found how busy their lives were and there wasn’t s as much silence as a a visitor has and that they were leading round the clock um busier li you know busy lives they were in the office twenty four hours hours a day with their colleagues every hour for the rest of their lives and that in many ways it’s more all consuming than a
0:30:55 job would be. So my temptation to become a monk has always been too strong, but again and again I’ve seen it’s my romantic illusion of what being a monk is rather than the real reality. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:12 Well look, perhaps becoming a monk is a b a bit extreme, but w why remain secular after all these years of religious exploration? I mean have you ever felt tempted to make that leap? Does it seem almost irrelevant to you at this point? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:42 I’m I’m so happy you said it might seem irrelevant, ’cause I I think that’s the best answer. In other words, I think what I believe is much less important than how I act. And the beliefs in some ways are material or they’re a luxury, because we all know people who strongly will assert their belief and act in ways that horrify us. And we all know people who claim to have no beliefs and act with a selflessness and compassion that could put a cardinal to shame. So I’m I’m happy not to get into the realm of belief, which can seem an
0:32:12 indulgence and certainly can divide the world. And I’m much more concerned on how can I be a better friend, a better husband, uh a better father. So I’ve never felt a need to join a group or to subscribe to a theory or a system of belief or a uh a particular understanding of the world. But I have wanted to try um to lead a kinder and more wide awake life. Um and I think again I began by saying maybe an inner life is um a way of putting
0:32:32 it that I respond to more happily than talking about spiritual spirituality or religion or any of those. I think if you have a rich inner life, you’ll be able to give more to other people. And if you neglect you in a life, there’s going to be a certain emptiness that you share with other people. And I prefer, I think, um to put it in those terms. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:32:37 What does a word like God mean to you at this point? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:33:08 And it’s a beautiful way of describing a truth that all of us um know and, intuit but lose sight of, and I go to the Hermitage to be reminded of that, and I don’t always happen to use that word for it, but it’s like many many languages. I can’t speak Aramaic, but it doesn’t mean that words in Aramaic are false, it just means that I don’t happen to understand them because I can only function in English. Um as you know, there was a moment in this book when actually I was on in my birth on my
0:33:38 there. And I went to have um an interview, a television interview. And I was told uh before the interview by the producers, you know, at the end there were going to be some rapid-fire questions. So we’ll tell you what they are so you can be prepared. So they told me the questions to anticipate. And I went and I had the hour-long interview. And at the end there were rapid-fire questions, but they were totally different from the ones the producers had prepared me for. I think they’d got it mixed up and given me the questions for somebody else. So out of nowhere the interviewer said uh
0:34:08 what what’s your definition of God? And because I was completely unprepared, I said reality. And I realised if I’d been prepared for that question or thought about it for a hundred days, I couldn’t have come up with a better answer for how I see things. Um but because it came out of me unthinkingly, it was exactly the right answer, the answer I could trust. Uh and so what does that mean? Does it mean that God is real? It could mean that. Does it mean, as the Buddhists will say, that really the divinity we have to bow before
0:34:38 reality could mean that. But um, you know, I think the n notion of God is a is a really helpful one if it um helps people navigate the complications of the world. But if people choose to use other words, that may be more helpful to them. You know, the Dalai Lama wonderfully says that there’s a reason that there are many religious traditions in the world, and it’s the same reason that there are many um medical traditions, because some people find their system responds best to Chinese
0:34:56 others respond well to ayurveda, others respond best to western medicine. Um all of us have the same problems, but each of our systems perhaps is most helped by one medical system rather than another. Um and I think that’s how I feel about um religious traditions.
0:35:26 a word you use a lot is mystery, and I quite like that. Um I think like you I’ve I’ve always enjoyed the questions more than the answers and to the extent that spiritual and religious traditions are just trying to keep us in contact with the mysteries of existence, I I find them very valuable. Um but I still think I’ll always believe that the dogmas and the
0:35:38 which are all too human do, more harm than good. But maybe I’m being too harsh in that judgement, I don’t know. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:36:08 No. No. I mean I I ag I happen to agree with you one hundred percent. And the sorrow is that the church is so imperfect, members of every church are so human and flawed, um dogma is so pernicious that many of us attempted to throw the baby out with the bath water. And we see so many terrible things done in the name of religion that uh we assume that a religion itself is corrupt, which I think is unfair. What
0:36:38 do with the heavens is always going to be human and extremely fallible and often destructive. What the heavens do with humans is much more inarguable. Right at the centre of my previous book uh was a chapter on Jerusalem, which to me speaks for exactly what we’re describing. Because I’m not Christian or Muslim or Jewish, and yet I move to tears when I go to Jerusalem. And sometimes I’ll be walking down the street in Japan and I’ll be magnetically pulled toward Jerusalem. So
0:37:08 powerful and charismatic is that place. And yet, as of course the city of faith is the city of division, and for as long as we can remember, Jerusalem has been a centre of bloody and violent conflicts, precisely because my sense one person’s sense of heaven is very different from his neighbour’s. There’s something real and inarguable about our longing for the divine and for the beyond, and yet what we do with it and the ways in which we try to cut it up into names and ideologies w exemplifies the
0:37:38 of of our humanity and and makes a mockery of it. So I agree with you. I mean I think mystery is is wonderful if it’s a n way of speaking of the ineffable. And I think most wise souls have said if we were to try to understand God it wouldn’t be God. But I mean w the net the nature of it divinity is it’s beyond words and expressions. And I think that’s another reason why I stress silence, ’cause I think silence touches me as no scripture ever could. The Bible, the teachings of the Buddha, the
0:38:07 they all have great wisdom in them, but I can’t one hundred percent subscribe to them. I c I can’t trust them in the way that I trust silence, which I think again lies beyond all of them in some part of me that I couldn’t begin or try to name or express. And and for all the horrors that are perpetrated in the name of religion, I don’t want to assume therefore that religion is a fraud. I think it’s just that t humans are not always worthy of the possibilities that are given to us.
0:38:17 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
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0:41:57 Well, as you know um when you’re not at the monastery leaning into that silence, being still, meditating, intensive reading, these things are hard to do and when we try to do them we often get carried away by distracting thoughts or events.
0:42:12 So I’m curious what your advice is to people for how to practice silence in the day-to-day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, rinse, wash, repeat world that most of us live in most of the time. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:42:42 Yeah. I think the harder it is, the more urgent and necessary it is. And when I have friends who say I don’t have time to be silent or I don’t have time to go on retreat, I think they’re the ones who are really in need of it, because somehow they’ve lost control of their lives. And all of us know that if you’re very very busy, you’re unlikely to be wise, and that those people who are really wise are never too busy. So to a typical person um who shares the concerns you just voiced
0:43:12 I would say go for a walk. Uh go and meet a friend without your cell phone. Try instead of killing time to restore time. I’ll give an example. Uh sitting in this apartment I every evening used to wait for my m wife to come back from work and I never knew if it would be twenty minutes or seventy minutes. So I was just waiting. And I would I would kill the time. I would scroll through the internet or I’d turn on the T_V_ there, there’s never anything to watch on Japanese T_V_. And then one day I thought um why don’t I just
0:43:42 turn off the lights and listen to some music. And by di and I did. And very quiet music at first, but not so quiet music later. And I was amazed at how much fresher I felt when I heard her key in the door, how much more I had to give to her, how much better I slept, how much less jangled I was when I woke up. And it’s a t tiny example of how I made a little space in my day for doing nothing when the alternative was doing useless stuff. And th doing nothing
0:44:12 really the best response to that, and the kindest thing I could share with my wife when she did come home. And I think all of us have those um spaces in our days, and it’s up to us how we choose to u to use them. Our aim in this world of distraction is to put ourselves in the space beyond distraction, because so long as we’re cut up and living in little fragments, we’re no use to anyone at all. And as I said, my prejudice is to think the more deeply absorbed we
0:44:42 something the happier and the fuller and the richer we are. I mean Simone, very years ago said attention is a form of prayer and I loved it when you were talking about the attention economy and I don’t want to give my attention uh to Google and Facebook if there’s a chance of giving my attention to Dostoevsky or Emily Dickinson or the beauty of the the Deer Park down the street from me um or wherever you happen to be. I think there’s beaut natural beauty around you. Um so uh I I think the beauty of
0:45:00 of of silence and the quality as I associate with silence is that they’re non-denominational and they’re available to everybody in her life. And if her life feels too full and too stressed, that’s a sign that she has to do something akin to taking medicine or or going to t to the to the doctor. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:15 i in this world of increasingly stunted attention spans, do you do you worry that the monastic life is disappearing, will disappear, and if it does, what do you think will lose? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:45 I worry a huge amount. And of course there are more because of uh diminished attention spans there are more and more spas and yoga centres and new age places, but unfortunately many of them are based around a single human who’s mortal or around a certain exclusive philosophy and not responsive to people who don’t subscribe to that. And so I do think if monasteries and convents die away and with them the example of people who have given their lives up twenty four hours a day for the rest of their
0:46:15 to a certain commitment, we’ll lose something very very significant. And all the retreat centres in the world are never going to compensate for that loss. It’s a it’s a severe concern and and the place that I go to uh New Camaraderie in Big Sur, they’re having a great trouble, as all monastic institutions are, getting new people to make a commitment for life. Um and so w wherever you are in every order, we’re losing um those places and and I think that’s a
0:46:33 loss and I don’t know how it could be repaired, because I’m a perfect bad example. In other words, I go there on retreat and I enjoy all the benefits of it, but I haven’t made the commitment to join them and and to support them in that way. Um so I hope there are lots of people who are wiser and more committed than I am who can keep these places going. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:46:42 I’m never gonna become a monk, but I’ve always wanted to visit a monastery and and write about the experience. Uh maybe I’ll go now. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:12 you’ll never regret it, Sean. And the one though is there’s a monastery near you, wherever you happen to be. I mean there are plenty of them and they many of them open their doors to visitors and all of them I think offer a version of the same silence. My suspicion is if you go once, a uh well you it may well in induced to start going more than once. But even if it doesn’t, just knowing that medicine is nearby, just the memory and just the prospect of a place that brings you closer to what is essential in
0:47:42 life is going to transform your days. And the more confusing and painful those days are, the more useful it is to recall well, there’s there’s a response to them and there there is um medicine at hand if if I really need it. Um so I yeah, I I g I’ve seemed to have come back in this conversation a lot to the to the medical analogy, but I think it’s because many of us are uh are sick or lost and confused and uh looking for anything that can address that and in my experience
0:47:48 on retreats and silence has been a one of the best and most irreplaceable medicines I found. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:15 I think we’re all probably a little sick lost and confused and only aware of it to varying degrees. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:20 Questions. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:33 Well it’s a beautiful book um and it was a joy to read um and once again the book is called A Flame, learning from silence. This was wonderful thank, you so much Pico. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:39 Thank you so much Sean um this is a kind of medicine you’re sharing with your listeners and I’m so grateful for it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:49:01 Alright, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know I did. This conversation genuinely changed how I think about the value of silence and how much I need to balance out all the noise and chaos in my own life.
0:49:23 But will it change how I actually use moments of silence? I don’t know. But I guess the only way to find out is to keep trying. Keep looking for those moments where we can find them. And if we can find them, I guess we’ll have to make them. Let’s do that now. Just sit and enjoy a few more seconds of silence together.
0:50:02 I would love to know what happened during your moment of silence. Did it feel the same as the moment of silence we took before the show? I would also love to know what you thought of the episode or any episode So. drop us a line at the grey area at box dot com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at one eight hundred two one four five seven four nine. And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the
0:50:03 podcast.
0:50:32 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the grey area drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox, support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
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0:01:19 how often do you find silence? I mean real silence. It’s always been hard, but in today’s world the clamour of technology and distractions is unrelenting. And there’s a part of us that likes this, that wants to be distracted, wants to be diverted, wants to be occupied by someone or something. Which means that when we do actually find a bit of silence, we don’t always know what to do with it. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s have a moment of silence
0:01:20 together.
0:01:52 So what happened? Did you think about your to-do list? Did you worry? Did you panic? Did you almost switch to another podcast? Or did you enjoy it? Regardless, that moment in which seemingly nothing happened was an experience. One that could, if you let it, affect you as profoundly as any other experience.
0:02:15 So what would happen if we allowed ourselves to sit in silence more often? Could moments of silence be restorative or exploratory? Could sitting in silence prepare us for the times when we can’t block out the noise? Let’s try it again. This time I’m not springing it on you, so maybe it will feel different. I’ll try to do it for the same amount of time.
0:02:28 I’m Sean Ealing and this is The Grey Area.
0:02:38 Today’s guest is Pico Iyer. He’s the author of fifteen books and a long time columnist for many publications around the world.
0:02:48 He’s also spent decades travelling with Adhavi Lama as a friend and travel writer. His latest book is called A Flame, Learning from Silence.
0:02:53 The book is what it sounds like, a meditation on silence.
0:03:22 And it’s based on Pico’s experiences over thirty years at a Catholic monastery on the coast of northern California. Pico isn’t a Catholic or even a Christian. In fact, he’s not a religious person at all. But he is a curious open-minded writer with a deep interest in spiritual and religious experiences. And his work, this book in particular, reflects that. So I wanted to speak with him about how we can all find silence and hopefully benefit from it.
0:03:30 Pico Iyer, welcome to the show. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:32 I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Sean. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:00 I’m happy to have you here. It’s such a curious thing about you that you’re not religious, you’re not a meditator or anything like that, and yet you’ve spent so much of your life inhabiting these spiritual spaces, living among monks, uh travelling around the world with the Dalai Lama. I mean how does all that happen? How do you make sense of that tension? Or do you even see any tension in that? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:30 Yes, I don’t think I see attention. I think I see a complementarity. It feels to me like breathing in and breathing out. And I don’t think my travels or experience would begin to make sense unless I had enough stillness and peace to to try to put them in perspective. And I’ve always, I think, or not always, but since a fairly young age, I’ve thought I don’t want to neglect the inner life. And the external is becoming so deafening and overwhelming, as you know, that I feel y
0:04:45 I almost have to take conscious measures these days to ensure that I’m putting things in perspective and that my inner life is not neglected, because if the inner life is gone, then it’s like a car without an engine. In other words, all the travel in the world makes no sense at all. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:49 Did you grow up in a very religious home? What did your parents do? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:19 probably did actually, which sent me in the opposite direction. You’re running away from religion. But I I know you’re a political theorist and philosopher and that’s exactly what my parents were. They were both philosophers um, both teachers of comparative religions, which means that they were interested in all religions personally as well as professionally. Uh and I suppose beyond that I maybe ha had the advantage of being born to two Hindu parents who’d grown up in British India
0:05:47 and therefore knew the Bible back to France. And I was born and grew up in England and so I went through very classical Anglican schooling, so by the time I was in college um I probably had some kind of grounding in the Christian world and I had you know my Hindu genes and D_N_A_ too, and my first name is actually Siddharth named after the Buddha. So I think my parents were equipping me for uh being conversant with lots of religious traditions. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:14 I wanna get into the book a little bit. Um i people may not know this about you, but you lost everything you owned, including your home and a fire, something like thirty years ago, give or take. Um you say that wasn’t exactly what brought you to the monastery in the first place, but you write that it did clear the way for many things. What did it clear the way for? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:45 Well, it left me in something akin to a desert, a vast open space from which I had to begin crafting my life anew. So I was caught in the middle of that fire, which was the worst in Californian history at the time, for three hours. And when finally a fire truck could get to me and say it was safe to drive downtown, I went to an all-night supermarket, I bought a toothbrush and the toothbrush was the only thing I had in the world, and then I was sleeping on a friend’s floor. And had I not
0:07:15 in that somewhat diminished state. I don’t think I’d have been so responsive when another friend came and saw me on the floor and said oh why don’t you try going to stay at this Benedictine hermitage um up the road. Uh I don’t think th I ever would have thought of going to stay in a Catholic monastery otherwise as somebody who’s not a Christian and who also uh spent fifteen years going through Christian schools and I thought oh I’ve had enough of that tradition, I was more interested in the traditions I didn’t know about. But uh my friend uh told
0:07:39 me that this hermitage that if nothing else would give me a bed to sleep in and a wide desk and a private walled garden above the Pacific Ocean, all the food I could eat for just thirty dollars a night at the time. So I thought well, if nothing else, that’s going to be to sleeping on the floor. Um so I tried it and as you know, that was thirty four years later and I’ve been more than a hundred times since and it’s really become my secret home.
0:07:49 Well tell me about that monastery up in the Big Sur area in northern California. What was it like, how did you spend your days there? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:08:19 I suppose the first thing to stress is that although it’s a Catholic monastery, and there are fifteen monks there and ten workers who live with them sustaining the community, they’re open to everyone. And really um the monks are responding to St. Benedict’s call to hospitality, and so there are no rules. Everybody is welcome, you don’t have to do anything, uh they provide you with all that you want, and I think they have the confidence to know that whoever
0:08:49 you are and whatever you’re longing and whatever your background, just three days in silence, without distraction, free from cell phones, uh in this radiant stretch of coastline above the ocean will help you find what is most sustaining. And some people would call it God and others would give different names to it, but I think it comes to the same thing. So just to give um our audience uh a sort of visual, you drive along Californian highway one which grows emptier and narrower and you’re
0:09:19 just in this vast elemental landscape with golden meadows running down from the hills to the one side and the flat blue plate of the Pacific Ocean on the other. And then you come to this even narrower road that snakes and twists for two miles around turns to the top of the hill uh where the retreat house um stands. And so everybody who goes to stay has either a trailer on the hill or a very simple room, but with your own garden twelve hundred and fifty feet with a
0:09:42 unbroken view over the ocean on nine hundred acres of uh glorious natural landscape. So between the nature and between the silence that’s been constructed by years of prayer and meditation, um and between the freedom from all that usually cuts us up into many pieces, um it’s hard not to be transported there. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:09:50 How different is the Christianity practiced by those monks from the Christianity practiced by most other Christians? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:10:21 So these monks belong to the Kamaldalese congregation within the Benedictine order, and that is the most contemplative uh congregation within the Catholic church. So it’s closest to Zen meditators and people who meditate in every tradition. And so just as you say, I think one of the first surprises for me is that the monks I meet there are much more open-minded than I am, much less dogmatic. When I went and have uh dinner one evening with a prayer who runs the
0:10:51 On his wall there’s a picture of Jesus in the lotus position meditating. Uh they actually maintain a Hindu ashram in southern India where the Catholic priest wears a doty, sleeps on the floor, eats with his hands, and the motto for that Catholic Hindu ashram is we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness. So I love that. If you were to ask me why I go there, I would say it’s to wake up wake up first and to cut
0:11:21 through the illusion of separateness and to feel closer to everyone and everything around me. And of course they are trying to cut through the illusion that they are separate from the other traditions of the world. So it seemed to me the perfect motto. And then I found out that we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness actually comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, and I thought how wonderful that these Catholic monks are open and wise enough to take as their motto the sai saying of a contemporary Vietnamese
0:11:51 That openness is what is so interesting to me. I mean I I’ve never liked conventional religion because, I’ve never liked dogma. I I think r I think religions often lose their connection to the experiential roots of faith and instead become these dogma enforcing institutions. But the fact that these monks seem to have no need for dogma at all is so surprising. O w why do you think they have no need for that? I think it’s
0:12:21 because they’re so deeply rooted in their own tradition and commitment, that they’re open to learning from everyone. Because they know where they stand, they’re not defensive, they’re not protective, and they’re n the last ones ever to say that their religion is the best or the only one. So I think it’s people who are uncertain of themselves or their faith who are likely to cling to it uh tenaciously or or belligerently, and it’s those who know who they are who are at least
0:12:51 to do that. But I I love what you say, and I think that’s the reason after thirty four years that I decided to publish a book about these guys and their silence, because I’ve never seen the world as divided as it is right now. And as you say, I think it’s divided because of our words, our beliefs and our ideologies. Uh and the ho the more fiercely we hold to them, the more we’re cutting the world up into us and them. So I was keen to shine a spotlight both on these monks who are so open to
0:13:21 and and not making distinctions, and are cutting through the illusion of separateness. And I was so eager also to shine a spotlight on silence, because it’s it’s the place that doesn’t ask us to prove or disprove a thing. I think silence lies on the far side of our beliefs and ideologies. And so I find if I start to talk with anybody, however sympathetic that person is, maybe after forty five minutes we’ll find that we’re on different sides of some important issue. But when we’re joined in a moment of
0:13:36 silence, I think we’re united in that part of us that lies much deeper than our assumptions and our ideologies, and that silence that actually is a bit of a corrective to the divisions that are cutting us up so violently across the nation and across the world right now.
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0:18:08 You refer to the monastery as a in the book as a a a place beyond divisions. Um and you know, it’s something I think about a lot as a political theorist is how these deep psychological needs play out in our social world, you know, as powerful as the ego is, as much as we all want to be recognised as individuals
0:18:37 We also have this longing to lose ourselves in the whole, and this is part of the appeal of tribalism in some of our darker political movements, but the kind of self-emptying you describe in the book, the kind of self-dissolution that these monks practice is very different from that, and it feels much more like a kind of love and attentiveness. And it’s it’s honestly awe-inspiring. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:19:08 Oh, so so beautifully said. Um and I loved it when you were talking about losing the self in the whole, because I think that’s pretty much my definition of happiness. My sense is that we’re happiest of all when we’re deeply absorbed in something, and we lose ourselves, we forget the time, in an intimate moment with a lover, in a conversation, in a concert, suddenly w we’re gone. And we’re filled up with something much richer than we could ever be. And and and we’re
0:19:38 without even knowing to use the word or to think in those terms. And that is actually what I experience every time I go on retreat. And all the agitation and all the thoughts of um my fears, my deadlines, my resume, it’s all left down on the highway, and I’m just open for once to everything that’s around me. So I’m in a state of wonder both, as you say, at the monks and seeing their life of devotion and at the fact that I found something
0:19:50 that is lost, that is there in me and in everybody in the core of our lives, but as we’re racing from the bank to the supermarket, we misplace and then we feel this emptiness, but we don’t know how to address it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:19:53 We’re so conditioned to think of freedom as
0:20:22 a freedom to. Free to do this, free to do that, free to pursue whatever I want, but this kind of spiritual freedom you’re talking about is a freedom from, right, freedom from constant striving, freedom from the never-ending push and pull of distractions, freedom from ourselves really, I mean I maybe that’s the kind of freedom T_S_ Eliot had in mind when he talked about the life we lost in living, which you quote in the book. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:20:54 Exactly. I was just going to cite that very line. And yes, freedom from the need to make anything of yourself in the world, freedom to decorate your C_V_, freedom to make an impression on anyone. And the interesting thing is that deep radiant freedom that they’re experiencing comes through a vow of obedience. Because when you look at them, they they a vow they vow to l obey their God, obey their prayer, and obey everybody else in their community. So to
0:21:24 initially it looks like the opposite of freedom, because they’re living within circumscribed limits in very simple rooms with a strict regimen. But that very s very strict regimen is precisely I think what gives them a certain freedom, because they know where they’re going to be and what they’re going to be doing every day of their lives. And they’re freed again from a lot of the clutter that confuses us. And I think the biggest freedom maybe, which I find in my life, is that in the w age of acceleration and information
0:21:43 There’s so much com coming in on me every minute. I can’t dis distinguish the trivial from the essential. I can’t put my hands on what really matters and what I care about They. have consecrated our lives only to what they care about. And so I don’t think they have any of the the confusions um or doubts that the rest of us have. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:02 you know the this era is defined in so many ways by our our our technology and the attention economy that drives it and you know a a tension I struggle with in my life and I know I’m not alone is this dual impulse to
0:22:23 on the one hand you wanna pay attention to all the news happening all the things happening in the world you wanna care about the problems and the existential threats and all of that because on some level being a responsible citizen means caring about the world. But on the other hand there’s so much noise there’s, so much nonsense there, are so many
0:22:53 problems that I as an individual cannot fix and paying attention to all of this makes my life less satisfying and less silent. Um so how do you decide when to retreat into silence and when to open yourself up to the noise and the clamour of the world because you are of the world and you’re responsible for it and our own little ways and you care. So how do you how do you walk that line?
0:23:24 Yeah, such a good question. I would say I’m responsible for those things that I can affect. And so to speak to the the example you just gave, I remember during the pandemic, I thought every day when I wake up, I can either attend to what’s going to cut me up or I can attend to what’s going to open me up. And I felt that if I were to go online or take in the news, I would hear about morgues being over-full in Bolivia and a thousand
0:23:54 just dying in Iran. And it’s really tragic, and of course one has to care for it, but I really thought there was nothing I could do about that. And conversely, I would look out of the window this radiant spring afternoon, and I would think about the friends and families and neighbours nearby, and I thought that’s what I can really affect positively. Sadly, there’s very little I can do about most of the external world, but my immediate world is really what I have to attend to, and I don’t want the news to take me away
0:24:24 from the parts of the world I can positively affect. So I think being a responsible citizen really means thinking about the people whose lives you can positively affect and how you can gather the strength and resources to be a help to them. And I find I don’t gather those resources by uh w reading The New York Times, driving the freeway or watching C_N_N_, and I do gather them by going for a walk or sitting quietly or most of all by
0:24:25 on retreat. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:32 I found myself wondering uh when I was reading the book and just now listening to you, what the monks
0:24:54 would say to someone who accused them of defeatism or quietism who said you know you’ve abandoned the world and gave up on it. I don’t think that’s quite fair, but I I’m sure it’s a common critique and I just wonder how they would respond to that. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:25:25 I think they would respond much as the Dalai Lama does. You can only change the world constructively by having dis the discernment to see what would be good for the world. If you just blindly race in um and try to tend to the world, you’re often going to make it worse than it was before. It’s like if suddenly I see somebody fall down on the sidewalk, I will race to help her, but it’s much better if I’m a trained physician who races to help her and can s exactly assess the situation and know what is
0:25:55 best response to it. You know, I mention in the book I see the Dalai Lama as an a physician in the emergency room, and I think that’s what my monk friends are too. Um they’re not stepping away from the world, they’re stepping into a deeper reality, so it’s better to understand the world. The monks um that I spend time with live for only one thing, and that’s to help others. Um and I think therefore they’re more engaged with the world than many a CEO
0:26:03 even many a a a a politician. But certainly um they’re not they’re not abandoning the world. I think they’re trying to tend to the world. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:08 And have you come to think that kind of attentiveness is only possible after
0:26:12 spending a lot of time in silence?
0:26:15 In solitude perhaps? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:46 Yes, I think meditation is famously um the means for gathering the resources for reple replenishing the inner savings account. And it takes v many different forms. It can be silent. Um but I do find that it’s those people who’ve taken the time to develop themselves inwardly, who have the most to give to the rest of the world. You know, the great German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart said as long as the inner work is strong, the outer work will
0:27:08 never be puny. In other words, as long as you take care of what’s inside you, then your career, your relationships, your l life as a responsible citizen will take care of itself. But if you don’t do that, it’s questionable how much you really have to offer to the world. Um good intentions perhaps, but not um the discernment to turn those good inte tensions into fruitful results. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:27:38 We imagine silence and solitude as as kind of inseparable, but it is fascinating how much actual deep connection is possible in sharing silence with other people. You you put it, I think, quite beautifully in the book You. um you say I’m reminded that the best in us lies deeper than our words. And so th again we think of these monks as like o like the hermits and recluses, but it’s such a wonderful little community and it doesn’t
0:27:43 require a lot of chatter, and yet the connections are are as deep as any. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:28:13 Yeah, I think that connections are maybe deeper because they’re not simplified or reduced by words. So in answer to your observation, I would say two things. First is another beautiful surprise uh for me was that as a bit of a loner who loves being by myself, one surprise of going to this place was that every time I walk along the monastery road, I’ll meet a fellow traveller, another retreatant. And we’ll stop and we’ll talk for maybe two minutes, three minutes. And I’ll quickly feel this is one of
0:28:43 closest friends. And that what we’re engaging in exchanging is really rich because we’re not joined by the fact we work in the same business or we come from the same town or we went to the same college. We’re joined by the fact we’ve responded to the same longing. We’ve both come in search of the silence. So we’re both in search of our deepest lost selves. And what we say to one another arises from silence. And so even the briefest interaction there is very rich. And I trust those people that I it’s strange as
0:29:12 I meet along the road, in a way sadly I wouldn’t trust the stranger I just bumped into on Fifth Avenue in New York or if I’m walking down the street in Santa Barbara. And secondly, as you said so beautifully, the monks are essentially living to look after one another. And as you know in the book one of the things that moves me more and more is how because they’re in this remote location um they’re often cut off from the world entirely by winter storms. And since many of the monks are quite elderly, they have to be
0:29:43 And the prior, who became a very good friend of mine, would tell me that there was one secret back road only open between eight in the evening and five in the morning. And he would drive five hours through the dark, through the night, night after night after night, just to be with one of his brothers in the hospital. The hospital’s two and a half hours away um by road. Uh so a monk would get helicoptered out and then the prior every night would make the long drive through the dark just to sit by the side
0:29:58 of his fellow monk. And he said, I am their father, I am the only family they have, I am their brother, literally as a monastic brother, uh I’m their mother in a sense. Uh and to see that degree of service and compassion is really humbling. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:30:14 All these trips to the monastery over all these years, have you ever thought about just not coming back into the world and just staying there to to stay in that silence and and and stay in that that space cut off from from all the the craziness? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:30:44 uh much too often and much too powerfully. And one good corrective um was when I started s staying with the monks in their enclosure I found how busy their lives were and there wasn’t s as much silence as a a visitor has and that they were leading round the clock um busier li you know busy lives they were in the office twenty four hours hours a day with their colleagues every hour for the rest of their lives and that in many ways it’s more all consuming than a
0:30:55 job would be. So my temptation to become a monk has always been too strong, but again and again I’ve seen it’s my romantic illusion of what being a monk is rather than the real reality. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:12 Well look, perhaps becoming a monk is a b a bit extreme, but w why remain secular after all these years of religious exploration? I mean have you ever felt tempted to make that leap? Does it seem almost irrelevant to you at this point? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:42 I’m I’m so happy you said it might seem irrelevant, ’cause I I think that’s the best answer. In other words, I think what I believe is much less important than how I act. And the beliefs in some ways are material or they’re a luxury, because we all know people who strongly will assert their belief and act in ways that horrify us. And we all know people who claim to have no beliefs and act with a selflessness and compassion that could put a cardinal to shame. So I’m I’m happy not to get into the realm of belief, which can seem an
0:32:12 indulgence and certainly can divide the world. And I’m much more concerned on how can I be a better friend, a better husband, uh a better father. So I’ve never felt a need to join a group or to subscribe to a theory or a system of belief or a uh a particular understanding of the world. But I have wanted to try um to lead a kinder and more wide awake life. Um and I think again I began by saying maybe an inner life is um a way of putting
0:32:32 it that I respond to more happily than talking about spiritual spirituality or religion or any of those. I think if you have a rich inner life, you’ll be able to give more to other people. And if you neglect you in a life, there’s going to be a certain emptiness that you share with other people. And I prefer, I think, um to put it in those terms. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:32:37 What does a word like God mean to you at this point? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:33:08 And it’s a beautiful way of describing a truth that all of us um know and, intuit but lose sight of, and I go to the Hermitage to be reminded of that, and I don’t always happen to use that word for it, but it’s like many many languages. I can’t speak Aramaic, but it doesn’t mean that words in Aramaic are false, it just means that I don’t happen to understand them because I can only function in English. Um as you know, there was a moment in this book when actually I was on in my birth on my
0:33:38 there. And I went to have um an interview, a television interview. And I was told uh before the interview by the producers, you know, at the end there were going to be some rapid-fire questions. So we’ll tell you what they are so you can be prepared. So they told me the questions to anticipate. And I went and I had the hour-long interview. And at the end there were rapid-fire questions, but they were totally different from the ones the producers had prepared me for. I think they’d got it mixed up and given me the questions for somebody else. So out of nowhere the interviewer said uh
0:34:08 what what’s your definition of God? And because I was completely unprepared, I said reality. And I realised if I’d been prepared for that question or thought about it for a hundred days, I couldn’t have come up with a better answer for how I see things. Um but because it came out of me unthinkingly, it was exactly the right answer, the answer I could trust. Uh and so what does that mean? Does it mean that God is real? It could mean that. Does it mean, as the Buddhists will say, that really the divinity we have to bow before
0:34:38 reality could mean that. But um, you know, I think the n notion of God is a is a really helpful one if it um helps people navigate the complications of the world. But if people choose to use other words, that may be more helpful to them. You know, the Dalai Lama wonderfully says that there’s a reason that there are many religious traditions in the world, and it’s the same reason that there are many um medical traditions, because some people find their system responds best to Chinese
0:34:56 others respond well to ayurveda, others respond best to western medicine. Um all of us have the same problems, but each of our systems perhaps is most helped by one medical system rather than another. Um and I think that’s how I feel about um religious traditions.
0:35:26 a word you use a lot is mystery, and I quite like that. Um I think like you I’ve I’ve always enjoyed the questions more than the answers and to the extent that spiritual and religious traditions are just trying to keep us in contact with the mysteries of existence, I I find them very valuable. Um but I still think I’ll always believe that the dogmas and the
0:35:38 which are all too human do, more harm than good. But maybe I’m being too harsh in that judgement, I don’t know. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:36:08 No. No. I mean I I ag I happen to agree with you one hundred percent. And the sorrow is that the church is so imperfect, members of every church are so human and flawed, um dogma is so pernicious that many of us attempted to throw the baby out with the bath water. And we see so many terrible things done in the name of religion that uh we assume that a religion itself is corrupt, which I think is unfair. What
0:36:38 do with the heavens is always going to be human and extremely fallible and often destructive. What the heavens do with humans is much more inarguable. Right at the centre of my previous book uh was a chapter on Jerusalem, which to me speaks for exactly what we’re describing. Because I’m not Christian or Muslim or Jewish, and yet I move to tears when I go to Jerusalem. And sometimes I’ll be walking down the street in Japan and I’ll be magnetically pulled toward Jerusalem. So
0:37:08 powerful and charismatic is that place. And yet, as of course the city of faith is the city of division, and for as long as we can remember, Jerusalem has been a centre of bloody and violent conflicts, precisely because my sense one person’s sense of heaven is very different from his neighbour’s. There’s something real and inarguable about our longing for the divine and for the beyond, and yet what we do with it and the ways in which we try to cut it up into names and ideologies w exemplifies the
0:37:38 of of our humanity and and makes a mockery of it. So I agree with you. I mean I think mystery is is wonderful if it’s a n way of speaking of the ineffable. And I think most wise souls have said if we were to try to understand God it wouldn’t be God. But I mean w the net the nature of it divinity is it’s beyond words and expressions. And I think that’s another reason why I stress silence, ’cause I think silence touches me as no scripture ever could. The Bible, the teachings of the Buddha, the
0:38:07 they all have great wisdom in them, but I can’t one hundred percent subscribe to them. I c I can’t trust them in the way that I trust silence, which I think again lies beyond all of them in some part of me that I couldn’t begin or try to name or express. And and for all the horrors that are perpetrated in the name of religion, I don’t want to assume therefore that religion is a fraud. I think it’s just that t humans are not always worthy of the possibilities that are given to us.
0:38:17 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
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0:41:57 Well, as you know um when you’re not at the monastery leaning into that silence, being still, meditating, intensive reading, these things are hard to do and when we try to do them we often get carried away by distracting thoughts or events.
0:42:12 So I’m curious what your advice is to people for how to practice silence in the day-to-day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, rinse, wash, repeat world that most of us live in most of the time. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:42:42 Yeah. I think the harder it is, the more urgent and necessary it is. And when I have friends who say I don’t have time to be silent or I don’t have time to go on retreat, I think they’re the ones who are really in need of it, because somehow they’ve lost control of their lives. And all of us know that if you’re very very busy, you’re unlikely to be wise, and that those people who are really wise are never too busy. So to a typical person um who shares the concerns you just voiced
0:43:12 I would say go for a walk. Uh go and meet a friend without your cell phone. Try instead of killing time to restore time. I’ll give an example. Uh sitting in this apartment I every evening used to wait for my m wife to come back from work and I never knew if it would be twenty minutes or seventy minutes. So I was just waiting. And I would I would kill the time. I would scroll through the internet or I’d turn on the T_V_ there, there’s never anything to watch on Japanese T_V_. And then one day I thought um why don’t I just
0:43:42 turn off the lights and listen to some music. And by di and I did. And very quiet music at first, but not so quiet music later. And I was amazed at how much fresher I felt when I heard her key in the door, how much more I had to give to her, how much better I slept, how much less jangled I was when I woke up. And it’s a t tiny example of how I made a little space in my day for doing nothing when the alternative was doing useless stuff. And th doing nothing
0:44:12 really the best response to that, and the kindest thing I could share with my wife when she did come home. And I think all of us have those um spaces in our days, and it’s up to us how we choose to u to use them. Our aim in this world of distraction is to put ourselves in the space beyond distraction, because so long as we’re cut up and living in little fragments, we’re no use to anyone at all. And as I said, my prejudice is to think the more deeply absorbed we
0:44:42 something the happier and the fuller and the richer we are. I mean Simone, very years ago said attention is a form of prayer and I loved it when you were talking about the attention economy and I don’t want to give my attention uh to Google and Facebook if there’s a chance of giving my attention to Dostoevsky or Emily Dickinson or the beauty of the the Deer Park down the street from me um or wherever you happen to be. I think there’s beaut natural beauty around you. Um so uh I I think the beauty of
0:45:00 of of silence and the quality as I associate with silence is that they’re non-denominational and they’re available to everybody in her life. And if her life feels too full and too stressed, that’s a sign that she has to do something akin to taking medicine or or going to t to the to the doctor. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:15 i in this world of increasingly stunted attention spans, do you do you worry that the monastic life is disappearing, will disappear, and if it does, what do you think will lose? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:45 I worry a huge amount. And of course there are more because of uh diminished attention spans there are more and more spas and yoga centres and new age places, but unfortunately many of them are based around a single human who’s mortal or around a certain exclusive philosophy and not responsive to people who don’t subscribe to that. And so I do think if monasteries and convents die away and with them the example of people who have given their lives up twenty four hours a day for the rest of their
0:46:15 to a certain commitment, we’ll lose something very very significant. And all the retreat centres in the world are never going to compensate for that loss. It’s a it’s a severe concern and and the place that I go to uh New Camaraderie in Big Sur, they’re having a great trouble, as all monastic institutions are, getting new people to make a commitment for life. Um and so w wherever you are in every order, we’re losing um those places and and I think that’s a
0:46:33 loss and I don’t know how it could be repaired, because I’m a perfect bad example. In other words, I go there on retreat and I enjoy all the benefits of it, but I haven’t made the commitment to join them and and to support them in that way. Um so I hope there are lots of people who are wiser and more committed than I am who can keep these places going. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:46:42 I’m never gonna become a monk, but I’ve always wanted to visit a monastery and and write about the experience. Uh maybe I’ll go now. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:12 you’ll never regret it, Sean. And the one though is there’s a monastery near you, wherever you happen to be. I mean there are plenty of them and they many of them open their doors to visitors and all of them I think offer a version of the same silence. My suspicion is if you go once, a uh well you it may well in induced to start going more than once. But even if it doesn’t, just knowing that medicine is nearby, just the memory and just the prospect of a place that brings you closer to what is essential in
0:47:42 life is going to transform your days. And the more confusing and painful those days are, the more useful it is to recall well, there’s there’s a response to them and there there is um medicine at hand if if I really need it. Um so I yeah, I I g I’ve seemed to have come back in this conversation a lot to the to the medical analogy, but I think it’s because many of us are uh are sick or lost and confused and uh looking for anything that can address that and in my experience
0:47:48 on retreats and silence has been a one of the best and most irreplaceable medicines I found. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:15 I think we’re all probably a little sick lost and confused and only aware of it to varying degrees. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:20 Questions. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:33 Well it’s a beautiful book um and it was a joy to read um and once again the book is called A Flame, learning from silence. This was wonderful thank, you so much Pico. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:39 Thank you so much Sean um this is a kind of medicine you’re sharing with your listeners and I’m so grateful for it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:49:01 Alright, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know I did. This conversation genuinely changed how I think about the value of silence and how much I need to balance out all the noise and chaos in my own life.
0:49:23 But will it change how I actually use moments of silence? I don’t know. But I guess the only way to find out is to keep trying. Keep looking for those moments where we can find them. And if we can find them, I guess we’ll have to make them. Let’s do that now. Just sit and enjoy a few more seconds of silence together.
0:50:02 I would love to know what happened during your moment of silence. Did it feel the same as the moment of silence we took before the show? I would also love to know what you thought of the episode or any episode So. drop us a line at the grey area at box dot com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at one eight hundred two one four five seven four nine. And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the
0:50:03 podcast.
0:50:32 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the grey area drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox, support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
0:50:35 And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
How often do you find silence? And do you know what to do with it when you do?
Today’s guest is essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer. His latest book is Aflame: Learning From Silence, which recounts his experiences living at a Catholic monastery in California after losing his home in a fire.
He speaks with Sean about the restorative power of silence, and how being quiet can prepare us for a busy and overstimulated world.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Pico Iyer, writer and author of Aflame: Learning From Silence
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