In Search of the Silent Mind: The Dutch Silence Retreat

There were calm September days for the annual HYMNS retreat at the Beukenhof in Biezenmortel.  The lady officer at passport control at Schipol airport asked for my destination.  Biezenmortel, I said with a smile. Where’s that? she asked. I have yet to meet a Dutch person who knows of it. Therefore. it must be the perfect place for a silence retreat.

The Beukenhof is a robust, stone-built former Capuchin monastery.  Next door is a former nunnery and to the back a field of cows. On the bus to Biezenmortel you pass a large church.  The area would have had a big rural population once, before the migration to the cities.  Around you see thatched houses some with interesting modern alterations.

In an evening meeting the teachers gave funny, sober, playful and sometimes serious accounts of their experiences with silence.  Reimke told of first experiencing silence as a child in church. That made me remember my own experience noticing silence around me.  It was palpable, it came as I went about in sight of distant hills.  Later, older but not wiser, I opted to read Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic where I came across the Transcendental Aesthetic in which space and time are inherent conditions of our thought prior to consideration of the world.  Then it must follow that the space surrounding objects has an affinity with our consciousness.  There is no separation, whatever the difference might be, for objects in space and the subtle sense of space within us.  It is true we would not know our bodies were it not for the mind and our bodies exist in  the space of our mind.   But the consideration of space, offering unity of consciousness by its intrinsic nature can’t be the final condition of knowing. What is the condition allowing space and time to be?  If consciousness of the world rests on space, what does space rest on?  We are looking behind what makes knowledge possible here.  What’s left after space?  Silence.  Think about it – there’s no thought there.  Just silence. The deepest thinking is not reason but contemplation.  Contemplation feeds on silence. I fancy all great philosophers east and west knew this silence and looked out upon the world from there.  And this is where we were being directed at the Beukenhof.

We were given a choice: ākāra mauna or kaśta mauna, silent but not so strictly or as silent as wood with total control over the senses, indriya gupti.  We were encouraged to consider the latter.  Then it is not just a case of not acknowledging others or not reading or not playing with a phone but not letting the mind attach itself to anything. If the eyes stray to a picture, then draw the eyes back, draw the mind from everything and manas will shut up.  Then buddhi,. without manas troubling it, turns more easily to see the difference between itself and silence.  It is the difference between the stillness of a faraway point in the sky and the leaves of the nearby trees rustling and distracting. Shailendra used this metaphor to explain contemplative walking.  Beyond the activity of manas and the indriyas is stillness, silence and uninterrupted consciousness.

Silence practice depends on discerning the subtle body.  We began with the Joints & Glands practice led by Uta.  The progressive attention from head to feet enhanced by prana mudra and agni sara draws awareness of the body from the body as object to a mental reception of physical movements.

Contemplative walking presents the inherent integration of the body though it is a physical practice.  One more step is all that’s needed to unity of awareness.

Pierre gave talks on japa and introduced a system of two 45-minute meditations with five minutes stretching exercises between, then nine rounds of nadi shodana. The effort was worth it: that bit nearer to silence.

Swami Ma Tripura Shakti led us through shitali karana, 61 points and yoga nidra over the days.  She also led guided meditations where we were invited to make friends and play within the subtle body.

Then came the akhanda japa: 25 hours with the stipulation that four sadhakas at least be in attendance each hour making 100 in respect of Swami Rama’s birth centenary.  The preceding subtle body practices prepare the way to grasp the inner sense of the japa:

“Undivided, indivisible, that which is not constituted of parts, ever remains one, whole and complete. By the invocation of which, by the presence of which within us all divisiveness and delusion of our minds and spiritual forces recover and discover our own interior indivisibility and rediscover that we are made of objects for a part of which we identify ourselves are not the part of the one, undivided, indivisible, spiritual essence.” – Swami Veda Bharati, 2010

To begin we chanted the mantra aloud, continued more softly and then by mental recitation.  Twenty-five hours later the mantra was withdrawn by bringing it back from the mind into the room.  All that remained was the quiet vibration.

This was a longer silence than in previous silence retreats at the Beukenhof.  The silence was deeper for that. It was a wonderful retreat, well thought out and delivered.