5 SILENCE & SOLITUDE

In every tribe without exception among the North American Indians, there exists, in addition to various kinds of collective rites, the practice of a solitary and silent worship, which is regarded as what is most profound and of the highest order.^[1] To some degree, collective rites always have, in fact, something relatively external about them; we say 'to some degree' because in this as in every other tradition it is of course necessary to differentiate between rites that may be called exoteric, that is, those in which any and all may participate, and the initiatic rites. Moreover, it is quite clear that, far from excluding these rites or opposing them in any way, the worship here in question is merely superimposed on them as something of another order as it were; and there is even every reason to think that to be truly effective and to produce actual results, initiation is implied as a necessary prerequisite.^[2] This worship is sometimes spoken of as 'prayer', but this is obviously inaccurate, for there is no petition of any kind; besides, prayers such as are generally expressed in ritual chants can only be addressed to the various divine manifestations,^[3] and we will see that in reality what is here under consideration is something completely different. It would certainly be much more appropriate to speak of 'incantation', in the sense in which we have defined it elsewhere,^[4] and it could also be spoken of as an 'invocation', in a sense exactly comparable to that of dhikr in the Islamic tradition, as long as it is made clear that it is essentially a silent and wholly interior 'invocation'.^[5] Here is what Charles Eastman^[6] writes in this connection: 'The worship of the Great Mystery was silent, solitary, without inner complication; it was silent because all speech is necessarily weak and imperfect, also the souls of our ancestors reached God through silent worship. It was solitary because they thought that God is closer to us in solitude, and there was no priest to serve as mediator between man and the Creator.'^[7] In truth, there can be no intermediaries in such a case, since this worship tends to establish a direct communication with the Supreme Principle, which is designated here as the 'Great Mystery'. Not only is it solely in and through silence that this communication can be obtained—for the 'Great Mystery' is beyond any form or expression—but silence itself 'is the Great Mystery'. How can this assertion be properly understood? First of all, one may recall in this connection that the true 'mystery' is essentially and exclusively the inexpressible, which can obviously be represented only by silence.^[8] Furthermore, since the 'Great Mystery' is the unmanifested, silence itself, which is precisely a state of non-manifestation, is thus like a participation in or conformity to the nature of the Supreme Principle. Moreover, silence, correlated to the Principle, is so to speak the unuttered Word; this is why 'sacred silence is the voice of the Great Spirit', insofar as the latter is identified with the Principle itself.^[9] This voice, which corresponds to the principal modality of sound which the Hindu tradition calls para or unmanifested,^[10] is the response to the call of a being at worship: call and response, alike silent, are an aspiration and an illumination that are both purely interior. For this to be true, silence must in reality be something more than the mere absence of word or speech, even if they are in a purely mental form. In fact, for the Indians, silence is essentially 'the perfect balance of the three parts of the being,' that is, of what is known in Western terminology as spirit, soul, and body, for the whole being, in all its constituent elements, has to participate in the worship in order to obtain a fully valid result. The necessity for this condition of equilibrium is easy to understand, for within manifestation itself equilibrium is like the image or reflection of the principal indistinction of the unmanifested, an indistinction also well represented by silence, so that there is no cause to wonder at the assimilation that has thus been established between silence and balance.^[11] As for solitude, let us first of all point out that its association with silence is in a way normal and even necessary, and that whoever establishes perfect silence within himself is thereby, even in the presence of other beings, necessarily isolated from them. Moreover, silence and solitude are both implied in the meaning of the Sanskrit term mauna, which, in the Hindu tradition, is no doubt what applies most exactly to the state currently under consideration.^[12] Multiplicity, being inherent to manifestation, and increasing as one descends to its lower degrees, necessarily removes one from the unmanifested. Also, the being that wishes to communicate with the Principle must first of all establish unity within itself to the degree possible by harmonizing and balancing all its elements; and at the same time it must isolate itself from all external multiplicity. The unification thus realized, even if still only relative in most cases, is nonetheless a certain conformity to the 'non-duality' of the Principle, in accordance with the present possibilities of the being. In the highest sense, isolation has the meaning of the Sanskrit term kaivalya, which simultaneously expresses the notions of perfection and of totality, and in its full significance even designates the absolute and unconditioned state, that of the being that has reached final Deliverance. At a much lower degree than this, one still belonging only to the preliminary phases of realization, one notes the following: wherever dispersion necessarily exists, solitude, inasmuch as it opposes multiplicity and coincides with a certain unity, is essentially concentration; and indeed one is well aware of the importance accorded concentration by all the traditional doctrines without exception, as means and indispensable condition for any realization. It seems of little use to emphasize this point further, but there is yet another consequence to which we wish to draw attention in closing: the method in question, by opposing every dispersion of the being's powers, excludes the separate and more or less disorderly development of one or another of its elements, particularly that of the psychic elements cultivated for their own sake as it were, a development that is always contrary to the harmony and equilibrium of the whole. According to Paul Coze, for the Indians 'it seems that in order to develop orenda,^[13] the intermediary between the material and the spiritual, one must first of all dominate matter and tend toward the divine.' This amounts to saying that they consider it legitimate to approach the psychic domain only 'from above', since results of the psychic order are obtained only in a very secondary way and 'by way of addition' so to speak, which is in fact the sole means of avoiding the dangers; and let us add that this is assuredly as far removed from common 'magic' as can be, contrary to what has all too often been attributed to such results by profane and superficial observers, no doubt because they themselves do not have the least notion of what true spirituality can be.