Noise and the Inner Life

The Problem of Noise

This quote comes from a letter that Jung wrote in 1957, responding to a request to contribute to an organization that had been formed to address the issue of noise, which, because of the growth and industrialization and technology, had increasingly become a problem as the first half of 20th century progressed.  It is a very pessimistic letter in many ways, but it raises concerns about several things that have only become exponentially more problematic in the more than 60 years since it was first written. 

Let me say right off the bat that by “noise,” I do not just mean loud sounds. This may have been Jung’s original intent when he wrote this letter, but even so, I am expanding the notion of noise to mean something along the lines of “psychological noise.” And by that, I mean everything that encroaches upon the free and spontaneous play of the deep psyche. Loud sounds, yes, but also lights that are always on — from street lights to glowing screens —  the endless amusements we are aggressively encouraged to binge, and the glut of information that streams endlessly in every setting of our lives. 

Defense, Denial, Distraction

In the last episode I said that a key component of the symbolic life is to carve out space for a discipline of deep listening. That is by no means a simple thing in this noisy, technological age in which we live.

You’ll notice in the quote from Jung that he identifies two core issues related to the problem of noise. The first is our tendency — both consciously and unconsciously — to use noise defensively. The second is in the way it affects our perception of the inner life, and that has consequences for how we live and express that inner life.

“Noise protects us from painful reflection,” says Jung. 

You know, it’s really important not to deceive ourselves that the symbolic life is easy, that it is just a program for feeling good. I've said before that the symbolic life has to do with meaning and that it involves an attunement with life. But it is not a path of denial. To be attuned with life also means facing the difficulties that every life must face — sadness, loss, regret, illness, death. 

“In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things work sadly.” So said William James in an essay titled Is Life Worth Living? (2) Can we be faulted if we are tempted to avoid these darker corners of the inner life? Still, if we are to realize the full potential of the symbolic life, we cannot hold ourselves back from it’s challenges.

One particularly painful area of reflection for many of us is the remembrance of all the ways we have let ourselves down, all the ways, perhaps, that we have not risked living out of our creative depths and our fear that we may never have the time, or the freedom, or the courage to even begin. And so we might keep ourselves busy or distracted or otherwise occupied, in part as a way to stay ahead of the pain of reflecting on our unlived lives.

We work hard to avoid the psychic pain, but the truth is that a life of meaning necessarily includes a place for painful reflection. In the same way that light and dark mutually support and contain each other, so too are joy and sorrow inseparable in a fully-lived human life. You can’t have one without the other.

Pursuit of Pleasure

When we avoid the painful truths of life, we are left only with the pursuit of pleasure. This sounds good, superficially, but the nature of pleasure is that it is always fleeting and, therefore, must be pursued in greater and more frequent “hits” in order to be sustained. Psychology calls this the hedonic treadmill. The human nervous system quickly becomes adjusted to the new and the unique so that what was pleasurable before soon becomes flat and unsatisfying.

This kind of pursuit of pleasure, ultimately, is but a momentary anaesthetic, an attempt to forget the pain. And what is anaesthetic is that which cuts us off from the aesthetic. In other words, it numbs us to feeling, to depth, to beauty, to soul. But how can we experience the beauty and poignancy of life, for instance, if we cannot acknowledge its fragility, it's heartbreaking brevity? “So teach us to number our days,” says the psalmist of the Old Testament, “that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” (3)

Drowning Out the Inner Life

The five colors blind the eye.

The five tones deafen the ear.

The five flavors dull the taste.

Racing and hunting madden the mind.

Precious things lead one astray.

Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.

He lets go of that and chooses this. (4)

On hearing this passage we might be tempted to respond, what are eyes for if not to see things, and ears if not to hear things, or the taste buds, if not to experience flavor? From the wisdom perspective, though, colors blind the eye and flavors numb the taste. The senses that are occupied are not available for other, perhaps more subtle, phenomena. How much more true must this be of our exceedingly overstimulated senses today?

Jung lamented the incursion of technology into the homes of modern people. Without adequate stillness and silence, he felt, we cannot escape the demands of time and begin to sense the timeless nature of the symbolic life. 

Even the privacy of our own minds becomes scarce. “We have our own room, of course,” he says, “but there is a telephone that can ring us up at any time, and we must always be ready.” (5) It goes without saying that today that telephone does not sit somewhere in another room in our houses, but is constantly with us in our hands and pockets and purses, everywhere we go.

The constant noise of information, entertainment, so-called breaking news, technology, and all the modern traffic of contemporary life makes it almost impossible to hear the still, small voice of the soul. Life has to work so much harder to break through the sound barrier that constantly surrounds us. 

We need our experiences to be extraordinary, beyond peak experiences, even. No doubt some of the major, significant life moments can break through, perhaps — things like falling in love, having a baby, the death of a loved one. But the day-to-day encounter with the depths of life is all but obscured. 

Silence is essential to the symbolic life because symbols speak with a kind of silence themselves. When we are able to be open and receptive to the resonance of a symbolic image, it transports our awareness beyond thought into a state of what Joseph Campbell, borrowing an idea from James Joyce, called aesthetic arrest. (6) In aesthetic arrest the racing of the mind and heart are stilled, such that we are enabled to feel a sense of our kinship with Being itself, beyond words or concepts or thought. But we need silence in order to hear that greater Silence.

The Now-Moment