Twenty Thousand Hertz- Golden

Episode Summary

Title: Golden - The Power of Silence in a World of Noise Summary: - The podcast episode features stories from the book "Golden" by Lee Mars and Justin Zorn, which explores the power of silence. - It includes the stories of two men who found inner peace through silence - Cyrus Habib, who gave up his political career to become a Jesuit novice and take a vow of silence, and Jarvis J. Masters, a Buddhist inmate on death row in San Quentin Prison. - Habib struggled with the voices in his head telling him to constantly achieve more success. The silence of becoming a Jesuit helped him discern his true inner voice and focus on living in the present moment. - Masters learned Buddhist techniques like meditation to find inner stillness despite the chaos and noise of prison. For him, silence cultivates compassion for other inmates and guards. - The episode argues that silence is available to everyone, not just in remote places. With practice, we can all tune out distractions, slow down our thoughts, and connect to our deeper selves, even in noisy environments. - Engaging with silence can bring healing, reshape our perspectives, and help us find solutions beyond just thinking or talking.

Episode Show Notes

Two stories about the transformative power of silence from our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz

Episode Transcript

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You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The podcast 20,000 Hertz is a show about the world's most interesting and recognizable sounds. It is almost a sibling of 99% invisible, lovingly produced and reported deep dives into everyday things that make you see the world differently, or in the case of 20,000 Hertz, make you hear the world differently. We've collaborated a number of times over the years, but we're featuring them today because our sibling podcast produced an episode with my actual sibling, Lee Mars, co-author of the book Golden, The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. Lee showed up on a mini story episode of 99 PI a few months back talking about the ever increasing loudness of sirens as a way of measuring how loud our world has become. But the story 20,000 Hertz produced tackles the main thesis of Golden more head on. And I love this episode. I love how it turned out. And I'm so proud of everyone involved that I just wanted to share it with you as a bonus episode. Enjoy. SPEAKER_05: It's an honor to be here with you all. SPEAKER_08: That's Cyrus Habib. First, I want to just briefly tell you kind of what my job is, what my role is. SPEAKER_08: It's fall 2019 and Cyrus is giving a speech to a large crowd in a busy convention center. He's wearing a black suit and dark sunglasses. SPEAKER_05: Most people here in Washington State too polite to ask the question, what do you actually do? SPEAKER_08: For the last two years, Cyrus has been the lieutenant governor of Washington State. That means he's the second in command of the state's political system. SPEAKER_05: I serve as number two in the executive branch. SPEAKER_08: As he talks, he grips a microphone in one hand and gestures to the crowd with the other. He looks confident, like the successful politician that he is. SPEAKER_05: If things worked out for you this year, if your business did well, your family's doing well, I'll take the credit for that. SPEAKER_08: People are predicting big things for his career. They're already talking about him as a possible candidate for the next governor, even though he's still in his 30s. SPEAKER_05: I'm for making sure that we give everyone the best opportunity, not any opportunity, but the best opportunity. SPEAKER_08: But Cyrus won't become governor because not long after this speech, he announces that he's giving up politics entirely, that he's becoming a Jesuit novice and taking a temporary vow of silence, and that he will now pursue a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. SPEAKER_08: No more speeches. SPEAKER_08: No more applause. Just golden silence. You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. SPEAKER_06: As I think back on my life, I was obsessed with the voice of the future, calling back to me, telling me, you got to do this, you got to do this so that you can get to this other place. SPEAKER_08: Cyrus's parents immigrated to the US from Iran and growing up, he was always determined to succeed. SPEAKER_06: Perhaps this has to do with losing my eyesight to cancer as a child, becoming blind and forming a kind of compulsive need to be seen as successful. SPEAKER_08: That urge to succeed continued into his political career. First, he served in the state House of Representatives and then the state Senate. SPEAKER_06: It was exhilarating for me to be around a lot of people. It was exhilarating for me to speak to huge audiences. It was exhilarating for me when we would have lobby days at the legislature and you'd have thousands of people coming by. SPEAKER_08: Cyrus's political future looked really bright. I was achieving more and more success. SPEAKER_06: I had collected all kinds of accolades and achievements. SPEAKER_08: But despite all of these achievements, he never felt satisfied. As those things were happening, I felt a greater and greater sense of emptiness. SPEAKER_06: Each time I would obtain one, the desire would come even more quickly for the next thing. SPEAKER_08: Worst of all, the voices in his head just wouldn't let him be. Voices of the past, you know, people suggesting that there's things I can't do because I'm SPEAKER_06: blind and I need to prove them wrong. Maybe voices from the future saying, you're going to love it when you reach this next stage. Maybe voices of others in the present saying, Cyrus, you really ought to think about doing this. Cyrus, you're what our country needs. These are the kinds of voices, some fictional, some real, that had crowded out my own desires. My own desires. My own desires actually had nothing to do with any of those things. SPEAKER_08: To fix this, some people might try looking for a new job. Others might start exercising or spending more time with their family. But Cyrus had a different idea. I had read James Martin's book, The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, in which he talks SPEAKER_06: about his life as a Jesuit. And so that had kind of planted a seed in me of interest in this life. What would it be like to live in a religious order? What would it be like to take vows and to simplify my life drastically? What would it be like to live a life dedicated to serving others? SPEAKER_08: While he was still lieutenant governor, Cyrus decided to visit a Jesuit ministry. SPEAKER_06: It's not a monastery. I mean, Jesuits are not monks. But still, there is an order and a structure to the day. So you'll rise at 630, 7 a.m. to 745, meditation on your own. 745, morning prayer in chapel. 8 a.m., breakfast together. 830, scullery, which is to say, you know, cleaning the pots and pans and the dishes and everything. SPEAKER_08: The whole day is planned out like this, right up until bedtime. Spiritual reading in the evenings. SPEAKER_06: And then night prayer in chapel. And then whatever other prayer one does at the end of the night. SPEAKER_08: Compare that to the life of a politician. SPEAKER_06: Public life, you know, it is the life of the crowd. So it is quite noisy. Often there'd be multiple meetings going on in my office and I would be kind of shuttling back and forth from different groups because we had so many people booked. SPEAKER_08: And it wasn't just his work life. Even in the car, I would turn on podcasts. SPEAKER_06: And now I look back and I think I did try to squeeze every bit of input into my life, even in moments that could have been downtime all the way till I fell asleep. SPEAKER_08: After a lot of thought, Cyrus made his decision. He finished his term in office, then sold his apartment. He gave up his possessions and left to begin his new life as a Jesuit. SPEAKER_06: When people tell me, I'm so surprised, I'm so shocked, Cyrus, to hear that you left politics behind and this career and everything to become a Jesuit. And I say, well, if you're surprised, how do you think I feel? I mean, truly, I am still surprised. SPEAKER_09: Cyrus made the most surprising career decision anyone could possibly imagine. SPEAKER_08: Justice policy adviser and political strategist Justin Zorn. He made an announcement that he was taking a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience as SPEAKER_09: a novice Jesuit priest. And in the New York Times, Frank Bruni described it as politician takes sledgehammer to own ego. SPEAKER_08: Throughout his career, Justin's worked on all kinds of projects. SPEAKER_09: Environmental justice, economic justice, climate, foreign policy. And I'm also a meditation teacher. I taught meditation on Capitol Hill. There were a few members of Congress who had a real just necessity to find a way to slow down, to tune into the breath, to tune into the workings of the mind and how to manage the neurosis and the intensity and the noise of life and politics. SPEAKER_08: Like Cyrus, Justin finds that noise to be pretty exhausting. You know, cable news constantly running in the office. SPEAKER_01: That's your choice. That's your choice. SPEAKER_07: My choice. SPEAKER_09: It's a nonstop parade of meetings and tours and phone calls and negotiations and fundraising sessions and emails and every requirement you can imagine at the auditory level of the noise and also the information level of the noise. SPEAKER_08: Eventually, Justin decided to leave that noise behind. My wife and I left D.C. and we headed out to the mountains in the western U.S. and I SPEAKER_09: was in the midst of a career transition. SPEAKER_08: Around that time, he started collaborating with an author and a leadership coach named Lee Mars. Lee was interested in many of the same ideas as Justin and the two of them started working on a book. That book is called Golden, The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. So we decided to just follow the cookie crumbs and started interviewing people, neuroscientists SPEAKER_09: and poets and activists. And the question we came upon was, what's the deepest silence you've ever known? SPEAKER_08: That question led Justin to Cyrus. SPEAKER_09: This friend of mine had said, oh, my God, you've got to meet this guy. You guys are just like at the same intersection of politics and spiritual life. So I asked my friend to connect us. He did. And we had our first conversation by phone. SPEAKER_08: The first thing Justin wanted to know was this. What was it like going from a life that is defined by noise to one of silence and reflection? SPEAKER_06: That was really hard. You're not on social media. You're not on the Internet. You're not on the phone with anybody. It was also hard to let go of those voices in his head. SPEAKER_08: The voices that said, what am I doing? SPEAKER_06: You know, I mean, I could be making laws right now. I could be speaking to the media about some new idea or initiative. And what am I doing? I'm just scrubbing toilets again. SPEAKER_08: These voices were telling Cyrus that he should go back to his old life. A life that was built around getting his ideas heard by as many people as possible. In a way, it's not surprising because modern society is all about making noise and getting attention. SPEAKER_09: If you look at the way our whole society is structured right now, even how we measure the economy, how we measure progress, our foremost measure of progress is also primed for the maximum production of mental stuff, of sound and stimulus. SPEAKER_08: But for Cyrus, the hardest part was still ahead because as a Jesuit novice, he had to go through an entire month without speaking or being spoken to. He couldn't even write an email or send a text. The first few days were pretty hard just because you're not used to silence. SPEAKER_06: And you know, after a couple days you think, oh my God, it's been so long. And then you realize, oh my God, there are 28 more days of this. SPEAKER_08: A vow of silence is supposed to help you discover spiritual truths. But when you experience something profound, it's natural to want to talk about it. SPEAKER_06: Because I am an extrovert, it was hard for me to get over that instinct to orally verbalize things to other people. You know, I would experience something in prayer or I would think of something and I'd instantly want to tell people about it. I'd want to talk to my friends about it, or I'd want to talk to my mom about it, or someone I'm close with. So that was really hard. SPEAKER_08: Cyrus completed his 30 days of silence and that experience taught him some valuable lessons. The first one was to focus on the moment. SPEAKER_06: Mindfulness, which is a word that's used a lot, but which I really got to understand as a novice, really came down to silencing those voices so that one can be attentive to the present no matter what's happening. So that might mean being really attentive to the food I'm eating. It might mean being really attentive to the conversation I'm having or really attentive to the dishes I'm washing. You are encountering the divine. You are encountering beauty, truth, and goodness in what you do. The key is, can you notice it? Do you notice it? SPEAKER_08: The next step is discernment. Discernment is about sifting through the noise of our world to find the signal amidst the SPEAKER_06: static and the interference of our daily busy lives. SPEAKER_08: And there's a lot of static out there. The professor at the University of Michigan estimated through years of research that the SPEAKER_09: average person has to listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses worth of internal chatter in their head every single day. SPEAKER_08: But with a little practice, you can turn down the chatter and focus on what you really care about. And that's when the real change can begin. SPEAKER_06: Take for example, someone who is in a relationship, maybe two people have been dating for a year or so. And you know, now all of a sudden they seem to be arguing all the time. That could mean any number of things. It could mean that there's an invitation there to change, to be kinder. It could mean there's an invitation to call the other person out and to advocate for oneself. It could mean there's an invitation to end the relationship. Who knows, right? Well, that's the question. We got to discern what's going on here and truly to believe that even in the most difficult circumstances, even in something like having cancer, even in something like becoming blind, there are myriad invitations to grow, invitations to become more fully oneself, more fully human. But to find that still small voice, one has to go through a process of noticing and learning. SPEAKER_08: Through this process, Cyrus managed to find his true inner voice. It was a voice that said, deep down, I want to be nourished. SPEAKER_06: Deep down, my heart desires a vocation, a life that is rewarding, that lets me be my loving self, that lets me grow in my loving approach to the world and to others, a life of balance. So it's a turning inward to the self. And it's also then a turning upward, a moving upward to the transcendent. SPEAKER_08: Cyrus looked for inner silence in a quiet, peaceful place. But how do you find that same peace in one of the noisiest, most chaotic places on earth? 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SPEAKER_08: His first years at San Quentin were pretty rough. SPEAKER_03: I was stubborn, I was mad, I was angry. All I was learning from San Quentin is what not to do. I never felt like I was being inspired to learn what to do. SPEAKER_08: But slowly, his perspective began to change. I started reading these books about masculinity and what do we do to imitate being what a SPEAKER_03: man is supposed to be based on what we've been told. So I was reading a lot of these books and they were really good books for me to read because they really started to tear away what I thought I should look like, sound like, and be like. SPEAKER_08: Then four years into his sentence, Jarvis was accused of making a weapon that was used to kill a prison guard. Jarvis insisted he was innocent but was found guilty. It's a complicated case, but there are a lot of people who think Jarvis was wrongly convicted. His supporters include the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey. Oprah even chose Jarvis's autobiography for her book club. Here she is explaining that decision on CBS mornings. SPEAKER_00: Number one, my intention is to expose the story. Number two, my intention is to let people know that there are a lot of people on death row and a lot of people in prison for whom there has been a miscarriage of justice. And in this case, I believe there has been a miscarriage of justice. SPEAKER_08: Understandably, Jarvis was devastated by the guilty verdict. He knew he might be sentenced to death. But then he came across a book. SPEAKER_03: And the name of the book was Life in Relationship to Death. And I sat there and read it for almost a week, one of the juries in deliberation. SPEAKER_08: The book was written by a Tibetan monk and is based on a specific school of Buddhism called Vajrayana. It uses techniques like mantras and visualizations to help people become more self-aware and accept their circumstances. You know, life in relationship to death, it was where I was. SPEAKER_03: And I just thought, hey, you know, let me try this. SPEAKER_08: Soon after, Jarvis was sentenced to death. He spent the next 21 years in solitary confinement. During that time, he wrote to the author of Life in Relationship to Death, who came and visited him in prison. Then Jarvis took what's called the refuge vow and committed himself to Vajrayana Buddhism. SPEAKER_03: I became a student of that practice. And I thought that practice as I began to sit with it was a very clear, honest way of opening me up to see where freedom really is. SPEAKER_08: The first step was learning to be still, both physically and mentally. SPEAKER_03: I had to learn how to sit down first before I learned how to meditate. I was a very angry person and I didn't particularly think sitting down was fulfilling for me at that time. I just had to learn how to sit down with me, you know, and that took a while. There was a lot of times where I was bored with it, but I made a commitment to myself to just sit there and things start opening up. Gates start opening up. And that was a beautiful time for me. It really was. SPEAKER_08: In 2007, Jarvis was finally allowed to leave solitary confinement, and that meant a lot more noise. But Jarvis kept using the techniques he had learned to find peace within that noise. SPEAKER_03: I hear the noise, but I'm not listening. I can learn to give the noises due, but not let it dictate what I want to do. I can walk around and feel very quiet within my own body, within my own way of thinking. And I guess that's been sort of like my meditation. It doesn't try to control what I do. It tries to ease me through what I'm doing. It's a gift. It's a gift because it honors you in a way that allows you to receive the benefits of just holding that silence, you know. It's a gift because no one knows what I hear but me. SPEAKER_02: There's just a lot of noise to navigate on death row in San Quentin, and Jarvis is a master at it. SPEAKER_08: That's author Lee Mars. Lee spent a lot of time interviewing Jarvis for the book Golden. SPEAKER_02: Even when we're speaking with him on the phone, we can hear it in the background. There's just lo-fi radios and party beats going. And then just men hollering at all times of day and night. And sometimes screaming in the night, suffering, having nightmares. And this is all being reflected and bouncing off of concrete and cement. It's a loud, loud environment. SPEAKER_08: And it's not just audible noise that prisoners have to live with. There's also informational noise. SPEAKER_02: Cases and appeals and documents, legal documents, and the situation of their trials or retrials. And there's more information available than ever before for them to fixate on or perhaps to be a key to their someday release. And then internally, there's the reverberation of state sanctioned death and trauma, regret, and worry. SPEAKER_08: Strangely, Jarvis finds it easier to find peace when the prison isn't totally silent. SPEAKER_02: There's a certain amount of noise that is necessary for him to feel quiet in prison. If it gets too quiet there, as you might imagine, it's not good. They might mean the guards are about to do a raid, you know, a search. That something's brewing, some trouble is brewing. So he was describing it in this way that was really helping me understand. He's like, I like the noise because I like the silence right beside that noise. SPEAKER_08: After 30 years of meditating, Jarvis has a lot of practice calming his mind. But even for him, it's not always easy. It can bother you in a way where you're overthinking things. SPEAKER_03: You're trying to direct where everybody should be at. And that's a problem for me, trying to push things to work the way it should work. I do start that way a lot of times, you know, frustrated. SPEAKER_08: But rather than trying to fight that anger, he's learned to let it pass. I think for a lot of people, it's accepting the fact that we might have to start our day SPEAKER_03: off like that. It's accepting the fact that, hey, you don't belong in this place and you should have a problem with it because this is a form of meditation. Looking at this stuff and trying to figure out how do I dissolve it into nothing? How does it move from what it is now into some kind of acceptance? SPEAKER_08: Once Jarvis has found his inner silence, he can then start to listen to his internal voice. But in his case, he's not listening for discernment. Instead, he's listening for compassion. SPEAKER_03: What my whole trip is to find the gates that was just going to open me up to understanding how compassion works inside a prison system. I see guards in a lot of pain and suffering and I say, wow, this guard may be going home to his son. And I would see violence and I say, wow, how can I participate in compassion? And I start realizing that we all suffer to some degree or another and that I was not alone. SPEAKER_08: Jarvis also uses that compassion to connect with his fellow inmates. SPEAKER_02: Just getting enough space to find quiet, to find stillness in oneself allowed him to know just the little scars on the men on their hands or on their faces. And he would occasionally ask about those. Hey, what happened? Knowing that it was a story. It was a story that probably led to a really tough childhood, a broken foster care system, violence at home. So for him, silence has a direct connection to compassion and that changes his relationship to the men he's with. SPEAKER_08: In return, the other inmates help Jarvis cultivate that silence. For instance, if someone is calling out his name. SPEAKER_02: The other guys will say, hey, Jarvis is on the phone or Jarvis is writing to help guard his silence so he can perhaps just be left alone or be undisturbed on a conversation or be able to dive into some writing. I just loved learning that they do that. SPEAKER_08: When Lee and Justin first started working on their book, they were thinking of silence as an absence of sound. But after speaking with people like Cyrus and Jarvis, they realized that silence is about much more than that. SPEAKER_02: There's an engagement. There's an aliveness when we're really engaging silence, we're engaging this presence that's teeming with life and joy and ecstasy. SPEAKER_09: Even in noisy, busy circumstances, we can tune into these little moments of silence and they have the capacity to bring us healing in our minds and our bodies. And it has the power to reshape our perspectives, our views of the world and feel some more optimism. SPEAKER_08: But engaging with silence is just the first step. We're living in this culture where success is defined by whether or not we win the argument, SPEAKER_09: whether we have the last word. But I kept coming back to this intuition that the answers might not come just through more thinking or talking. The answers might not come through making more and more noise. The answers might come through silence. SPEAKER_08: And the more you practice finding silence, the more you'll get out of it. SPEAKER_06: I thought it would be more like the first few months of a relationship when you think like, oh, this is exciting. This is cool. This is different. But I think people who are in happy marriages will know a marriage is not just that exciting first date played out over and over and over again. It's something much more profound than that. This is the kind of joy, the kind of contentedness that lets me fall asleep immediately. SPEAKER_08: No matter who you are or where you are, silence is always available. SPEAKER_02: Silence isn't fancy. It doesn't require equipment. It doesn't require gadgetry. It belongs to everyone. We all have access to it. It's innate to being human. SPEAKER_03: At some point in the day, I realized my silence is my best friend. It brings me to that point where I'm in a state of gratitude. And that says a lot to me because I've seen the worst, you know. It just blows me away that by being quiet, you can receive these kinds of gifts. You can get this kind of knowledge. It's given me the gift of having realized what time means to me. SPEAKER_08: The two stories you just heard came from the book Golden, the power of silence in a world of noise. In the book, you'll find 12 other stories circling around the concept of silence. Take a moment to go buy it wherever you get your books. It's also available as an audio book. 20,000 Hertz is produced out of the Sound Design Studios of De facto Sound. SPEAKER_04: This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson and Casey Emerling. SPEAKER_08: With help from Grace East. Directed with sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Nick Spradlin with original music by Wesley Slover. Thanks to our guests, Jarvis J Masters, Cyrus Habib, Lee Mars and Justin Zorn. To find out more about Jarvis's case and his latest appeal, follow the link in the show description. A special thanks to Corny Cole for sharing her interviews with Jarvis. Corny's podcast, Dear Governor, is a deep dive into Jarvis's life story and his ongoing legal battle. Both seasons are available now. SPEAKER_01: