Doing Nothing is Everything: The Creative Silence That Unlocks Your True Self

“I am not with You because I am not with myself.” Augustine

The false self loves talking. It loves narratives. It feeds off them, constantly rehashing its own misery. It loves making others responsible for what’s going wrong in my life. It loves talking about what happened to me. As Richard Rohr says,

“The false self is always the loudest, because it is built on external, fragile things that can be taken from you. It is always talking because it knows its own insecurity and needs constant reinforcement.”

The true self is silent. It is born in the total silence of love and is capable of creative silence. One test of whether I am in the false or true self is whether I can be creatively silent for ten minutes.

“The True Self does not need to prove itself. It just is, and its power comes from its groundedness in God. It is content to remain silent because it knows it is enough.” Richard Rohr

What is a moment of creative silence? It is the moment of total groundedness in Being. According to Martin Heidegger, you can only be creatively silent when you truly have something to say. Creative silence comes over you when your true self is connected to Being and gets inspired to say something.

“Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discourse. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say — that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case, one’s reticence makes something manifest, and does away with ‘idle talk.’”

All “idle talk,” the chatter of the false self, subside when we are authentically and richly disclosed to Being. When a writer is creatively looking at an empty page, they are tuning in to Being. They fall silent. There’s no idle talk in their mind anymore. There’s only this attuning to Being.

Their reticence wants to manifest something authentic. All true words are born in the silence of Being. When we are in the silence of Being, we are truly silent because we feel that true words are being born inside us. We have become a womb for something new to come into the world.

We participate in the initial act of creatio ex nihilo. Creation from nothing. As Heidegger famously said, “The nothing itself nothings.” Nothing is a verb. It acts. It is the most active force in the universe. To birth something authentic into the world means to be in an active state of nothingness.

As Winnie-the-Pooh humorously suggests that “doing nothing” is, in fact, a skill or accomplishment of its own,

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”

To participate in creatio ex nihilo we must adopt the carefree attitude of Pooh. We must be in a carefree state of play to be able to “do nothing.” This is what the 4th Commandment is all about. The Sabbath is not so much about “not acting” as it is about freeing yourself of all care. When we are free of care, we play. We can really “do nothing.”

It is from this state of mind that all authentic innovations come into the world. Care is counterproductive; the Sabbath is the source of inner silence and disclosedness to Being, which is the channel of all creativity. When we are engrossed in play, all the idle talk of the false self subsides. We come into our own. We are our true selves. As Augustine said in the Confessions,

“I am not with You because I am not with myself.”