The Great Listening: Opening to the Murmurs of Collective Silence

With all the extensive development of outer technology, media, and personal devices, there is a risk of losing one of the most important elements in the human story: silence.  In a culture that prizes speaking, we often forget the sacred art of listening. Not just listening to another person’s words, but listening through them—listening for what longs to be said, for what arises in the spaces between. When we listen this way, we discover that wisdom is not held by any single individual. It lives in the field between us, waiting for us to attune.

Laura and I have had the privilege of hosting in-residence gatherings for several decades, and we continue to appreciate that the most powerful voice in the room is silence. The moments when words fall away and something deeper begins to move among us. It’s not an empty silence, but a living one, charged with presence.

For me, this is the heart of what I call the Great Listening. It is the practice of honoring stillness, of allowing the unseen currents of intuition, feeling, and resonance to guide us. When I stop trying to make something happen and simply listen, I notice how much is already unfolding—subtle shifts in energy, the sense of being held by something larger than myself, the way one person’s thought completes another’s before it’s even spoken.

The Great Listening begins with trust. Trust that if I do not rush to fill the silence, something deeper will speak. Trust that the body knows how to sense subtle shifts in energy. Trust that my intuition is not separate from yours, but part of a larger stream flowing through us. This trust allows us to soften our grip on control, to yield to what is larger than the sum of our individual voices.

Ancient traditions understood this well. Circles of elders gathered not to debate, but to listen—to the crackle of the fire, to the rustle of the night wind, to the quiet stirrings in their own hearts. They knew that wisdom speaks in many tongues, and that if the group slowed down enough, the unseen world would join the conversation.

Silence is alive. It vibrates with possibility, with currents of feeling, with the subtle threads that connect us beneath words. When we lean into silence, something begins to emerge—a wisdom that is not mine or yours, but ours.

As my wife Laura Lee says, silence is not an empty set. It’s not nothing. It’s the implicate order to the explicate. This echoes deep philosophical and spiritual traditions. Silence as implicate order (to borrow David Bohm’s term) suggests that beneath what seems empty or still lies a hidden coherence, a matrix out of which the “explicate”—the manifest and audible—arises. Silence isn’t an absence; it’s a fullness, a pregnant field. It carries possibility, pattern, and meaning, waiting to be expressed. The moment sound or speech emerges, it unfolds from that deeper ground.

We recognize the need to reclaim this practice as a important part of ritual. Together, we sit without agenda but with the intention of letting silence take its place among us as a participant. We listen beyond the ears, with our whole being; with breath, with skin, with heart. In this deep listening, we begin to notice the subtle ripples that pass through the group, as if something greater is quietly nodding in recognition. These are the murmurs of collective wisdom—guidance that thought alone could never provide.

To engage the Great Listening is to remember that presence itself is generative. When we create space for the unseen, we invite a chorus of voices that stretch beyond time and self. What arises may not always come in words—it may be a shared feeling, a gesture, an image that lands in the imagination of one and echoes in another.

The invitation is simple yet radical: to trust silence as teacher, to welcome intuition as language, to honor the unseen as part of the conversation. When we do, we open ourselves to a wisdom that belongs to all of us, yet is held by none of us alone.

Perhaps this is what our times are calling for—not more noise, but more listening. Not louder voices, but deeper ones. A listening wide enough to hold the world, tender enough to catch its whispers, strong enough to carry us together into what comes next.