99% Invisible - Twenty Thousand Hertz- Golden

Episode Date: March 18, 2023

The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz is a show about the world's most interesting and recognizable sounds. I think of it as almost a sibling of 99% Invisible: lovingly produced and reported deep dives into everyday things that make you see the world differently. In case of Twenty Thousand Hertz, hear the world differently. We’ve collaborated a number of times, but we’re featuring them today because our sibling podcast produced an episode with my actual sibling Leigh Marz, co-author of the book Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. Leigh showed up on a mini-story episode 99pi a few months talking about the ever increasing loudness of sirens as a way of measuring just how loud our world has become. But the story Twenty Thousand Hertz produced tackles the main thesis of Golden more head on. I love how this episode turned out and I’m so proud of everyone involved, that I want to share it with you as a bonus episode. In a noisy, tumultuous world, how can we find inner peace? This episode features two stories about the transformative power of silence. In the first, the Lieutenant Governor of Washington State abandons politics to become a Jesuit novice, and takes a temporary vow of silence. In the second, a death row inmate at San Quentin discovers Buddhist practices that help to calm his mind, and embrace compassion.Featuring Cyrus Habib, Jarvis Masters, Leigh Marz, and Justin Zorn.

The podcast 20,000 Hurtz is a show about the world's most interesting and recognizable sounds. I think of it as 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 Hurtz, 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 99PI 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 hurts 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. It's an honor to be here with you all. That's Cyrus Habib. First, I want to just briefly tell you kind of what my job is, what my role is. 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.

Most people year in Washington say to polite to ask the question, what do you actually do? 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. 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. If things worked out for you this year, if your business did well, your family is doing well, I'll take the credit for that. 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 thirties. I'm for making sure that we give everyone the best opportunity, not any opportunity, but the best opportunity, not any opportunity, but the best opportunity. 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. In my office in a few different ways, first of all, no more speeches, in a program which is the first of its kind. No more applause. Cheers.

Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Just golden silence. You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. Cheers. Cheers. to 20,000 Hertz. 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. Cyrus's parents immigrated to the US from Iran, and growing up, he was always determined to succeed. 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. That urge to succeed continued into his political career. First, he served in the State House of Representatives, and then the State Senate. 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. Cyrus's political future looked really bright. I was achieving more and more success. I had collected all kinds of accolades and achievements. But despite all of these achievements, he never felt satisfied. As those things were happening, I felt a greater and greater sense of emptiness.

Each time I would obtain one, the desire would come even more quickly for the next thing. 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 blind, and I need to prove them wrong. Maybe voices from the future saying, you're gonna love it when you reach this next stage. Maybe voices of others in the present saying, SIRES, you really ought to think about doing this. SIRES, you're what our country needs. These are the kinds of voices, some fictional, some real,

that had crowded out my own desires. Oh, my own desires, my own desires, actually had nothing to do with any of those things. 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 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 v 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?

While he was still Lieutenant Governor, Cyrus decided to visit a Jesuit ministry. 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 6.30 a.m. to 7.45 meditation prayer in chapel. 8 a.m. breakfast together. 8.30, a scullary, which is to say, you know, cleaning the pots and pans and the dishes and everything.

The whole day is planned out like this, right up until bedtime, the spiritual reading in the evenings, we are brought to vision in debit and the night prayer and chapel, and then whatever other prayer one does at the end of the night. Compare that to the life of a politician. 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. And it wasn't just his work life. Even in the car, I would turn on podcasts. But an old block calls for them to vote seven.

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. 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. When people tell me, I'm so surprised, I'm so shocked, Cyrus, to hear that you left politics behind and you just career and everything to become a Jesuit and say, well, if you're surprised, how do you think I feel?

I mean, truly, I am still surprised. Cyrus made the most surprising career decision anyone could possibly imagine. That's policy advisor and political strategist Justin Zorn. He made an announcement that he was taking a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a novice Jesuit priest. And in the New York Times, Frank Bruney described it as, politician takes a sledgehammer to own ego.

Throughout his career, Justin's worked on all kinds of projects. 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. Like Cyrus, Justin finds that noise to be pretty exhausting.

You know, cable news constantly running in the office. That's your choice. That's your choice. That's your choice. My choice. It's an on-stop 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 informational level of the noise. Eventually, Justin decided to leave that noise behind. My wife and I left DC and we headed out to the mountains in the western US. And I was in the midst of a career transition. Around that time, he started collaborating with an author and 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 start interviewing people, neuroscientists and poets and activists, and the question we came upon was, what's the deepest silence you've ever known? That question led Justin to Cyrus. 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. 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? That was really hard. You're not on social media, you're not on the internet, you're not on the phone. of silence and reflection. I could be speaking to the media about some new idea or initiative, and what am I doing? I'm just scrubbing toilets again. 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. 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. 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. And, you know, after a couple days, you think, oh my God, it's been so long. And then you realize, oh my God, they're 28 more days of this.

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. 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 wanna tell people about it. I'd wanna talk to my friends about it

or I'd wanna talk to my mom about it or someone I'm close with. So that was really hard. So I was really hard. Cyrus completed his 30 days of silence, and that experience taught him some valuable lessons. The first one was to focus on the moment. 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 be 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? The next step is discernment. Desirnment is about sifting through the noise of our world to find the signal amidst the static and the interference of our daily busy lives. And there's a lot of static out there. The professor at the University of Michigan estimated through years of research that the

average person has to listen to something like 320 stated the union addresses worth of internal chatter in their head every single day. 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. Take for example someone who is in a relationship. Maybe two people have been dating for a year or so. And 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. Through this process, Cyrus managed to find his true inner voice. It was a voice that said, Deep down, I want to be nourished.

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. [♪ Music playing in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background, in background quiet peaceful place, but how do you find that same piece in one of the noisiest most chaotic places on earth? You have a pre-paid call from...

Jarvis Masters and in Nadehant, the California State Prison San Quentin. My name is Jarvis Masters. I have been an inmate at San Corden Prison for almost 40 years. I hope you take time to live into my school. That's coming up after the break. Even in a quiet place, it can be really hard to find peace, because there's always the incessant chatter in our heads.

But how much harder would it be if you were surrounded by non-stop noise? Finding silence in San Quentin Prison might seem impossible, but not for Jarvis is known as the Buddhist of Death Row. Jarvis first came to San Quentin in 1981 after pleading guilty to armed robbery. He was sentenced to 20 years with no possibility of parole. He remembers when he first arrived in his jail cell. Probably the first thing I was able to see was how low the ceiling was. I can put my arms to the side and touch both balls, you know. And I knew right then and there. I cannot see this every single day. So I was being buried alive.

His first years at San Quentin were pretty rough. I was stubborn, I was mad, I was angry, and 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. But slowly, his perspective began to change. I started reading these books about masculinity and what we do to imitate being what a 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 it'd be like. What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do?

What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do?

What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? What's the most important thing to do? 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' autobiography for her book club. Here she is explaining that decision on CBS Mornings. 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 Understandably Jarvis was devastated by the guilty verdict. He knew he might be sentenced to death But then he came across a book in the name of the book was Then he came across a book. The book was Life and Relationship to Death and I said they're in ready for almost a week while the jury's in deliberation. 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 and relationship to death was where I was and I just thought, hey, you know, let me try this." 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 Val, and committed himself to Vajrayana Buddhism.

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. The first step was learning to be still, both physically and mentally. 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. So 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 for myself to just sit there.

And being start opening up, gate start opening up, and that was a beautiful time for me, it really was. 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. Yeah, you're the noise, but I'm not listening. I can learn to give the noise just to, but not let it dictate what I want to do. I can walk around and feel very quiet within my own body, with 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 a benefit of just pulling that silence, you know. It's a gift because no one knows what I hear but me. There's just a lot of noise to navigate on death row in San Quentin, and Jarvis is a master at it. That's author Lee Mars. Lee spent a lot of time interviewing Jarvis for the book Golden. Even when we're speaking with him on the phone, we can hear it in the background. There's just low fire radios and party beats going. And they're just men hollering at all times at day and night. And sometimes screaming in the night,

suffering, having nightmares. And this is all being reflected and bouncing off of concrete cement. It's a loud, loud environment. of concrete and cement. It's a loud, loud environment. And it's not just audible noise that prisoners have to live with. There's also informational noise.

All rise. 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 the state-synch-in-death and and trauma, regret and worry. Strangely, Jarvis finds it easier to find peace when the prison isn't totally silent. 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. It 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. After 30 years of meditating, Jarvis has a lot of practice calming his mind, but even for him, it's not always easy. They can bother you in a way where you're overthinking things. 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. But rather than trying to fight that anger, he's learned to let it pass. I think for a lot of people, if accepting the fact that we might have to start our day off like that, if accepting the fact that hey, you don't blow him his face and you should have a problem with it because this is a full of meditation. Looking at this stuff and trying to figure out how to dissolve it into nothing, how does it move from what it is now into some kind of acceptance. 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. What my whole trip is to find a gate that was just going to open me up to understanding how compassion works inside a prison system. I see guards spend a lot of pain and suffering, and I say, wow, this guard may be going home to his son. 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. Jarvis also uses that compassion to connect with his fellow inmates. Just getting enough space to find quiet, to find stoneness in oneself allowed him to notice the little scars on the men men on their hands or on their faces. And he would occasionally ask about those, hey, what happened? You know, knowing that there 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. In return, the other inmates help Jarvis cultivate that silence. For instance, if someone is calling out his name, 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. And I just loved learning that they do that.

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. There's an engagement, there's an aliveness, when we're really engaging silence, we're engaging this presence that's teaming with life, and joy, and ecstasy. 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.

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, 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. And the more you practice finding silence, the more you'll get out of it. 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. No matter who you are or where you are, silence is always available. 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. At some point of the day I realized my silence is my best friend. And 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, but be required, 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. 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 Hurtz is produced out of the sound design studios of De facto Sound. This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson and Casey Emerling. With help from Grace East. It was 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' case and his latest appeal, follow the link in the show description. A special thanks to Courtney Cole for sharing her interviews with Jarvis. Courtney's podcast, Dear Governor, is a deep dive into Jarvis' life story and his ongoing legal battle.

Both seasons are available now. I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening. you