Steiner's name for a stillness deeper than the absence of sound, reached by holding the word back before the larynx so that the Logos can speak.
The Deep Silence of the Soul in Anthroposophy is the second stage of Rudolf Steiner's meditative path, a stillness that falls below the zero point of ordinary quiet into what he called negative silence. Steiner named it in the 1923 lecture cycle collected as GA 84, What was the Purpose of the Goetheanum and What Should Anthroposophy Do?, and gave it in German as das tiefe Schweigen der Seele. The practice is exact rather than atmospheric: the meditant kindles the full inner impulse to speak, then arrests the word before it takes possession of the larynx, sustaining the speech activity while withholding the sound. Outer quiet, Steiner argued, can only equal zero. This one goes past zero into the negative. Out of that sub-zero stillness the spiritual world begins to speak, the Logos becomes audible as inner word, and the astral body and the astral world become perceptible.
The Deep Silence of the Soul is what Steiner reached for when ordinary stillness ran out. A forest is quiet. A soul that has extinguished its own thinking, feeling, and willing, after first raising all three to full strength, is quieter than quiet. He borrowed the mathematician's negative numbers to say it: silence can go below zero, and what fills that negative region is not nothing but speech from the other side of existence.
In Steiner's Own Words
But that sense of being firmly rooted in the spiritual world is experienced when by earnest striving man attains what I have called the “deep silence of the soul.” As regards the force which normally serves him as modified breathing-power, man must learn not to spend this power in the breathing-process for forming words of vocal speech but, as indicated in “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment,” to hold back what wants to pour itself into words. At the same time, however, he must strive inwardly to maintain that activity which otherwise finds its outlet in the spoken word. This is how he must achieve the inner silence.
What it Means Today
In 1951 John Cage entered the anechoic chamber at Harvard University expecting to hear nothing. He heard two sounds, one high and one low, and was told afterward they were his nervous system and his circulating blood. Cage set the conclusion down in the essay “Experimental Music” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan University Press, 1961): silence as the absence of sound does not exist. On 29 August 1952, at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, David Tudor performed 4′33″ by not playing, so the room would hear what was there anyway.
Cage and Steiner hit the same wall from opposite sides. Cage hunted for zero out in the world and found the world will not go quiet, because the listener is himself a noise. Steiner had conceded that in 1923: the world-quiet can only equal zero. His move was to stop treating zero as the destination. The silence he describes is made rather than found, made by an active withholding, the speech impulse fully lit and then stopped at the larynx, so the organ of speech becomes an organ of hearing.
Thalira synthesis: Cage's anechoic chamber is the empirical demonstration of Steiner's premise, that outer silence bottoms out at zero, which is precisely why the Deep Silence of the Soul has to be produced by the will rather than located in a quiet room.
Where to Read More