This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.

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.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original music by Wesley Slover
Entering Unseen by Rinnovare
Welsh Winter by Glass Echoes
Santosha by Van Sandano
Technicolor Dreamscape by Franz Gordon
Stay (Piano Mix) by Roary
Lune by Tony Anderson
Low Tide by Stan Forbee
Walk With Me by Stan Forbee
The Beautiful Nothing by Blake Ewing
Oooh by Fasion
In Between by Kyle McEvoy

Follow us on Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, & Facebook.

Sign up for Twenty Thousand Hertz+ to get our bonus show MicroHertz and get our entire catalog ad-free.

If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at mystery.20k.org.

Purchase Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, by Justin Zorn & Leigh Marz.

To learn more about Jarvis Masters, read the story and timeline of his case, and subscribe to the Dear Governor podcast.

Go to indeed.com/hertz to start hiring today.

Find the right doctor, right now with at zocdoc.com/20k.

Visit shopify.com/20k and sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period.

View Transcript ▶︎

[sfx: applause]

Cyrus Habib: It's an honor to be here with you all.

That’s Cyrus Habib.

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.

Cyrus Habib: Most people here in Washington state, too polite to ask the question, "What do you actually do?"

[music in]

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.

Cyrus Habib: I serve as number two in the executive branch.

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.

Cyrus Habib: 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.

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.

Cyrus Habib: I'm for making sure that we give everyone the best opportunity, not any opportunity, but the best opportunity.

[sfx: cheering]

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.

No more speeches. [speech fades out]

No more applause. [crowd noises fade out]

[music out]

Just golden silence.

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

Cyrus Habib: As I think back on my life, I was obsessed with the voice of the future calling back to me telling me, "You gotta do this, you gotta do this, so that you can get to this other place."

Cyrus' parents immigrated to the US from Iran, and growing up, he was always determined to succeed.

Cyrus Habib: 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.

Cyrus Habib: 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 people coming by.

Cyrus' political future looked really bright.

Cyrus Habib: 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.

Cyrus Habib: 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.

Cyrus Habib: Voices of the past, you know, people suggesting that there's things I can't do ‘cuz I'm blind, and I need to prove them wrong. Maybe voices from the future saying, [sfx: internal voices] "You're gonna 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."

Cyrus Habib: These are the kinds of voices, some fictional, some real, that had crowded out my own desires. What were my own desires? My own desires actually had nothing to do with any of those things.

[music out]

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.

Cyrus Habib: 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 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.

Cyrus Habib: It's not a monastery. I mean, Jesuits are not monks. But still, there is an order and a structure to the day.

[music in]

Cyrus Habib: So you'll rise at 6:30 [sfx: birds] 7 AM to 7:45 meditation on your own. [sfx: deep breathing] 7:45 morning prayer in chapel. [sfx: group prayers] 8:00 AM breakfast together. [sfx: breakfast] 8:30 scullery, which is to say, you know, cleaning the pots and pans and the dishes and everything [sfx: cleaning]

The whole day is planned out like this, right up until bedtime.

Cyrus Habib: Spiritual reading in the evenings [sfx: Biblical passage] and then night prayer in chapel, [sfx: group prayer] and then whatever other prayer one does at the end of the night. [sfx: whispered prayer + crickets]

Compare that to the life of a politician…

[sfx: camera shutters, press]

Cyrus Habib: Public life you know it is the life of the crowd. So it is quite noisy.

[sfx: office noises]

Cyrus Habib: 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…

Cyrus Habib: Even in the car [sfx: car engine] I would turn on podcasts [sfx: podcast snippet] 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." [sfx: several inputs swell and resolve]

[music out]

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.

Cyrus Habib: 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.

Justin Zorn: Cyrus made the most surprising career decision anyone could possibly imagine.

That's policy advisor and political strategist Justin Zorn.

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 Bruni described it as "Politician takes sledgehammer to own ego."

[music in]

Throughout his career, Justin's worked on all kinds of projects.

Justin Zorn: Environmental justice, economic justice, climate, foreign policy. And I'm also a meditation teacher. I taught meditation on Capitol Hill.

Justin Zorn: 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 in politics.

Like Cyrus, Justin finds that noise to be pretty exhausting.

Justin Zorn: You know, cable news constantly running in the office. [sfx: political TV news] This 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 informational level of the noise.

[music out]

Eventually, Justin decided to leave that noise behind.

Justin Zorn: 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 Leigh Marz. Leigh 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.

Justin Zorn: 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.

Justin Zorn: This friend of mine had said, “Oh my God, you've gotta 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 had our first conversation by phone.

[music in]

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?

Cyrus Habib: 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. The voices that said…

Cyrus Habib: "What am I doing?" 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."

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.

Justin Zorn: 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.

[music out]

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.

Cyrus Habib: 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, there are 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.

Cyrus Habib: Because I am an extrovert, it was harder 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 wanna 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.

[music in]

Cyrus completed his 30 days of silence. And that experience taught him some valuable lessons. The first one was to focus on the moment.

Cyrus Habib: 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.

Cyrus Habib: 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?

[music out]

The next step is discernment.

Cyrus Habib: Discernment 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.

Justin Zorn: A professor at the University of Michigan estimated through years of research that the average person has to listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses worth of internal chatter in their head every single day.

[State of the Union out]

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.

[music in]

Cyrus Habib: 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.

Cyrus Habib: Who knows, right? Well, that's the question. We gotta 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…

Cyrus Habib: "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."

Cyrus Habib: So it's a turning inward to the self, and it's also then a turning upward, a moving upward to the transcendent.

[music out]

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?

[sfx: phone call]

Other Voices: You have a prepaid call from…

Jarvis Masters: …Jarvis Masters

Other Voices: An inmate at the California State Prison San Quentin.

Jarvis Masters: My name is Jarvis Masters. I have been an inmate at San Quentin Prison for almost 40 years. I hope you take time to listen to my story.

That's coming up, after the break.

MIDROLL

[music in]

Even in a quiet place, it can be really hard to find peace. Because, there's always the incessant chatter in our heads.

[sound designed self-doubt voices]

Other Voices: Did I lock the front door?

Other Voices: I look terrible today.

Other Voices: I can't believe I said that.

Other Voices: I'm such an idiot.

Other Voices: I have to make a good impression.

Other Voices: This is hopeless.

Other Voices: They'll never choose someone like me.

But how much harder would it be if you were surrounded by nonstop noise?

[prison sounds in]

Finding silence in San Quentin Prison might seem impossible. But not for Jarvis Jay Masters.

[sfx out]

Because Jarvis is known as the Buddhist of Death Row.

[music in]

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.

Jarvis Masters: 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 walls, you know? And I knew right then and there, I cannot see this every single day. It felt like I was being buried alive.

His first years at San Quentin were pretty rough.

Jarvis Masters: 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.

Jarvis Masters: I started reading these books about masculinity, and what do we do to imitate being what a man’s supposed to be, based on what we've been told?

Jarvis Masters: 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.

[music out]

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' autobiography for her book club. Here she is explaining that decision on CBS Mornings.

Oprah Winfrey: 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.

Understandably, Jarvis was devastated by the guilty verdict. He knew he might be sentenced to death. But then, he came across a book…

Jarvis Masters: And the name of the book was Life in Relationship to Death, and I sat there and read it 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.

Jarvis Masters: You know, "life in relationship to death." It 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 twenty one 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.

Jarvis Masters: 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.

[music in]

The first step was learning to be still, both physically and mentally.

Jarvis Masters: I had to learn how to sit down first before I'd learn 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.

Jarvis Masters: 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 started opening up, gates started 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.

Jarvis Masters: I hear the noise, but I'm not listening. I can learn to give the noise it's due, but not let it dictate what I wanna do. I can walk around and feel very quiet within my own body and 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.

Jarvis Masters: 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.

[music out]

Leigh Marz: 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 Leigh Marz. Leigh spent a lot of time interviewing Jarvis for the book Golden.

Leigh Marz: Even when we're speaking with him on the phone, we can hear it in the background.

[prison noise in]

Leigh Marz: 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.

[prison noise under]

And it's not just audible noise that prisoners have to live with. There's also informational noise.

[sound designed informational noise]

Leigh Marz: 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.

[sound design fade under]

Leigh Marz: And then internally, there's the reverberation of state sanctioned death and trauma, regret and worry.

Strangely, Jarvis finds it easier to find peace when the prison isn't totally silent.

Leigh Marz: 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 ‘cuz I like the silence right beside that noise."

[music in]

After 30 years of meditating, Jarvis has a lot of practice calming his mind. But even for him, it’s not always easy.

Jarvis Masters: It 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.

Jarvis Masters: I think for a lot of people, it's accepting the fact that we might have to start our day 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?"

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.

Jarvis Masters: What my whole trip is to find the gates that was just gonna 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." Or I would see violence and I say, "Wow, how can I participate in compassion?"

Jarvis Masters: And I started realizing that we all suffer to some degree or another, and that I was not alone.

[music out]

Jarvis also uses that compassion to connect with his fellow inmates.

Leigh Marz: Just getting enough space to find quiet, to find stillness in oneself allowed him to notice the little scars on the men, on their hands, or on their faces and he would occasionally ask about those. "Hey what happened?" You know, knowing 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…

Leigh Marz: 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.

[music in]

When Leigh 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.

Leigh Marz: 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.

Justin Zorn: 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, in 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.

Justin Zorn: 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.

Cyrus Habib: 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.

Leigh Marz: 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.

Jarvis Masters: At some point in the day, I realize 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?

Jarvis Masters: 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.

[music out into in]

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 audiobook.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound.

Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson, and Casey Emmerling, 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 Jay Masters, Cyrus Habib, Leigh Marz 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 Corny Koehl for sharing her interviews with Jarvis. Corny’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.

[music out]