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A couple of years ago I traveled for the first time to Mexico with the idea of experiencing a long deep seclusion. I thought perhaps if I created a situation in which I experienced "no relationship" I might access previously inaccessible parts of myself.
My van filled with fifty gallons of water and close to eighty pounds of rice, beans and potatoes, I drove across the border and some hours later, after passing a pleasant, unruffled Mexican village, bedded down at sunset next to a small flowing brook. To either side of me tall cliffs jutted skyward.
Over the years I have had hundreds of "psychic" experiences, from glimpsing the presence of "clear beings" in what I sensed to be high vibrational localities, to "flying in" on friends in local space/time reality, to exploring "bleed throughs" into other and past selves. But this night in my van, surrounded by its eight hundred pounds of driftwood built-ins, was the first time I experienced listening to an American disc jockey playing the top 40 from inside my head!
Upon awakening and seeing the awesome beauty surrounding me, I wondered if it would be possible to find a completely quiet place where the process of ever deepening self-reflection would not be influenced by cumbersome radio and/or other intrusive waves, so pervasive on our planet. How would it be to experience an environment which would facilitate a complete purification, as if in a more innocent time--let's say, two thousand years ago? A romantic notion?
I drove again until I reached the small mountain city of Saltillo, about 250 miles south of the border. I figured a tire shop would be a good place to find a Mexican who would also speak my native tongue, so I entered one and asked a man to guide me towards a desert region where I might disappear for a long while without seeing another soul.
His immediate response was an invitation to his home for lunch. There Tito showed me a magazine article on La Zona del Silencio (the silent zone), and told me of a professor friend of his who ventured there periodically. Without further ado I was off for La Zona del Silencio.
The Zone of Silence is located between the 26th and 28th parallels, along the 104th meridian. Its area is unknown, but has been roughly estimated as a circle with a radius of 50 kilometers, and the center is the Vertice de Trino, a point which marks the juncture of the states of Durango, Coahuila and Chihuahua.
The Zone of Silence is part of the great Mapimi Basin, one of the most important depressions in the Mexican highlands, which drop from an average of 2,000 to 1,000 meters above sea level, thus forming the beginning of the prairies of western North America.
In the 1960's, an engineer by the name of Harry Augusto de la Pena was assigned to explore the area, now known as the Zone of Silence, by PEMEX, the Mexican state petroleum industry. By chance, he discovered that there were certain places where it was impossible to communicate by radio. Scientific curiosity led him to investigate the phenomenon further, and his findings caused quite a stir.
In 1975 the Historical Studies society of Chihuahua focused attention on the Zone with a program of research, seminars and conferences. The University of Guadalajara sent 30 investigators to the area, including biologists, geologists, and zoologists. The University of Monclova explored and tested for iron ore in the region. According to de la Pena the results were positive. It was also confirmed that Geiger counters register high concentrations of energy in the area.
In 1976, the National Institute of Nuclear Energy sent two engineers to the Zone: Ray Cruz, winner of the National Science Prize, and Jorge Aguilera, an expert in electronic design. Their studies were focused on Hertzian waves and showed that the horizontal propagation of radio waves was normal but that the vertical was cut off completely, thus causing the phenomenon of "silence." These scientists concluded that this anomaly was not a function of position, but of time.
Other scientists have stated this phenomenon may be related to the fact that the magma of the Earth's core is closer to the surface in this particular place, which may be causing the interruption of radio waves.
All these hypotheses are of a scientific bent. Perhaps it is only fair to consider another kind of hypotheses, one with an unscientific bent.
As I approached the area, I found on my radio, just eight or nine miles outside of the Zone, the most highly concentrated radio waves I've ever experienced anywhere. But once past this area and into the Zone there were no signs of radio signals at all! I felt as though I had traveled into the eye of a hurricane.
The desert area I chose has twice been a sea in millenniums past. Surrounded by mountains on all side, I drove miles into the region and stopped on what I later discovered to be a dry pool of quartz crystals, the only such I found on this desert floor. Later, during an occasional sunset I found myself sitting by the van and waiting for the sun's light to reflect off of one crystal. Then I would walk blindly but steadily forward until I could see it well with my eyes. I didn't know anything about crystals then. I just parked where I felt like parking.
The most outstanding part of my thirty-five days stay in La Zona was that I did not want to be anywhere else. I spent the first twenty-one days in and around the van. The discipline I chose called for no writing or reading and no speaking. Not even with an animal or a tree. I would sit, cook, eat, eliminate, meditate (follow natural breathing), sleep, walk, wash, and watch.
Desert is a word that is used to convey a sense of barrens and desolation, of the forbidding and forsaken, the joyless and the lifeless. But, the bare-boned beauty of the desert, as first perceived, turns out to be a camouflage for a vibrant and varied world, its richness reserved for the patient and observing, the initiated. One cannot come to the desert fettered with the prejudices of the jungle or the forest, where nature spills over in lavish displays. There is a wise restraint about the desert that is neither mean nor needy. The desert can be generous, but almost never wasteful.
This is a world of light, a light so brilliant and all-pervasive that it confuses the eye at first, fools it into thinking that there is a sameness in the details of the landscape, a lack of definition in the colors. We must wait and adjust, metamorphize. When we have begun to become creatures of the desert, like the reptiles with their ancient stares and several sets of eyelids, then we begin to see. And suddenly there is so much to see that we are astonished. Where was it all before? Somewhere behind the smoke screen of our habitual ways of looking.
The adaptation is spatial as well. Except for the occasional hills, and the distant mountain ranges, there was little to break up the space in the Zone of Silence. This, too, made it hard to see the details immediately. One was overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of space, a visual tidal wave whose enormity, or first encounter, drowned everything else. It was exhilarating to be in such a space, where openness never closed, not even at the darkest hour of a moonless night. As weeks passed, my experiences varied. I felt a deep sense of quiet, nowness and peace.
La Zona del Silencio is the most profoundly conductive physical locality for experiencing a state of restful alertness. In conjunction with self-reflection, a stay in La Zona may well be one of the most highly charged transformational tools available on the planet.