Silence, waiting, empty stillness: these are not achievements we accomplish but living forces beyond ourselves which we learn to flow with, surrender to. There is a River of Stillness, or Musical Silence, or Beautiful Darkness flowing through the heart of al beings which we enter into when we allow ourselves to rest in quiet, in silence, waiting. The contemplative way is to begin listening to this dancing stillness.
Quotations
Pray Without Ceasing
Spend time in solitude and silence. Solitude permits us to retreat from the press and struggle in order to let our fragmented and dispersed selves to become collected again. Silence goes hand in hand with solitude. Silence sensitizes, just as noise desensitizes.
SILENCE is the winter name of God.
Be still
and listen
to the heartbeat of God.
and listen
to the heartbeat of God.
Earth's Inner Light
There are three things needed, for which you don't require a computer, television or radio. The first is a bit of stillness. Nothing can happen if there isn't a certain stillness. We also need silence. There is nothing so vocal and articulate as silence; all good language, all great words, are born of it. Meister Eckhart said, "there is nothing in the universe that so much resembles God as silence". So we need to return back beneath our language to the silence within us. And the third thing we need is solitude ... an invitation for the soul to come alive.
If you love truth be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God.
One of the reasons why communication in general in our society is so shallow and boring is that it does not grow out of silence and solitude. Consequently there is no communion. ...Communication could be a kind of communion if indeed we were a more silent and solitary people. Where we live with God alone in silence, then when we come out of that holy, sacred space, we are deepened and not only ready but longing to share with others the deeper dimensions of life.
John the Solitary, on Prayer
There is a silence of the tongue, a silence of the whole body, the silence of the soul, the silence of the mind, and the silence of the spirit. The silence of the tongue is merely when it is not incited to speech; the silence of the entire body is when its senses are unoccupied; the silence of the soul is when no ugly thoughts burst forth within it; the silence of the mind is when it is not reflecting on anything harmful; the silence of the spirit is when the mind ceases even from stirrings caused by created spiritual beings and all its movements are stirred solely by Being, at the wondrous awe of the silence which surrounds Being.
Universal Sufism
Inayat Khan tells the illuminating story of a disciple who came to the teacher and started to ask a philosophical question. The spiritual teacher was, however, in deep meditation from which he would not be disturbed. He said to the disciple: "SILENCE!"
This word was so powerful that the disciple went into silence -- and remained silent for the rest of his life. However, there came a time when his silence began to speak aloud. His silent thought would manifest and his silent wish be granted; his silent glance would heal; his silent look would inspire. His silence became living.
The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed.
The Presence of Absence
Sitting there in silence, listening to the quiet, I was filled with a unique feeling of peace, an impression so intense that it seemed to expand into ineffable JOY. ...It went on, second after second, so pervasive that it seemed to fill my entire body. I relaxed into it luxuriated in it. Then with no warning, and surely without preparation or expectation, I knew what it was: for the seconds it lasted I felt, with a certainty I cannot account for, a sense of the presence of God.
Finding Joy
Joy has the power to open our hearts, remove fear, instill hope and foster healing. Joy leads us to wisdom because it connects us to all we are -- our mind, heart, power, and spirit. Joy stimulates our immune system, increases our energy, and gives us mental clarity. It helps us heighten our level of consciousness so we can more readily tap our inner wisdom. Instead of agonizing over decisions, we become more able to simply listen within and KNOW what to do.
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Angels Within Us
Several years ago I realized the profound impact that joy had in my life by experiencing the lack of it. I did not know that I was "joyless" until I sought the answer to a ridiculous turn of events where everything seemed to be out of kilter. During a very specific time frame the car broke down, the lawn mower fell apart, the clothes dryer died, the TV went on the blink, and my business affairs were like a soap opera. When I finally stopped to go into the silence within and ask, I heard the answer:
"Your joy vibration is practically nonexistent, and joy is the energy and the catalyst for order and harmony. Without joy all forms held in consciousness begin to disintegrate."
Joy is made full through the act of abiding in the Presence. When we are consciously aware of the Presence of the divine consciousness, we become in tune with the Energy of Joy, because the song of the soul is joy.
The Door to Joy
The true source of joy is love -- love of God, love of beauty, love of wisdom, love of another human being, it does not matter which. It is all one love: a joyful awareness of dissolving boundaries of our ordinary narrow self, of being one with the reality beyond, of being made whole.
Angels
The smile of the contemplative in the presence of the Beloved is merely a physical expression of the total joy one perceives as one communes with God. St. Bernard used to say, "The joy of being in love is in the very loving." In other words, joy is not to be sought for itself, but is a by-product of love, and the smile is but the physical, exterior expression of the inner joy-love.
The sky of my being is dark and still,
But deep within my heart
The bird of faith stirs, awakens,
And begins a song of joyous anticipation,
Until at last,
Beyond the horizon of my mind,
The Self's own Light breaks forth,
Illumining me with joy.
The Gift
Cultivate seeds of joy!
You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare --
Don't mix them!
You carry all the ingredients
To turn your existence into joy,
Mix them,
Mix Them!
People say that what we're all seeking in life is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think we're seeking the rapture, the joy, of being alive.
Love and the Soul
The way toward individuality is deceptively simple. When suffering is felt, it is time to move, to do something. Moving means moving out of the fixed patterns of habit. ...It is quite possible to feel joy while finding that the outer life is in many ways more difficult, more trying than was lived before. The bodily sensation that tells us that we are at least moving toward the sense of individuality is joy. Nothing given from the outside can bring joy; it may bring pleasure, but not joy. We are always surprised by joy because this is living from the time current from the future and there are no concepts for joy.
There Was Light
Why has this Frenchman from France written his book in the United States to present to his friends today? Because loving the country and wanting to show his gratitude, he could find no better way of expressing it than in these two truths, intimately known to him [Jacques is blind] and reaching beyond all boundaries.
The first of these is that joy does not come from outside, for whatever happens to us it is within. The second truth is that light does not come to us from without; Light is in us, even if we have no eyes.
Walking in Beauty
Joy is the perception of beauty, unlike happiness, which is because of something. Joy is singing of the heart, a feeling of praise.
A Mythic Life
Somewhere downstairs a door slammed, and my father entered the house laughing. Instantly, the whole universe joined in. Great roars of hilarity sounded from sun to sun. Field mice uttered, and so did angels and rainbows. Laughter leavened every atom and every star until I saw a universe inspirited and spiraled by joy, not unlike the one I read of years later when Dante describes his great vision in paradise.
"D'el riso d'el universo." (The joy that spins the universe). This was a knowledge of the way everything worked. It worked through love and joy and the utter interpenetration and union of everything with the All That Is.
The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.
Even on the foggiest nights.
The Light Inside the Dark
MEDITATION does not itself accomplish the tasks of life but provides spaciousness, bringing the great background near, so that whatever we do, rising in the quiet, has force and beauty. In meditation, we take time, sit down, watch, while the silence accumulates -- which is how the spirit gathers to a vessel the soul has prepared ... then, spiritual silence can appear in the midst of any concentrated activity. Meditation is a fasting of the heart in which, for a time, we do not go with our wanting and fear. We cease to attach so strongly to the things of our lives. When the heart fasts and we don't pursue the world, the world begins to come to us.
Awakening Intuition
The silent mind, cultivated in many different forms of meditation, is the matrix of intuition. When you are in touch with the stillpoint at the center of your being there is no need to use imagery or verbal exercises to activate intuition. It flows by itself, unimpeded by fears or preoccupations.
The Web of Silence
From the brokenness of our humanity we can learn the healing and transcendent wisdom of self-acceptance and the non-judgmental acceptance of others. Meditation makes more sense to the broken or humbled parts of us than to the well-defended, successful or public poses that form the more assertive parts of our identity. Simple and pure awareness, without judgment or evaluation, such as we practice in meditation, is always compassionate.
The modality of my prayer has changed radically. In place of discursive meditation, I have begun the practice of sitting in silence, making myself a capacity for an outpouring of God's love. ... It is my experience that our awakening to the Sacred in the world of everyday is fed and nurtured by our silent journey to that "space" within where all things are ONE.
Mending the Mind, Minding the Body
Mindfulness is meditation in action and involves a "be here now" approach that allows life to unfold without the limitation of prejudgment. It means being open to an awareness of the moment as it is and to what the moment could hold. It is a relaxed state of attentiveness to both the inner world of thoughts and feelings and the outer world of actions and perceptions.
Word into Silence
Our task in meditation is to allow our unity to be restored and for our scattered parts to move back into their proper harmonious alignment to the center of our being. To do this we must not scatter ourselves further. We concentrate to move towards our center. When our consciousness truly awakens to that center, in silence, then a power is released which is the power of life, the power of the Spirit. In that power we are reformed, reunited, re-created.
Roaring Stream
"The mountains, the rivers, the whole earth, the entire array of phenomena are all oneself." If you can absorb the essence of this message, there are no activities outside of meditation: you dress in meditation and eat in meditation; you walk, stand, sit, and lie down in meditation; you experience joy, anger, sadness, and happiness in meditation.
Meditation is the work of entering the silence of our own true nature
and the silence of God's true nature.
I believe in the influence of silent and radiant people and I say to myself that such people are rare. They, nevertheless, give savor to the world. ...Nothing will be lost here so long as such people continue to exist. Let us wish that out of our meditation we might see in ourselves the beginnings of contemplation, which introduces us to the very heart of creation.
The Music of Silence
Contemplative life is the putting together of vision and action. Vision alone, meditation alone, is not true contemplation. We must put vision into action. Not just monks, but all of us are called to contemplation in this full sense. If we want to live healthy lives, we have to build into our daily life moments of vision, and let our actions be formed by that vision.
The Subtle Self
Meditation is basically the practice of quieting the mind on deeper and deeper levels until we reach the underlying, subtle consciousness that is the root of all things. But a quiet mind does not mean the absence of thoughts. It means a mind that does not interfere with or distort the natural flow of sensations, feelings, perceptions, images, and thoughts through the open field of our consciousness. A quiet mind is a clear space, a mirror for the entire experience of inner and outer life.
Meditation consists in learning to focus and to control the mind. When the mind is stilled, then the light of the intellect begins to shine. The mind is ordinarily scattered and dissipated, but gather the mind into one and then the pure light shines in the mirror which is oneself. Speech is the movement by which we go out of ourselves to communicate with another. Meditation takes us within ourselves. It is a process of inward withdrawal, a centering in the place of inner detachment, a staying of the mind upon God.
If we hope to move beyond the superficialities of our culture, we must be willing to go down into the recreating silence, into the inner world of contemplation.
The Silence of the Heart
To live a surrendered life is to be present moment to moment with our experience, to accept our experience without judging it. Or if we judge it, to forgive ourselves for defending, for pushing away. To be with our experience does not mean that we do not space out, detach, disappear emotionally. It means that we become increasingly aware of when we dissociate and gently bring ourselves back. This "bringing ourselves back" is the essence of meditation. To meditate, it is not necessary to stop thinking. But it is necessary to become aware of the thoughts as they happen, to see how they take us out of the silence. To see how they prevent us from being wholly present.
In deepest meditation
the mind now utterly still
Truth reveals itself...
Gold in Your Memories
There is a way that the soul can get crowded out of one's day. The soul is a bit shy and does not demand center stage. She lives a life of her own, and yet there are soulprints in every fiber of your being, even in things you've forgotten. The soul is the keeper of memories. She knows where beauty is stored. She contains the memories of your entire life. Deep in your unconscious she stands guard. If you are in need of a particular memory she can reveal it to you and help you to bear both the beauty and the pain. She knows all about the gold in your memories.
Your soul is your life. Everything else is a fiction -- a mind game in authenticity. Without nourishing your own soul, you can't nourish the world; you can't give what you don't have. As your soul grows, however, it emanates invisibly and involuntarily the light which it has received.
Hildegard
"Hearing with the soul" refers to perception with the spiritual senses, to an awakening of a new quality of perception. It is an inbreaking of a contemplative awareness that is capable of perceiving all reality as illumined and suffused by God, as graced with tremendous potential. ...The awakening of the spiritual senses can happen to all of us. We are all capable of "hearing with the soul."
People need to climb the mountain not simply because it is there, but because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit.
Union with God
In the resurrected state, there comes an utter silence of the soul. By that silence, the advanced pilgrim lives in God and lives from God. It is silence of soul that he or she communicates with God. A soul that is thus dead to its own working and to all provision of itself, to that soul, SILENCE becomes both a wonderful TRANSMISSION and RECEIVING of Divine communication.
The soul of humanity, like the soul of the individual, lives only through love. Inspirited life is never immobilised in the barren monotony of mechanism. Ever and again it brings fresh animation, winged by some spirit on whose pinions it bears a kindred and loving life to all it meets.
Love and the Soul
The World Soul has undergone the long process of evolution, a kind of fall from unity, in order that this unity might be again fulfilled, now fully consciously. Restoring the World Soul to its unity becomes weighted on the side of the development of fully conscious individual soul life: the task of human beings in the destiny of Holy Wisdom.
Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul,
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home...
Call the world, if you please,
"the vale of Soul-making".
Then you will find out the use
of the world.
Someone who loves us can often see our soul potential more clearly than we can ourselves. When this happens, it has a catalytic effect, it invites and encourages the dormant, undeveloped part of us to come forth and find expression.