Meditating in silence is a little like donning black robes. You turn off your internal music and distracting narrative, and stop worrying about whether you fit in. You realize that stillness can offer another way of learning and communication. Rather than marching to a different drummer, you walk along quietly at your own pace, not leading, not following, just trying to experience the entire parade.
Silence without, stillness within:
you have entered the Unmanifested.
Concentration in the silence without effort is the state of consciousness of perfect calm, accompanied by the complete relaxation of the nerves and muscles of the body. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony.
And the waters are deep, so deep! And the silence grows, ever increasing. . . What silence! . . . One wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again a wave of still more profound silence.
Have you ever DRUNK SILENCE? If so, you know what meditation without effort is.
Soul-making is allowing the eternal essence to enter and experience the outer world through all the senses of the body — seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching — so that the soul grows during its time on Earth. Soul-making is constantly confronting the paradox that an eternal being is dwelling in a temporal body.
The soul of an individual is the longing inside each person for a greater sense of belonging, for a new country. We go through most workdays forgetting that this grand migratory force exists within us. We may feel a small satisfaction in a step taken, while the soul feels as if it is anchored off the promised land, wit just a short row to bring it home. At the level of our souls, no matter the difficulty in our work, or the responsibilities, or the possibility of failure, entire new worlds are coming into being.
In our soul's Magnificat, we become conscious of the cosmos with us. We hear the music of peace, we hear the music of cooperation, we hear the music of love. In our soul's forgetting, we become unconscious of our cosmic birthright, plighted with disharmony, disunity, torn asunder from the stars.
I hear the bells! It seems as though they are inviting me to rise higher than this earth into infinite spaces where there is nothing but Thou. I should like to be utterly silent . . . O my God, may I live entirely within, in the cell Thou are building in my heart. Establish my soul in peace; make it Thy cherished abode, the place of Thy rest. Let me never leave Thee there alone, but remain ever there absorbed in Thee in living faith and wholly yielded up Thy creative action!
There are great treasures in the soul: there's faith and love, there's awe and wisdom. All these things you can dig — but if you don't know where to dig, you dig up mud. If you want to get to the gold — awe before God, and the silver — the love, and the diamonds — the faith, then you have to find the geologist of the soul who tells you where to dig. But the digging you have to do yourself.
To direct a soul is to lead it in the ways of God, is to teach the soul to listen for Divine inspiration, and to respond to it; it is to suggest to the soul the practice of all the virtues proper for its particular state; it is not only to preserve that soul in purity and innocence, but to help it advance in wholeness: in a word, it is to contribute as much as possible in raising that soul to the degree of sanctity destined for it.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to meet us everywhere
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul humanity ever took —
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
The soul knows its own experience;
it needs only a little awakening
to make itself conscious.
Now is the time to seek intimate union with the Soul of the universe.
Oh, when a soul is hid in Thee
For what adventure can it yearn
Save love and still more love to learn,
And thus to love increasingly,
So deep does love within it burn?
My God, I pray Thee for a love
That years until I see Thy face.
And builds itself a nest above
Within its true abiding place.
Fold your wings, my soul,
those wings you had spread wide to soar
to the terrestrial peaks where light is
most ardent: it is for you to simply waith
the descent of the Fire —
supposing it to be willing to take possession of you.
Saints are not saints by chance, nor by choice, but by necessity — because there is a hunger in their soul which can not be satisfied by anything less than the divine.
Our culture has lost touch with the soul and with any way to meet it. It becomes more difficult all the time simply to be quiet: mobile phones, faxes, and e-mail make us more accessible to the intrusions of information. Being reflective may soon seem a radical act. Without being reflective, without entering into moments of silence, we cannot let the soul in. The soul's voice is a still, soft one, and we must be quiet if we are to hear it.
The Windforest is the giver and sustainer of the Rainforest's abundant life as well as the means by which the byproducts of living are universally shared. It is the conquerer of inanimate space and time, and it is the soul of the living world.
The canary began to sing again. The sun had struck it, and its throat and tiny breast had filled with son. Francis gazed at it for a long time, not speaking, his eyes dimmed with tears.
"The canary is like our soul. It sees bars around it, but instead of despairing it sings, and see: one day its song shall break the bars."
Education in soul leads to the enchantment of the world and the attunement of self ...
A prescription for continued SOUL growth
SILENCE in large doses
BREATHING deeply and consiously throughout the day
LISTENING and ATUNING to the inner Voice of Love
GIVING THANKS always for all things
RESTING IN PRAYER regularly each day
DISCOVER your INTERCONNECTEDNESS with ALL
STAYING CONNECTED to your guardian angel
ASKING, IMAGINING, DREAMING, ENVISIONING a peace-filled world
SINGING your unique heart-song daily
LOVING the Mystery . . . TRUSTING the Process
ever SERVING in the Divine Plan!
Silence is making-friends-with-time. It does not fight it or waste it; it refuses to run after it. Silence floats free of time, letting the pattern of the moments unfold at its own pace... In silence we break the hold time has on us, and accept in practice that our true home is in eternity.
It's a curious paradox in this life that change is a constant, dependable, and unchanging fact. But when we try to control the moment by denying what is so, we have lost the moment to the past or the future. Trying to alter the moment steals it from us. If we want fruitful change in our lives, we have to move through each moment, experiencing its wholeness, savoring what it has to offer, noticing where we are stuck, and in the process maintain an intimate contact with our deepest sense of self.
They are not long
These days to be
But a taste of eternity.
In each hour,
There is the power
Of a Now
That stretches timeless
In Its core
And knows eternity
Be not more.
We nee to "slow down to a human tempo" and experience time as it was meant to be experienced. We already live in "the fullness of time," and we must give ourselves a chance to realize that we have what we seek. Our hearts and flesh cry out for the living God, Who IS here, right now, among us if we but receive that Divine Presence. The call to take time to be holy is a call to integrate prayer and life, for they are, in fact, one. The call is to live as if all time were Holy time. So, I rejoice to announce to you, it is!
When we accept each moment as a new opportunity for fulfilling our purpose, we are always present, always succeeding, always changing the world for the better. And we are always HERE ... NOW.
Heaven bestows, yet wemust receive.
For what has happened, I give thanks.
For what is happening, I send praise.
For what is to happen, I have faith.
Time is a regulating providence, giving us the chance to make our world at one with the World of God.
I am done with great things
And big things, great institutions
And big success, and I am for those
Tiny invisible molecular moral
Forces that work from individual
To individual, creeping through
The crannies of the world like
So many rootlets, or like the
Capillary oozing of water,
Yet which, if you give them Time
Will rend the hardest monuments
Of our pride.
The destination of human time is death. Eternal time is unbroken presence.
The field of space and time is invisible, but in that space and time is the conscious awareness of the mind of the universe. Within it are mystical experience an high loving. The cosmos is being created in its entirety every eco-second. We are working with God in a process of coevolution.
The spiritual life can only be lived in the present moment, in the now. All the great religious traditions insist upon this simple but difficult truth. When we go rushing ahead into the future or shrinking back into the past, we miss the hand of God, which can only touch us in the now.
To open to the sense, to become really conscious, you have to drop out of the future and the past and remain for a time in what T. S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world" — the present. The only true reality is the present.
Our relationship to time has become corrupted because we allow ourselves very little experience of the TIMEless. We speak continuously of SAVING time, but time in it richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. We speak of STEALING time as if it no longer belonged to us We speak of NEEDING time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to MAKE time for ourselves as if it were in our power to o so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient, and present.
The garden was a splendid sight, rich with life and glowing with color and greenery in the desert heat. I heard bluejays squawking and sparrows chirping near our rooftop, gazed at the white butterflies dancing amid the tomato plants pregnant with fruit, and I took a deep breath, longing to capture forever the magical moment in my mind's eye. Such beauty, such peace, I thought, right here in my own backyard.
The beauty of the world is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation. All love of universal beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe.
Spirit cuts like water though it all
Carving out this emptiness
So inner eye can see
The soaring height of canyon walls within
Walls whose very color, texture, form
Redeem in beauty all my life has been
The darkness and the light, the false, the true
While deep below through my parts
To resurrect my gravebound heart
Making, always making, all things new.
I wonder what beauty is. I have been seeing lovely things all my life, but they never moved me, never presented themselves so poignantly as they have done since I entered into adversity. Now beauty appears as something more than itself. It seems to me a gateway into God. the thrilling, moving, tremendous thing about it is not the especial aspect under which it appears, not the tree, the flower the bird note at dusk, but the occasional sense of otherwhereness, of something more, a marvelous Something — complete ecstasy — that beauty half reveals... It is this overpowering Something, hidden in the midst of beauty, that moves one so exquisitely, tears the heart out, almost terrifies at times by its nearness — "Oh Ecstasy behind the grass, come softly when Thou comest nigh!"
Love the beautiful in everything; it is a ray of light divine. It is love's beauty. The beautiful thrills us into a kind of ecstasy, suspending the din of our inward activity in the silence of admiration; and admiration gives our nature a kind of fulfillment, a restful satiety asking for nothing more. It is the very essence of contemplative adoration.
The night is beautiful
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
Be not afraid to seek the Treasure within,
To discover the beauty hidden in the heart's garden.
For as you root out the weeds of fear,
peace, love, truth and joy begin to flower;
Light radiates out from your
inner garden to all the world.