The meaning of the contemplative life -- of all spiritual life -- is love. Love is at once the origin, the means, and the goal of human spirituality, and when seen through spiritual eyes, the meaning of life in its entirety is love. God's love is endless, boundless without qualifications. Love must create, and we human beings and all the rest of creation are continually born in and from God's love. Creation brings forth diversity and separation. This permits a sense of "me and you," "I and thou," lover and beloved. In other words, we are created as unique individuals so that we may love God and one another. Love is the reason for our being. In our individuality and separateness, each of us is given a longing for re-union, a yearning for the greater fulfillment of love. In the endless movements of love, there is delicate beauty, majestic power, unbearable joy and considerable pain -- and freedom.
This is called the Temple of Silence, the Place of Power; for when we reach the place of silence in mind, we have reached the place of power -- the place where all is one, the one power -- God... Only as we turn from the without to the silence of the within can we hope to make conscious union with God... God does not speak so much in the fire, the earthquake, or the great wind, as in the still, small voice -- the still, small voice deep in our own souls.