A Sense of Presence - Howard Thurman

 The true purpose of all spiritual disciplines is to clear away
whatever may block our awareness of that which [some call]
God in us...

It will be in order to suggest certain simple aids to this end.

One of these is the practice of silence , or quiet.
As a child I was accustomed to spend many hours alone in
my rowboat, fishing along the river, when there was no sound
save the lapping of the waves against the boat.

There were times when it seemed as if the earth and the river
and the sky and I were one beat of the same pulse.  It was a
time of watching and waiting for what I did not know -
yet I always knew.

There would come a moment when beyond the single pulse
beat there was a sense of Presence which seemed always
to speak to me.  My response to the sense of Presence 
always had the quality of personal communion.

There was no voice.  There was no image.
There was no vision.

There was God.

Howard Thurman

from Disciplines of the Spirit

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

Personal Note:  I shy away from using the word "God"
in my own experiences now because it holds religious
connotations from the religion of my childhood
 that I no longer relate to.  I use names now that don't hold
  identifications with the word, such as "The Mystery",
"The Beloved", "The Ineffable", "The Sacred" etc. 
I especially like the words The Silence, or The Quiet
as representations of what I experience when I sit in silence
Encountering the deep Silence of Being for me feels like
encountering "God", like "personal communion."

I bask in The Sacred Silence, absorbed, feeling the sense
of Presence, of something vaster than an image of "God"
that I hold in my mind; something which is ever-
present, and personal...  The Deep Silence within is the
Heart of Being, "The Mystery", The Ineffable" - my refuge.

_/\_

Namaste

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering