Rediscovering Sacred Silence - Jean Klein

Silence is our real nature.
What we are fundamentally,

is only Silence...

It was before the beginning of all things.
It is causeless.
Its greatness lies in the fact that it simply is.

Silence has no opposite in noise.
It is beyond positive and negative.
Silence dissolves all objects.
It is not related to any counterpart
which belongs to the mind.
Silence has nothing to do with mind.
It cannot be defined but it can be felt directly...

Silence is freedom without restriction or center.
It is our wholeness,

neither inside or outside the body.

Silence is joyful, no pleasurable.

It is not psychological...

Silence is holy.
Silence needs no intermediary.
It is healing.
There is no fear in Silence.
Silence is autonomous like love and beauty.
It is untouched by time.
Silence is meditation, free from any intention...

Silence is the absence of one's self...

Sound, which comes from Silence, is music.
All activity is creative when it comes from Silence.
It is constantly a new beginning.
Silence precedes speech and poetry
and music and all art.

Silence is the home ground of all creative activity.
What is truly creative is the word, is Truth.

Silence is the word.
Silence is Truth

Jean Klein

with thanks to Being Silently Drawn

(Jean Klein's words, my format)

~

Photo - Vortex Art
2011

 

Rising In Perilous Hope - Marge Piercy

What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?

What words can I say that will catch...

If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.

If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists us....

what could I do but what I know?

I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.

I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning

come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

Marge Piercy
from: Colors Passing Through Us
2003

With thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

 

Create Silence - David Whyte

 The object in meditation and all of our contemplative
disciplines is silence.  But...  that silence is in order for
you to perceive something other than yourself -
what you've arranged as yourself to actually perceive
this frontier between what you call your self and what you
call other than your self,  whether that's a person or a landscape.

One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence
through attentive speech - speech that says something in
such a way that it appears as a third frontier between you and
the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous
sense of your own identity and the identity of the world...

Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can actually create
silence...

Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard
of fixed identities.  Real silence puts any present understanding
to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the
well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the
unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about
to break in upon our lives.

In silence, Essence speaks to us of Essence itself and asks
for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential
nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery
atomizes and falls apart.

As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation
through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability,
revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive
eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion,
and belonging to a different person than the one who first
entered the quiet.

David Whyte
Poet
from - Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and
Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Photo by Aaron Burden

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

The Desert of Our Own Silence - Ron Rolheiser

 The Belgian spiritual writer, Bieke Vandekerckhove, comes by her
wisdom honestly.  She didn't learn what she shares from a book
or even primarily from the good example of others.  She learned
what she shares through the crucible of a unique suffering, being
hit at the tender age of nineteen with a terminal disease that
promised not just an early death but also a complete breakdown
and humiliation of her body enroute to that death.

Her attempt to cope with her situation drove her in many
directions, initially to anger and hopelessness, but eventually into
the deep well of silence, that desert that lurks so threateningly
inisde each of us.  Away from all the noises of the world, in the
silence of her own soul, inside the chaos of her raging, restless
insides she found the wisdom and strength not just to cope with
her illness but to also find a deeper meaning and joy in her life.

There are, as John Updike poetically puts it, secrets that are hidden
from health, though, as Vandekerckhove makes evident, they can
be uncovered in silence.  However, uncovering the secrets that
silence has to teach us is not easy.  Silence, until properly befriended,
is scary and the process of befriending it is the soul's equivalent of
crossing a hot desert.  Our insides don't easily become calm, 
restlessness doesn't easily turn into solitude, and the temptation to
turn to the outside world for consolation doesn't easily give way
to the idea of quiet.  But there's a peace and a meaning that can
only be found inside the desert of our own chaotic and raging
insides.  The deep wells of consolation lie at the end of an inner
journey through heat, thirst, and dead-ends that must be pushed
through with dogged fidelity.  

Here's how Vandekerckhove describes one aspect of the journey:
'Inner noise can be quite exhausting.  That's probably why so many
flee to the seduction of exterior background noises.  But if you want
to grow spiritually, you have to stay inside the room of your
spiritual raging and persevere.  You have to continue to sit silently
 and honestly until the raging quiets down and your heart gradually
 becomes quieted.  Silence forces us to take stock of our actual
manner of being human.  And then we hit a wall, a dead point. 
No matter what we do, no matter what we try, something in us
continues to feel lost and estranged, despite the myriad ways of
 society to meet our human needs.  Silence confronts us with
 an unbearable bottomlessness, and there appears no way out.
We have no choice but to align ourselves with the depth in us.

There's a profound truth: Silence confronts us with an unbearable
bottomlessness and we have not choice but to align ourselves with
the depth inside us.  Sadly, for most of us, we will learn this only
by bitter conscription when we have to actually face our own
death.  .....before this surrender is made, our lives will always
remain somewhat unstable and confusing and there will always
be dark, inner corners of the soul that scare us.

But a journey into silence can take us beyond our dark fears and
shine healing light into our darkest corners.  But as
Vandekerckhove and other spiritual writers point out, that peace
is usually found only after we have reached an impasse, a 
'dead point' where the only thing we can do is to "pierce the
negative.'

In her book, The Taste of Silence, Vandekerckhove recounts how
an idealistic friend of hers shared his dream of going off by himself
into some desert to explore spirituality.  Her prompt reaction was not
much to his liking: 'A person is ready to go to any kind of desert.
He's willing to sit anywhere, as long as it's not his own desert.'  
How true.  We forever hanker after idealized deserts and avoid our
own.

The spiritual journey, the pilgrimage, the Camino we most need to
make doesn't require an airline ticket....  The most spiritually
rewarding trip we can  make is an inner pilgrimage, into the desert
of our own silence.

As human beings we are constitutively social. ...but there's a certain
deep inner work that can only be done alone, in silence, away from
the noise of the world.

Ron Rolheiser

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - via No Mind's Land

Silence Creates Space - Rollheiser & Jung

There's a language beyond words.
Silence creates the space for it.
Sometimes when we feel powerless to speak words
that are meaningful, when we have to back off into
unknowing and helplessness, but remain in the
situation, silence creates the space that's needed
for a deeper happening to occur.

Ron Rollheiser
from - The Healing Place of Silence

~

Silence is for me a fount of healing
which makes my life worth living.
Talking is often a torment for me,
and I need many days of silence
to recover from the futility of words.

C.G. Jung

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Survivors of Solitude - John O'Donohue

They are to be admired those survivors
of solitude who have gone with no maps
into the room without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where in the panic of being, each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost...
...and the end of all exploring is the relentless
arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

John O'Donohue
From: Echoes of Memory

Original title - "Nowhere"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Why I Sit in "Silence"...

I come to sit - to rest in the deep Quietness...

To sit with uncertainty,
with the fear and anger,
if they arise again, as they
most certainly will.

I come to sit - to mourn the losses of life
and losses of the ways of life;
to mourn the living and the dead,
for the suffering they have endured;

and for the grief - unending grief.

I come to sit - to feel the depths of healing Silence,
the deep Stillness;
to lay the burdens of the heart down
and just rest...

Mystic Meandering
April 30, 2020

~

Photo - Meditating Monks Mandala

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Solitude - Zat Rana

"All of man's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly
in a room alone..."

Blaise Pascal

According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, we dread
the boredom and instead choose aimless distractions, and we can't
help but run from the problems of our emotions into the false
comforts of the mind.

We never learned the art of solitude.  And now we live in a world
where we're connected to everything except ourselves.  Everything
 that has done so much to connect us has simultaneously isolated us.
We are so busy being distracted that we are forgetting to tend to
ourselves, which is consequently making us feel more and more
alone...

Never being alone is not the same as never feeling alone.  The less
comfortable you are with solitude, the more likely it is that you
won't know yourself.  And then, you'll spend even more time
avoiding it to focus elsewhere.  In the process, you'll become
addicted to the same technologies that were meant to set you free.
Just because we can use the noise of the world to block out the
discomfort of dealing with ourselves doesn't mean that this
discomfort goes away.

Almost everybody thinks of themselves as self-aware.  They
think they know how they feel and what they want and what
their problems are.  But the truth is that very few people really
do.  And those that do will be the first to tell you how fickle
self-awareness is and how much alone time it takes to get
there.  In today's world, people can go their whole lives
without truly digging beyond the surface level masks they
wear...[How interesting that we are required to wear masks
these days.] We are increasingly out of touch with who we are...
[Maybe this is why so many are having a hard time with
the "stay-at-home" orders - feeling confined, like their freedom
 has been taken away - acting out].

Almost anything that controls our life in an unhealthy way
finds its roots in our realization that we dread the nothingness
of nothing.  We can't imagine just being rather than doing.  We have an instinctive aversion to simply being.   And there-
fore, we look for entertainment, we seek company, and if
 those fail, we chase every higher highs.

We ignore the fact that never facing the nothingness is the same
as never facing ourselves.  And never facing ourselves is why
we feel lonely and anxious in spite of being intimately connected
to everything around us.

Fortunately, there is a solution.....  When you surround yourself
with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately
familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation
doesn't allow. [Forced socialization]  The world becomes richer,
the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they
 really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions,
 and in all their unfamiliarity.

You realize there are other things you are capable of paying
attention to than just what makes the most noise on the
surface.  [Solitude] allows you to discover the novelty in things
you didn't know were novel; it's like being an unconditioned
child seeing the world for the first time.  It also resolves the
majority of internal conflicts.

Without realizing the value of solitude, we are overlooking the
fact that, once the fear of boredom is faced, it can actually
provide its own stimulation.  And the only way to face it is to
make time to just sit... with our thoughts, with our feelings, with
a moment of stillness...

Zat Rana

Excerpt from: "The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You"
an article in Medium.com

[brackets mine]

~

Your solitude will be a support and a home for you,
even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances,
and from it you will find all your paths...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Excerpt from: Letters to a Young Poet #1

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Waiting for the Words - Etty Hillesum

The only words I want to write are those normally woven
into great silence, not those merely that serve to drown out
silence and to pull it apart.  They should simply emphasize
the silence..... and around it space, not empty but inspired.
The few great things that matter in life can be said in a
few words.  I hate the accumulation of words.  I would like
to brush in a few words against a wordless background.  To
describe the silence and the stillness and to inspire them.

What matters is the right relationship between words and
wordlessness, the wordlessness in which much happens
than all the words one can string together...

We must speak about the Ultimate only when the words
well up inside us as simply and as naturally as water
from a spring...  Say only what is absolutely essential...
and become more concentrated in yourself...

I cannot stop searching for.....the one word that sums
up everything within me...  So I shall wait patiently
until the words have grown inside me...

Etty Hillesum

from: Etty Hillesum - Essential Writings
by Annemarie S. Kidder

Etty was a 28 or 29 year old Dutch Jewish girl
when she died at the Nazi camp in Auschwitz...

~

I wish I could find some inspiring words to offer

during this stressful time...  Like Etty I wait for
the words, and if they arise, or if I find inspiration
from others, I will post them...

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Talk/Sound and Silence - Kahlil Gibran

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your
heart, you live in your lips.

Sound is a diversion and a pastime.

For thought is a bird of space,
that in a cage of words may indeed
unfold its wings, but cannot fly.

Kahlil Gibran

~

There are those among you who seek the talkative
through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes
their naked selves and they would escape.

And there are those who talk
and without knowledge of forethought
reveal a truth which they themselves
do not understand.

And there are those who have
the truth within them, but they tell it not
in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells
in rhythmic silence ~ ~ ~

Kahlil Gibran

Thanks to Dorothea Mills

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Healing Silence...

Find the inner Flow with Life again.
Turn inward to the Quiet, to the rhythm of
the breath that leads to the pool of Stillness
and breathe the Inner Rhythm;
just being...just resting.

Let life go - for now - just let it go...

"Sabbatical" is what is required;
the deep, inner rest...

Immerse yourself in the Silence;
the Luminous Mother Energy of all that is manifest;
the hum of the Universe that slowly pulses through you...

Let your life be a "sabbatical", resting in this Sacred Silence.
Move intuitively, spontaneously, and fluidly through life,
from the Stillness at the core of your Being;
untouched by the constant chaos of the world...

Turn inward again and again
feeling the Inner Rhythm;
breathing the Rhythm of Silence;
living the Rhythm of Silence,
until you intuitively feel the movement
of Life - moving you...

Live from the core of your Being...

Mystic Meandering
Sept. 13, 2019

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Personal Note:  My poems sometimes come across as "directives."
That is how they have come to me in meditative Silence - directives from
The Silence.  They are not me telling you what you should do.  I merely write
the words that come and put them in poem form and share them...

Silence Heals the Brain - Azriel ReShel

The value of silence is felt by everyone at some point in their life.
Silence is comforting and nourishing...  It opens you up to
inspiration, and nurtures the mind, body and soul.  Meanwhile
the madness of the noisy world is drowning out our creativity,
our inner connection [to Source] and hampering our resilience.
Science is now showing that silence may be just what we need
to regenerate our exhausted brains and bodies.

Studies show that noise has a powerful physical effect on our
brains, causing elevated levels of stress hormones.  Sound
travels to the brain as electrical signals via the ear.  Even
when we are sleeping these sound waves cause the body to
react and activate the amygdala, the part of the brain associated
with memory and emotion, leading to the release of stress
hormones.  So, living in a consistently noisy environment will
cause you to experience extremely high levels of these
harmful hormones.

The brain recognizes silence and responds powerfully...
Many meditation teachers and practitioners can attest to this.
 The brain recognizes silence.  Two hours of silence per day
prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain
region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses.
And when you are in an environment with lower levels of
sensory input, the brain can 'recover' some of its cognitive
abilities.

While noise creates stress, silence relieves stress and tension
in the brain and body.  Silence helps our cognitive resources,
while noise makes us lose our concentration, decreases
cognitive powers and motivation, as well as overall brain
functioning.  The ancient spiritual masters have known this
all along; silence heals, silence takes us deeply into ourselves,
and silence balances the body and mind.

The healing benefits of nature and stillness are well documented,
but now we can add to this quest for health and well-being,
the nourishment of our brains.  The simple, yet ancient
experience of silence could just be the healing balm we need
to quell our crazy modern lifestyle...

Azriel ReShel
Excerpt from an article entitled:
Silence is Vital for our Brains Well-Being
at https://upliftconnect.com/

via - No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Inside a large seashell