“To hear the voice of the silence is to comprehend that from within comes the only true guidance.” Mabel Collins
For the profane and unsuspecting man, silence is a simple
absence of noise, especially physical noise. As the tyrannical ego can only
survive under the atmosphere of noise, silence represents for this human ego,
death, as it cannot comprehend that the revelations of the Divinity are silent,
that it is the silence of plenitude, the life that does not fill the void of
the noisy ego.
Once, a religious man was asked if he had an hour of
meditative silence in the morning. He replied that if he practised this
silence, he would go mad; someone also said that it was sure that neither she
nor anyone else could do half an hour of meditation.
--- There are many studies about what Jesus said and did,
but there is a lack of knowledge of what he did not say and did not do; for
example, about the eighteen years of silence in Nazareth and the forty days of
meditation in the desert. Several books nowadays still try to unravel this
mystery. The vast majority seek the facts of the historical Jesus, but few are focusing
on the truths of his divine message.
--- Moses and Elijah spent 40 days of silence and solitude
with God.
--- Francis of Assisi spent whole months of silence on the
heights of Mount Alverne, after what happened to him during the appearance of
Jesus crucified and imprinted his wounds.
--- After the conversion in Damascus, Paul of Tarsus
retired to the deserts of Arabia, where he remained there for three years in
solitude with God.
--- Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi practised long
periods of silence.
--- The Order of the Trappist monks, whose one of its
members, Thomas Merton - who became famous for his writings - practically lived
his entire life in permanent silence. On the door of this monastery near Paris,
one sees this legend: “The regret of living without pleasure is worth well for
the pleasure of dying without regret.”
--- Albert Einstein, that brilliant universal scientist,
visionary, humanist and mystic, abstracted himself for many hours from his
daily life in deep silence, in solitary encounters with himself, immersing in
his thoughts, or thought nothing, as it was recorded in a sentence taken from
his memories: “I live thinking almost 100% of my time, and I find nothing; I
ceased to think and immerse myself in silence - and behold, the truth is
revealed.”
One could even say that the Theory of Relativity is an
escape from all relative things and refuge into the Absolute...
For man, says Mabel Collins in her book, “Light on the
Path”, to hear the voice of the Masters, he must be deaf to the profane noises.
One of the greatest treasures that official Christianity
has lost in recent centuries has undoubtedly been the treasure of dynamic
silence. And perhaps it is one of the main reasons for its inefficiency in
human society. These days, the new evangelical sects are trying to get more
adherents - often hysterically - under the violence of thunderous noises of
sermons and music coming from loudspeakers, in an unbearable noise, including
fireworks, using a pulpit, which looks more like the ring of a
circus.
“Silence is revenue - noise is the expense.”
And whoever has more expenses than revenue goes bankrupt;
it is no wonder that humanity today is on the brink of bankruptcy.
When the profane man is asked to exercise a spiritual
retreat periodically, the unsuspecting person immediately thinks of physical or
mental illness.
The reason for this horror of silence is the false concept
of silence. The profane man understands by silence, not to speak or to hear
anything. Others, more advanced, include the absence of mental and emotional
noise in the silence, nothing to think and nothing to desire.
Among a thousand people, no one comprehends by silence a
great attitude of the cosmic presence or a fascinating
plenitude of the Universe. They only think of silence as an absence and
emptiness, and, as nature abhors absence and emptiness, for it is plentiful,
these unsuspecting ones cannot love silence, which does not seem to enrich the
soul.
As long as man lives in the false conception - which he
learns in schools and churches - that meditation consists of analyzing certain
sacred texts, all doors will remain closed, and he will never learn the divine
art of fruitful and enriching silence.
Nowadays, there is much talk about meditation, but
meditation has a much deeper connotation. To meditate is to empty oneself
totally of any content of the tyrannical ego and to become fully conscious, as
an empty channel, before the plenitude of the Source or in the language of
Sacred Scripture: “Be still - and you will know that I am God.” Or, “God
resists the arrogant (to those full of ego) and gives his grace to the humble
(to those empty of ego).” According to eternal cosmic mathematics,
cosmo-plenitude only fulfils ego-emptiness but does not fulfil ego-plenitude.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, knew of this when she exclaimed
before Elizabeth: “God has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the
rich away empty.” Or even in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are those hungering and
thirsting for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
Silence-presence and silence-plenitude are
absence and emptiness of the human ego that has an intense desire for
Theo-presence and Theo-plenitude, because man, who has already surpassed and
became disillusioned in the hope of finding in the peripheral zone of his
inconstant and relative externalities, the divine truth, shifts like a
sunflower towards the centre of the Absolute and constant of the Reality.
Whoever has not glimpsed, or at least imagined the
Absolute, God, in long and deep dives into silence, live plenified of vacuums
and do not feel the desire for the Absolute.
Through the emptiness of the longstanding silence, the
plenitude of the soul flows irresistibly into the emptiness of the human
cosmos.
Silence is the language of the spirit - which is
interrupted by noise.
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