Stillness Speaks – Finding Real Power Within

 

For many people is is hard to imagine that the real power within arises in how Stillness Speaks through you.  In fairytales and mythological stories there is a certain kind of language that is used.  It is the same kind of language that is used in some of the more difficult to understand parables in the Bible.  It is the kind of language that is the stuff of Zen koans.  It is the language of riddles.  This is the language of paradox.  Paradox defies the logical mind and is intended to cross the threshold of the logical mind.  It invites you beyond the experience of duality.  It invites you beyond the sense of opposites and into a Trinitarian experience.  This is the experience where something is not and something is and both something and nothing at the same time.

 

Let me share with you some of my favourite paradoxical lines.  One phrase comes from the singer song writer Paul Simon.  This paradox is invited in the title of the song The Sound of Silence.  Another paradox is invited by the modern mystic Eckhart Tolle in his Sounds True recording Stillness Speaks.  Notice here that I have chosen two related dynamics.  These are the relation of stillness to silence and visa versa.  The logical mind says that stillness does not speak and that silence has no sound.  That is true at the level of thought but at the level of the Mind, which is beyond thought, the stillness and silence are what allows for Creation.  I cannot emphasise enough the power available to you that arises out of the sound of silence and the small still voice within.

 

 

There is a fear of silence in our world.  There is a judgment in our world in relation to stillness.  Both are seen as unproductive.  Neither, we are advised, contributes to productivity and to achieving results.  Nearly everywhere I go now there is the constant background noise.  It is heard when I go to the bank, to the doctor’s or even to the hospital.  Shopping centres are filled with it.  Most of this noise is banal.  It fills the space between advertising on radio.  All that people are doing is talking and chattering.  It is an external representation of the mind that they cannot switch off.

 

Silence and stillness are feared because they invite a sense of psychological death.  They are an experience of no thing and an experience of a void.  So we avoid this experience and never truly enter the void dance.  This dance is the creating of all things out of the living paradox of no thing.  Please note that no thing is not the same as nothing.  Yet this stillness and silence is at the heart of one of the greatest spiritual instructions ever given.

 

Be Still and Know that I am God.

 

I like to change the word God into the word Love (with a capital L).  The word God has so much baggage around it that for many people it is a turn off.  The stillness that speaks is the power of Creation.  It is always speaking but it doesn’t speak to you in words.  It speaks to you in enthusiasm and creativity.  It speaks to you as the ever new and the experience of renewal.  Silence and stillness are restful.  This is good for your health because it is closest to wholeness.  You cannot divide silence.  You cannot cut it up into little pieces the way that you do with logic.  It is the fullness that contains sound.  I invite you to make it a conscious part of your everyday life.  This is simply a fifteen minute period of engagement with stillness and silence at the beginning and end of each day.

 

For most people doing nothing is the hardest thing that they are invited not to do.  Firstly,they think it is a waste of time when there is so much to do and anyway what is the meaning of doing nothing in the first place?  The paradox has to be lived and felt in order for you to have faith in the process and allow the power of the sound of silence to radiate through you.  You are not trying to achieve anything.  You are practicing availability.  You are practicing a paradoxical kind of waiting which is waiting without waiting.  “Waiting for what?” you might ask.  You are waiting to have the movement of Creation move and expand through you which is the very reason why Creation created you in the first place.  You learn to pay attention to the way this movement happens within you and you test its authenticity through taking action.  You trust the process and you follow where the sound of silence invites you.

 

The ego, the culture, will tell you that this is nonsense.  The ego fears loss of its power as a separate entity.  In the honouring of the power of silence there is a new power being invited.  It is the willingness to know the power of Love.  When you go into the silence and stillness there is nothing there but no thing.  The paradox that mystics know, and invite you to know and live, is that the abundance within that silence is infinite.  Quantum physicists who work at the leading edge of science all agree that space is not empty but is filled with potential.  Eckhart Tolle, speaking in the audio recording by Sounds True invites people to pay more attention to space.  Without space nothing could move and have its existence.  Without space nothing would move

 

When you go into the silence and stillness you will not find anything except the chatter of your thoughts.  If you practice meditation you learn to allow these thoughts to simply flow and to become still.  Do not, however, practice meditation as suggested by Rick Warren in his book The Purpose Driven Life – What on Earth am I here for.  In this book it appears that Rick Warren does not know what meditation is because when he invites his readers to meditate on the word of God he tells them to think about it.  Thinking is not mediation.  It may be reflection but it is still in the area of thought and thus in the arena of the known.  It is not what is called the practice of the renewal of the mind.  It is simply the moving of thoughts like moving pieces around a chess board.  You get different results but the end game is always the same.

 

‘Thinking about’ is not the stillness of the One Mind.  The stillness of the mind invites not thought, but insight.  You become still and you know the I AM experience beyond the limitation of I am – which is the identification with the ego.  This is how stillness speaks.

 

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

 

 

 

 

 

If you simply follow the information accessed by the logical, linear mind then all that you will do will go and talk to the darkness and be left without a vision.  This vision is called insight.  It isn’t attained through analysis by paralysis.  It is revealed through trusting in an invisible force that created you from no thing.  It created you from the paradox of the sound of silence.  It is always speaking to you.   In the Lesson 49 of a Course in Miracles you have a lesson which tells you

 

Gods Voice speaks to me all through the day.

 

This lesson goes on to say,

 

Listen in deep silence.  Be very still and open your mind.  Go past all the raucous shrieks and sick imaginings that cover your real thoughts and obscure your eternal link with God.  Sind deep into the peace that awaits you beyond the frantic, riotous thoughts and sights and sounds of this insane world.  You do not live here.  We are trying to reach your real home.  We are trying to reach the place where you are truly welcome.  We are trying to reach God.

 

 

Notice the key invitation to deep silence.  Notice the invitation to be still and allow the stillness that speaks.  Notice the invitation to a mind absent of thought.  So I invite you to practice the paradoxical power of doing no thing and making yourself available to the power of the infinite.  Spend time each day in stillness and silence without trying to achieve any result.  It goes against everything you have been taught but the results of what you have been taught are not, for the most part, bringing you joy or the knowing of deep peace and the knowing of the infinite peace that you are.

 

Take the road less travelled and the road and the road of the Hero.  Listen to the inner knower within you.  This is the key that will unlock the true abundance that is waiting to be expressed through you.   This gives you the ability to listen to the desires of the heart and not simply the desires of the never quite enough culture and the desires of the ego.

 

 

Let it be so.

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