I just read what I wrote and went - fun - wrong word. But I can't find what the right word is - except it is what it is. God is love. God created all that is. God shows me things at times in visions. I see, I know. mm you said it on another thread and it was beautifully said. It is the way that it is, now, and I can't find words to express it.

Energy rises, words are spoken, hurt happens, but out of that hurt healing can take place. The energy shows there is a place where injury resides and healing can take place once you know it is there. To me that is God. He is the guide who shows us where healing is needed. It is learning to listen, to hear, to follow. That to me is the preciousness of silence. Be still and know that I am God. I cannot hear the voice of God if I do not be still. Stop. Give myself and give God the gift of - stop. I was not brought up to do that. It has been difficult to - all the words I think of are doing words, achieve, etc. Anyway,
Peace, D

That's all nicely stated, Diane.

One of my favorite writers is Jean Pierre de Caussade. In his Abandonment to Divine Providence, he speaks often about this waiting for inner guidance. . . of learning to detect the leadings of the Spirit through the attractions awakened within us. This gets us out of the realm of the "should" and puts us in touch with our own inner wisdom. Learning to claim this wisdom is an essential part of the spiritual journey, imo. We all need to stop "shoulding upon" ourselves.

Phil said: This gets us out of the realm of the "should" and puts us in touch with our own inner wisdom.

I�ve laid down those writings by de Caussade for the moment, but I mean to pick them back up soon. But what you just said above about the "should" and "inner wisdom" is about as simple, direct, and concentrated a description of what I think religion/spirituality means to me. Is that not what we are trying to steer toward when we cultivate solitude and silence? We can quibble about the ultimate source of that inner wisdom (God, cosmic consciousness, Tao, whatever), but it seems a fruitless waste of energy to try to contend that it doesn�t exist. My "shoulds" have quite literally tried to kill me at times. They still interfere with my peace and sense of purpose (and probably actual purpose).

Diane said: We have been given a forum to share our heart and head. It is good. The first time I wrote I almost hyperventilated and waited with bated breathe til a reply came and I was not cut down. Now, maybe I can hold my own - here and out there! We will see. Peace, D

I have not mastered setting myself outside the opinions of other people. I doubt that I ever will. It feels good when they give praise and hurts sometimes when they criticize. The core lesson is that these feelings, good or bad, can show our level of dependence on the opinions of other people. I am WAY too dependent, but I think I�m getting better. At some point we just have to blurt out what is in our heart and minds and as long as we�re not being overtly nasty about it then if others don�t agree then that�s just the way it is. They can like it or lump it, as they say. If others agree, well then great. But I think ultimately it�s cultivating the relationships in between agreement and disagreement that is probably the part that lasts. We ought not to agree with others simply to find this space and we ought not to disagree with others simply to find this space, although it is human nature to do so. At some point we have to develop some kind of appreciation for the "is" quality of things.

I have spent a lifetime "shoulding upon" myself. I am learning and choosing not to. First, I found I had to be honest with myself. I found that very interesting as I did not know that I lied. But I did. Everytime I agreed with someone when I really did not. Now I am learning how to share with others what I believe and they are now getting to know who Diane is. (So am I)

I am learning that I can speak my truths in love or as close to nice as I possibly can and if they do not like it, it is their problem not mine. Sometimes I can actually do that and not feel guilty or wrong. Life is getting better all the time. Like you Brad, I do not know if I will ever get out of that place of fear or not, its a journey.

All that you say resonates with me as well, Diane. Very much so. Nicely said.

Whenever I find myself in that "stinkin' thinkin'"
and I'm "shoulding all over myself," I take comfort from the eternal wisdom of Stuart Smalley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Smalley

http://computertoaster.com/rev...insearch_0440504708/

dailyaffirmations.com

Solitude and silence are my dearest friends. Was it a yearning within that brought my spirit to this hermitic life; absolutely. The teacher within daily sifts and separates the wheat from the chaff, as I grow in awareness and truth, without the entanglements of worldly stimulation. Family, friends and neighbors ask me as to how I could possibly live in such stillnes. I tell them that it is exactly this very stillness that allows me to know God.

"Be still and know God"

After the devil works me over for a long while, there is a peace that passes understanding...

Family, friends and neighbors ask me as to how I could possibly live in such stillnes.

Us contemplative, or silence-seeking types, are freaks of nature. And first off, let me confess that "contemplative" describes what I do only part of the time. A good deal of the time I am the hermit, the loner, or the anti-social recluse. I just want to make sure that I don�t drop some fancy name on "couch potato" and try to glorify it, particularly because one of my definite ends of contemplation, or silence, (or whatever it is I�m doing) is to build up the strength of my identity so that I have more options than to just contemplate or be alone. Alone can suck.

But unless we want to go around in the world like chickens with our heads cut off, it is almost a requirement that we make friends, or at least come to some kind of peace with, solitude and silence. Silence is something that most people run from. Indeed, there�s nothing wrong with feeling a hole and wanting to fill it with something. I don�t half doubt that one of the reasons we feel this hole is so that we don�t all stay in bed contemplating the universe while the sewage piles up outside our doors. Our compulsions, passions, and obsessions (however one wants to characterize them) can drive us to do some really extraordinary and life-enhancing things�including the invention and building of a modern sewage systems!

On the other hand, it can sure pay dividends, for us and others, to spend some time in silence. I like how Henri Nouwen puts it in The Inner Voice of Love:

quote:

Different people have different ways of being present. You have to know and claim your way. That is why discernment is so important. Once you have an inner knowledge of your true vocation, you have a point of orientation. That will help you decide what to do and what to let go of, what to say and what to remain silent about, when to go out and when to stay home, who to be with and who to avoid.

�Your way of being present to your community may require times of absence, prayer, writing, or solitude. These too are times for your community. They allow you to be deeply present to your people and speak words that come from God in you. When it is part of your vocation to offer your people a vision that will nurture them and allow them to keep moving forward, it is crucial that you give yourself the time and space to let that vision mature in you and become an integral part of your being.

You community needs you, but maybe not as a constant presence. Your community might need you as a presence that offers courage and spiritual food for the journey, a presence that creates the safe ground in which others can grow and develop, a presence that belongs to the matrix of the community. But your community also needs your creative absence.

I think "creative absence" is a particularly good turn of phrase. And certainly the thing that is first and foremost on my mind these days when experiencing silence, solitude, and/or contemplation is to become better "planted" in life, in myself, in Ultimate Being. Or as Henri puts it:

quote:

Here you have to be very attentive to your inner self. "Coming home" and "being given back to yourself" are expressions that indicate that you have a solid inner base from which you can speak and act�without apologies�humbly but convincingly.

I don�t think I�ve ever heard it put better -- the need to have a "solid inner base from which you can speak and act." Here we are free, through our various faiths or philosophies, to imagine just what that inner base is and how to make it solid. But I don�t think there can be any doubt that a healthy appreciation for silence and solitude can help to clarify these matters.

Probably the prime reason we run from silence is that the silence puts us in touch with our innate emptiness. But there is alchemical "magic" in staying with the emptiness. Emptiness is not something we should reflexively run from just because it feels uncomfortable. It can actually lead to a feeling of being full�or fuller. Arguable, in the very middle of our sense of human emptiness is the solution to it all. I like how Henri Nouwen puts it:

quote:

This is an important search because it leads you to discern something good about yourself. The pain of your loneliness may be rooted in your deepest vocation. You might find that your loneliness is linked to your call to live completely for God. Thus your loneliness may be revealed to you as the other side of your unique gift. Once you can experience in your innermost being the truth of this, you may find your loneliness not only tolerable but even fruitful. What seemed primarily painful may then become a feeling that, though painful, opens you for the way to an even deeper knowledge of Gods� love.

Personally, I find emptiness to be an extremely interesting "boundary area" -- an area that seems to sit squarely between the realization of possibly the most important truth that a human being can have knowledge of, and what could be little more than the world�s biggest rationalization stemming from the desire to escape that almost unbearable feeling of human emptiness and loneliness. One has to be prepared to step into that space and stay there, and then cook slowly like a turkey roasting in the oven.

Here�s what I think is another profound and creative description by Henri of why we run away from our pain (and thus why I think we might run from silence and solitude):

quote:

What is your pain? It is the experience of not receiving what you most need. It is a place of emptiness where you feel sharply the absence of the love you most desire. To go back to that place is hard, because you are confronted there with your wounds as well as with your powerlessness to heal yourself. You are so afraid of that place that you think of it as a place of death. Your instinct for survival makes you run away and go looking for something else that can give you a sense of at-homeness, even though you know full well that it can�t be found out in the world.

We might as well spend some quality time in silence, solitude, and contemplation because if we don�t, we�re liable to run around like that proverbial chicken with its head cut off. More Henri:

quote:

Your main question should always be whether something is lived with or without God. You have your own inner knowledge to answer that question. Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them. But every time you do something for the glory of God, you will know God�s peace in your heart and find rest there.

Silence and solitude seem to have a potential element of escapism to them. But that element seems to dissolve and fade when we actually give in to our solitude without resistance. And then the realizations, Divine promptings, or whatever, seem to begin to really re-form and re-shape us. Being alone and being in solitude is a way to get away from one thing (the outer world), but without the concomitant immersion into an inner world we might just have well stayed in the outer world of noise and chaos because we are then just using our solitude to stay in limbo.

quote:

A word with power is a word that comes out of silence. A word that bears fruit is a word that emerges from the silence and returns to it. � Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

Those of us who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. We will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our agressivity, our ego-centered ambitions, our delusions about ends and means. � Thomas Merton

To me, these two quotes above are like two peas in a pod. They fit together. I think it would be useful to contemplate them together.

quote:

The roots of loneliness are very deep and cannot be touched by optimistic advertisement, substitute love images, or social togetherness. They find their food in the suspicion that there is no one who cares and offers love without conditions, and no place where we can be vulnerable without being used.

�This difficult road is the road of conversion, the conversion from loneliness into solitude. Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into a fruitful solitude. To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry, desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play. � Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

quote:

When we are not afraid to enter into our own center and to concentrate on the stirrings of our own soul, we come to know that being alive means being loved. This experience tells us that we can love only because we are born out of love, that we can give only because our life is a gift, and that we can make others free only because we are set free by God whose heart is greater than ours. When we have found the anchor places for our lives in our own center, we can be free to let others enter into the space created for them and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song, and speak their own language without fear. Then our presence is no longer threatening and demanding but inviting and liberating. � Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

Obsessions. Compulsions. Drives. Desires. Passions. These things are not so easy to just check at the door when you enter the cottage of silence and solitude. Those wheels keep turning inside our head, so it�s difficult to avoid using silence as just a big blackboard for trying to figure out stuff, to plan, to prepare, to fix, to avoid, to obsess, to remain vigilant, to remain on guard. But I think silence is for surrender and trust. No matter one�s religion, no matter one�s focus word or mantra, silence will form in us something, especially when we stop trying, especially when we acquiesce and give in to uncertainty and mystery, to a process that doesn�t conform strictly to our immediate desires and whims. But that "silence" is more than just a lack of noise in the room. Nor is it necessarily a lack of noise in our heads. I think it�s first and foremost a lack of "noise" in regards to our willfulness, our desire to remain in control, our desire to have quite specific and focused goals for those times of silence.

And that�s where surrender and trust come in. In silence one is apt to expose one�s deep lack of trust in the world, in god, and perhaps also in one�s self. To sit in a room silently with no "game plan" as such (other than maybe to love and to receive love), and to just exist in the world, can make us squirm with discomfort. It can make us feel very precarious. We must be doing something with this time or we may think we�re falling behind. Thus I think one needs to develop a trust that we are okay as is. We are okay in just being. The world and god will not reject us because we are idle and not doing things to bolster our worthiness or security. With at least some trust in hand, we can than surrender our willfulness and our compulsive desire that aim to accomplish something with the silence. Accomplishments may indeed come, but a less active verb and attitude are likely needed in order to do so. We need to trust in the silence and surrender to the silence rather than trying to do something with it.

And if that place of solitude still feels like death then good. You�re probably doing it right. Your obsessions, compulsions, drives, desires, and passions are right to feel threatened with extinction, if only for a moment. But I don�t think the point of silence and solitude is to extinguish our obsessions. But at the very least I think the point is to bring the flavor and attitude of silence to our more active moments. Just as one can wait patiently, one can act patiently. One can drive an automobile while enjoying the view, while listening to one�s favorite music, or while just enjoying the experience of driving. Or one can stress at traffic and every single car on the road that isn�t doing it right in one way or another. Mea culpa. Since moving recently, I now have a rather modest commute on the freeway (about 20 minutes), but it�s a new lesson in patience/impatience, courtesy/discourtesy, acquiescence/obsession, trust/fear. And I�m of the disposition and personality where I can very easily pick up the stress of others if I am not careful. And stress in the morning commute there is. Death literally hangs in the air, the death of a thousand hopes and dreams as people rush to a place they�d really rather not go. They�re not on my bumper because I�m not moving fast enough. No. They�re there because I�m the symbolic impediment to their lives.

We desperately need the fruits of silence and solitude. But the irony is that we can�t receive these fruits by being desperate. We must trust and surrender into silence. Things will happen there. Good things. But don�t bring a scorecard.

First off, you should know that I�m still searching. I have not yet found what I'm looking for. I would never want to come across as anything but a very fallible and flawed human. I have no answers, only questions. But I usually keep a pen and paper next to me when I meditate, pray, or just stare at the ceiling with that long gaze. And sometimes some interesting things pop out of the ether and I write them down. Sometimes they are interesting because they are so mundane. Here's a sampling:

Although I don't understand everything, I will continue to relate myself to the Unknown, and hopefully the helpful.

It is not bad to be dependent. It means there's someone to be dependent on.

When are different psychological states indicative of different ontological realities?

More and more I notice that no matter how sad, angry, afraid, or depressed I get, this mood is often interrupted by feelings and pangs of love�as if I were being held in a gentle hand.

I am an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

We're all looking for anchorage in something. The wise person in search of knowledge anchors in an air bubble.

If there was no resistance to what we wanted, would there be meaning?

Only when we stop being angry with the world is our philosophy worth a damn.

I need to acquiesce and say "yes" to life, even though the most awesome thing is going to happen to me. I'm going to die.

What do I want? How silly that I even need to ask. I want to be told that I'm alright, that everything is going to be alright. I want to be at peace.

What we believe is governed by experience. What we experience is governed by what we believe.

[This is one of my favorites. Yeah, personal, but funny.] It's all reams and reams of thinking trying to make up for sexual frustration.

When I pray to god, I know that I am the one who has to change. I don't tend to wish for things for myself.

The philosophy of my life can perhaps be condensed down to this: I don't know why the world is the way that it is. I only know what my response to it must be.

Trust that my limitations mean something and are purposeful. Spirituality isn't about perfection of the mind or body, but evolution of the heart.

Your life my brother, is a solitary habitation separated from other men's dwellings. It is a house into whose interior no neighbor's gaze can penetrate. If it were plunged into darkness, your neighbor's lamp could not illumine it. If it were emptied of provisions, the stores of your neighbors could not fill it. If it stood in a dessert, you could not move it into other men's gardens, tilled and planted by others hands. If it stood on a mountaintop, you could not bring it down into the valley trod by other men's feet.

Your spirit's life, my brother, is encompassed by loneliness, and were it not for this loneliness and solitude, you could not be you, nor would I be I. Were it not for this lonliness and solitude, I would come to believe on hearing your voice that it was my voice speaking; or seeing your face, that is was myself looking into a mirror.
-Kahlil Gibran-

quote:

Your spirit's life, my brother, is encompassed by loneliness, and were it not for this loneliness and solitude, you could not be you, nor would I be I. Were it not for this lonliness and solitude, I would come to believe on hearing your voice that it was my voice speaking; or seeing your face, that is was myself looking into a mirror.
-Kahlil Gibran-

Wow. I'm blown away by that awesome quote, Freebird. Thanks for posting that. There is indeed an inherent loneliness to being a human being. And it seems this is a necessary state for an independent being, at least to some extent, for as Gibran said, "Were it not for this lonliness and solitude, I would come to believe on hearing your voice that it was my voice speaking; or seeing your face, that is was myself looking into a mirror." That's my interpretation of what he was saying, anyway.

The amazing thing that I find about silence is that it tends to run counter to our whole way of being. Quite literally, if we were to completely stop moving, we would be dead. That is stasis. Most of our life, if we stop to think about it, is about accumulating, building, reinforcing, strengthening, acting, repairing, adjusting, and bridging. Nature herself mirrors our progressive activity at she evolves ever-higher forms of life and existence. When we lose something -- whether a lover, a reputation, a friend, or a house -- we experience more than just grief and sadness. We quite literally experience a regression that is akin to a mini-death. Everything about our lives and ourselves is built to accommodate growth and accumulation. We not only can experience a mini-death but feel existentially vacant when we are not robustly growing, let alone when we lose something. And ironically, although we all need quiet time, the fact is that those who are struggling with loss in its many forms need most the fruits of silence and solitude. That is because in the magic of silence we can turn the world upside down and thus can reassess our place in it. We can gain a new perspective. Motion and acquisition alone are no longer the judge, jury, and potential executioner of the worthiness of our lives. We expand the definition of what it is to be. In silence we can turn "being" into a verb. It is enough just to be. To be is for our souls to scorch a trail through existence leaving a cloud of dust behind us. Our cup runneth over from just sitting at the rich banquet of simple existence.