For Further Reflection:

I encourage you to spend some time in further reflection on this theme. Below are some of the quotes from the talk and additional quotes for you to take this theme further.

Soren Kierkegaard:

“The present state of the world, the whole of life, is diseased.

If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply:

Create silence! Bring people to silence.

The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today.

Create silence.”

Maggie Ross: 

"To choose silence as the mind's default in an accelerating consumer culture—a culture that sustains itself by dehumanizing people through the unrelenting pressure of clamor, confusion, and commodification—is indeed a subversive act."

Martin Laird: 

"We progress in overcoming the illusion of separation from God when we learn how to deal with the barrage of thoughts that pummels us into misery."

My journal entry:

"I am reminded that prayer is to be 'delivered' from contingent identites, and have the muddy waters cleared of the grasping, resisting and stories of the mind. I have allowed myself to become so content-laden, and then "I" try to grasp at a spiritual state or realisation, or even at emptiness! I am reminded that it's more of a gentle dissolution of "me" and "my", by resting in quietness and trust in the Divine Healer, Who knows what and how to free all this stuckness. Just rest in this calm abiding."

Fred LaMotte:

"There are moments of awakening when the silence of our Being speaks more wisdom than all the words of the Gospel. ... But most of the time, we fear to plunge into the groundless golden void that yearns to hold us, to breathe us, to refresh us with astonishment. We willfully overlook the magnetic longing that emanates from our very core. Instead, we try to grasp and own the fleeting details of the peripheral world, until a manic absurdity exhausts us, forcing us to collapse, because there is nowhere else to flee. Yet gladly and gracefully we collapse. We collapse into God's yearning for us, which we find at last in the radiance of our own heart."

James Finley: 

"Prayer begins to take on its full dimensions only when we begin to intuit that the subtle nothingness of prayer is everything. ... We find ourselves in a solitary silence that skirts the edge of the abyss that is at once our own nothingness and the plenitude of God. ... We are called upon to live Christ’s life. We are called into the desert to meet the demon within. We are called to face God alone in the night of our own solitude. We are called to die with Jesus, in order to live with him. We are asked to lose all, to be emptied out, in order to be filled with the very fullness of God."

Jacob Needleman: 

"The proper work of the mind is to function at two levels, the level of silence and the level of expression. And it is expression that is secondary—that is, truth in the form of words and formulations can come only out of silence . . . The mind alone—the mind that is not nourished by the silence of the fertile void of pure Being—as such is incapable of guiding human life. ... This, in sum, is the tragedy of our era, of our knowledge in the modern world. All that science has brought us—the phenomenal, wondrous discoveries it has brought us about life, matter and the universe—will eventually bring us nothing but destruction because we have forgotten that the mind alone cannot direct itself or the whole of ourselves."

Cynthia Bourgeault: 

"Word and silence belong together in an organic and mutually life-giving way, rather like breathing."

Thomas Merton: 

"Silence is crucially important for spiritual freedom."  

Ilie Cioara: 

"How could this small shell, which is the human mind, embrace and comprehend the immensity of the ocean of Cosmic Energy? Nevertheless, this audacious “ego” persistently affirms that he knows what God is, what is creative Love, immortality etc. More so, it states and even offers solutions to tackling and solving the great problems that challenge humankind. Yet this “ego” is not aware of one thing: that its own presence creates the whole tragedy and suffering on the entire surface of the Earth. It is the human being’s main and only enemy. Its fictitious, chaotic and misleading movement generates and maintains the human misery and suffering. But when a ray of light, emanated by Pure Consciousness, pierces the limited shell of the mind and exposes its whole fiction, this mind becomes humble and silent.” ... "Once you have discovered true life, it transforms you, and through it, it transforms the whole humanity, for in the Great Whole – real essence through itself and by itself – everything that exists forms a unique, compact, homogenous mass. The transformation of one part naturally influences the whole."