“There’s a momentary silence in the space between your thoughts that you can become aware of with practice. In this silent space, you’ll find the peace that you crave in your daily life. You’ll never know that peace if you have no spaces between your thoughts. The average person is said to have 60,000 separate thoughts every day. With so many thoughts, there are almost no gaps. If you could reduce that number by half, you would open up an entire world of possibilities for yourself. For it is when you merge into the silence and become one with it that you reconnect to your source and know the peacefulness that some call God. “Be still and know that I am God,” says it so beautifully in the Psalms of the Old Testament. The key words are still and know.
Be still actually means silence. Mother Teresa described silence and its relationship to God by saying, ‘God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, grass, grow in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.’ This includes your soul!
It’s really the space between the notes that makes the music you enjoy so much. Without the spaces, all you would have is one continuous noisy note. Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. Those who will supersede us are waiting in the vast void. All creativity requires some stillness. Your sense of inner peace depends on spending some of your life energy in silence to recharge your battery, remove tension and anxiety, reacquaint you with the joy of knowing God, and feel closer to all of humanity. Silence reduces fatigue and allows you to experience your own creative juices.
The second word in the Old Testament observation, know, refers to making your personal and conscious contact with God. To know God is to banish doubt and become independent of others’ definition and description of God. Instead, you have your own personal knowing. And as Melville reminded us so poignantly, ‘God’s one and only voice is silence.’
Accessing More Silence in Your Life
I urge you to demand more and more time for silence in your life. One of the most effective ways to bring this about is to make meditation a daily practice. And remember, there’s no such thing as a bad meditation. Give yourself time to sit quietly alone. At first your thoughts will take off trying to convince you that this is a waste of time, that you should be out there being productive, and that you’ve got so many other things to do. Hundreds of other unrelated thoughts will pop in and out of your mind.
But you can weather this thunderstorm of mental protestations by sitting quietly and becoming the observer to all of this inner chatter. Eventually you’ll be able to move to the gaps between your thoughts and notice how peaceful you felt in that silent gap when you emerge from it. Try it right now. Use the Lord’s Prayer. First, concentrate on the word Our, and then Father. Try to go into the gap between the two words, Our and Father. Then do it again withWho and art and in Heaven. Just slip momentarily into the gap, and notice how peaceful and exquisite you feel in that gap.
I teach a meditation, which I describe in detail and guide you through with my voice, in a CD and app called Meditations for Manifesting. This meditation uses the sound of ‘ahhhh‘ as a mantra to keep your thoughts from wandering during the morning meditation. This mantra sound is in virtually all names of the Divine. Listen for it, for example, in God, Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Jehovah, Ra, and Ptah. By repeating this mantra sound, you make conscious contact with God. The evening meditation uses the sound of om, the sound of gratitude for all that has manifested in your life. Repeating the sound of ahhhh in the morning and om in the evening for approximately 20 minutes creates an opportunity for you to experience inner peace and success, in a way you may have never known before.”
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