Sacred silence engenders stillness. It IS stillness. And that stillness opens up the dimension of spiritual existence -- that luminous world that awaits our discovery as soon as we redirect our attention from external things to our own radiant depths... Silence is not merely a discipline; rather, it is primarily a state of being. It is in, through, and as silence that we discover our authentic identity, the Self.
We collect data, things, people, ideas, 'profound experiences,' never penetrating any of them . . . But there are other times. There are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.
~ James Carroll, in SILENCE AND SOLITUDE, edited by Eileen Campbell
