One day, as if I had lived alone for many years in the deep desert, I was taken by a
stunning stillness, and without resistance I disappeared into Silence... It was my soul's
homecoming, my heart's overflowing love, and my mind's eternal peace.
In Silence, I felt my core identity, my essential nature, as a unity-in-love with all
creation. I experienced freedom, clarity, and joy as my true Self... This Self, this
Silence belongs to all of us—it is who we are, it is what we are. If we are to experience
and embody authentic peace and love, if we are going to bring true healing to our
wildly violent and endangered world, we are going to have to learn to live within this
essence which joins us together as brothers and sisters.
~ from THE HEALING POWER OF SILENCE by Robert Rabbin
If you ask for grace to realize who you are, ask also for the courage you will need to do so. To realize who you are, you will have to walk through all the shadows in your inner landscape. It is not easy. You will need to give up all your views about yourself again and again, each time they crystallize into a pattern. You will have to experience and release all the pain in your life. You will have to embrace your death. You will have to bear everything to realize everything. A perfect divine economy.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton
We are all native speakers of the language of life. To talk with what lives, we have to listen patiently and quietly for a long time. We have to listen in a place where we can hear, where the sounds of the living world are louder than the sounds of the machine world. If we have the patience and the silence we can begin to hear. If many of us listen, many of us will hear. We will learn the language of the living Earth, and it will become our language again.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton
Our culture has lost touch with the soul and with any way to meet it. It becomes more difficult all the time simply to be quiet: mobile phones, faxes, and e-mail make us more accessible to the intrusions of information. Being reflective may soon seem a radical act. Without being reflective, without entering into moments of silence, we cannot let the soul in. The soul's voice is a still, soft one, and we must be quiet if we are to hear it.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton
