The highest level of prayer is not a prayer FOR anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know God. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined. Prayer is meant to dissolve the worldly focus, to dissolve our sense of a separate self, to help us detach from the noisy world order.
Prayer is like pouring hot water on an ice cube, melting the cold and encrusted thought forms that still surround our hearts.
In the Sahara one day, I climbed over a dune to descend into a deep bowl of sand. Sitting at the bottom I encountered for the first time absolute silence, stillness that is indivisible. For there are two silences: a silence can be no more than the absence of noise, it can be inert; or, at the other end of the scale, there is a nothingness that is infinitely alive, and every cell of the body can be penetrated and vivified by this second silence's activity.
