Flowers have incredible power. Their fragile beauty and brief life can teach us to enjoy without attachment, to experience deeply while knowing full well the experience is temporary. It is the same with all life... On the spiritual path it is not the pleasure we want to renounce, it is the attachment to the pleasure. Life will have its joys and its sorrows; to live fully we must live from the source, without attachment to either pleasure or pain.
True experience always comes about in withdrawal "from the crowd." The original, true and proper attitude of the mind is, as Heraclites says, that of "listening to the truth of things..." Our journey into the territory of being should be made in silence, with wondering, wide-open eyes. The fullness of truth and reality is revealed only to those who attain to a silence which covers every aspect of their beings, or who, in other words make their basic attitude toward the whole of being one of delicate and reserved courtesy... For anyone who wishes to hear what is true and real, every voice must for once be still. Silence, however, is not merely the absence of speech. It is not something negative; it is "something" in itself. It is a depth, a fullness, a peaceful flow of hidden life. Everything true and great grows in silence. Without silence we fall short of reality and cannot plumb the depths of being.
