The inner self is as secret as God and, like God, it evades every concept that tries to seize hold of it with full possession. It is a life that cannot be held and studied as object, because it is not "a thing". It is not reached and coaxed forth from hiding by any process under the sun, including meditation. All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of presence.
Every soul is born out of silence, dies back into silence and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence allows the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every word. The Unmanifested is present in the world as silence. Thnis is why it has b een said that nothing in this world is so like God as silence.
