I have written and talked a lot about silence. In the book I’m reading I ran across this quote and agree so much with it.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
The only thing I would add to that is “in silence.” That might not have been necessary in Pascal’s time but today it would be.
It is critically important for us to take “down time.” Not just time to sit but time to sit with nothing else going on. It is easy to notice how difficult this is for people when in church you ask people to sit for a moment in silence. It doesn’t take long for the twitching to begin.
Our culture gives so little time for this kind of restfulness. There is almost always something to watch, listen to, or be distracted by. I have noticed that some school systems in the world are beginning to teach children how to sit quietly in a meditative way. What a wonderful thing. The current generations have great trouble with it.
I was an only child and had much time by myself to just be quiet and think. It has helped me to be able to do this. Everyone needs to learn!
d why I struggle to spend more time in silence
“When I use the word “mystical” I am referring to experiential knowing instead of just intellectual, textbook, or dogmatic knowing. A mystic sees things in their wholeness, connection, and union, not only their particularity. Mystics get a whole gestalt in one picture, beyond the sequential and separated way of seeing that most of us encounter in everyday life. In this, mystics tend to be closer to poets and artists than to linear thinkers. Obviously, there is a place for both, but since the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there has been less and less appreciation of such seeing in wholes. The mystic was indeed considered an “eccentric” (off center), but maybe mystics are the most centered of all, which leads them to emphasizing love as the center, the goal, and the motivating energy of everything.
m
Safe in the womb
worry-less-journey 