In the final installment of this series on getting ready for 2012, I would like to discuss entering the silence. The year of 2012 represents a great shift in consciousness, according to sources as widely various as the Mayan Calendar, Western astrology and the Confederation sources for which I have been a channel for over four decades. Becoming fearless in the face of death is the point from which we can start getting ready for 2012. Understanding that our lives are all about choosing to polarize towards service to others sets us on our way. Keeping our energy bodies open is critical in terms of being able to live in our open and flowing hearts as we make our ethical choices.
So far, so good!
However there is one more resource that vastly enhances our chances of staying on task in getting ready for this paradigmatic shift. That is silence. Within silence lies the space to seat inspiration and study. Q’uo, in a session recorded on March 22, 2008, puts it this way:
“The most helpful and appropriate way of relating to all outer words and systems of words is to work with them consciously, at all times creating a spaciousness around the words, the thoughts, the comparisons, and so forth, which gives the soul room for the unspoken, the ineffable, the noumenal. For there is much between every inspired word which is unspoken and which creates the ambience in which the spoken word rings with truth.”
Entering the silence gives our deeper minds the opportunity to integrate and be able to use the wonderful things we read and hear from teachers and gurus. The silence keeps us from becoming spiritual rattlepates, always able to talk about metaphysical things and never able to practice them fully.
Within silence lies the “still, small voice” of our guidance. In a session recorded on October 11, 2008, Q’uo says:
“The handiest and simplest way to work with your guidance is to enter into the silence each day. We often speak of entering into the silence and maintaining a silence of self as being a very important part of a spiritual battery of resources that are helpful to the seeker.”
Everyone thinks of guidance uniquely. Some see guidance as coming from the Holy Spirit or from their higher selves. Some see guidance as coming from inner-planes masters, angels, saints or discarnate gurus. Some claim all of nature, with its totem animals and trees, its moons and seasons, winds and waters, as their guidance. One thing is sure: we all have a system of guidance. The trick is to remember to ask for its help.
Within silence lies our connection to eternity and infinity. In the March 22, 2008 session, Q’uo says:
“There is an old story within Buddhist teaching of a saint who held stones in his mouth for twenty years until he learned to be silent. And we appreciate this effort to arrive at the ability to contain and feel comfortable with silence. In silence, there is no need to take a cookie-cutter to the concepts that speak to the deep mind with that still small voice of spirit. In silence, there is no need to work the machinery of the intellect. In silence, one may rest and allow the truth to rise up into consciousness from the infinite invisible that is the heart of each seeker and the heart of the universe alike.”
How easily we can become addicted to the busy-ness of our outer lives! We may even come to depend on the noise of living on the surface. We turn on the television to catch the weather and the buzz. Or we pop in a DVD or a CD and watch a film or listen to music as we go about our daily chores. Or we text, e-mail or call our friends to let them know what we are doing. We do not pause for silent moments. We fill those moments up with sound and action.
Our culture is on information overload at all times. It is a huge machine, careering downhill from its peaks of the deep snows of new news towards the valley of old news like a juggernaut. Its avalanche often buries the little part of us that yearns for quiet times. We become addicts of the new, taking the T-bar back up to the peak to ride the machine again and again, glutting ourselves on sound bites and video clips, staying in the know.
Yet what we “know” from all this immersion in information is only skin-deep. There is no entry from it into the energetic world in which our spirits live. There is no entry into consciousness. It is only when we choose to stop our outer activity and give ourselves some silence that we can dip below the surface into our deeper selves. It is only in silence that our consciousness can thrive – that consciousness which we share with each other and every living thing; that consciousness that is shared with the Creator. It is only in silence that we become creatures of love and true power.
Within silence, the gateway to intelligent infinity may open and yield inklings and whispers of intuition and direct insight. In that same session, Q’uo suggests:
“Daily periods of silence are a strong resource for the seeker who wishes to do more than think about the great questions. For beyond thought lies the truth. Beyond the intellect lies insight. Beyond knowledge lies gnosis.”
You may ask what gnosis has to do with our efforts to stay in the open heart and thereby polarize towards service to others and our goal of graduation. It does not make much sense to the daylight mind that something as abstract as insight or gnosis will make us better at choosing the loving way. However, getting ready for 2012 is about shifting our center of gravity from the attitude of a person immersed in the workaday world to the attitude of a person with a part of himself always tuned to love. In the same session, Q’uo notes:
“There is great wisdom in taking lightly and with laughter the entire business of study and thought for spiritual seekers. It is indeed a mark of spiritual maturity that the intense desire to know the truth becomes gradually transformed into the intense desire to be the truth.
“It is not that there is no truth or that there is nothing to seek. Quite the contrary, my friends. However, that which is sought is the heart of the self. The journey towards truth seems as though it is an outer journey, a seeking out there, a winnowing through the harvest of other people’s seeking to find one’s truth.
“And yet, in the end, it is as though various things begin to fall away in the seeker’s mind and in the seeker’s heart and in the seeker’s experience until gradually the truth itself rises to the surface of consciousness and realization occurs; that realization that it is a perfect world, it is a perfect environment for unlocking the gate that leads to unknowing.”
“Within third density, beyond all the things that you come to know and believe, there lies the glory of that final awareness that nothing can be known and that all speaks of the one infinite Creator. Paradox after paradox, mystery and mystery flow and create patterns around one. And powerful and glorious ideas and images move through the awareness and at the end, the seeker has become transparent to himself as he finds at the very heart of himself the consciousness of unconditional love, that love that created him, that love that created the universe, that love with which he and all about him, seen and unseen, are one.”
There are as many ways to enter the silence as there are personality types. For one person, the best way might be to schedule a daily period of silent meditation, where he lets all his cares drift away and if they come into his consciousness again, he lets them rise and fall away again in their own time, without allowing them to take over his attention.
For another person, the best way to enter the silence might be to immerse himself in the wild world of nature, hiking, listening to birdcalls or sitting on a rock found at a stopping place on the mountain, or a fallen tree in the forest, and soaking in the weather’s sunshine or rain and the beauty nature offers so lavishly to those with eyes to see.
For yet another person, a period of meditation guided by a mantra, a key spiritual thought or a guru’s words might be the best way to enter the silence. The inspirational word, phrase or thought opens doors within and the silence blooms like a rose.
A kind of practice that will help all types of people alike is taking some quiet time at the end of the day to reflect upon all that it has held. In a session recorded October 11, 2008, Q’uo suggests,
“There is the active kind of meditation where you are musing and contemplating your day. And in those times it is helpful to work with those things that triggered you today, experiencing them in memory, allowing their opposites to come into your consciousness and allowing that opposite dynamic to take over your consciousness. Then as you finish, hold those two opposites side by side in your mind and affirm the 360-degree nature of your nature and of the Creator’s. The Creator is all things and you contain all things as well.
“As you become more and more known to yourself, all of these ways of achieving good digestion and a happy energy body become ever more smooth and easy, even effortless, to accomplish. So many things, my friends, are a matter of habit. Create the habits of contemplation and meditation, of lightheartedness, thoughtfulness and balance, and you shall have a very good meal of life.”
I hope that you will investigate the practices of entering the silence that appeal to you. It does not matter one whit that you may not be “good” at meditating or that you may be entirely unused to praying or asking for guidance. I have never been good at meditating. My busy mind churns up endless thoughts from the clutter of my daily doings. And yet I am absolutely certain that as poor a meditator as I am, I am transformed by the practice.
It does not matter that you have only dribs and drabs of time in which to enter the silence. A minute of silence, entered with conscious intention, will keep you going all day.
All that matters is that you enter the silence. Enter it with your hands empty, for you shall receive treasures that will fill them until they spill over with the minted gold of new attitude, new energy and new power to serve. Then your busy days will retain this attitude, energy and power. As Q’uo puts it in a session dated October 12, 1986,
“We hope that you may bring that silence with you as a tool to use not in the dark with your eyes closed only, but in the harshest of daylights and under the most trying of conditions, for if there is a portion of you that remains in the silence of that which is most precious to you, then all else is but a shadow which moves across the sun at the center of your being, and no cloud is large enough to blot out the joy you may take in living.”
I open my arms and embrace your spirit! Let us dedicate ourselves to getting ready for 2012! Surely we are more than ready for that new paradigm, that new attitude of love and understanding! And so may our lives take part, more and more, in the Thought which is unconditional love.