Silence on Self (read it regularly till in Silence you realize your Self)

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

"True silence really means going deep within yourself to that place where nothing is happening, where you transcend time and space. You go into a brand new dimension of nothingness. That's where all the power is. That's your real home. That's where you really belong, in deep Silence where there is no good or bad, no one trying to achieve anything. Just being, pure being... Silence is the ultimate reality."

Robert Adams

"The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and when he is answered it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God."

Thomas Merton

"The truest communication with God is absolute, total silence;
there is not a single word in existence that can convey this communication."

Bernadette Roberts

“After long searches here and there, in temples and in churches, in earths and in heavens, at last you come back, completing the circle from where you started, to your own soul and find that He, for whom you have been weeping and praying in churches and temples, on whom you were looking as the mystery of all mysteries shrouded in the clouds, is the nearest of the near, in your own Self, the reality of your life, body and soul.”

Swami Vivekananda

"The good and the wise lead quiet lives."

Euripides

"We cannot speak of God without having first achieved an interior silence.

Just as it's necessary to make use of a Geiger chamber and mathematical matrices in order to speak knowledgeably about electrons, we need to have a purity of heart that would allow us to listen to Reality without any self-seeking interference. Without this silence of mental processes, we cannot elaborate any discourse on God that is not reducible to simple mental extrapolations.

This purity of heart is equivalent to what other traditions call emptiness -- maintaining oneself open to Reality, with neither pragmatic concerns nor expectations on one hand, or resentments or preconceived ideas on the other. Without such a condition, we are only projecting our own preoccupations, good or bad. If we are seeking God in order to make use of the divine for something, we are overturning the order of Reality. "When you wish to pray," the Gospel says, "go into the deepest and most silent part of your house."

Raimon Panikkar

"As there are silent depths in the ocean which the fiercest storm cannot reach, so there are silent, holy depths of the hearts of people which the storm of sin and sorrow can never disturb. To reach this silence and to live consciously in it is peace."

James Allen

"Silence has a regenerative power of its own.
It is always sacred. It always returns you home."

Barbara De Angelis

"Silence is a true friend who never betrays."

Confucius

"Silence is the language of God;
it is also the language of the heart."

Sivananda

"Silence is God's language, and it is a very difficult language to learn."

Thomas Keating

"In this noisy, restless, bewildering age, there is a great need for quietness of spirit. Even in our communion with God we are so busy presenting our problems, asking for help, seeking relief that we leave no moments of silence to listen for God’s answers. By practice we can learn to submerge our spirits beneath the turbulent surface waves of life and reach that depth of our being where all is still, where no storms can reach us. Here only can we forget the material world and its demands on us."

Alice Hegan Rice

"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live."

Bertrand Russell

"Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity."

Voltaire

"The Divine Reality itself is actually silence or stillness."

Teasdale

"Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality."

Thomas Merton

"This silence, this moment, every moment, if it's genuinely inside you, brings what you need. There's nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, 'Be more silent.' Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the tangle of fear- thinking. Live in silence."

Rumi

"Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity."

Norman Cousins

"Silence is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torrent for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words."

Carl Gustav Jung

"What a strange power there is in silence! How many resolutions are formed, how many sublime conquests effected, during that pause when the lips are closed, and the soul secretly feels the eye of her Maker upon her! They are the strong ones who know how to keep silence when it is a pain and a grief unto them, and who give time to their own souls to wax strong against temptation."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In listening and stillness there is nobody who is still, and this stillness doesn't refer to any object; it is absolutely objectless; it is our real nature."

Jean Klein

"Brahman in the Universe, God in his transcendence and immanence is also the Spirit of man, the self in every one and in all, Atman. Thus the momentous statement is made in the Upanishads that God must not be sought as something far away, separate from us, but rather as the very inmost of us, as the higher Self in us above the limitations of our little self. Thus when the sage of the Upanishads is pressed for a definition of God, he remains silent, meaning that God is silence. When asked again to express God in words, he says "Neti, neti," "Not his, not this"; but when pressed for a positive explanation he utters the sublimely simple words" TAT TWAM ASI," "Thou art That." "

Juan Mascaro, The Upanishads

"Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation."

Thomas Keating

"Be quiet in your mind, quiet in your senses, and also quiet in your body. Then, when all these are quiet, don't do anything. In that state truth will reveal itself to you. It will appear in front of you and ask, "what do you want?"

Kabir

"Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature."

Lao Tzu

"Go into your room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father who is in the Secret Place."

Yeshua (Jesus of Nazareth)

"Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub."

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

"True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment."

William Penn

"Things that are real are given and received in Silence. God has been everlastingly working in Silence, unobserved, unheard, except by those who experience His Infinite Silence."

Meher Baba

"Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence."

Deepak Chopra

"In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness."

Gandhi

"Silence is the language of God;
It is also the language of the heart."

Dag Hammarskjöld

"We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... we need silence to be able to touch souls."

Mother Teresa

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not all it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

T.S. Eliot

"How then are we going to reach God? How, but in quietness and in confidence, in the stillness and the Silence? How, but by learning to abide in a quietness within, by being still."

Joel S. Goldsmith

"Be still, and know that I am (God)."

Psalm 46:10

"Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. It is a harrowing journey, a death to self—the false self—and no one wants to die. But it is the only path to life, to freedom, to peace, to true love. And it begins with silence. We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves. This is the great value of silence. It is the pathway to all we truly want."

M. Basil Pennington

"If only all might be hushed, sense impressions, the soul itself, all imagery, all symbols, all things transient, then we might hear the very voice of the eternal, and if that experience were prolonged, we would indeed enter into the joy of our Lord."

Augustine

"Passion is overcome only by him who has won through stillness of spirit the perfect vision; it comes through the contentment that is regardless of the world."

Santideva

"What exists in truth is the Self alone. The self is that where there is absolutely no "I" thought. That is called Silence. The Self itself is the world; the Self itself is "I"; the Self itself is God."

Ramana Maharshi

"No particular thought can be mind's natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience, or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence."

Nisargadatta Maharaj

"...[] remember, in the face of Mystery, silence ultimately alone will do: you simply cannot categorize, in ANY way, that which is radically Unqualifiable. You know that Mystery by being Emptiness, not by conceptualizing it, naming it, labeling it."

Ken Wilber

"Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot"

Ken Wilber

"There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness. When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence."

Sri Aurobindo

"Silence is ancient. Silence has been in the space you are at this very moment for longer than anything else has. It will remain after you leave and exist long after all other things have faded."

Pagan reflections Yule: The Silence of Winter

"There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one's mind and one's subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything else."

Maitri Upanishad

"Real action is done in moments of silence."

Emerson

"For the ignorant there is no better rule than silence and if he knew its advantage he would not be ignorant."

Saadi

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

Antonio Machado

"Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us."

Thoreau

"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time."

Thomas Carlyle

"A tremendous "knowing" comes effortlessly into the mind when it falls into Silence, when it gives up trying to understand, when its reel of stored images no longer projects abstract pictures onto the clean screen of simplicity.

This kind of knowing is transmitted to us as pure revelation, as a clarity untouched by words or other symbols of meaning. When we allow this knowing into our minds, our very lives become as clear and startling as this knowing."

Robert Rabbin

"Silence is the essential condition of happiness."

A Zen Master

"Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. What the old sorcerers were after was the final dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence. Some very talented practitioners need only a few minutes of silence to reach that coveted goal. Others, less talented, need long periods of silence, perhaps more than one hour of quietude, before they reach the desired result. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called "stopping the world", the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it's always been. This is the moment when sorcerers return to the TRUE nature of man. The old sorcerers always called it "total freedom" "

Don Juan (Carlos Castanada)

"Concepts can at best only serve to negate one another, as one thorn is used to remove another, and then be thrown away. Only in deep silence do we leave concepts behind. Words and language deal only with concepts, and cannot approach Reality."

Ramesh Balsekar

"One realizes the Absolute as one's true identity, totally beyond all manifestations, but containing them within its mysterious vastness. The emphasis is on the transcendence of the world, including the body and mind. One becomes the immense solidity of the absolute, totally still and inactive, while dispassionately witnessing the play of all phenomena. [One] witnesses all phenomena as the dynamic transformation of a cosmic and boundless consciousness, which consciousness arises in [its] silent immensity as a surface phenomenon. In the vastness of silence, the world arises in all its multiplicity, but all the world is made out of a conscious presence, a Presence which is a consciousness that can reflect on itself."

A.H. Almaas

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

"The Self is the Spirit. This Spirit resides in the heart of every human being and is in a witness-like state. The Spirit is the projection of God Almighty, while the Kundalini is the projection of the power of God, of His desire which is the Primordial Mother, or you can call it Adi Shakti, Holy Ghost or Athena. So the Kundalini is the projection of the Holy Ghost, while the Spirit is the projection of God Almighty. The All-pervading Power of Love is the power of the Primordial Mother which creates and evolves, and does all the living work." - Shri Mataji Nirmal Devi

Question: How does one discard all the organization and useless activities (of Sahaja Yoga) and seek her (Holy Spirit/Adi Shakti) only in the Sahastrara (Kingdom of God)?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I am still unable to rid myself of catches and other chakra problems despite years of daily (Sahaja Yoga) footsoaking and treatments. What do I do now?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I am far from a Sahaja Yoga collective. How do I continue practicing Sahaja Yoga?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: My collective leader has told me to leave Sahaja Yoga due to some personal problems. What do I do now?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: Despite being years in Sahaja Yoga I do not agree with what our leaders are doing. I am thinking of leaving my collective. Can you suggest something that will help me continue on my own?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I am a Muslim who absolutely am against worshipping of any idol or image. How then is Sahaja Yoga and Shri Mataji compatible with Islam?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: We are devout Christians who are very uncomfortable with Hindu rituals, and see the same in Sahaja Yoga. Is there any way we can do without such rituals?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: You loudly claim on your website that all religions and holy scriptures preach the same message. I don't see such evidence. What have you got to say?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I do not want to meditate on anything non-Christian but agree that the Holy Spirit is feminine. How do I only worship the Holy Spirit but not the Adi Shakti?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: My parents and husband are against worshipping Shri Mataji. How can I solve this serious family problem but still continue to practice Sahaja Yoga without their knowledge?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I completely agree with your belief that if you have to take a single step in any direction to seek the Divine you are going the wrong way. How and why did you reach this incredible conclusion only now despite spending so many years meditating, checking the scriptures and listening to Shri Mataji's speeches?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: How can we spread Shri Mataji's message successfully? So many have failed all these years and Sahaja Yoga is very slow. Most of the seekers have never heard of Shri Mataji. Other than Her Divine Message what can we teach new seekers that will attract them?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I do not want to follow any religious organization or yoga teacher but still am interested in spirituality. You think that is possible?
Answer: Silence on Self

Question: My mother-in-law is totally against Shri Mataji and regards Her as just another false guru. But I know Shri Mataji is the Adi Shakti and want to continue. However, i do not want to antagonize my mother-in-law. Any suggestions?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I am a Sikh. I am completely against any Hindu ritual or worshipping of their idols and gods. Sikhism is completely against such practices. But Sahaja Yoga is also so full of such rituals and gods. What have you got to say, being a Sikh yourself?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I am getting somewhat ridiculed for my own spiritual experiences regarding the crown chakra and the divine feminine. People think I'm weird by emphasizing that the Devi is the true nature of brahman and it is creating doubt about my path (despite my own experiences). Should I continue with my meditations and ignore them or try to explain to them? What do you suggest?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: There is so much information about yoga and meditation. I am so confused and do not know which path to take. What then is the truth? How do I attain it?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I have been in Sahaja Yoga for years but still do not know what is Self-realization. Can you tell me in detail what you understand by it?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I have been a SY for many years and some of us find shoe- beating and some rituals quite absurd. You also are against them. How then can we solve our subtle system problems without such treatments?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I am a Muslim living in Pakistan who want to practice Sahaja Yoga. But there are no centers here. How can I continue?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: What will happen after Shri Mataji passes away? Will She still be in the photograph? Where will the vibrations come from then?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I have just started meditating on Shri Mataji in the Sahasrara but find it very difficult. Is there a better way?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I do not want to join Sahaja Yoga but believe in a number of Shri Mataji's teachings. Can you help me?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I am an established SYogini who am concerned at the way the organization is heading. However, I still want to spread Shri Mataji's teachings. What do you suggest I tell others?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: I want to practice meditation but find it impossible to stop the thoughts. I value you opinion. If you don't mind my asking, but how do you do it?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: What is the shortest and surest route to realize God?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: Some religions claim that humans are divine in nature and that liberation is from within. Can you tell me how all this is realized in such a hectic and materialistic world?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: As a SY I am concerned that after Shri Mataji takes Mahasamadhi there will great grief and sense of loss. How can I cope with this eventuality and continue my faith and devotion? Do I continue to meditate on Her photo even though She is not physically present anymore?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: Jagbir, you are already telling us to discard Shri Mataji's photo and meditate on Her is the Sahasrara. A number of SYs have been offended by this and have left the forum. What makes you so sure you are right?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: What is the most profound and deepest enlightenment you have discovered after all these years, based on the teachings of Shri Mataji? She also claims that all religions teach the same truth about the spirit. How is that so given all the religious differences and centuries-old rivalry?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: Hi, man-made religions, sects and denominations are wide spread. So much misdeeds and divisions are committed and blood is shed in the name of God and religion. Is there a way to make humans realize that they are all worshipping the One and same Creator, no matter how different religious organizations have made God to be?

Answer: Silence on Self

Question: It seems that religions are all preaching about a God that is to be found only in their organizations. Why then is it that the Divine can only be realized through one's own experience? What and where is God then?

Answer: Silence on Self

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