If only I listened to my own rhythm, and tried to live in accordance with it. Much of what I do is mere imitation, springs from a sense of duty or from pre-conceived notions of how people should behave. The only certainties about what is right and wrong are those which spring from sources deep inside oneself. And I say it humbly and gratefully and I mean every word of it right now, though I know I shall again grow rebellious and irritable. 'Oh God, I thank you for the sense of fulfillment I sometimes have, that fulfillment is after all nothing but being filled with you. I promise yet to strive my whole life long for beauty and harmony and also humility and true love, whispers of which I hear inside me during my best moments.'
Silence is the sea which best bears up our prayers. Silence creates possibility -- the possibility of hearing. What we learn to do in silence is to create within ourselves silence, to create within ourselves emptiness, to brush aside all words, all concepts, all feelings, all fantasies, all anxieties, all ambition -- gently to brush away all these things that seem so important -- to let them go and to empty ourselves so that if the word is spoken we may hear it, and if the song is sung, we may attend.
In silence we do not try to be anything or anyone ... we give up trying to be, and simply are -- we become being -- or, to put it another way, we must become nothing in order that we may once again become that which we truly are.