As we become sensitive to our soul's experience, we find the smallest moments, the slightest breezes, can move so much inside us in the stillness. Life's brief encounters with intimacy have more importance. With the subtle qualities we find in our inner life, the silence leads us. The pure presence always begins inside. From our soul's quiet recesses we are taken to caverns and gardens and skies above mansions of silence. Our interior life is full of the ways of the soul. Our dreams, feelings, intuition, and thoughts are just the beginnings of the vast language of our soul in the silence. In our meditations and prayers we hear the small whispers, the perfect presence speak to us, seeking our awareness and appreciation. To value our inner life is to open the doors for the galaxies of stars in the silence to be discovered. These stars turn out to be not so far away but right next to our soul and in the midst of the hearts of those around us.
Teilhard de Chardin practiced the art of self-forgetfulness; the self being forgotten in a sympathetic union with all people and with every man and woman individually. The deep roots of his simultaneous love of God and the world is seen most clearly in THE DIVINE MILIEU:
Throughout my whole life, during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within ... The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe ... This is what I have learned from my contact with the earth -- the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe, the divine radiating from the depths of matter aflame ... To overcome every obstacle, to unite our beings without loss of individual personality, there is a single force which nothing can replace and nothing destroy, a force which urges us forwards and draws us upwards: this is the force of love.