Unless we are rooted in God, and rooted in the only sure way of listening to God -- namely, silence -- then we are doomed to spend our lives standing at the window of life and watching the world go by... It strikes me that most of the first part of our lives is spent filling our heads with information. The last part -- and the most important part -- is spent emptying our heads of all the trivia so that our hearts may be free to learn wisdom -- in silence.
In prayer we are neither on the one hand dialoguing with an outside source who utters messages from without, nor are we simply talking to ourselves. We are reaching deeply into ourselves and sensing more clearly that we are in God's knowledge and love. We are discovering the Divine within us. We are experiencing ourselves and our lives as uttered by God, and we listen.