The power of silence lies in its emptiness. Silence is a receptive space. It creates a sacred void, an opening through which you can receive: truth, perspective, strength, healing, revelation. In silence, you transcend words and contact the wordless. You fill up with a peaceful knowing. Silence is not the same as prayer. Prayer is a way of directing your feelings and thoughts, focusing them and sending them toward a source. Silence is listening, receiving, being. One is trying to reach the source of communication with it; the other, silence, is allowing yourself to hear the source within yourself, to become one with it... In prayer, you are the sender; in silence, you are the receiver.
Consciousness individually and collectively shapes our material world. Our interior life constantly shapes our exterior life. This is why no matter how diverse our work in the external world, the "common work" of humanity —the only true way we can live our external lives — requires becoming conscious of the relationship between our inner and outer lives.