Any way to God has to be a way through silence.
And the first thing if you want to attain to silence and you want to get to God is understanding of readiness to realize that your ideas of God are all inadequate and lots of people are not ready to realize that.
And that's the big obstacle to prayer and to meditation in their case.
Imagine that there is a man born blind and he says to me,
What is this color green that everybody's talking about?
How would you describe that to him?
Impossible.
And then he says,
Listen to his questions.
He says,
Is it hot or is it cold?
Is it long or is it short?
Is it rough or is it smooth?
It is none of these things because the poor man is asking the questions from his limited experience.
But let's suppose I were to try.
I'd say,
You know,
That color green,
I'll tell you what it's like.
It's like soft music.
And one day the man recovers his sight and I say to him,
Well,
Did you see the color green?
He says,
No.
You know why?
Because he's looking for soft music.
He got stuck to that idea of green being soft music.
So when he was looking at green,
He failed to recognize it.
There's another story we have in the East of this little fish in the ocean.
Somebody tells the fish,
What a mighty thing the ocean is.
Great,
Marvelous.
And so this little fish is swimming everywhere in search of the ocean,
In the ocean.
And all he finds is water.
See,
He failed to recognize.
He got stuck to that word,
Ocean.
Now can it be that that is happening to us?
Can it be that God is staring us in the face,
But because we are clinging to some ideas,
We fail to recognize him?
That would be a tragedy,
Wouldn't it?
So then we come to the second thing.
The second thing you need to do if you want to get silence and you want to get to God,
It is now get ready because some of you are going to think that this is absurd.
It's almost incredible.
All you need to do is look,
Listen,
Hear,
See.
That's all.
That's all.
Let me explain that.
You know,
In the East we say God created the world.
God dances the world.
Can you think of a dancer and his dance?
They are one thing.
They're not the same thing,
But they're not two.
There's a great English theologian who put it,
God is in creation the way the voice of a singer is in a song.
Let's suppose I were to sing a song.
Let's suppose I were to say,
Nearer my God to thee.
You've got my voice.
You've got the song.
So intimately connected,
Though they're not the same thing.
Now listen to this.
Isn't it strange that we would be listening to the song and we don't hear the voice?
That we're looking at the dance and we don't see the dancer?
Now you might say to me,
Well,
Does it mean that if we just look,
We will be given the grace of seeing and of recognizing?
No,
You may be given the grace of seeing and recognizing because this calls for a special way of seeing.
Remember that lovely book,
The Little Prince?
A fox says something to the prince there that is marvelously put.
He says,
It is only with the heart that one sees rightly what is essential,
Is invisible to the eye.
So what you need is heart caring,
Heart seeing.
There is an admirable Japanese tale that brings this out very well.
This disciple goes to his master and he says,
You are hiding the final secret of contemplation from me.
And the master says,
No,
I'm not.
And the disciple says,
Oh,
Yes,
You are.
One day they happen to be walking along the mountainside and they heard a bird sing.
And the master said to the disciple,
Did you hear that bird sing?
And the disciple said,
Yes.
The master said,
Well,
Now you know that I haven't hidden anything from you.
And the disciple said,
Yes.
You know what had happened?
He had attained heart hearing,
Heart listening.
This is a gift that may be given to us if we would look.
Another way of putting the same thing.
You know,
I keep giving you these various comparisons because some people will be helped by some and others by others.
Imagine that I am looking at the sunset and a peasant comes to me and says,
What are you looking at?
You seem all enraptured.
And I say,
I'm enraptured by the beauty.
And the poor man comes every day at evening to look for beauty.
Where is this beauty?
He says,
Well,
He can see the sun.
He can see the clouds.
He can see the trees.
But beauty,
He doesn't realize that beauty isn't a thing.
Beauty is a way of looking at things.
See?
Look at creation.
Hopefully,
Someday,
Heart looking will be given to you.
And when you're looking at creation,
Don't look for anything sensational now.
You know,
You may have heard of the God experience and you're nothing sensational.
Just look.
Just observe.
And don't look at ideas.
Look at creation.
And hopefully,
It will be given to you because you will become quiet as you look.
And silence will overtake you.
And then you may see.
