11th December, 2024
John Main, Word Into Silence (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980), 71.
Image: Joshua Earle, UK, unsplash.com/@joshuaearle
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'Language may not be able to lead us into the ultimate communion but it is the atmosphere in which we first draw the breath of consciousness. It expands our consciousness and leads us to silence, but only in and through silence do we become fully conscious.
As an example of this somewhat abstract point, let me turn to the idea of our personal harmony. As an idea we have to talk about it in language. Language uses words. Words have meaning to the extent that they do not mean something else and so to talk about harmony we must analyse, distinguish, separate. By personal harmony I mean the integration, the perfect co-operation of mind and heart, body and spirit. But when I talk about them like this, as separate entities, am I not suggesting that they actually work independently of each other? Of course you know and I know that they do not work for themselves but they work for the whole. If I hear some joyful news I feel that joy in my body, I know it in my mind, and it expands my spirit. All these things happen, they are altogether my response, my involvement in what is happening to me. It is not that my body is telling my mind something or that my mind is communicating something to me through body language. I am a whole person and I respond wholly.*
We know that we are this whole person, this harmony and yet we do not know it because this knowledge has not yet become fully conscious. Perhaps we could say that the conscious harmony that lives in perfect joy and liberty at the centre of our being has not yet expanded and spread itself throughout our being. To allow it to do so we must simply remove the obstacle of narrowly self-conscious thought, self-important language. In other words we must become silent. If a man really did know himself as body-mind-spirit, as the harmony of these three, then he would be on the way to making that knowledge fully conscious throughout his whole being. But modern man, at any rate, has lost the knowledge of his spirit and confounded it with his mind. As a result, he has lost that sense of his own balance and proportion as a creature which should lead him into the creative silence of prayer. …
The way to become fully conscious of this essential harmony of our being is to be silent. And to meditate is to be silent. The harmony of our essence, our centre, then, as it were blossoms and diffuses itself throughout every part and molecule of our being. … [73] It is for us to recognise and accept it, and this we do, not by being clever or self-analytical, but by being silent, by being simple. The gift is already given. … Meditation is simply our way to knowing it.'
* See 1 Corinthians 12: 12–26.
Pages 71-72 & 73.