“Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. What the old sorcerers were after was the final dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence. Some very talented practitioners need only a few minutes of silence to reach that coveted goal. Others, less talented, need long periods of silence, perhaps more than one hour of quietude, before they reach the desired result. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called “stopping the world”, the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it’s always been. This is the moment when sorcerers return to the TRUE nature of man. The old sorcerers always called it ‘total freedom'”
~Don Juan (Carlos Castanada)~

“The world… has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living.  Not all…  are called to be hermits, but all…  need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.  When that inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting.  For he cannot go on happily for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul.  If man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person…  He becomes a kind of automaton, living without joy because he has lost his spontaneity.  He is no longer moved from within, but only from outside himself.”

~ Thomas Merton ~

The Prayer of the Heart

“To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea and desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light….few are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.” ~Thomas Merton~