silence

If the Pentateuch be true, religious persecution is a duty. The dungeons of the Inquisition were temples, and the clank of every chain upon the limbs of heresy was music in the ear of God. If the Pentateuch was inspired, every heretic should be destroyed; and every man who advocates a fact inconsistent with the sacred book, should be consumed by sword and flame.In the Old Testament no one is told to reason with a heretic, and not one word is said about relying upon argument, upon education, nor upon intellectual development__othing except simple brute force. Is there to-day a christian who will say that four thousand years ago, it was the duty of a husband to kill his wife if she differed with him upon the subject of religion? Is there one who will now say that, under such circumstances, the wife ought to have been killed? Why should God be so jealous of the wooden idols of the heathen? Could he not compete with Baal? Was he envious of the success of the Egyptian magicians? Was it not possible for him to make such a convincing display of his power as to silence forever the voice of unbelief? Did this God have to resort to force to make converts? Was he so ignorant of the structure of the human mind as to believe all honest doubt a crime? If he wished to do away with the idolatry of the Canaanites, why did he not appear to them? Why did he not give them the tables of the law? Why did he only make known his will to a few wandering savages in the desert of Sinai? Will some theologian have the kindness to answer these questions? Will some minister, who now believes in religious liberty, and eloquently denounces the intolerance of Catholicism, explain these things; will he tell us why he worships an intolerant God? Is a god who will burn a soul forever in another world, better than a christian who burns the body for a few hours in this? Is there no intellectual liberty in heaven? Do the angels all discuss questions on the same side? Are all the investigators in perdition? Will the penitent thief, winged and crowned, laugh at the honest folks in hell? Will the agony of the damned increase or decrease the happiness of God? Will there be, in the universe, an eternal auto da fe?

The New Man means to develop all the three dimensions of being, all the three doors to God: the head, the dimension of thinking, logic and reason, the heart - the dimension of joy, trust, intuition, relationships, beauty, creativity and a sense of unity in love and the being, the dimension of meditation, silence, emptiness and oneness with life.The first level of the head is the dimension of ideas, intellect, hypothesis, theories, logic, analysis, rationality and dualistic thinking.The first level is the level of the mind, which means a continuous oscillation like a pendulum between the mind's memories of the past and the ideas, dreams and expectations of the future. The second level of the heart is the dimension of joy, acceptance, trust, understanding, trust, friendship, intuition, empathy, creativity, compassion, humor, playfulness and a sense of unity in love. The third level of being is the dimension of presence, awareness, meditation, silence, emptiness and wholeness. The third level is our connection with our inner life source.

To think is to have doubt....yet even thinking will bring you to "no thought"....eventually.

The calmness was fracturing, tendrils of fear seeping through her mind like ivy. Once the fear consumed her, she'd run.

When you silence your mind, faith walks in.

The voice of the Soul can be heard within the silence of the unaffected mind. Listen.

Or_ maybe I__ not going crazy. __aybe I__ some sort of android-cyborg-clone-thing, and I__ just breaking down.I__ not sure which way is worse.Dad laughs. __ou__e not in your right mind, dear,_ he says. __o, no, no, you__e not.__nd then___ilence.Dad fades away. The reverie chair disappears.There__ just blackness. I remember then that I am in the reverie of something dead. Whatever that thing was, it was dead.And, just as I__ starting to wonder if, perhaps, I have died, too, I see a light, far away in the corner of the dreamscape. The light isn__ soft; it__ not glowing. It crackles like silent lightning, burning with electricity, sparks flying out and fizzling in the dark.I don__ know why__t makes no sense, the way dreams often don____ut I want to touch the light.So I do.

Don't ever underestimate the value and power of doing nothing sometime.

Silence free the mind from its verbal cage.

We may wonder what is going on in the back of the mind and what betides in the mood of some people who live on the edge of isolation and emotional poverty. They belong to life__ outcasts: deserted by affection, deprived of physical or lingual contact and finally reduced to silence. ("Why didn't he ask ? ")

Sometimes you gotta take a break from all the noise to appreciate the beauty of silence.

When we feel lost in time, with only shadows of the past living in our mind; when the moment, which __as", no longer "is_ and when only silence remains, loads of questions arise. We can cry a river or we may wonder: __hat went wrong?

Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.

He kept coming back to the silence. It was so big. And surprising. Even when a donkey brayed somewhere in the same valley - loud, long and loaded with loneliness - it did not change the silence, it enhanced it. Like jewels around a beautiful neck. Ed smiled. You can be at the poshest hotel in the country, on the planet even, but a farmer can still put a lonely donkey in the field next door. In the same way he couldn't control what arose in his mind - or appears in the world around him - but he could give it space.

Silent our body is a sacred temple, A place to connect with other people. Can't we just stay any younger? Really, we might keep it stronger, Elated, rather than so tilted or feeble!!

A silence overtook the odd family in their odd surroundings as loss became the mockery of the moment, and they were caught up in the emotional release that is common in a theater audience after the sudden ending of a tragic movie; the curtain closes and the people are still in their seats, numb and sighing their way back into reality.

Tolerance! The virtue that makes one bite his tongue so that he can tear out his hair.

Valentine reminds us that to be fully human is to be both a story teller and a story dweller."--- Christina Meldrum, author of Madapple and Amaryllis in Blueberry