ENTERING THE SILENCE
“Entering the Silence is an ecstatic state in which the human consciousness is transcended and, while it lasts, all sense of personality is lost.”
“You must dwell with God ere you can think God’s thoughts or respond to the vibrations of His Soundless Voice.”
Our Many Lives
The mystic sees that we live many aspects of life within our one life. We have our outer life that we live before the world and whose achievements may be worthy for history to record as constituting our life. That is our outer, public, or physical life.
Then we have a life that is known only to our family and close friends. That is our personal life. Then we have our mental life which is shared only by those of like mind and ideas.
We also have our psychic life in which we commune with our loved ones who have finished their work here on Earth and have withdrawn from the outer physical body to continue their life manifestation in a finer body, “one flight up with their overcoats off” as we express it.
We also have our own life in those higher realms when we withdraw from the physical during sleep and mingle with our loved ones up there in that higher school of life. For, remember, there is no death. Only a withdrawal from a temporary and lower manifestation of life to function in a higher.
The Real Life
But back of all, we have that Inner Life of the Soul, that Real Self which is the Real Life and which animates all the forms in which we may manifest on all planes in all the worlds of manifestation. That is the mysterious Inner Self whose inner urge keeps us ever seeking, ever striving. Striving for what? For satisfaction. And why? That we may attain that happiness whose ultimate aim is heavenly bliss; that “peace which passeth all understanding”; the realization of the consciousness of the Divine within us.
How is this then to be attained? How do we enter into this silence?
“What in this imperfect world of Nature speaks so distinctly, so persistently to your heart? It is the Soundless Sound — that Divine Power which lies veiled behind all the imperfections.”
(From The Soundless Sound by The Teacher of the Order)
“He who would hear the voice of Nâda, “the Soundless Sound,” and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dhâranâ.
When he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE — the inner sound which kills the outer.
Then only, not till then, shall he forsake the region of Asat, the false, to come unto the realm of Sat, the true.
Before the soul can comprehend and may remember, she must unto the Silent Speaker be united.
For then the soul will hear and will remember.
And then to the inner ear will speak —The Voice of the Silence.”
(From The Voice of the Silence by H.P. Blavatsky)
It is this Divine Power, experienced in meditation as that Soundless Sound, also known as the Universal Christ Principle or the individualized Ray of God within each heart. This Ray is often called the First Begotten Son of God, the Spiritual Self, the Real Self, the Higher Self, the I Am Presence, the God within, the Christ-within, the Name of God, The Word, etc.
This Divine Power is contacted by going within, by the method of deep meditation, named here by Blavatsky as knowing the nature of Dhâranâ.
Dhâranâ, is the intense and perfect concentration of the mind upon some one interior object, (here the interior object is termed Nâda), accompanied by complete abstraction from everything pertaining to the external Universe, or the world of the senses.
The Great Silence is the Cosmic Reservoir of the Divine Consciousness, which in a definite purposeful way, is ever striving for greater and more perfect expressions of the Divine Ideal in nature and in man.
(From The Temple of Silence, Curtiss)
When Jesus told his disciples to enter into the closet and shut the door and pray to your Father in secret, the closet referred to the Silence, and the “door” which they were to shut was the door of the mind. To pray here means to meditate or to go within, and the Father who seeth in secret is the Higher Self, who does not require words, but who seeth in secret, i.e., in the Silence. The open reward is the peace, comfort and spiritual upliftment which comes as the result of such communing with the Father-in-heaven.
HPB left her pupils and disciples with a sublime treatise on entering the silence titled The Voice of the Silence, her last major work. This work was “Dedicated to the Few” ….. real mystics in the Theosophical Society. As The Teacher of the Order, she continued that work in the publication The Soundless Sound and devoted that work “To Those who can hear and in whose hearts an echo of the Soundless Sound has thrilled.”
Learn then and implement this Dhâranâ into your daily life.
Om Tat Sat.
