Dalton Roberts

Dalton Roberts
--My Sunday Journal
IPS Features

CULTIVATE A THIRST FOR SILENCE
5-1-05

We submerge ourselves in the numbing fog of noise to keep from thinking. We flee thinking because thinking hurts.

Well, not all thinking hurts. Popcorn thinking where we flit from one thing to another with no objective doesn’t hurt. It is really a form of mental noise. We use it as a way to amuse ourselves.

I wrote a song with these lines:

I got tired and left the city

With its inhumanity

And it’s people cold as sidewalks

Running crazy in the streets

I ain’t got me no appointments

No sirens screaming in the streets

A man who can write these lines has made his peace with silence. I have actually come to crave it. In silence I am able to think about the things that matter in my life, the values I will hold, and the awareness I will cultivate.

Responding to something I had written about total quiet, a reader wrote. “If I thought I was going to have an hour or two of silence, I would make sure I conjured up drama. When I was alone I was so hard on myself. It gave me time to think.”

Our soul desperately needs silence so we can become aware of our strange, sick weird way of churning out drama. It needs silence so we can receive light on why we are so hard on ourselves.

As Vernon Howard pointed up over and over, learning to see ourselves as spiritual detectives tracing clues to our attitudes and behaviors is the most exciting venture in this life. No case you will ever work on as your own personal spiritual detective is more important than discovering why you have allowed noise to hypnotize you. It’s related to the TV going endlessly, horns blaring and sirens screaming all around us but we will come at last to realize the most damaging noise comes from our own mind.

To become our own spiritual detective all we need to do is to make time for silence and to find the joy it brings in growing a bigger soul. We will know we have broken the hypnosis of noise when seeking the sweetness of silence becomes one of our greatest joys.

Visit Dalton’s website at www.daltonroberts.com and peruse his gathered writings at www.opsfeatures.com.

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