Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness

by Robert Sardello

Book Overview

In this chaotic world, we need "Silence" to maintain and enlarge our inner connection with the mystery of the world, to find a sense of spiritual direction, and to become more receptive to healing... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556437935
• ISBN13: 9781556437939
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An Encouragement of Light Against My Being

This compassionate inviting meditation walks with me every day into the center of my heart and abides with me there patiently, intimately present to me, to my journey. It is an encouragement of light against my being.

Changed my Life

When I started reading Silence I knew I was being met at a level I rarely experience with books. I can only read very small sections at a time; the incredibly rich material invites me to go into the experience of silence, rather than describing something in a self-help, patronizing way. Robert's language comes from a deep well of active listening to the sacred pulsations in Life. Silence is an antidote to the tremendous noise of our times, both internal and external. I teach sound-healing courses, and I choose this small book as our textbook for the course, knowing that truly healing sound must originate from the depths of silence. I travel with this book, have gifted and recommended it to many people, and if I was on a desert island, this is one I'd definitely want to have with me.

Generosity of Spirit

Sardello's SILENCE is so beautifully rich as to slow one's rate of breathing. The exquisite passages by his wife, residing in that realm between prose and poety, deepen the body's response. Open this book at any point, read a paragraph or two, and feel soul expand as the body warms and calms. If you are looking for a still point in this whirling world, this is the master key.

Entering the Silence

Robert Sardello is unique among contemporary authors on the spiritual life. He brings to his work an extraordinary subtlety and depth of theory and practice that is simultaneously soul-based, philosophically sophisticated, and groundbreaking in its spiritual--and even theological--implications. For more than thirty years, Sardello has walked a lonely, sometimes controversial, path weaving together phenomenological attention to the immediate data of consciousness with an archetypal Jungian devotion to the needs of the soul--both within the methodological framework provided by Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy. Silence marks a breakthrough in this journey. All elements knit seamlessly--and effortlessly--into a truly new spiritual psychology expressed in the open language of the heart. Silence is thus not so much a book about silence as it an embodiment of the way to experience it through the heart. Compact in size, elegantly and simply written, it is a difficult book to review precisely because it is so much what it is about. As the fruit of meditation it must itself be read meditatively: it must be experienced. The experience is both fruitful and rewarding. There are nine short chapters. We first meet Silence as a companion-presence, the most primary phenomenon of existence, always and everywhere inviting us in. Entering her, we seem both to find her at the center of our being and our being at her center, and yet she comes to us from without, from the periphery, embracing and intimately blessing us with unfathomable wholeness and renewal. But she is not easy to find, especially in our noisy world. She loves to hide, and seems to conceal herself even as she reveals herself. Gradually, however, as we persist in her ways, letting go of ourselves in stillness and peace, we find that the boundaries between us and the world begin to dissipate. We begin to realize Silence is palpable, kind of subtle substance or being whose depth is intimately related to who and where we are: a kind of double mirror whose crossing-point is the heart. Situating ourselves there, we enter a kind of non-exteriority: everything is now within. We become aware of a multitude of currents of inner activity, of presences or qualities of silence. We realize that each thing has its own silence and that the world itself seems to arise in its inner being from a vast interplay of silences. Next we become aware of the guardians of silence, who protect its threshold: boredom, distraction, and fantasy--the familiar chaotic ego-driven gamut of images and feelings that the old masters called "demons." Overcoming the demons ensures that we enter Silence fully prepared. To enter, silence itself must become the practice, for only silence enters Silence. We must learn to sense her as a palpable mystery, for sensing assures the truthfulness of our experience. We must let our consciousness become a multidimensional sensing organ. For this, we need simply "to learn to be present to what happens when