A Tradition of Silence. A Tradition of Silence. Quotes from the Masters. The more I read, the more I surf the web, I am finding an increasing amount of. There. is a commonality of experience and declaration. It is the genuine heart of. Spirit speaking here through the ages. The voices differ, the textures differ. Those who have found Pure. Silence: the freedom within, are moved simply to share it. The following are. The unity (of God) is un- necessitous. The mind is. rid of light when it is rid of mode; and it is rid of darkness when letting go. Then it loses both light. Such is. the estrangement in one as foreshadowed in the ordinary mind, but the. O unfathomable void, bottomless to creatures and to. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not. God, nor from ourselves. There's nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing. I come into this beauty. My Wife Shows No Affection : A true, personal story from the experience, I Am Married But Lonely. I am a 39 year old man in pretty good shape, 6'2" and fairly good. A Tradition of Silence: Quotes from the Masters The more I read, the more I surf the web, I am finding an increasing amount of treasure in the words of many. Alone in the Wilderness Part II on DVD (New Release) Click here to view a clip from "Alone in the Wilderness part II" Dick Proenneke's simple, yet profound account of. R e t u r n t o b i r d d r o p p i n g s. Read Some Robert Service Poetry. THE SPELL OF THE YUKON AND OTHER VERSES by ROBERT W. On a chilly day in March 1934, immediately after a heavy snowfall, (Anandamayi) Ma visited Solan in the Simla Hills and temporarily lived, incognito, in a cave. The Lonely Shining Goblin: Episode 3 by Javabeans. We’re only on Episode 3, but wow are we in for massive developments. I wouldn’t say that the story is moving. Read India's top 6 safari parks. Sasan Gir Wildlife Sanctuary, Gujarat. Chances of seeing a tiger here are zero. Dear Shelby, Well, I think a few months in was when I first felt that “thud.” Certainly not a fun experience. And I’m with youI thought I could get through. Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that. Be more silent.' Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the. Then, when all these are quiet. In that state truth will reveal. It will appear in front of you and ask. People confuse the word “alone” with lonely. In a society where marriage has been held up as the ideal, they misunderstand how those who’ve never married, or. After World War II, literary critics in France, for whom war. They. grow and flourish and then return to the source. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your. God has been. everlastingly working in Silence, unobserved, unheard, except by those who. His Infinite Silence. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and. How, but in quietness and in confidence, in. Silence? How, but by learning to abide in a quietness. Then there is that sense of absolute silence in the brain. All. the movement of thought has ended. There is an ancient peace you. The self is that where there is absolutely no . That is called Silence. The Self itself is the world; the Self itself. Not the idea of. silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts. You. know that Mystery by being Emptiness, not by conceptualizing it, naming. Silence has been in the space youare at this very. It will remain after you leave and. It. is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one's mind and one's subtle body rest. When we allow this knowing into. What the old. sorcerers were after was the final dramatic, end result of reaching that. Some very talented practitioners need only a. Others, less talented, need. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called. This is the moment when sorcerers return to the TRUE nature of. The old sorcerers always called it . Only in deep silence do we leave. Words and language deal only with concepts, and cannot approach. Reality. Ramesh Balsekar. One realizes the Absolute as one's true identity, totally beyond all. The emphasis. is on the transcendence of the world, including the body and mind. One becomes. the immense solidity of the absolute, totally still and inactive, while. In. the vastness of silence, the world arises in all its multiplicity, but all the. Presence which is a consciousness. Almaas. Discovering silence. Your chances of discovering this inner silence serendipitously, are slim. You. could get a taste of it when your hand unexpectedly gets caught in a lawn mower. You are jolted into silence, and your whole thought process gets. Or you may have a glimpse of it when you jump out. Or when you jump out for the 3. In these extreme situations your mind might go into. Your inner. dialogue can come to a halt because of radical circumstance. And in a way it's a. This silence in your brain, this acute awareness, is so refreshing. And. Silence kept quiet about what she was unable to describe: the Unspeakable. He is. a no- thing- ness beyond being. The subject that can be seen is not your home- ground. What. is sometimes called the ultimate subject is nothing other than silence. This is consciousness, the light behind all. The subject that is talked about is still in duality, the subject- object relationship. Jean Klein. I shall update this page as more quotes appear. The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce. Noah Pierce’s headstone gives his date of death as July 2. No one is sure what pushed him to it. He said in his suicide note it was impotence—a common side effect of post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It was “the snowflake that toppled the iceberg,” he wrote. But it could have been the memory of the Iraqi child he crushed under his Bradley. It could have been the unarmed man he shot point- blank in the forehead during a house- to- house raid, or the friend he tried madly to gather into a plastic bag after he had been blown to bits by a roadside bomb, or—as the fragments of Noah’s poetry might lead you to believe—it could have been the doctor he killed at a checkpoint. A self- portrait of Noah Pierce in Iraq. Noah Pierce grew up in Sparta, Minnesota, a town of fewer than one thousand on the outskirts of the Quad Cities—Mountain Iron, Virginia, Eveleth, and Gilbert—on the Mesabi Iron Range. Discovered on the heels of the Civil War, the range’s ore deposit is the largest in the United States. These were the mines that made the Second Industrial Revolution. Range steel became the tracks of railroads, the wires of suspension bridges, the girders of skyscrapers. It became the weapons and artillery of the World Wars. WELCOME TO MOUNTAIN IRON, THE TACONITE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD reads a sign greeting visitors along the highway. There are so many open pit mines that the cities seem perched on tiny outcrops, overlooking gaping holes ready to engulf them. Around the clock, deep metallic groans come out of the ground, and freight trains barrel through, horns screeching. Blasting takes place so close to people’s houses, residents open their front doors so the pressure doesn’t blow out their windows. Locals are proud of their hardworking, hard- drinking heritage. There are more than twenty bars on Eveleth’s half- mile- long main street. On a typical night last May, when I was there, loudspeakers affixed to lampposts blared John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and Harleys thundered through town. One bar closed early, when a drunk got thrown through the front window. Right from the start, Noah had seemed ill- equipped for life on the range. He was a quiet, sensitive kid. He kept a tight circle of friends and passed time with them building tree forts and playing army in the woods. Noah’s biological father, Dale Pierce, a deep- sea diver who worked on oil rigs, separated from Noah’s mother shortly after she became pregnant, but Tom Softich, Noah’s stepfather, treated the thin- skinned boy as his own. When Noah turned six, Tommy began taking him hunting, and by thirteen Noah had his own high- powered rifle. For practice, they went rabbit shooting together at a small clearing a mile from their house. It became such a regular place to find Noah that his family and friends began referring to the clearing simply as “the spot.”When Noah went missing in July 2. Iraq, police ordered a countywide search. His friend Ryan Nelson thought he might know where to look. When he pulled up to the spot, he immediately recognized Noah’s truck. Inside, Ryan found his friend slumped over the bench seat, his head blown apart, the gun in his right hand. Half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Special Blend lay on the passenger seat, and beer cans were strewn about. On the dash lay his photo IDs; he had stabbed each photo through the face. And on the floorboard was the scrawled, rambling suicide note. It was his final attempt to explain the horrors he had seen—and committed. Noah Pierce was not the only veteran wrestling with depression and PTSD. Katz, Deputy Chief Patient Care Services Officer for Mental Health at the Department of Veterans Affairs, became embroiled in scandal when a memo surfaced in which he instructed members of his staff to suppress the results of an internal VA investigation into the number of veterans attempting suicide. Based on their surveys and tabulations from the NCHS’s National Death Index and the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System, Katz estimated that between 5. It is possible that the number of suicide deaths among veterans in 2. Iraq and Afghanistan since 2. It pains Noah’s family and friends that the Pentagon will never add him—nor the thousands like him—to the official tally of 4,0. Likewise, PTSD and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are excluded from the count of 5. PTSD and TBI often have far greater long- term health effects than bullet wounds or even lost limbs. A recent study by the RAND Corporation found that one in five (approximately 3. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from depression or stress disorders and another 3. TBIs that place them at a higher risk for depression and stress disorders. Noah’s mother, Cheryl, believes her son’s death could have been avoided had he received counseling. Statistically, veterans outside the VA system are four times more likely to attempt suicide than those within the system. Now Cheryl’s mission is to have a clause inserted into every standard military contract that would require veterans to visit a therapist every two weeks of the first year after a combat deployment. Noah was an excellent soldier, and if it was mandatory, he would have gone faithfully to every appointment. But it wasn’t.”Cheryl Softich is a slight, chain- smoking woman of fifty, whose disarmingly direct approach to conversation could easily be mistaken as brusque by an outsider. She sank into the oversize leather couch in her living room, recounting her twelve- hour labor, two days before Christmas 1. She remembered the blinding pain of each contraction and smiled when she recalled the doctor asking permission for a group of twenty medical students to observe. But then Cheryl’s smile faded. Did not know how or why, but I was going to outlive this child.”Cheryl Softich. The feeling returned the day, not long after 9/1. Noah came home with enlistment papers. He was a few months shy of eighteen and needed a parental signature. Well, no child of mine is going off to war thinking I don’t support him. Did I try to talk him out of it? Did I finally give up trying to talk him out of it? Yes, because it was what he was going to do, so I accepted it, and I was proud of him for his decision.”Not everybody was as understanding. He expressed surprise at seeing fellow soldiers break down in tears, homesick and scared, but admitted to feeling a little that way himself. Noah’s unit—First Platoon, Bravo Battery, First Battalion, Third Air Defense Artillery—was assigned to the front line. He rolled northward in a Bradley Linebacker, a heavily armored infantry track vehicle equipped with surface- to- air Stinger missiles, but Saddam’s army had virtually no helicopters or jets, so Noah’s platoon was changed to infantry and tasked with kicking in doors and searching houses. By early April, American troops had reached Baghdad, and the airwaves were filled with images of Saddam’s statue toppling in Firdos Square and the troops being hailed as conquering heroes. Noah was outraged. All the soldiers I know including me think it is a bunch of bullshit. We came in and invaded this country and murdered a lot of innocent people. So tell me how we are heros.”Barely a month into the invasion, Noah already felt beset by the moral ambiguity of house- to- house raids. Plus you never had to shoot people in the drivers hatch. Even the gunner has it better. All they ever shot were vehicles, so they didn’t have to see the affects. Unlike when you shoot someone in the head at point blank range. Did they show that shit on T. V.?” The violation of bursting into someone’s home and the consequences of any errors haunted him. Plus, he’s on his knees with his hands on his head but you are scared out of your mind. Would you pull the trigger? Say you just shoot out of instinct like hunting, like when you suddenly flush a grouse (dad should know what I mean). Then, after, you realize what you did. Is that considered murder?”The questions read as oblique confession, and Noah admitted that there were “some things I can’t even get myself to write about.” For some of those things, he had taken photographs—though he was uncertain what he would ever do with the images, whom he could show them to. Noah was impressed by their scale; he liked the palm trees, and he enjoyed the sweet tea. But his unit’s turf was the Abu Ghraib neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad—home to the infamous prison and the last main road before Fallujah, the cradle of the insurgency. One night, Noah’s platoon went out on a mission to guard buildings against looters. While he was in the turret of his Bradley, a van drove toward him and someone started shooting. I just finished the magazine. I watched it for a minute and someone ran around from the passenger side and dragged (I assume the body) into the back seat. I didn’t shoot anymore and just let them leave. The gunner and track commander were asleep in the truck and didn’t wake up so I never mentioned it to anybody. I can’t wait until I get out of here and I hope I never have to do something like this again.”The letter ended: “It’s definitely been an experience I’ll never forget, hopefully I will be able to forget most of it someday, but I doubt it.”“Everything good Noah got from Tommy. From me he inherited an overly sensitive heart,” Cheryl said one afternoon, her voice quavering as she spoke. She wanted me to understand that, no matter the terrible things her son may have done, he was a good person. It was his sensitivity—her sensitivity—that burrowed under his skin, that would come to make him edgy and aggressive. By summer 2. 00. 3, he was suffering constant nightmares and couldn’t sleep. The difference is, he suffered from it. He felt guilty afterwards.”But with each passing day in the desert, Noah’s guilt was turning to anger, confusion, and, finally, despair. I have so much hatred in me I could go murder more sandniggers and I would just smile. That goes for almost everyone here.
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