The Silence

I find myself on a quest to be with this creative force and understand it. As I have said before, I call the force God and believe it to be inside us and outside of us. It permeates everything, so how can I be on a quest to be with God? It is the only way I can describe it. Another way to express this maybe to explain it as being at one with God. Many ancient sources suggest loosing the self, the ego, to become one with God / the universe. Yet, surely we are given self to be individual? I am not talking about being an egoist, but being unique, for we have been given this rite. I am talking about being oneself with God / the universe.
In the silence of meditation, the clearing of the mind, one catches glimpses of this eternal force. In the silence, we discover the nature of it, its way, its being. Getting in to the silence is through meditation. I have found Zen very helpful in this regard. The guidelines for Zen practice, not belief, encourage discipline of the meditative process whilst sitting and moving. In the same way we achieve muscle memory by learning movement and fine motor movements through years of unwitting practice; in the same way we learn to breathe, speak and walk, we can learn to meditate. Maintaining the practice throughout our daily lives is difficult, but not impossible. Some, like monks and nuns, may choose a devotional life to enhance contemplative life, but I am in favour of keeping contemplation in everyday life; work, rest, socialising and shopping, etc. So part of my quest is not just to find and stay in the silence, but to bring it with myself into every situation. For the silence is very noisy anyway. In a Zen-like way, silence is noise. It's the crackle of a flame, the wind in the trees, the rain on the window, the chattering of birds, the fluttering of butterfly wings, the murmurs of people, the footstep on grass, the gentle inspiration and expiration of breath, and everyday life. When you learn to hear the silence, you can hear it anywhere and everywhere. The silence is being audibly at peace with the environment. I will explain how to find the silence later.
In my journey to be at one with God, I have realised that it is a force that we work with, not against. It is energy, but not like Chi. We tend to call it faith, but it is a force. We cannot own it, nor bend it. It works in union with us. We cannot tell it, we have to ask. It is a cooperative energy. It's a force that works for good that communicates between us, God, and the object. It is respectful and gentle. If you had a power, you would use it to your advantage, but this force is not an owned power. It is a mutual request being acted on, a prayer, an act of faith. I tell you that if you believe what you are asking for and can envision it happening, then it will happen. If it is good, right and beneficent it will come to pass, but it cannot go against the way of things. It can only go with the way, the flow, the natural order of things. And this is why you must learn about the constant changes that all things go through. Everything changes except the force, the creative spark, God. There is no death, it is merely change. There is no decay, it's a transition.
The silence helps us to understand this. It helps us to be at one with the energy, the way, God, the force, the universe, with all things. Because the energy, the silence, is already inside you and in everything, you could talk to a leaf and ask it to fall, ask for shower of rain on a cloudless day, ask a tree to come back to life, and ask the wind to ease its temper. You cannot control it, you ask for it to happen.
To find the silence you must believe you can find it, then you can be with it, and at one with it. It is learning to keep it with you wherever you go, through the many changes, that you will stay with it and it within you. With time you will learn to understand this.