Any kind of thought in the silence would be distraction. And we can say, like Meister Eckhart, ‘There is nothing so much like God as silence,’ because Simone Weil said, ‘attention without distraction is God’. So here we are in silence, not looking at, not objectifying, free from thought.
So listen to Fr John as he describes the stages of sounding the mantra in our hearts. He says:
This could be described as like pushing a pendulum that needs only a slight stimulus to set it swinging in a calm and steady rhythm.
(The Art of Waiting by Laurence Freeman OSB)
