What many people don’t understand about the mantra is that we change the way we say it over time, as we learn with faith to just say it, saying it, sounding it, listening to it, and listening to it with deeper and deeper attention, until the mantra leads us into complete silence. And in this silence, we don’t have the thought, ‘I am silent’, because that would be another thought. So the silence is the absence of thought. 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.
The Art of Waiting by Laurence Freeman OSB
