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The reality of being

(PHOTO: LAURENCE FREEMAN, THE HOLY LAND)

Silence is the most effective language that enables us to commune with that experience. As Fr John said, not to experience the experience, not to try to anticipate it or imagine it or have clever ideas about it, but to be, to be one with it. To be one, to experience Being. Even the word ‘experience’ Maggie Ross* says, is a very dangerous word because ‘experience’ always suggests something happened which I am looking at, thinking about or deciding about. Silence introduces us to this reality of being, not through words like you look up something in the dictionary – you don’t know what it means and you look it up, and that definition doesn’t help you either, so you look up the words in the definition, and you just go round and round in circles. Silence breaks out of that circularity of words and thought, into a direct realisation.

(The Experience of Being by Laurence Freeman OSB 

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