By Dadi Janki
THE CALL OF THIS TIME IS A CALL FOR PEACE. In my early morning meditations, I can hear the call of the peaceless world for peace – not just for an end to conflict, but for a deep inner stillness and calm, which all souls remember as our original state.
If we are to find peace, first we must teach ourselves to become quiet and then we can become peaceful. Becoming peaceful means seizing the reins of the out-of-control mind and bringing the runaway thoughts to a halt. Once we have the mind's attention, we can begin to coax it to take us into silence, a true silence; not the place without sound, but the place in which we experience a deep sense of peace and a pervasive awareness of our well-being.
It is not an empty mind that elicits this state of peace. To move into this state of profound silence, we must train the intellect to create pure, good thoughts. We must train it to concentrate. Our wasteful thoughts burden us. Our habits of creating too many thoughts and too many words exhaust the intellect. We must ask, "How can I cultivate the habit of pure thought?"
Who is it that yearns to go into silence? It is I, the inner being, the soul. As I detach from my body and from bodily things, and turn away from the distractions of the world, I can face inwards to the inner being. Like a perfectly calm lake when all whispers of wind have stopped, the inner being shimmers, quietly reflecting the intrinsic qualities of the soul. Feelings of peace and well-being steal across my mind and, with them, thoughts of benevolence.
I let go of all thoughts of discontentment and am reminded of my oldest, most intrinsic state of being. I remember this inner calm. Though I have not been here recently, I remember it as my most fundamental awareness, and a feeling of happiness and contentment wells up inside of me. In this state I know every soul to be my friend. I am my own friend. I am deeply quiet. I am silent and utterly at peace.
This deep well of peace is the original state of the soul. When I am in this state, I feel the flow of love for humanity and I feel a state more elevated than what I would normally call happiness, a state of bliss. It is when I attain this state that something truly miraculous can happen. When I am in this state of complete soul-conscious rest, I become aware that another energy is beginning to flow into me. I feel strength and a power so expansive, that in this moment I know there is nothing I cannot do, nowhere I cannot reach.
When this happens, I am experiencing the connection with the divine energy and the flow of God's power into my inner being. If I stay focused inwards, connected with this stream of divine power, even the way I use the physical senses will be different. When I look at the world, I will see through my original nature of benevolence and experience compassion for the world.
It is in this experience that I know what silence power is. It is this power that transforms me inside, making me pure and powerful. When the soul and God are linked together, there is a power that reaches me and then reaches invisibly across to others, bringing about transformation in them, in nature, and in the world.
The secret of this power of silence is that I don't have to do the work of transformation. Divine power automatically transforms. Let me do the inner work. Let me go deeply into that experience of the original state of the self, and let there be silence so that God is able to do His work through me, His instrument.
