Direct line to the divine.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ~ Blaise Pascal
I often find myself desiring a direct line to God. Thinking “if only I could communicate with the divine, then I would know what to do. Who to be. Where to go.”
You can imagine my embarrassment, then, when I remind myself that a direct line to the divine is something I’ve always had. Because the divine lives within me, as it lives within you. A seed planted at birth. Each of us, different receptors of the “…same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditation).
A share of the divine that calls to us, saddened we don’t hear its ring. A Muse, saddened we don’t hear it sing. It’s not that we can’t hear it; it’s that we won’t pay the toll: stillness.
In my own attempts to be still I often find myself rebelling against the idea of slowing down. As if there is some darker force at work, anxious to keep me from tapping into stillness lest I unleash the beauty it holds. But then I remind myself: when we are still and remove the static, we create the space to consult our conscience. Our soul. The piece of God that lives in all of us. In the stillness, we cut through the noise and tap into a direct line to the divine.
Then the enemy attacks again. “You don’t have time to be still” it reasons, “you live in a busy world and time waits for nobody! You cannot afford to slow down lest the world pass you by.” And so, I fall back into the noisy rhythm of daily life, and drown out the call of divine once again. The world turns faster and faster, twirling me along and spinning me around, leaving me dizzy and disoriented – my mind, foggy.
Scampering from task to task because it makes me feel productive. I’ve been conditioned to believe that busy equals important. That time spent in stillness is “dead” time and “dead” time is the enemy. So I fill any “dead” time with the device in my pocket that offers distraction on demand. More noise. More static.
We humans are addicted to distraction and technology has exposed us. We don’t dare let the noise die down because of the anxieties that await when we turn off the noise we’ve deployed to escape from ourselves.
In the stillness, we’re forced to confront the demons we’ve stuffed in the corners of our minds, where they stand ready to devour us with overwhelming anxiety and fear. And that’s a dark place. So we never turn the noise off. We continue to plod along, from distraction to distraction, wondering why we feel aimless and empty.
As Blaise Pascal put it in the 1600s, “[a]ll of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We march methodically toward death distracted by more – more achievements, more things, more noise – hoping it fill the hole that is, in the words of my favorite musician (Jon Bellion), “stupid deep.”
Yet the answers we are looking for lie in the silence we so fear. And we’ve all experienced the beauty. It’s in moments of stillness where ideas, inspirations, and clarity come to us. In the middle of meditation, it materializes. Mid-prayer it’s the voice that speaks to us. When showering, it’s the idea that pops into your mind as if placed by the water droplets pelting our head. Wherever you find stillness, so too will you find answers.
As the song goes: “[i]n the secret, in the quiet place. In the stillness, you are there.” In the stillness, that’s where God is. That’s why Moses goes to the top of the mountain to retrieve the Ten Commandments. It’s why Monks seclude themselves in mountains. By cultivating the stillness to consult your soul, and what it calls you to be, you consult God, and what he made you to be. In that moment, you know what you need to do. In that moment, you have a direct line to the divine.
How? You might ask. Sit with yourself and watch your thoughts until you get bored. Go for a walk or a run without headphones. Find solitude. Give yourself a chance to hear what your soul has been trying to tell you. Turn the nob on the radio a few notches to remove the static and tune into the soul that has been calling out. The soul that you were born with. The soul that, in my belief, connects you with God and all other living things. The soul that gives you a direct line to the divine.
So if you, like I have many times, are struggling to find purpose or direction in your life, I pray that you find the time to clear the static and tune into your soul – I suspect it has something to say. Use your direct line to the divine.
Book Suggestions:
Stillness is the Key – Ryan Holiday