Your silent center
You have a silent center, a place within your actual flesh and blood body that is no place, where you and God are not other than each other, you are obscurely one, bound together in an infinite peacefulness.* The reason I say that it is a place that is “no place” is because you can't go inside yourself, get it, and remove it like a tumor. As one teacher says, “it is not at your disposal.” Your silent center is the ground of your being where God is pouring you into existence, moment by moment. It is there that the peace you are looking for resides in endless supply.
Until you discover the peace that dwells within your actual flesh and blood body you will be subject to the brutal whims of exterior circumstances the vast majority of which are entirely unpredictable. It is easy to get stuck in a false sense that if you can just solve this “one particular problem” everything will be okay. All the while another perhaps more challenging and insidious problem is lurking secretly in the background waiting to pounce and wrench from your grip the unsteady peace you’ve attained through problem solving.
As long as your inner peace is contingent upon exterior circumstances being just so, you will be on an exhausting quest for something that you will never find. When you quit trying, die to the ambitious agenda of the problem solving (ego) self, then you can sink down into your silent center, discover the Divine waiting for you there, and re-emerge into the wonder of your exterior life loving all that is right in front of you with God from the place of union, your silent center.
I am afraid that that all sounds like pie in the sky and that you are thinking that it is perhaps too poetically put to be of any use in the real world. But it’s the truth, it’s what Jesus is talking about when he says, “As long as you’re trying to save your life you're just in the act of losing it,” that is, you’re tossing it to the lions of circumstance. Saving your life means trying to find peace on your own terms by taming the world around you. To take up your cross and die, or lose your life for Jesus’ sake, is to let go of the illusion that when things are just right you’ll find and feel peace. Show me where that has ever happened in a sustained way. The good news is that God is with and within you. The good news is that you have a silent center, and you can go there. The good news is that you don’t have to be a problem solver to find and feel peace, you just have to accept the love that is your birthright and believe that it is the thing for which you actually hunger.
*You are not God, nor am I. We can all agree on that! However, God dwells within you, therefore you are not other than God. Don’t resolve the tension of that insight and you’re beginning to traverse the wondrous, trembling ground of mystical theology. Your oneness is obscure, that is, hard to envision and sense in any way, but it is absolutely true nonetheless.
