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some food for meditation from an unlikely place
One of my favourite spiritual or religious times is listening to Orthodox monks, learning about orthodoxy in general and listening to their music.
I heard one story of Catholic students visiting mount Athos monastery and on learning of one of the monks daily practice of praying for hours on end, one of the students asked him 'you must have done a lot of sins to have to ask for forgiveness for so long' and the monk replied 'I just sit and look at god, and he sits and looks at me'.
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Another person, Father Lazarus, lived his life as an atheist marxist for his youth and on revelation went to live in a monastery, then later to live in the desert Jesus is believed to have gone into for 40 days and nights. When he was interviewed by a fellow westerner, they asked him about silence and he said.
"I was an atheist before I went to the monastery, so I needed to go a long journey from marxism, and atheism and existentialism which was all keeping me.. all the isms keeping me far away from god..." 'Is silence important to you?'
"Naturally. first of all, there are kinds of silence. There is going somewhere quiet, away from traffic, helping you to be quiet. It helps you to breath slowly, enjoy the aesthetic pleasure. But this is transient it does not last. There is another kind of silence which is interior silence, it is much harder to find but it is long lasting.
For example, I live in this desert and I almost never meet another person for months. Yet if I cannot find that interior silence, my mind can be as loud and as busy as if I was in new york..." "it is about stilling the voices that are speaking, speaking, speaking inside you."
I hope this gets you in a good state of mind to meditate. It helps me.
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