Sacred silence engenders stillness. It IS stillness. And that stillness opens up the dimension of spiritual existence -- that luminous world that awaits our discovery as soon as we redirect our attention from external things to our own radiant depths... Silence is not merely a discipline; rather, it is primarily a state of being. It is in, through, and as silence that we discover our authentic identity, the Self.
The spiritual function of fierce terrain...is to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the abandonment of language and the relinquishment of ego. A vast expanse of jagged stone, desert sand, and towering thunderheads has a way of challenging all the mental constructs in which we are tempted to take comfort and pride, thinking we have captured the divine. The things that ignore us save us in the end.