I walked out onto a dock in the Gulf of Mexico. I ceased to exist. I experienced being a part of the sea breeze, the movement of the water and the fish, the light rays cast by the sun, the colors of the palms and tropical flowers. I had no sense of past or future. It was not a particularly blissful experience; it was terrifying. It was the kind of ecstatic experience I'd invested a lot of energy in avoiding. I did not experience myself as the SAME as the water, the wind, and the light, but as participating with them in the SAME SYSTEM of movement. We were all dancing together.
We need quiet time in the presence of God. Although we want to make all our time time for God, we will never succeed if we do not reserve a specific and consistent amount of time to listen in the Silence. This asks for much discipline and risk-taking, because we often have something more urgent to do and "just sitting there" and "doing nothing" may disturb us more than it helps. But there is no way around this. Being useless and silent in the presence of God belongs to the core of all prayer. In the beginning, we often hear our own unruly inner noises more loudly than God's voice. This is at times very hard to tolerate. But slowly, very slowly, we discover that the silent time makes us quiet and deepens our awareness of ourselves and God. Then, very soon, we start to miss these moments when we are deprived of them, and before we are fully aware of it, an inner momentum has developed that draws us more and more into silence and closer to that still point where God speaks to us.