The Wise Silence

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the Eternal One.

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in any hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay The Over-Soul. Emerson believed that the soul spreads itself into this time-space reality and then experiences life in a variety of human forms. He understood that everything is related, and we are part of the whole that connects all consciousness. The wise silence that injects us with the energy we project into this reality has limitless boundaries and infinite ways to express those boundaries. The nature of the force we call God is whole in every part of consciousness, and part of every whole of consciousness. We do see our world in pieces, but each piece represents a whole part of the wise silence within it.

Emerson started the 19th century Transcendental Movement to bring that message to the religious righteous of his era. He believed the consciousness within the consciousness of Christ was the catalyst within all of us. All consciousness has wise silence and the impetus to express it. But we express our inner silence in different ways in order to feel the different values within it. Value Fulfillment is a path of knowing. We learn how to listen to our wise silence as we add value to our life. Within that value is the chatter of other parts of our soul.