In this inspiring book, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer collects the wisdom of some of the greatest thinkers of the past twenty-five centuries -- Buddha, Jesus, Michelangelo, and Emily Dickinson among them. In succinct original essays, Dyer sets out to explain the meaning and context of each piece of wisdom -- and shows us how we can actively apply these teachings to our modern lives and come to recognize our own potential for greatness.
Learn to be silent.
Let your
quiet mind
listen and absorb.
Pythagoras
(580 B.C. -- 500 B.C.)
A Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras was especially interested in the study of mathematics in relation to weights and measures and to musical theory.
All man's miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pasca(1623-1662)
Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and writer, whose treatises contributed to the fields of hydraulics and pure geometry.
This is the one time in this collection of great contributors that I have elected to highlight two writers on the same subject. I selected two men whose lives were separated by over two millennia, both of whom in their own times were considered the most knowledgeable in the rational fields of mathematics and science.
Pythagoras, whose writings influenced the thought of Plato and Aristotle, was a major contributor to the development of both mathematics and Western rational philosophy. Blaise Pascal, a famous French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher who lived twenty-two centuries after Pythagoras, is considered one of the original scientific minds. He is responsible for inventing the syringe, the hydraulic press, and the first digital calculator. Pascal's Law of Pressure is still taught in science classes around the world today.
Keeping in mind the left-brained scientific leanings of these two scientists, reread their two quotes. Pascal: "All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone." Pythagoras: "Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb." They both speak to the importance of silence and the value of meditation in your life, whether you are an accountant or an avatar. They send us a valuable message about a way of being *in life that is not popularly encouraged 'in our culture: that there is tremendous value *in creating alone time *in your life that is spent in silence. If you want to shed your miseries, learn to sit silently in a room alone and meditate.
It has been estimated that the average person has sixty thousand separate thoughts each and every day. The problem with this is that we have the same sixty thousand thoughts today that we had yesterday, and we'll repeat them again tomorrow. Our minds are filled with the same chatter day in and day out. Learning to be quiet and meditate involves figuring out a way to enter the spaces between your thoughts; or the gap, as I call it. In this silent empty space between your thoughts, you can find a sense of total peace' in a realm that is ordinarily unknowable. Here, any illusion of your separateness is shattered. However, if you have sixty thousand separate thoughts in a day, there is literally no time available to enter the space between your thoughts, because there is no space!
Most of us have minds that race full-speed day and night. Our thoughts are a hodgepodge of continuous dialogue about schedules, money worries, sexual fantasies, grocery lists, drapery problems, concern about the children, vacation plans, and on and on like a merry-go-round that never stops. Those sixty thousand thoughts are usually about ordinary daily activities and create a mental pattern that leaves no space for silence.
Wayne W. Dyer is the bestselling author of more than twenty books and has a doctorate in counseling psychology. He lectures across the country and appears regularly on radio and television. He lives in southern Florida.
