Advertising, Roll Royce, and Meditation...

Advertising, Rolls-Royce, and Meditation…
Principles don’t change, do they?
Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher of Victorian times, said, “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.”
That’s what Mindful Awareness is about. And Meditation. And Prayer. And any means by which you can still the mind, calm the emotions. It’s a lost part of who we are. We’ve forgotten how to stop. To stop, come to a halt, just be.
Some may regard that as a bit arcane, requiring some deep and mysterious insight to understand it. That’s understandable. That’s the image generated by some practitioners; if we haven’t sat on the peaks of mountains, spent endless weeks in retreat, read reams of text in Eastern Philosophy, that we can’t understand Peace of Mind, Tranquillity, Deep sense of purpose.
Geography isn’t the solution to confusion, speed of life, anxiety. It may help.
But the real solution lies within every human on this planet. Anyone who has the need and the desire can achieve this.
Advertising legend, David Ogilvy, understood this. Speaking of the quiet ride of a Rolls-Royce, his ad’ said, “At sixty miles an hour, the only thing you can hear in this car is the ticking clock.”
The ad’ was a smash hit.
After the first ad’ had run its course, he followed it with, “We’ve now fixed that clock.”
That’s the sound of silence. The Rolls – Royce of moments.
Try this for 28 days; every day, have a place in which you can go quiet. Calm the imagination. Direct it to a point, an object, a sound.
Be in silence, for twelve minutes..
Don’t talk. Don’t read. Don’t watch TV. Shut off the radio. Shut off the phone. Become solitary. Unavailable.
Twelve minutes.
 Hear the silence. You will; you’ll hear it in the tick of a clock, or the sough of the wind, or a distant voice, the bark of a dog, and let them just wash through your mind and evaporate.
Then you’ll hear the quiet. And experience it, in every cell, muscle, fibre of your existence.

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