The Silence of the Mind

By Ilie Cioara

This beautiful book has been translated by Petrica Verdes in a most sympathetic way bringing out the true essence of Ilie Cioara’s work. Here is Petrica’s introduction, which for me says it all:-

I would like to introduce you to Ilie Cioara, a rare flower of humanity, a hidden treasure, a realized enlightened being, translated for the first time into English. His writings are a mirror of the beyond, of something that cannot be expressed into words: it can only be experienced.   

‘Ilie Cioara is unique as he doesn’t belong to any lineage or school of enlightenment. He never even visited India; instead, he lived in Eastern Europe during the communist years, behind the iron curtain, in almost total isolation. After practicing a mantra for 20 years, the author felt an inner intuitive impulse to drop the mantra and just practice the silence of the mind, by listening to and watching “what is”, in the now. After a few years, one morning, as he was waking up from sleep, enlightenment happened.

His writings are refreshing as they are devoid of any enlightenment jargon and free from any tradition. This is not a book about meditation – reading the book is a meditation in itself. Words are used in order to induce a state of meditative awareness.

There is nothing else to say, except to invite the reader to experience the silence of the mind in Ilie Cioara’s words’. 

I love reading it in a kind of random way, opening to any page to receive a message or thought provoking idea that exactly fits with the moment.

Before writing this review I asked for a passage that really sums up this work, and this is what I found:-

“Self-knowing” is based on certain and real facts, accessible to any human being in his natural capacity of understanding.

Here is a first fact related to this subject: Life manifests itself as reality in perpetual movement and, as such, newness from one moment to another, Therefore, the aliveness, through its very existence, is, in its nature, movement and freshness which never repeats itself.

Knowing this aliveness can only have the same characteristics; both melting together within the essence of the Infinite.

This way, if the meeting with life is real, in that moment, our being is integrated into Eternity. Immediately afterwards, it becomes detached, leaving consciousness free for a new contact with life, whose freshness and movement differs from the previous moment.

If Eternity weren’t already within us, this meeting with the boundless and the everlasting would be impossible. This statement can be immediately proved by practice.

It is sufficient to face any of the reactions of the mind with our all-encompassing attention and we will see them disappear; in the psychological void thus created, harmony ensues. This state of “being” represents the communion between our whole being with the Absolute.

Therefore, knowing – if correctly applied – leads us each time into Boundlessness, in which we melt spontaneously. This is the purpose of our existence on Earth.

Depending on our passion for the truth, after a long period of living in dimensions, the physical as well as the astral world, after a succession of lives, the energies of the “ego” are eliminated. In this fortunate event, the Sacred within us returns to the Source of Light, from where, millions of years ago, it started its difficult journey in order to experience the world of matter.

From this moment on, “Self-knowing” has no purpose anymore, because the “personal self”, the generator of all the causes which brought us again and again in the form of this world, not longer exists.

The road is nevertheless very long and the path very narrow in the beginning. But the thirst, diligence and passion of the person who stumbles across this truth widens it, practicing day and night, without a moment’s rest.

As long as we live tied to this earth through the body, there is nothing more valuable or useful to accomplish than the detachment from the slavery of the “ego”. The simplicity of this knowing is within our grasp and it invites us to use it in confidence. The time of deceit has already taken too long; its results are too obvious to keep hiding and ignoring them.

In the beginning of this third millennium, reality requires a strict revision of all the practices which brought humanity into its present state of chaos.

Our times demand that we use a different approach to life, in which Love and Intelligence – as a result of personal discovery – can manifest its beneficial influence, so that human beings find the divine within themselves.

This passage could quite easily have been written recently through one of the many channellings we receive each month for the Magic of Being, rather than by someone who was born in Rumania in 1916.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is on their spiritual journey, it speaks to us at whatever stage we find ourselves, at all levels. A very special book indeed.

Colin.

Ilie Cioara was an enlightened mystic who lived in Eastern Europe. His writings in 16 books describe the experience of meditation and enlightenment, as well as the practice of Self-knowing using all-encompassing Attention.  The Silence of the Mind is the first in a tetralogy by Ilie Cioara to be published by OBooks, to be followed byThe Wondrous Journey, Life is Eternal Newness and I Am Boundlessness.

Website thesilencebook.blogspot.com

Facebook Page www.facebook.com/silencebook

Purchase direct from OBooks