Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 25 of 34

XVII. I Listen

I go into the silence and open my Inner hearing to the “still, small voice.” The sanctuary of soul is the “Holy of Holies;” the trysting-place of the divine and the human. The tribunal of God is at the soul-centre of man. The divine likeness is here unveiled. It is the “manner” where the Christ-consciousness comes to birth, while external discords are only the beasts of the stall. It is the angel who brings “good tidings of great joy.” Here the resurrection takes place, when the stone of the lower self-consciousness is rolled away. Here is the divine affinity which feels its oneness with God. “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, there! for lo, the kingdom of God is within you.” That kingdom includes wholeness, harmony, and health. The sun of righteousness arises with “healing in his wings.”

Insight

I go into the silence and open my Inner hearing — Wood is using the technical New Thought vocabulary (the silence) that Emma Curtis Hopkins had taught a generation of teachers, and the meditation reads as a guided sequence: still the outer, listen for the still small voice, recognize the Christ-consciousness coming to birth, watch the resurrection happen in the soul-ground. The Elijah scene at Horeb (1 Kings 19:11-13) is the scriptural anchor — God not in the wind, the earthquake, the fire, but in the still small voice. The same passage is foundational for the Quaker tradition's silent waiting, for the Hesychast practice of stillness, and for the Carmelite prayer of quiet. Wood is doing it in 1893 American Protestant idiom; the older traditions would recognize the technique even if not the vocabulary.1 Kings 19:11-13; Emma Curtis Hopkins on the silence; Quaker silence-practice; Hesychast hesychia; Teresa of Avila prayer of quiet.

The Lord was not in “the wind,” “the earthquake,” nor “the fire,” but in the “still, small voice.” As we feel the Presence, we receive an impress of its beauty and perfection.