Every weed is a kingdom, every fragrance a rendezvous. Here I am lost. I don't know whether to cry, O Christ! O Krishna! or O Raheem!
The Beloved walks beside me in the wilderness of self-abandonment. We have both strayed far from the path. God is lost too. The silence is alive, the sound of a boundless bell, struck ten billion years ago, still ringing in each atom.
Placing two fingers to my lips, the Beloved whispers, "Shhh! Don't pray like that. No need to cry, O Christ! O Krishna! O Raheem! Just O! is enough. That is my eternal name, the sound of your dissolving."
Now the Beloved's lips touch my brow. A golden rose blossoms there, made of starlight. But this is the starlight that is already inside us, before the making of stars.
O Rose of countless petals, shimmering doorways that lead to mansions of amethyst and ruby, where numberless souls return at the end of every exhalation, and go forth with each new breath!
O golden thousand-tiered Radiance that toys with the eye of my heart! I am troubled and dizzy with the fragrance of your light. In you I behold the lineaments of a Face gazing back, or is it the intricate design of a heavenly City, our true home, where all humanity, atoned by harmonious living, dwells in a shimmer, blurring I and We, Self and Other, into one, yet resolving them into distinction?
O personal Gaze of the All, you are the mathematical symmetry of the Logos, transcending reason and order, containing perfect knowledge in a fractal chaos of tangled asymptotes that draw the eye beyond silence, into the vanishing point of bliss, the emptiness of this very O!
Perhaps you are only a mirage, gleaming out of the infinite yet nearer than my next breath. Perhaps your golden glance at me is the image of my yearning for you, reflected by the eternal solitude of consciousness itself. Perhaps the holy city shimmering in your depth is the likeness of the space within my many-mansioned heart. Perhaps this whole creation finally dissolves into Presence, without form or content, and I am simply in the moment between one breath and another.
O sacred confusion! I cannot tell if I rest in God, or God rests in me!
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