Silence is no thing, but Silence is not nothing. Not the suppression of thought, but the fountain of creative intuition. Not the negation of action, but the wellspring of cosmic energy.
Real Silence is not static or inert, but living and vibrant. Living Silence is not the thought of "silence." Living Silence cannot be created by thinking of it, for Silence is beyond thought. One must dissolve the mind in astonishment.
Matter is solidified Silence. Yet Silence gushes from the womb of Mother matter. As ice and vapor are two states of the same water, so matter and consciousness are two states of the same Silence.
Real Silence is not static or inert, but living and vibrant. Living Silence is not the thought of "silence." Living Silence cannot be created by thinking of it, for Silence is beyond thought. One must dissolve the mind in astonishment.
Matter is solidified Silence. Yet Silence gushes from the womb of Mother matter. As ice and vapor are two states of the same water, so matter and consciousness are two states of the same Silence.
The world echoes out of the abyss of Silence, yet that Silence remains transcendent, ever-virgin, still. The early Christian gnostic Valentinus wrote, "the real Virgin Mother is mystical eternal silence." Yet nothing in the world can go back and possess the Silence that gave birth to it. Once the secret is out, creation cannot return to the creator. And while all good thoughts flow from the depth of Silence, the mind cannot go back and think it. How then may I return to the un-created?
The only bridge that leads back to Silence is grace, the grace of one already steeped and drowned in Silence, one whose mind has dissolved in Silence, one whose body vibrates with Silence, every atom saturated with transcendental bliss.
O Lord, the bridge to Silence is your Word, your Word that sacrifices itself, dying for me, dissolving into Silence.
No asana, no breath practice, no righteous moral conduct, transports my awareness back to Silence. The only raft is the grace of your Name. You, O Silence, are God. Your Name is the Goddess.
No asana, no breath practice, no righteous moral conduct, transports my awareness back to Silence. The only raft is the grace of your Name. You, O Silence, are God. Your Name is the Goddess.
She vibrates, She dances, She undulates through my spine. She is the song inside the stillness at the source of my breath. Her Name is the secret energy that awakened creation. Moral conduct, yoga postures, pranayam, study of tantra and vedic scriptures, these disciplines may take me to subtler fields of the relative creation, but only the grace of the Name of the Goddess carries me h(om)e to the ocean of the Absolute.
In Sanskrit, the word "mantra" consists of the root syllables "man," meaning mind, and "tra," meaning vehicle. Thus from Sanskrit we have the suffix, "tron" as in "electron," a vehicle for electricity. Mantra is the vehicle for the mind. The beautiful vibrations of the mantra's sound-energy settles our contracted egoic awareness into the field of awakened restfulness. And when awareness is fully awake, while fully at rest, it is unconditional cosmic consciousness. Thus we return to Silence through the mantra, by the grace of Her who pervades the cosmos as the transcendent witness to her own creation.
O Mother, your Name has merged with my ever-vanishing heartbeat, hearing whose unstruck sound, I drown in the ineffable - in the beauty of the poem that has not yet been written, the music that has not been heard. And this is the sacred pain of the artist and the mystic, of all who drown in You. We yearn to speak the unspeakable poem and sing the music of divine Silence, and cannot!
Your Silence trembles. It vibrates with the un-manifest Word before creation, the seed Christ before incarnation. Your Womb-Silence teems with virtual photons and virtual electrons of pre-existent energy. Even physicists see this now! Your living Silence radiates each atom, pulses the green into each clover blade, inflames the stars whose light is only now arriving as my body.
O Mother, I give thanks for the grace of your Name. O Gurudev, I give thanks for the grace of your whisper. For it is you who gifted me her Name, the mantra. Stunned by the mystery of Silence, I bow down, and when I touches the earth, my forehead shatters. Galaxies pour from my marrow. Meadows and forests, burgeoning clouds, and all that pullulates under dark loam, spill out of my bewilderment.
Let Shakti be my vibration, the breath that flows in, the breath that flows out. Let Shiva be the stillness between them. O Lord, my soul is your Silence. Therefor I sing.
In Sanskrit, the word "mantra" consists of the root syllables "man," meaning mind, and "tra," meaning vehicle. Thus from Sanskrit we have the suffix, "tron" as in "electron," a vehicle for electricity. Mantra is the vehicle for the mind. The beautiful vibrations of the mantra's sound-energy settles our contracted egoic awareness into the field of awakened restfulness. And when awareness is fully awake, while fully at rest, it is unconditional cosmic consciousness. Thus we return to Silence through the mantra, by the grace of Her who pervades the cosmos as the transcendent witness to her own creation.
O Mother, your Name has merged with my ever-vanishing heartbeat, hearing whose unstruck sound, I drown in the ineffable - in the beauty of the poem that has not yet been written, the music that has not been heard. And this is the sacred pain of the artist and the mystic, of all who drown in You. We yearn to speak the unspeakable poem and sing the music of divine Silence, and cannot!
Your Silence trembles. It vibrates with the un-manifest Word before creation, the seed Christ before incarnation. Your Womb-Silence teems with virtual photons and virtual electrons of pre-existent energy. Even physicists see this now! Your living Silence radiates each atom, pulses the green into each clover blade, inflames the stars whose light is only now arriving as my body.
O Mother, I give thanks for the grace of your Name. O Gurudev, I give thanks for the grace of your whisper. For it is you who gifted me her Name, the mantra. Stunned by the mystery of Silence, I bow down, and when I touches the earth, my forehead shatters. Galaxies pour from my marrow. Meadows and forests, burgeoning clouds, and all that pullulates under dark loam, spill out of my bewilderment.
Let Shakti be my vibration, the breath that flows in, the breath that flows out. Let Shiva be the stillness between them. O Lord, my soul is your Silence. Therefor I sing.
Chagall, Madonna of the Village
No comments:
Post a Comment