and the rest is silence
the sheer beauty of osho's words arrested me this morning: “ our existence is nothing but a sound in the immense ocean of silence.”
as i sat with his words these ripples surfaced and began floating towards me:
we emerge out of that ocean and return to that ocean. you can call that ocean the tao, the primal source, the universe, or any other name of your liking. any name will do as no name will do. no name will do as it is beyond names and naming. beyond, meaning, it allows us to name but has no name. out of the depth of the unutterable, namelessnesss, naming and names appear.
the tao that can be named is not the eternal tao ( tao te ching)
it is coming out of that vast silence and it is returning back to that vast silence.
that which comes out of silence (call it shunyata) and returns to silence we call sound (call it form.)
if we find peace in the appearing and disappearing of that sound which is our particular existence, our drop of water out of that endless ocean of life and death, we then intimately feel the ocean is always there.
beyond that, to forget what it means that the ocean has always been there, the ocean shall always be there, we are at peace with just this: the ocean is there, or not even the ocean is there, just, the ocean is, for ultimately there is no there or here.
awakening to the: the ocean is, is realizing silence is our true home. in silence we abide.
then we worry less about the sound we make, others make, we won’t worry if the sound we are making is being heard or goes unheeded. (who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? rilke)
we just make the sounds we are here to make while tuning into the silence that is our home. you can call this movement harmony. we just sing the song we are here to sing and go in obedience, humility and grace. and that is the end of the story, if story there ever was.
as we settle at home in the nature of: the ocean is, silence is my home, we cease all concern about what will become of our individual sound; will it completely vanish one day, will it keep reverberating through the infinity of space and time, will it return like a distant echo, will it turn into a song and be forever remembered. our fundamental fear is: will i survive nothingness?
who is at home in the ocean is not afraid of drowning in the sea. let the concerns of the waves repose in the absolute stillness of the ocean bed whence they return.
happy to be this sound, happy to be this drop of morning rain dripping on a palm frond, happy to be this bird cry meandering through green open fields, this note of vesper music suspended in midair the time that the wind passes.
here our nature is found, all we need is to listen, listen to silence, listen to silence that is the voice of god.
we settle in the peace of
the ocean is
we are
and the rest is silence
nice, french riviera, 2007