The Word of The Silence
by Aurobindo
A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,
A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,
A greatness pure, virgin of will.
Once on its pages Ignorance could write
In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time
And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light,
A food for souls that wander on Nature's rim.
But now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The Voice that only Silence's ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.
All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace
To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.
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/ Image by kim-e-sens /
This poem describes the profound silence that engulfs us in the states of deepest communion -- and the true healing it brings. The rumble of the mind is quiet, emotions are still. All projections onto reality cease, making our "sight clear," revealing the world as it is, "inimitable."
When deep silence is truly encountered, we begin to recognize the limitations and erratic nature of the intellect. It is constantly busy and scrawling in a thousand directions, like a "scribble" on a clean sheet of paper. It can be said to be a form of "Ignorance" or false knowledge. At best, such activity produces "gleam-messages of ephemeral light" that feed us as best they can when we wander lost at the edge of awareness -- the results are not lasting, they to do not get to the root of the problems of worldly existence, they do not touch on the eternal.
Sri Aurobindo has recognized in deep, mystic silence, "the Word," the meta-word that contains all words, all forms, all possibilities. It is a wordless "voice" that can be heard only in silence, but it frees the "eternal glory" of enlightenment, of "Day."
And, in that "Day" of enlightenment, in that "wideness and unbroken peace," everything -- everything! -- turns "to a tumult of joy" and ecstatic freedom.
This is what the world truly hungers for. It cannot be found through mental work, or through any activity that is a mere rearrangement of forms and systems. Real healing, real service always returns people and the world to their original, eternal source, which is revealed by "The Word of The Silence."
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