NOEMAYA

Speech holds the Real; it is the light that illumines the sight; it is the flute that animates the shadows and brings them forth and out of the primordial obscurity.

What’s found in the depths must be rescued and exposed by the ever ascending rope of speech. Oh, silence! Truth is so vast that it will overflow even your infinitude; and its overflow is its speech.

The one who goes into solitude to find the treasures of the soul, must hold onto the saving rope of logos lest he himself gets lost in the swamp of his own solitude, in the oblivion of one’s own subjectivity. One who has found the truth must speak it.

Truth is deep but pure and simple; indeed it liberates, but it does not liberate the individual; it liberates you from the bondage of your individuality.

Truth always returns, wearing the mask of an individual, clothed in signs and symbols; truth penetrates the symbol so that the symbol may find its truth.

There is no salvation to be found in thinking, no salvation in the caves or the mountains. Truth is not locked behind the doors to be opened by religious zeal and spiritual practice; truth does not discriminate between the saint and the sinner. Our prayers and meditations may keep us sane but they do not take us to the truth, to the One.

Truth is not behind any doors; it is always here spread before our eyes. It’s available unconditionally. I have found more truth in the mundane and the ordinary than in the profound and the extraordinary. I have found more truth in the crackhead and the prostitute than the monk and the preacher. Oh, there is so much truth in the brothel.

It is only that we have become selective in our taste for truth; we want only our own piece of the spectrum and not anything unfamiliar and disturbing. But truth is all inclusive. It is equally present in the ugly and the beautiful, in the just and the unjust, in forgiveness and punishment. Truth is pervasive: It is everywhere and it is everyone.

I have digressed. The point is, the man of truth must return from the mountain of silence and solitude and step into the crowd, back into the cave of this world; he must return with speech, with embodied truth. The one who has found the truth does not belong to himself anymore; he is no more an individual; he is the universal man; he belongs to everyone; he must become nothing and fully transparent so that the truth will speak through him. The man of truth must become speech itself.

It is a fact; truth is the Reality at once transcendent and immanent. Truth transcends language but is at once immanent in it. A gem fallen in excrement doesn’t lose its value; but to find and recover it, one must step into the excrement and then return. Till then, the journey is not complete.

We must lose our tongue so that the One can be heard. Silence is not the goal but the means. The goal is for the idle speech to be replaced with the divine murmur.