Listen to God’s Voice in the
Language of Silence
If you are in a room, you can measure the length and breadth of its ceiling. But if you are in a big field, under the open sky, all your criteria for measuring things fail to gauge the length and breadth of the sky.
The same holds true for the rest of the universe. A little seed gradually grows into a tree, which is a world in itself. Who can narrate how this happens? The light that the sun pours out, the circulation of the winds, the songs of the birds, the gurgling of the brooks, and innumerable similar things – we see them with our eyes, but it is not possible to express them in words.
Truth is a finer thing than that which can be expressed in words. In reality, Truth starts where the tongue gets stuck and falls silent. Significance and meaning appear where words stop and cannot go further. God speaks in the language of silence, but we want to listen to Him in the language of noise! How, then, can we at all listen to God’s voice? The most precious things in this world are conveyed in the language of silence. Those who know how to listen only to deafening din remain as unaware of these matters as a deaf person is of fine music.
This world of God’s is infinitely beautiful. Its beauty cannot be described in words. When a person sees the world, he loses all control. He wants to become part of the winds, to melt into the trees, to lose himself in the loftiness of the skies. But his limitations stand in the way of this desire. Perhaps heaven is this – when an individual is made free of his limitations so that he can enter that beautiful world of Paradise that lasts forever.
The civilized world that human beings have made is starkly different from God’s world. The vehicles people have built emit pollution and create a terrible noise. But in God’s world, light travels at the astounding speed of 1,86,000 miles per second without making any noise or emitting pollution at all! Human beings live together in such a way that they always face various types of problems from one another. But in God’s world, the winds blow without coming into conflict with anything at all. We emit our waste in the form of carbon dioxide and sweat and so on and dump it into the outside world, but in God’s world, trees emit their ‘pollution’ in the form of oxygen, without which human and animal life would have been impossible. Flowers emit their fragrance as their ‘pollution’. We litter our streets with mounds of garbage, even though it is against the law. But in God’s world, everyday enormous amounts of ‘garbage’ are produced without anyone even knowing or noticing this, and this ‘garbage’ is recycled and reconverted into useful things.
If you deeply ponder on these marvels of the universe, you will be struck by a sense of how utterly helpless a person is! And you will be struck by silence, too, being unable to utter even a single word.
