THE SPEECH THAT CANNOT BE GRASPED
Hear me, you that hear
and listen to my words, you who know me.
I am the hearing that can be acquired everywhere,
and I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the name of the sound
and the sound of the name.
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashioned you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment. —The Thunder: Perfect Mind, NHL, p. 302
The words of the soul emerge from a mystery, and they are a mystery.
They suggest to us that the outer life and the inner life are reflections of one another.
Neither has an independent existence, although they seem to; the separation of
the world within from the world without is an illusion.
How subtle is the wisdom in her words, “I am the hearing that can be acquired everywhere, and I am the speech that cannot be grasped”!
It is one thing to perceive the sound of the words but quite another to understand what they mean for our own existence and how they demand that we behave.
Hearing is something that we can do without much effort, but grasping the import of what we hear requires us to open ourselves to all that is present in our lives with neither expectation nor prejudice.
The wisdom of the soul tells us that we cannot separate ourselves from what
is outside of us, since everything that we see is shaped by what we are; as we bring our essence into confrontation with the visible world, we color it with the
colors of our own being.
Whatever we see before us is affected by what we bring to it.
If we are angry, we see others through the lens of our anger; if we are deceitful, we regard others with suspicion; if we are trusting and compassionate, others will speak freely to us.
Name and sound, sound and name—how are they different?
One is the perception, and the other validates it.
Yet there would not be a name without the sound of the name.
And if it is kept secret, if it is not pronounced, the name and the sound still remain in a state of potentiality waiting to be expressed.
So when the soul speaks to us in silence, we ought to listen and hold her wisdom in
silence also, until the moment when it seems right to give it voice.
The soul tells us that the one who has made the inner world has also made the world without and that what is outside of us is also inside.
This is a statement of the essential unity of all that exists, an assertion that we are made of the same stuff as are the stars and that our movements are not isolated from theirs but rather are part of an all-inclusive process.
If we listen to the words of the living soul within us, we will know that we move with the rhythms of the universe.
We are truly separate, in the sense that every note in a symphony is separate
from the others, but we are also one with the All, with the many sounds of earth
and sky that blend together to produce harmony or discord.
bring our essence into confrontation with the visible world, we color it with the
colors of our own being.
Whatever we see before us is affected by what we bring to it.
If we are angry, we see others through the lens of our anger; if we are deceitful, we regard others with suspicion; if we are trusting and compassionate, others will speak freely to us.
Name and sound, sound and name—how are they different?
One is the perception, and the other validates it.
Yet there would not be a name without the sound of the name.
And if it is kept secret, if it is not pronounced, the name and the sound still remain in a state of potentiality waiting to be expressed.
So when the soul speaks to us in silence, we ought to listen and hold her wisdom in
silence also, until the moment when it seems right to give it voice.
The soul tells us that the one who has made the inner world has also made the world without and that what is outside of us is also inside.
This is a statement of the essential unity of all that exists, an assertion that we are made of the same stuff as are the stars and that our movements are not isolated from theirs but rather are part of an all-inclusive process.
If we listen to the words of the living soul within us, we will know that we move with the rhythms of the universe.
We are truly separate, in the sense that every note in a symphony is separate
from the others, but we are also one with the All, with the many sounds of earth
and sky that blend together to produce harmony or discord. ~June Singer, A Gnostic Book of Hours. Keys to Inner Wisdom , Page 44-45
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