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The eloquence of silence speaks to the heart and not to the ear. The eardrum cannot catch it. The heart beats with it. The life rhymes with it. The Creation is instinct with it. The Universe is aflame with it. The still serenity of Eternity is suffused and surcharged with it.

The Silence is the unagitated breath of the eternal and unconditioned existence. This Silence is paradoxically never silent but always puissant. The natural effortless Apnoea, the Kumbhaka, is the symbol and insignia of immortality, the undying awareness of the dying and the deathless, the born and the unborn, the unsleeping witness keeping an uninterrupted vigil of all that sleeps and is sleepless, and the state of all states.

The agitated breath signifies the movement of the samskaras and the desires for divided things and not for the Whole and the Infinite. It is the agitation of the breath which creates plurality of words and multiplicity of sounds and so creates a film over Silence. It is that film which veils the face of Silence and makes its eternal eloquence apparently inaudible in the World's cauldron of the chemistry of sound.

You can utter the Word but not the Silence. The Silence is unutterable. It is unspeakable.... The Silence is the matrix out of which matter is born and to which matter returns.... The Silence is the pabulum that feeds Life Eternal and indestructible. It is the supreme imperturbable Static which alone makes all Dynamics possible.

Silence is the spirit. The "Word" is the body. To "utter" is to make outer. Whatever is made outer is necessarily partial and can never be total. If it were total, the grand illusion of the inner and the outer will snap and the silent will absorb the non-silent. For then according to the Vedas "Yat Bahyam, Tad Antaram, Yat Antaram, Tad Bahyam". Then the Drama, the Audience and the Author become one.

Silence therefore by its very nature must remain indivisible and infinite. Words must therefore remain divisible, partial and finite.

"The Word" is different from words. "The Word" is the speaking messenger of Silence. But the messenger can only announce the Silence. What does he announce? "The Word" announces the Silence. That is why Kabir Saheb says that there is only "one Word and not two words": "Ekai Bachan, Dujoi bachan Nahi."

Words, therefore, in plurality, are the army of confusion. They build the Tower of Babel. The heart of all hearts, the King of hearts, speaks The Word. The tongue speaks many words. Between the Word and words lies encompassed the whole story of Creation telling the tale of how the Universal becomes individuals, the Infinite becomes finite, the One becomes many, the Ocean becomes waves, the river becomes rivulets, the rivulets becomes ponds, and the pond becomes stagnant cesspool. The Sound coiled is the "Kundalini" lying dormant in forms of matter....

But the Mission persists though the missionaries separate themselves. With every inhalation of the breath "Puraka", the bewildered missionary unsuspectantly tries to ascend. With every exhalation, "Rechaka", he lapses to disintegrate. In between the two struggles, the momentary pause for balance (Kumbhaka) goes unnoticed. The result is that the missionary is perpetually and restlessly distracted from the left (Ida) to the right (Pingala) and from the right to the left and never finds the straight and the middle path (Susumna), which preserves "The Word".

Although the missionary has forgotten the Mission, yet the Mission eternally remembers him. Such is the beauty, such is the miracle, and such is the mystery, that the Mission goes on with its ceaseless operation. To be conscious of the Mission is to redeem oneself and to redeem the worlds of phenomena. "THE WORD" is the redeemer....

The metaphysics of Sound has to be understood first, in any endeavour to realize, understand and enter the realmless Silence, which Meher Baba is expounding with his life.