To turn down the noise of the world.

When and how does one turn down the noise of the world? Is there a volume knob, aside from that great one planted in the farthest reaches of man’s obscured soul? Where does the music cease and the sound of life begin?

I have heard melodies and harmonies such that I am full. All I crave for is to find the humor in my own song: the clamor of pant legs clumsily brushing against each other, dancing to the rhythm of cold city air. The uneven hustle of a self-styled gentleman rushing to be somewhere.

It could be anywhere for all my song cares.

In moments like this, how I long to laugh at my music and turn down its noise. To set aside the passing pleasures felt of ear and for a fleeting moment sense the essence of pleasure: a child in search of a new world to imagine, a dog discovering a long-buried bone, an expired body releasing its final thought.

The hustle is by nature transient, seductive only in its brevity, attractive only in its mortality. It is the quiet pulsing beneath all that noise that we forget as we chase the fleeting. It is here, in the sound of life itself, that the highest aspirations of mankind remain patiently waiting.

Waiting to be unfolded while we infinitely postpone and procrastinate because there is so much that is and will no longer be that requires our immediate attention.

Yet if it will no longer be, then soon will it no longer matter.

But that does not matter to me, for I am lost in the now, yet not lost enough. I am so entranced in the now that passes from moment to moment that I cannot immerse myself in the now that has always existed, the now that knows no other. The second that has no second: the one that lasts forever.

My breath. What happens in the spaces between the inhalations and exhalations, in the moments of quiet pause where the music no longer converses with itself? If the banter of the world and the chatter of the mind sustain this illusion, then let me disappear into my own loneliness.

Let me be nothing more than the space between my breaths, the air between my folded hands. Let me be contained by the permeating silence. In it, may there be bliss. Let me lose myself in love for the stillness, so patiently waiting to disclose its vast knowledge in the sounds of a quiet pulsing of blood through my veins, in the distant beating of my embryonic heart within the caverns of my own overgrown being.

My breath. What better sound could there possibly be than the very sound of life’s energy? Why did we need to corrupt this beauty with tools of raw goatskin and drumsticks made of fallen trees? What part of me loves this noise so much that it cannot let go and simply repeat to itself:

I am the endless, I am the endlessness.
I am the endless, I am the endlessness.
I am the endless, I am the endlessness.

Inhale and exhale. Be born and then die. This is the rhythm of my loneliness, were I able to find it. This is the salvation of my silence, the poetry of my stillness. If only I could enter into it and be taken wholly by this moment: the moment that lasted forever.

In the sweet sleep between breaths, a rebuke to painful wakefulness, might I hear the vibration of creation? In holy stillness, might I finally disappear from the world? In sacred emptiness breathing in and out and in and out and in and endless bliss.

 
// Essay by Ravi S. Kudesia