Primordial Silence Poem by Mystic Qalandar

When I am completely still,
what I hear
is this: I was born from silence—
not the silence
of nothingness,
nor of that void
from which sound has already fled,
but from the silence
that existed before even the first word
came to see itself
as separate from the meaning
it carried within its name.

That silence has no boundary,
because there is nothing outside it.
It is not the pause between two notes—
it is the very substance
from which all notes are made,
from which they are born
and to which they can never fully return.

When I am still,
this is what I hear:
silence is my true nature—
not something
I hold within me,
but the reality
that holds me within itself—
as the sky is not inside the window
yet fills every room
that opens toward it.

I did not arrive at this knowing.
This knowing passed through me
as morning comes—
not by erasing the dark
but by revealing
that the dark, too, was always
light resting in its own peace.

I never heard the silence
when I was lost in that seductive noise—
that ancient illusion
in which the world
believes in its own separateness,
that carnival of forms
where everything cried out:
Only I am real—
yet every cry
was borrowed from the very unity
it had turned away from.

I kept making myself deaf
to that trembling echo
of primordial silence—
that foundational song
playing beneath every song,
that single note
the universe hums ceaselessly
to remind itself
it was never more than one.

And the noise…
the noise was beautiful.
That is the honest confession.
It dressed itself
in garments of urgency and importance,
shaped itself into longing and belonging,
and I wrapped myself in it
as a person might
mistake for their own face
what is not their face at all,
and forget
that beneath every face
there is one formless light.

This devotion to hearing silence
was no discipline I chose,
but a dissolution—
the slow melting of borders
the self drew around itself
to feel like something solid,
the erasing of every wall
that called itself identity.

Silence does not fill the self.
It dissolves the very boundary
that convinced the self
it ended somewhere.

And this listening also protects—
from those whose whole edifice
is built on division,
who insist
that distances between things
must remain absolute,
who call silence a void
because a void can be occupied,
and they have much to sell.

And from subtler disguises too—
those voices clothed in sacred language
that promise arrival
while keeping the seeker
always one step from the threshold,
though they already stand upon it.
These are the agents of forgetting—
offering not darkness
but a finer veil,
teaching separation
in the language of union.

Once, strange thoughts came
as strangers come
to settle in a house
whose owner has long been absent—
they lodged in corners,
began to insist
they had always lived there,
and that silence was the stranger.

But silence is
the very substance of this house.
Not its furniture—
its original structure.
Remove everything
that can be named,
and silence does not become empty.
It simply becomes visible.

What I know now—
to say it in words
is already to lose something—
yet this much at least remains true:
at the center of all moving things
there is a stillness
not still because it has stopped,
but because it is the source
from which all motion springs—
that wholeness
which precedes every division
we ever desired
or suffered.

The reed weeps
because it dreams
it was cut from origin.
But if it listens deeply enough,
it discovers
its music has never left the source.
There is no cutting, no distance.
Beneath the reed
and the riverbank both—
there is one listener,
never separated
from the one singer.

To this I return—
not as practice,
not as destination,
but as remembrance
that I was never separate at all:
silence and I
are not two distinct realities,
one containing the other,
but one light
looking at itself
with such closeness
that no distance remains.

— MyKoul

MyKoul