Extract from “Silence and Word”
A word presupposes silence: it cannot be heard in the midst of noise. Silence must be perfect to the extent the word is noble. This is why dhikr requires faqr: the Name Allāh is fully pronounced only if the soul is extinguished for it.
When there is extinction of soul there is virtue. The soul is virtuous when it is as God created it: vices are privations, or they are superimposed defects. The primordial soul—extinguished, silent—is the “lotus” (padma) that contains the “jewel” (mani); it is this lotus the Blessed Virgin personifies. She is the “peace” (salām) that conveys “blessing” (salāt). Or she is the holy “silence” (hesychia) that contains the divine Word (Logos), the Name.
But in reality this “silence” is life: “I am black, but beautiful.” Let the fallen soul remain silent—vacare Deo—and the divine Qualities will be mirrored in it, Qualities whose traces it bears in its very substance.
Truth and beauty are paths toward holy silence: they bring about the remembrance of our paradisiacal substance. For this silence is made of truth and beauty; it is an emptiness that in reality is plenitude.
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dhikr "remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word
Allāh.
(more..) logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (
cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation.
(B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic
Logos (like the Egyptian
Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple
Logos containing a plurality of individual
logoi (
Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus,
Logos is not a separate
hupostasis, but determines the relation of any
hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech (
logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought (
logos endiathetos).(more..) mani "jewel," often in the shape of a tear-drop; in Eastern traditions, understood to be powerful in removing evil and the causes of sorrow; see
Om mani padme hum.
(more..) padmaLotus; in Buddhism, an image of non-attachment and of primordial openness to enlightenment, serving symbolically as the throne of the Buddhas; see
Oṃ maṇi padme hum.
(more..) vacare Deo literally, "to be empty for God"; to be at leisure for or available to God; in the Christian monastic and contemplative tradition, to set aside time from work for meditation and prayer.
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