“The sound of a subtle silence”

Words by Prabhuji from the solitude of his hermitage

May 15, 2025

“I remember that gray afternoon in Haifa in 1996. The sky was overcast. The sunset was effortlessly making its way across the sky. I sat down, as I did every day, to meditate, without intention, without expectation, without any goal. There was no purpose behind the gesture, no hidden desire to achieve anything. I was just there, sitting, without needing to understand why. The silence was no different from other days. But this time something changed without changing. It was not caused by practice or sought with effort; it was natural. Nothing extraordinary happened. The body remained still. The world around me remained the same. Yet everything seemed more open, cleaner, as if things were weightless, without history, without a name.
It was not a revelation or a breakthrough. It was more like the fading of separation. The evaporation of all fractures or divisions. There was no longer a clear difference between the observer and the observed. No idea, image, or understanding arose. Just a formless sensation, a presence without origin, which seemed to have always been there. It did not come from anywhere. It was neither internal nor external. It simply was.
From that moment on, everything remained the same. And, at the same time, nothing was ever the same again.
What had previously seemed separate—the sky, the body, thought, the world—was no longer so. It was not a new unity, nor a total vision. It was rather the absence of all division. Things, people, and everything were as they always had been, but without the distance that named them.
I didn’t find anything new. I didn’t get or gain anything. I didn’t achieve anything. I just accessed what had always been there, without having been hidden. There was no longer a path to the real: the real, the true, the authentic was not elsewhere.
I learned to be without taking up space. To be without defining myself. To live in the moment without needing to capture it. The place no longer had a center. The self no longer had limits. Time did not disappear, but it no longer divided. Although the mind did not shut down, its weight was lightened.
It was not an achievement. It was not a prize or a success. It was the moment when every attempt, every effort was exhausted. When there was nothing left to hope for, when even silence had dissolved, only that remained: formless, wordless, undefined, without need for confirmation. Since then, everything happens there. Not in me, not because of me, not for me. Only in that which is neither born nor dies.
There is no path, technique, or method that leads to it. There is no key that unlocks it. There is no map that names it. All that remains is to sit, look, do nothing, observe. Don’t push, don’t resist. Don’t look for meaning. Just let life, when we don’t measure it, show itself as it is.
Nothing is missing. Nothing is superfluous. There is no destination, because there was never any distance. What we are is not at the end: it is always, permanently, even before the journey begins.
Prabhuji

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