The Inner Path: 10

Voice 1 (asking with hesitation): You speak of the soul—but what is its form? Is it light? Sound? Vibration?
Voice 2 (calm, colorless): No…the soul has no form, no quality, no attribute. It is only bliss—a bliss that depends on nothing—which has no cause, no boundary.
Voice 1 (in rapt wonder): Then is the soul not an experience? Like laughter, happiness, love?
(Voice 2): Those are all shadows. There is true bliss, yet it cannot be felt, because it is deeper than even 'being'—it is complete in itself alone.
Voice 1 (slowly sinking into its own depths): Am I then that bliss? Or do I only wish to possess it?
Voice 2 (in words both tender and impenetrable): As long as the thought 'I wish to possess' remains—you stand outside it. When you forget yourself—then you are that bliss itself, that fullness.

Both together (in voices like flowing streams, soundless music of joy—in meditation's cadence, in the self's own luminescence): Neither form nor fragrance, neither language nor emotion—I am only bliss. Neither response nor stillness, I am only the soul's silent smile. I am not in things, I am not greater than things—I am only bliss. A feeling of not-wanting, not-thinking, not-making—which simply is, which is only joy.

Voice 1 (in a trembling voice, questioning): I say again and again—"I am Brahman," yet it seems—some wall remains…Have I truly become one with Brahman?
Voice 2 (in a silence spoken as deep truth): As long as you say—I am Brahman, unity is not complete. For 'I' still lives. To become one means—there is no 'I', no 'Brahman', only "One."
Voice 1 (in stillness): Then is there no awareness there?
Voice 2 (in gentle laughter): Neither awareness nor its absence—neither knowledge nor ignorance. Neither meditation nor the lack of it. That unity is like a stream—which flows only within itself.
(Voice 1): Such emptiness! Such void! And yet you say—that is fullness?
Voice 2 (in a voice suffused with laughter beneath eternal light): In what is not, lies everything. Where division ends, there begins the radiant glow of unity.

Both together (united in soundless music—in deep unity's chant, fit to be recited): I am not, you are not—there is only One. That One some call Brahman, others call—'I.' But where no one speaks anything at all—there unity is the final truth. To become one means—not to erase oneself, but to make oneself shadowless. I and you, God and devotee, meditation and meditator—all together, only One. That One some call 'Brahman,' some know not even its name. I am only that—I am not, I am only One.