Shabd

Shabd alone takes us into the innermost recesses of pure spirituality; it alone casts off from over our eyes the veil of ignorance and delusion and shows us truth in its divine glory and celestial splendour. In a moment of eternal consciousness of Shabd, the soul embraces the whole of the cosmos and comprehends the totality of being; in a rapture of spiritual ecstasy it beholds the light of transcendent truth and bathes in the radiance of divine glory.

We are ignorant of that glory and have forgotten our true home with God, and we therefore suffer a perpetual round of misery and trouble. Our ignorance, however, is not intellectual; this forgetting is not mental. It goes deep into our being; it is stuck firmly to the root of our existence. If we are anxious to shake off this chronic lethargy and come out of this universal oblivion, we should try to find the Shabd.

Shabd is a superconscious transcendent power. It can neither be heard with the ears nor uttered by the tongue. Pen cannot write it and language cannot describe it. It passes all human perception and conception; it transcends all limitation and dependence; it goes beyond all duality and relativity. For its transmission it does not depend on any material element; it penetrates all things and all beings.

Shabd is the essence of all reality and existence – the divine Word, the heavenly Harmony, the celestial Music. It is the light and life of all creation; it is the very being of the ultimate absolute; it is the supreme current of spirituality, a wave or tide in the ocean of Godhead. It permeates all creation; it pervades the whole cosmos. Only the transcendent soul can come into contact with it; only in a superconscious rapture of mystic transport can we touch it and know it; only in a divine ecstasy of spiritual flight do we embrace it; only in a moment of eternal consciousness do we become one with it.
_{Extract from Mysticism, The Spiritual Path}