Prem means love, Sami is a sufi name for God – it means: the all-hearing one. Your full name will mean: a loving capacity to hear all. And if one can really hear, nothing else is needed. If one can hear the wind passing through the trees, that is gospel. If one can hear the birds singing in the morning, one has heard prayer. If one can hear the waterfall and its sound and the roaring waves of the ocean, one has heard the sound of the cosmos. These are all the ways God is trying to approach you, to call you… these are all invocations.

 

But man has become deaf and blind and heartless. We don’t feel any more. Even when we feel, we only think that we feel. And we don’t hear any more, because to hear something one doesn’t need only the ears; one needs a feeling heart behind it. We don’t see any more, because unless the heart is standing there, close to the windows of your eyes, you will not be able to see that which is. The form is seen but the formless is missed. The word is heard but the wordless is missed. And that is the true being – the formless, the wordless.

 

So become more and more loving and more and more capable of listening to existence. I am giving the name to you as a meditation. Your satori, your experience of light, will come through the ears not through the eyes. Enlightenment happens in two ways – either through the eyes or through the ears.

 

To a few people it happens as a vision: they see it. To a few people it happens through the ears: they hear it. The founder of islam, Mohammed, heard it; Moses saw it, so their approach becomes totally different.

 

You will be able to hear it, and the name will remind you again and again that it is through the ears that God will knock on your door. So become more and more sound-conscious, become more and more musical. Develop the musical ear. Listen to nuances of sounds, subtle sounds… and they are always there. Listening to them, hearing them and becoming more and more alert of the subtleties of sound, you will become silent. When one is really able to listen, one suddenly falls into deep silence. All thinking stops, the mind disappears.

 

- Osho, “The 99 Names of Nothingness, #15”