Psalms 19:3 Meaning There Is No Speech Nor Language

Āyāt: Signs Āyāt is the Quran's word for things that point past themselves, and al-Ghazali treated the visible world as a ladder up to the unseen one. Someone can walk the same street for years and see only buildings, then one afternoon the same street lands differently. Nothing outside has changed, only the looking, and the world stops being scenery and starts being a message meant for someone.

Everything praises Him, though you do not understand their praise: the world is already speaking A line from the Quran that Sufis come back to again and again. The praise goes on whether or not anyone catches it, which puts the difficulty on the listener rather than on the world. A person who feels that everything has gone quiet is standing in a room where the conversation never stopped.

Nafas al-Raḥmān: the Breath of the Merciful Ibn Arabi described existence as words carried out on a breath. Speaking takes breath, and every word a person says rides on air leaving the body; he saw all created things arriving the same way. Once someone takes that in, a tree or a stranger becomes part of the speaking itself, not an object sitting near it.

Ghaflah: Heedlessness Ghaflah is the forgetting that comes from being used to things. Nothing dramatic causes it; a person is busy, the same commute happens for the thousandth time, and it registers as nothing at all. Nothing has gone quiet outside, the attention has just gone flat, and people call the world empty when the flatness is their own.

Samā': Listening Samā' is the listening Sufis train, where any sound at all can carry the one Speaker. Two people stand in the same street and hear thunder, traffic, a voice on the stairs; one of them is only hearing noise. The change happens inside the listener, who quits sorting sounds into important and unimportant and takes all of them as coming from one place.