Osmon ichra

Osmon ichra is for me not simply the final track and not simply a beautiful cosmic image. It is the place where the whole album suddenly folds into a single geometry. From the very beginning I was walking somewhere. The light was ahead, the road beneath my feet, the sky above. Even as the path became more and more inner, the very habit of thinking spatially remained. The finale breaks this axis: “I did not rise to the sky - I entered the sky within me.”

I like very much that everything begins with closed eyes: “I closed my eyes, and the stars slowly opened.” In Nur the closing of the eyes already hinted at another way of seeing; in Sukunat “eyes have closed - the secret has opened.” Here this motif becomes cosmic. I close the outer sight not to deny the world, but to see that the familiar “outside” does not exhaust reality. The stars open within the same experience that began with a single step.

The phrase “higher, inward, one” is for me almost a formula of the whole cycle. At the beginning “higher” and “inward” could seem different directions. Now they coincide, not geographically but spiritually. It is here that I especially keenly hear safar dar watan - the inner journey of which the Khwajagan line spoke. In Yo‘l it was a principle of movement; in the finale it becomes lived experience: the farthest road turned out to be a road to another depth of presence.

At the same time I very much do not want the line “You were always within me” to turn into the crude formula “God is located inside a human being” as an object in a container. The Quranic language of closeness is far stronger than spatial metaphors. God is called the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden; it is said that He is nearer to a person than the jugular vein; wherever a person turns, there is the Face of God. For me these verses do not explain the finale mechanically, but help not to reduce “within” to psychology.

The inner here is not a small subjective room. After Dil Ichra and Ko‘ngil Shahri the heart has already become a space that does not fit into ordinary private logic. After Haqiqat the familiar “I” lost its status as the center. After Vasl the former distance disappeared. So “within” in the finale means closeness rather than location.

The boldest line is “I myself have become the sky.” For me this is pure poetry, and I want to leave it the right to be poetry. I do not assert a literal ontological transformation of a human being into the cosmos or God. I hear here a change of measure. The sky is a symbol of infinity, capaciousness, the absence of walls. If before I looked at infinity as something that surpasses me and is far away, now the very capacity to be open to this infinity becomes part of my inner state.

Especially interesting here is the Naqshbandi understanding that Jami describes as constant presence and, at a mature stage, the witnessing of Divine manifestation in everything. This is close to me as a context for the line “every time I look at the sky, You look back at me again.” The gaze ceases to be one-sided. The world is no longer simply an object before me. I myself am inside a relationship, inside an answer.

And then the three words return: “breath. silence. light.” For me this deliberately sounds like the memory of the album. Nafas taught me to hear presence in a single breath. Sukunat - to let words step aside. Nur - to understand light as a medium that changes the one who looks. In the finale these three motifs are no longer separate stations. They make up the inner sky.

“There is no distance. There is only within” I perceive as the last formula of the cycle, but not as a closing answer. The distance disappears not because I have finally mastered Truth, but because the former scheme “I am here - She is there” stops working. This is very important. The album does not end with the words “I have arrived.” It ends with the words “I vanished in infinity.” The first track promised that there would be no end point, and the promise is kept.

That is why Osmon ichra is for me a return to Yo‘l on another level. There I said: “the path itself is my goal.” Here it becomes clear why. If the goal were a place, it could be reached and one could stop. But the goal was a change in the very way of seeing. The path did not bring me to the sky. It gradually changed me so that the sky stopped being only above.