What Sound Reveals with Time
The poem below was written over 20 years ago. At the time, I didn’t know what I now know—not conceptually, but viscerally. I had glimpses, instincts, intuitive echoes of something deeper stirring through vibration.
As my spiritual path evolved within the Diamond Approach®, my understanding of HU and, by extension, love deepened and transformed, bringing that knowing into my body, bones, and breath. The HU symbol in the featured image is a trademark of the Ridhwan Foundation, representing the complete human being.
The sound of HU is the beginning and end of all sounds, the sound of the unseen.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
This year, I published Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence. It’s not a continuation of the poem—it’s a resonance. A deeper octave. The fruit of lived experience, countless hours of chanting, teaching, and exploring how sound opens us to Being.
In Good Vibrations, I draw from ancient traditions, modern neuroscience, and direct phenomenological practice to illuminate what this poem was reaching toward: your body is not just a vessel for sound—It is the instrument.
And when you learn how to let it resonate, not just physically but spiritually, it doesn’t just echo the sacred.
It is the sacred.
That’s what 20 years taught me.
That’s what Good Vibrations is about.
And that’s what this old poem, in its raw and searching way, was already trying to sing.
Who says this love
Will set you free
When that love
Knows the beauty of jailWho says this love
Is a consuming fire
When that love
Is a river of blissWho says this love
Is the light of God
When that love
Is dark MysteryWho says this love
The soul longs for
When that love
Devours the falseI tell you
Here is the secret
Of this and that
HU says………
John Harper
The poem invokes HU, a sacred sound deeply rooted in Sufism and the Diamond Approach. In Sufism, HU is the breath of the divine, the sound that echoes the oneness of all creation. The very essence of the sacred permeates every aspect of life. HU resolves all duality, representing the unity of all things—the ultimate reality where love and existence are the same.
In the Diamond Approach, HU represents the complete human being who has integrated the spiritual and human worlds into one realization. It reminds us that the divine is not something separate from us but the very fabric of our being.
Understanding HU means recognizing unity beyond all dualities—light and dark, love and pain, being and non-being.
HU is the ground of all existence, the source from which everything emerges. It is the ultimate expression of the divine, embodying the truth that love is not just an emotion or state of being but the essence of who we are. – A. H. Almaas
HU is the secret of “this and that,” the sound that calls us back to our true nature, to the oneness that lies at the heart of all things.
HU is the essence of breath, the echo of the unstruck sound that connects us to the Beloved.
Rumi
HU is the sound of that embodiment, the divine vibration that guides us toward the unity and oneness that is our true nature.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.