| Taken From: "The Essential Rumi" Translated by: Coleman Barks HarperCollins Publishers, 1995 Drink all your passion, and be a disgrace. Close both eyes to see with the other eye. Open your hands, if you want to be held. Sit down in this circle. *** Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence *** The children follow, not knowing the taste of wine, or how his drunkness feels. All people on this planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire. *** If you haven't left child's play, how can you be an adult? Without purity of spirit, if you are still in the middle of lust and greed and other wantings, you're like children playing at sexual intercourse. They wrestle and rub together, but it's not sex! The same with the fightings of mankind. It's a squabble with play-swords. No purpose, totally futile. *** Your actions mean nothing, the sex and war that you do. *** Experience that breathing. >From books and words come fantasy, and sometimes, from fantasy comes union. *** Gone, inner and outer, no moon, no ground or sky. *** The wine we really drink is our own blood. Our bodies ferment in these barrels. We give everything for a glass of this. We give our minds for a sip. *** There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Don't think all ecstasies are the same! *** Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight. Be a connoisseur, and taste with caution. Any wine will get you high. Judge like a king, and choose the purest. *** Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon's reflection. *** First, when I was apart from you, this world did not exist, nor any other. Second, whatever I was looking for was always you. Third, why did I ever learn to count to three? *** This is the sema of slavery and mastery dancing together. This is not being. Neither words, nor any natural fact can express this. *** Sometimes organization and computation become absurd. *** Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I'm already under and living within the ocean. *** Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. *** The body is a device to calculate the astronomy of the spirit. Look through that astrolabe and become oceanic. *** You kiss a beautiful mouth, and a key turns the lock of your fear. *** The friend comes into my body looking for the center, unable to find it, draws a blade, strikes anywhere. *** Do you know what I'm doing? That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it's writing, or the ball can guess where it's going next. *** "Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back. At any gathering I am there, mingling in the laughing and grieving, a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden within the notes. No ears for that. Body flowing out of spirit, spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing. But it's not given us to see the soul. The reed flute is fire, not wind. Be that empty." *** I have a thirsty fish in me that can never find enough of what it's thirsty for! *** What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest. I can explain this, but it would break the glass cover on your heart, and there's no fixing that. *** Are these enough words, or shall I squeeze more juice from this? Who am I, my friend? *** For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness. Then one swoop, one swing of the arm, that work is over. Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope, free of mountainous wanting. The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw blown off into emptiness. *** The mother and father are your attachment to beliefs and bloodties and desires and comforting habits. Don't listen to them! They seem to protect, but they imprison. They are your worst enemies. They make you afraid of living in emptiness. *** When you are with everyone but me, you're with no one. When you are with no one but me, you're with everyone Instead of being bound up with everyone, be everyone. When you become that many, you're nothing. Empty. *** A lover's food is the love of bread, not the bread. No one who really loves, loves existence. *** To an Egyptian, the Nile looks bloody. To an Israelite, clear. What is a highway to one is a disaster to the other *** Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being. *** Come to the orchid in Spring. There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers. If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter. *** Who comes to a spring thirsty and sees the moon reflected in it? *** The rest of this poem is too blurry for them to read. *** What is form in the presence of reality? Very feeble. Reality keeps the sky turned over like a cup above us, revolving. Who turns the sky wheel? The universal intelligence. *** Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be. *** A night full of talking that hurts, my worst held-back secrets. Everything has to do with loving and not loving. This night will pass. Then we have work to do. *** Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. *** How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river. How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you. *** Pale sunlight, pale the wall. Love moves away. The light changes. I need more grace than I thought. *** We must drown, away from heroism, and descriptions of heroism. *** The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question, nor is it bought with going to amazing places. Until you've kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years, you don't begin to cross over from confusion. *** What the sayer of praise is really praising is himself, by saying implicitly, "My eyes are clear." Likewise, someone who criticizes is criticizing himself, saying implicitly, "I can't see very well with my eyes so inflamed." Don't ever feel sorry for someone who wants to be the sun, that other son, the one that makes rotten things fresh. And don't ever envy someone who wants to be this world. *** Just because you can't drink all that falls doesn't mean you give up taking sips of rainwater. If the nut of the mystery can't be held, at least let me touch the shell. *** The rooster of lust, the peacock of wanting to be famous, the crow of ownership, and the duck of urgency, kill them and revive them in another form, changed and harmless. *** A true person is more calm and deliberate. He or she doesn't worry about interruptions. *** There's a hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the sound box is stuffed full of anything, no music. If the brain and the belly are burning clean with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire. The fog clears, and the new energy makes you run up the steps in front of you. *** When you're full of food and drink, an ugly metal statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast, good habits gather like friends who want to help. *** You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up in the dark with eyes closed. Listen to the answer. There is no "other world." I only know what I've experienced. You must be hallucinating. *** "Just as you can't come close, I can't go out!" This is how animal energy becomes monstrous and ruins your life's freshness and beauty. *** That's why you see things in two ways. Sometimes you look at a person and see a cynical snake. Someone else sees a joyful lover, and you are both right! Everyone is half and half, like the black and white ox. *** Do you pay regular visits to yourself? Don't argue or answer rationally. Let us die, and dying, reply. *** Do you know what you are to me? During the day, you're my energy for working. At night, you're my deepest sleep. *** "Would you like one piece of silver now, O Lord of my spirit, or three at breakfast tomorrow morning?" The Sufi answered, "I love the half a coin already in my hand from yesterday more than the promise of a whole one today, or the promise of a hundred tomorrow. A sufi is the child of this moment." *** A hand shifts our birdcages around. Some are brought closer. Some move apart. Do not try to reason it out. Be conscious of who draws you and who not. *** Be tough, and strength will come. *** I'm through. Read the rest of this poem in the dark tonight. *** A certain person came to the Friend's door and knocked. "Who's there?" "It's me." The Friend answered, "Go away. There's no place for raw meat at this table." The individual went wandering for a year. Nothing but the fire of separation can change hypocrisy and ego. The person returned completely cooked, walked up and down in front of the Friend's house, gently knocked. "Who is it?" "You." Please come in, my self, there's no place in this house for two. The doubled end of the thread is not what goes through the eye of the needle. It is a single-pointed, fined-down, thread end, not a big ego-beast with baggage." *** Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there's really only one work. *** "The one who keeps me in here is the one who keeps you out there. The same who will not let you in will not let me out." *** Then suddenly he leaned and whispered something in the second king's ear, and that second, that second king became a wanderer too. They walked out of town hand in hand. No royal belts, no thrones. This is what love does and continues to do. ... So they wandered around China like birds pecking at bits of grain. They rarely spoke because of the dangerous seriousness of the secret they knew. ... All that world-power wants, really, is this weakness. So the kings talked in low tones, and carefully. Only God knows what they said. They used unsayable words. Bird language. But some people have imitated them, learned a few birdcalls, and gotten prestigious. *** You are every image, and yet I'm homesick for you. *** Who sees inside from outside? Who finds hundreds of mysteries even where minds are deranged? See through his eyes what he sees. Who then is looking out from his eyes? *** Touch my skin so I can be myself. *** Most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it. *** Listen to presences inside poems, Let them take you where they will. Follow those private hints, and never leave the premises. *** Submit to a daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door. Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who's there. *** Come back, my friend! The form of our love is not created form. Nothing can help me but that beauty. There was a dawn I remember when my soul heard something from your soul. I drank water from your spring and felt the current take me. *** Advice doesn't help lovers! They're not the kind of mountain stream you can build a dam across. An intellectual doesn't know what the drunk is feeling! Don't try to figure what those lost inside love will do next! *** I saw you and became empty. This emptiness, more beautiful than existence, it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes, existence thrives and creates more existence! ... To praise is to praise how one surrenders to the emptiness. *** We rarely hear the inward music, but we're all dancing to it nevertheless, *** When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. *** Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along. *** We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. *** I want to hold you close like a lute, so we can cry out with loving. *** Love is vanishing into the sky. The mind, for learning what men have done and tried to do. Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why. *** If the drinker has a deep gentleness in him, he will show that, when drunk. But if he has hidden anger and arrogance, those appear, and since most people do, wine is forbidden to everyone. *** On Resurrection Day your body testifies against you. Your hand says, "I stole money." Your lips, "I said meanness." Your feet, "I went where I shouldn't." Your genitals, "Me too." *** This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. *** We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again. *** Your bodily soul wants comforting. The severe father wants spiritual clarity. He scolds but eventually leads you into the open. Pray for a tough instructor to hear and act and stay with you. *** In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. *** When the ocean surges, don't let me just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest! *** I am filled with you. Skin, blood, bone, brain, soul. There's no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence. *** Give the beautiful ones mirrors, and let them fall in love with themselves. That way they polish their souls and kindle remembering in others. *** There is nothing worse than thinking you are well enough. More than anything, self-complacency blocks the workmanship. *** You've seen a herd of goats going down to the water. The lame and dreamy goat brings up the rear. There are worried faces about that one, but now they're laughing, because look, as they return, that goat is leading! There are many different kinds of knowing. The lame goat's kind is a branch that traces back to the roots of presence. Learn from the lame goat, and lead the herd home. *** Your intelligence is always with you, overseeing your body, even though you may not be aware of its work. If you start doing something against your health, your intelligence will eventually scold you. *** The movement of your finger is not separate from your finger. *** Give your weakness to the one who helps. *** It's not me that's glorified in acts of worship. It's the worshippers! I don't hear the words they say. I look inside at the humility. *** If the beloved is everywhere, the lover is a veil, but when living itself becomes the Friend, lovers disappear. *** A story is like a water that you heat for your bath. It takes messages between the fire and your skin. It lets them meet, and it cleans you! *** There are two types on the path. Those who come against their will, the blindly religious people, and those who obey out of love. The former have ulterior motives. They want the midwife near, because she gives them milk. The others love the beauty of the nurse. The former memorize the prooftexts of conformity, and repeat them. The latter disappear into whatever draws them to God. Both are drawn from the source. Any movings from the mover. Any love from the beloved. *** Friends are enemies sometimes, and enemies friends. *** There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as the new sciences. With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid, and it doesn't move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out. *** With great speed they joined each other. When bodies blend in copulation, spirits also merge. *** Theologians mumble, rumble-dumble, necessity and free will, while lover and beloved pull themselves into each other. *** Someone who has heard about ecstatic love, but never tasted it, disrupts the banquet. *** the way you make love is the way God will be with you. *** Tell her, one surrendering bow is sweeter than a hundred empires, is itself a kingdom. *** You could be moving in a circuit without wing, nourished without eating, sovereign without a throne. No longer subject to fortune, you could be luck itself, if you would rise from sleep, leave the market arguing, and learn that your own essence is your wealth. *** Gamble everything for love, if you're a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. *** Muhammad says, "Love of one's country is a part of the faith." But don't take that literally! Your real "country" is where you're heading, not where you are. Don't misread that hadith. *** Don't regret what's happened. If it's in the past, let it go. Don't even remember it! *** The net, of course, finally closed around him, and as he lay in the terrible frying-pan bed, he thought, "If I get out of this, I'll never live again in the limits of a lake. Next time, the ocean! I'll make the infinite my home." Inside me a hundred beings are putting their fingers to their lips and saying, "That's enough for now. Shhhhh." Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river *** All our lives we've looked into each other's faces. That was the case today too. How do we keep our love-secret? We speak from brow to brow and hear with our eyes. *** I will search for the Friend with all my passion and all my energy, until I learn that I don't need to search. *** But knowing depends on the time spent looking! *** You fear losing some eminent position. You hope to gain something from that, but it comes from elsewhere. Existence does this switching trick, giving you hope from one source, then satisfaction from another. It keeps you bewildered and wondering, and lets your trust in the unseen grow. *** Those who inherit wealth don't know what work it took to get it. *** Nightingales are put in cages because their songs give pleasure. Whoever heard of keeping a crow? *** When light returns to its source, it takes nothing of what it has illuminated. *** The wine God loves is human honesty. *** "Dalqak, say what it is!" "I was far from the court when I heard that you needed a courier, someone who could go to Samarcand and come back in five days." "Yes!" "I hurried here to tell you that I will not be able to do it." "What!" "I don't have the stamina or the agility. Don't expect me to be the one." *** With deceptive people, cover the jar, and shield it. But be calm with those in duality. Speak sweetly and reasonably. Patience polishes and purifies. *** The snake is your animal-soul. When you bring it into the hot air of your wanting-energy, warmed by that and by the prospect of power and wealth, it does massive damage. Leave it in the snow mountains. Don't expect to oppose it with quietness and sweetness and wishing. *** I am a cow, or thistles for camels to browse on. People who insult me are only polishing the mirror. *** Learn from Ali how to fight without your ego participating. God's lion did nothing that didn't originate from his deep center. Once in a battle he got the best of a certain night and quickly drew his swords. The man, helpless on the ground, spat in Ali's face. Ali dropped his sword, relaxed, and helped the man to his feet. "Why have you spared me?" How has lightning contracted back into its cloud? Speak, my prince, so that my soul can begin to stir in me like an embryo." Ali was quiet and then finally answered, "I am God's Lion, not the lion of passion. The sun is my lord. I have no longing except for the One. When a wind of personal reaction comes, I do not go along with it. There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it's always been. There is nothing now except the divine qualities. Come through the opening in me. Your impudence was better than any reverence, because in this moment I am you and you are me. I give you this opened heart as God gives gifts: the poison of your spit has become the honey of friendship." *** Earth-love, spirit-love, any love looks into that yonder, and whatever I try to say explaining love is embarrassing! Some commentary clarifies, but with love silence is clearer. A pen went scribbling along, but when it tried to write love, it broke. If you want to expound on love, take your intellect out and let it lie down in the mud. It's no help. *** Any love based on physical beauty is not love. *** When someone does not feel grateful to that, the forms appear to be as he feels. They mirror his anger, his greed, and his fear. Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. *** Your intellect is in fragments, like bits of gold scattered over many matters. You must scrape them together, so the royal stamp can be pressed into you. *** "Water! There! There!" It's that There! that keeps him asleep. In the future, in the distance, those are illusions. Taste the here and the now of God. This present thirst is your real intelligence, not the back-and-forth, merciful brightness. Discursiveness dies and gets put in the grave. This contemplative joy does not. Scholarly knowledge is a vertigo, an exhausted famousness. Listening is better. *** What goes comes back. Come back. We never left each other. *** With company you quicken you ascent. You may be happy enough going along, but with others you'll get farther, faster. *** Stay together, friends Don't scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake. *** Much of our thought is of the past, or the future. They're free of those. Before a mine is dug, they judge coins. Before vineyards, they know the excitements to come. In July they feel December. *** The Prophet Muhammad said, "There is no better companion on this way than what you do. Your actions will be your best friend, or if you are cruel and selfish, your actions will be a poisonous snake that lives in your grave." But tell me, can you do the good work without a teacher? Can you even know what it is without the presence of a Master? Notice how the lowest livelihood requires some instruction. First comes knowledge, then the doing of the job. And much later, perhaps after you're dead, something grows from what you've done. Look for help and guidance in whatever craft you're learning. Look for a generous teacher, one who has absorbed the tradition he's in. *** Don't feed both sides of yourself equally. The spirit and the body carry different loads and require different attentions. Too often we put saddlebags on Jesus and let the donkey run loose in the pasture. Don't make the body do what the spirit does best, and don't put a big load on the spirit that the body could carry easily. *** Look how the caravan of civilization has been ambushed. Fools are everywhere in charge. Do not practice solitude like Jesus. Be in the assembly, and take charge of it. *** Deliberation is one of the qualities of God. Throw a dog a bit of something. He sniffs to see if he wants it. Be that careful. Sniff with your wisdom-nose. Get clear. Then decide. *** We are the night ocean filled with glints of light. We are the space between the fish and the moon, while we sit here together. *** Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands, or your own genuine solitude? Freedom, or power over an entire nation? A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given to you. *** This we have now is not imagination. This is not grief or joy. Not a judging state, or an elation, or sadness. Those come and go. This is the presence that doesn't. *** This that we are now created the body, cell by cell, like bees building a honeycomb. The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and human body. *** I walk into a huge pasture. I nurse the milk of millennia. Everyone does this in different ways. Knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small place to live, every human being streams at night in the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work. *** A secret turning in us makes the universe turn. Head unaware of feet, and feet head. Neither cares. They keep turning. *** Walk to the well. Turn as the earth and the moon turn, circling what they love. Whatever circles comes from the center. *** No better love than love with no object, no more satisfying work than work with no purpose. If you could give up tricks and cleverness, that would be the cleverest trick! *** Real value comes with madness, matzub below, scientist above. Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears in to emptiness with a thousand new disguises. *** Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance, when you're perfectly free. | |
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