The Essential Rumi

• “Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. / Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, / where something might be planted, / a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.”
• “Do you think I know what I’m doing? / That for one breath of 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.”
• “Let the beauty we love be what we do. / There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
• “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, / there is a field. I’ll meet you there. // When the soul lies down in that grass, / the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other / doesn’t make any sense.”
• “In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul and you are that. // But we have ways within each other / that will never be said by anyone.”

• “How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?”

• Our descriptions will always fall short of what is.

• “This mirror inside me shows… / I can’t say what, but I can’t not know!”

• We have a deep familiar sense of who we are, but have a hard time describing it. Again, descriptions will always fall short.

• “And the motion of the body comes from the spirit like a waterwheel that’s held in a stream.”

• “What the sayer or 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.’”

• Wonderful. Those who praise praise themselves for recognizing what is praiseworthy. Those who blame blame themselves for being teary-eyed victims of the so-called blameworthy. Both try to pretend that their judgment is not clouded.

• “Never ignore those intuitions. / When you feel some slight repugnance about doing something, / listen to it. These premonitions come from God. […] It’s not always a blind man / who falls in a pit. Sometimes it’s one who can see.”
• “There’s no blocking the speechflow-river-running-all-carrying momentum that true intimacy is.”
• “The stars come up spinning / every night, bewildered in love.”
• “To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.”
• “Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity? / Why would you refuse to give / this joy to anyone? // Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups! / They swim the huge fluid freedom.”
• “The visible bowl of form contains food / that is both nourishing and a source of heartburn. // There is an unseen presence we honor / that gives the gifts. […] When the ocean surges, / don’t let me just hear it. / Let it splash inside my chest!”
• “What is the mirror of being? / Non-being. Always bring a mirror of non-existence / as a gift. Any other present is foolish. […] Your defects are the way glory gets manifested. / Whoever sees clearly what’s diseased in himself / begins to gallop on the way.”

I come before dawn

“…Remember the rewards you get for being obedient! 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.”

Story Water

A story is like water
that you heat for your bath. It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!

…

The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that’s blazing
inside your presence. Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden. Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.

• Permissive role of the body in consciousness. In line with McGilchrist’s view that the brain brings into being consciousness through resistance, active filtering.

In a boat down a fast-running creek, it feels like trees on the bank are rushing by. What seems

to be changing around us is rather the speed of our craft leaving this world.

• As we age, our escape velocity increases. What we think as the world changing around us could be us changing within the Oneness of the world. Time flying by could be us flying from time.

• “The physical sun is unique, but it’s possible to imagine something like it. // The spiritual sun has nothing comparable, inner or outer. Imagination cannot contain it.”
• When two lovely souls meet, they become one and many. “The ocean waves are their closest likeness, when wind makes, from unity, the numerous. This happened to the sub, and it broke into rays, through the window, into bodies. The disc of the sub does exist, but if you see only the ray-bodies, you may have doubts. The human-divine combination is a oneness. Plurality, the apparent separation into rays.”
  • Apparent separation.
• “These leaves, our bodily personalities, seem identical, / but the globe of soul fruit / we make, / each is elaborately / unique.”
• “Your words are guesswork. / He [the Lord] speaks from experience. / There’s a huge difference.”
  • Theory vs. Experiential knowing
• “The moment this love comes to rest in me, / many beings in one being. / In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks. / Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of starts.”
  • Unity/multiplicity. Rotation.
• “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!”
  • Intrinsic love and purpose. Really good ending… we need to be somehow cleverer about not being clever.
• “I am so small! I can barely be seen. / How can this great love be inside me? // Look at your eyes. They are small, / but they see enormous things.”
• “…A Spring wind moves to dance / any branch that isn’t dead.”
• “If love is your center, a ring / gets put on your finger. // Something in the moth / is made of fire.”
  • Revolving again
• Whatever language you speak, speak with love
• “Do not avoid your suffering. / Plunge it in the Nile. // Purify your stubbornness. / Drown it. Burn it. // Your body is a stingy piece of aloeswood / that won’t let go its healing smoke / until you put it in fire.”
• “No is a thousand yesses / in the code of emptiness.”
  • A thousand yesses is like a light too bright. A bit of shadow, a single no, reveals the contours of the face. Darkness offers the potential for light to fulfill itself.
• “…the shore looks like there are multiple marriages going on at once…”
• “Your body must become soul, / every hairtip quivering with spontaneous life.”

A Cleared Site

The presence rolling through again clears the shelves and shuts down shops.

Friend of the soul, enemy of the soul, why do you want mine?

Bring tribute from the village.
But the village is gone in your flood.

That cleared site is what I want.
Live in the opening where there is no door
to hide behind. Be pure absence.
In that state everything is essential.

The rest of this must be said in silence because of the enormous difference between light and the words that try to say light.

• Beautiful. Captures renewal and the discomfort associated with it; how emptiness makes what is whole more essential and offers a fertile bed upon which the whole can fulfil itself; and the unspeakable nature of the field of embodied experience and God

• “Let your prayer be pure praise, not begging for something to happen, or not happen.”
• “Fast, and watch what arrives. / A materially full person is not alert / for dishes that descend. // Don’t always eat what’s offered. / Be lordly. Refuse the first plate. / Wait, and the host will send out better food.”
• “Don’t fall down the well of scripture. Use the words to keep moving. Thousands are trapped in the Qur’an and the Bible, holding to a rope. It’s not the rope’s fault. Let the wellrope pull you out. Then let the wellrope go.”