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Despite the many differences that seem to exist between peoples the world over — regardless of culture, tradition, environment, or heredity — there is but one seeker, one search, and one sacred object of our desire. The celestial source of this sacred being doesn’t just live within us… we are, in fact, one with it.
Why do I strive, why do I toil in this narrow, confined frame, when life, all life with all its joys, is open to me?
Every instrument and tool, if it does that for which it has been made, is well, and yet he who made it is not there. But in things which are put together by nature, there abides in them the power which made them, therefore, the more correct it is to reverence this power. Think that if you live and act according to its will, everything in you is in harmony with intelligence.
Then he realized, I indeed, I am this creation, for I have poured it forth from myself. In that way he became this creation. Verily, he who knows this becomes in this creation a creator.
That inner Self, as the primeval Spirit, Eternal, ever effulgent, full and infinite bliss, single, indivisible, whole and living, shines in everyone as the witnessing awareness. That Self in its splendour, shining in the cavity of the heart, this Self is neither born nor dies, neither grows nor decays, nor does it suffer any change. When a pot is broken, the space within it is not, and similarly, when the body dies the Self in it remains eternal.
It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, or aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you and all other conscious beings as such are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment is intuition.
“Know thyself” is one of the most useful and comprehensive precepts in the whole moral system, and it is well known in how great a veneration this maxim was held by the ancients.
The Man Watching
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap. For example, she could not produce a horse if it were not preceded by all the other animals on which she ascends to the horse’s structure as if on the rungs of a ladder. Thus every one thing exists for the sake of all things and all for the sake of one. For the one is of course the all as well. Nature, despite her seeming diversity, is always a unity, a whole. And thus, when she manifests herself in any part of that whole, the rest must serve as a basis for that particular manifestation, and the latter must have a relationship to the rest of the system.
More radiant than the sun, purer than the snow, subtler than the ether, is the Self, the spirit within my heart. I am that Self, that Self am I.
Thus it is said if you know them and know yourself, your victory will not be imperiled. If you know Heaven and you know Earth, your victory can be complete.
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form — no object in the world, nor life, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space — ample the fields of Nature.
The kingdom of Heaven is within you, and whosoever knoweth himself shall find it.
Let him lovingly cast all his thoughts and cares, and his sins, too, as it were, on that unknown Will. Beyond this unknown will of God, he must desire and purpose nothing; neither way, nor rest, nor work, neither this nor that, nor wholly subject and offer himself up to this unknown will.
I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.
O Lord, I cannot plead my love of thee. I plead thy love of me, The shallow conduit hails the unfathomed sea.
There is a deep significance concealed, connecting man, when he once has felt it, with the highest truths of the invisible world.
Don’t unstring the bow,
I am your four-feathered arrow
that has not been used yet.
I am a strong knifeblade word,
not some if or maybe,
dissolving in air.
I am sunlight slicing the dark.
Who made this night?
A forge deep in the earth-mud.
What is the body?
Endurance.
What is love?
Gratitude.
What is hidden in our chests?
Laughter.
What else?
Compassion.
Let the beloved be a hat pulled down firmly on my head.
Or drawstrings pulled and tied around my chest.
Someone asks, “How does love have hands and feet?”
Love is the sprouting-bed for hands and feet!
Your father and mother were playing love games,
They came together, and you appeared!
Don’t ask what love can make or do!
Look at the colours of the world.
The riverwater moving in all rivers at once.
The truth that lives in Shams’ face.
There are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.
All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it, let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power.
God loveth those who are pure. Naught in the Bayan and in the sight of God is more loved than purity and immaculate cleanliness… God desireth not to see, in the Dispensation of the Bayan, any soul deprived of joy and radiance.
He indeed desireth that under all conditions, all may be adorned with such purity, both inwardly and outwardly, that no repugnance may be caused even to themselves, how much less unto others.
There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.
He who has found the bliss of the Eternal has no fear from any quarter.
He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.
