A distraught man approached a master teacher.
"Please, Master, I feel lost, desperate. I don't know who I am. Please, show me my true self!" But the teacher just looked away without responding. The man began to plead and beg, but still the master gave no reply. Finally giving up in frustration, the man turned to leave. At that moment the master called out to him by name.
"Yes!" the man said as he spun back around. "There it is!" exclaimed the master.

You cannot describe it, you cannot picture it,
You cannot admire it, you cannot sense it.
It is your true self, it has nowhere to hide.
When the world is destroyed, it will not be destroyed.

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Only Breath

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 or 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.

The son of Mary, Jesus, hurries up a slope as though a wild animal were chasing him. Someone following him asks, "Where are you going? No one is after you." Jesus keeps on, saying nothing, across two more fields. "Are you the one who says words over a dead person, so that he wakes up?" I am. "Did you not make the clay birds fly?" Yes. "Who then could possibly cause you to run like this?" Jesus slows his pace.

I say the Great Name over the deaf and the blind, they are healed. Over a stony mountainside, and it tears its mantle down the navel.

Over non-existence, it comes into existence. But when I speak lovingly for hours, for days, with those who take human warmth and mock it, when I say the Name to them, nothing happens. They remain rock, or turn to sand, where no plants can grow. Other diseases are ways for mercy to enter, but this non-responding breeds violence and coldness toward God. I am fleeing from that.

As little by little air steals water, so praise dries up and evaporates with foolish people who refuse to change. Like cold stone you sit on a cynic steals body heat. He doesn't feel the sun. Jesus wasn't running from actual people. He was teaching in a new way.

Christ is the population of the world, and every object as well. There is no room for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing when sweet water is everywhere.

Lovers think they're looking for each other, but there's only search: wandering this world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here, there is no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did about the future. Forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that.

On the way you may want to look back, or not, but if you can say There's nothing ahead, there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain. Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both, you don't belong with us.

When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us. There's no place like that anywhere in the world.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear who hear my voice? Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

How does a part of the world leave the world? How can wetness leave water? Don't try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire! Don't wash a wound with blood!

No matter how fast you run, your shadow more than keeps up. Sometimes it's in front! Only full, overhead sun diminishes your shadow. But that shadows has been serving you! 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. You must have shadow and light source both. Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe. When from that tree, feathers and wings sprout on you, be quieter than a dove. Don't open your mouth for even a cooooooo.

When a frog slips into the water, the snake cannot get it. Then the frog climbs back out and croaks, and the snake moves toward him again. Even if the frog learned to hiss, still the snake would hear through the hiss the information he needed, the frog voice underneath. But if the frog could be completely silent, then the snake would go back to sleeping, and the frog could reach the barley.

THIS WORLD WHICH IS MADE OF OUR LOVE FOR EMPTINESS

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:

this place made from our love for that emptiness! Yet somehow comes emptiness, this existence goes. Praise to that happening, over and over!

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 of into emptiness.

These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning: existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words and what they try to say swept out the window, down the slant of the roof.

Consider the difference in our actions and God's actions. We often ask, "Why did you do that?" or "Why did I act like that?"

We do act, and yet everything we do is God's creative action. We look back and analyze the events of our lives, but there is another way of seeing. a backward-and-forward-at-once vision, that is not rationally understandable. Only God can understand it.

Satan made the excuse, You cause me to fall, whereas Adam said to God, We did this to ourselves. After this repentance, God asked Adam, Since all is within my foreknowledge, why didn't you defend yourself with that reason? Adam answered, I was afraid and I wanted to be reverent.

Whoever acts with respect will get respect. Whoever bring sweetness will be served almond cake. Good women are drawn to be with good men.

Love, tell an incident now that will clarify this mystery of how we act freely, and are yet compelled. One hand shakes with palsy. Another shakes because you slapped it away. Both tremblings come from God, but you feel guilty for the one, and what about the other?

These are intellectual questions. The spirit approaches the matter differently. Omar once had a friend, a scientist, Bu'l-Hakam, who was flawless at solving empirical problems, but he could not follow Omar into the area of illumination and wonder.

Now I return to the text, "And He is with you, wherever you are," but when have I ever left it!

Ignorance is God's prison. Knowing is God's palace. We sleep in God's unconsciousness. We wake in Gods' open hand. We weep God's rain. We laugh God's lightning. Fighting and peacefulness both take place within God.

Who are we then in this complicated world-tangle, that is really just the single straight line down at the beginning of ALLAH?

Let your spirit be strong like Jesus. If that part becomes weak, then the worn-out donkey grows to a dragon.

Once, a holy man, riding his donkey, saw a snake crawling into a sleeping man's mouth! He hurried, but he couldn't prevent it. He hit the man several blows with his club.

The man woke terrified and ran beneath an apple tree with many rotten apples on the ground. "Eat! You miserable wretch! Eat."

"I've never seen you before! Who are you? Do you have some inner quarrel with my soul?"

The wise man kept forcing him to eat, and then he ran him. For hours he whipped the poor man and made him run. Finally, at nightfall, full of rotten apples, fatigued, bleeding, he fell and vomited everything, the good and the bad, the apples and the snake.

When he saw that ugly snake come out of himself, he fell on his knees before his assailant.

I bless the moment you first noticed me. I was dead and didn't know it. You've given me a new life. Everything I've said to you was stupid! I didn't know."

Muhammad said, 'If I described the enemy that lives inside men, even the most courageous would be paralyzed. No one would go out, or do any work. No one would pray or fast, and all power to change would fade from human beings,'

so I kept quiet while I was beating you, that like David I might shape iron, so that, impossibly, I might put feathers back into a bird's wing.

God's silence is necessary, because of humankind's faintheartedness. If I had told you about the snake, you wouldn't have been able to eat, and if you hadn't eaten, you wouldn't have vomited.

I saw your condition and drove my donkey hard into the middle of it, saying always under my breath, 'Lord, make it easy on him.' I wasn't permitted to tell you, and I wasn't permitted to stop beating you!"

The healed man, still kneeling, "I have no way to thank you for the quickness of your wisdom and the strength of your guidance.

I've said before that every craftsman searches for what's not there to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole where the roof caved in. A water carrier picks the empty pot. A carpenter stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill. Their hope, though, is for emptiness, so don't think you must avoid it. It contains what you need!

Dear soul, if you were not friends with the vast nothing inside, why would you always be casting your net into it, and waiting so patiently?

This invisible ocean has given you such abundance, but still you call it 'death,' that which provides you sustenance and work.

God has allowed some magical reversal to occur, so that you see the scorpion pit as an object of desire, and all the beautiful expanse around it as dangerous and swarming with snakes.

This is how strange your fear of death and emptiness is, and how perverse the attachment to what you want.

Now that you've heard me on your misapprehension, dear friend, listen to Attar's story on the same subject.

He strung the pearls of this about King Mahmud, how among the spoils of his Indian campaign there was a Hindu boy, whom he adopted as a son. He educated and provided royally for the boy and later made him vice-regent, seated on a gold throne beside himself.

One day he found the young man weeping. "Why are you crying? You're the companion of an emperor! The entire nation is range out before you like stars that you can command!"

The young man replied, "I am remembering my mother and my father, and how they scared me as a child with threats of you! 'Uh-oh, he's headed for King Mahmud's court! Nothing could be more hellish!' Where are they now when they should see me sitting here?"

This incident is about your fear of changing. You are the Hindu boy. Mahmud, which means, Praise to the End, is the spirit's poverty, or emptiness.

The mother and father are your attachment to beliefs and bloodties and desires and comforting habits.

Some day you'll weep tears of delight in that court, remembering your mistaken parents!

Know that your body nurtures the spirit, helps it grow, and then gives it wrong advice.

The body becomes, eventually, like a vest of chainmail in peaceful years, too hot in summer and too cold in winter.

But the body's desires, in another way, are like an unpredictable associate, whom you must be patient with. And that companion is helpful, because patience expands your capacity to love and feel peace.

The patience of a rose close to a thorn keeps it fragrant. It's patience that gives milk to the male camel still nursing in its third year, and patience is what the prophets show to us.

Be with those who mix with God as honey blends with milk, and say, "Anything that comes and goes, rises and sets, is not what I love."

Live in the one who created the prophets, else you'll be like a caravan fire left to flare itself out alone beside the road.

SAY I AM YOU

I am dust particles in sunlight.

I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.

To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.

I am wind in the top of a groove, and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel, I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.

Silence, thought, and voice. The musical air coming through a flute, a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal. Both candle, and the moth crazy around it.

Rose and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy, the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away. What is and what isn't.

You who know Jelaludin, You the one in all, Say who I am.

Say I am You

~Jalaludin Rumi~

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds her circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age, smells the shirt of his lost son and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up a flowing prophet?
Or, like Moses, goes for fire and finds what burns inside the sunrise.

Jesus quietly slips into a house for a moment's peaceful escape
from this world, and opens the door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere.
An oyster opens its mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there's a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he is wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories.
How thing have gone with others - - -
Unfold your own myth,
Without complicated explanations.
So everyone will understand the passage.
We have opened you.

Start walking toward shams.
Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you have grown,
Lifting.

From: The Essential Rumi; translations by Coleman Barks and John Moyne;
Harper, San Francisco, '95.

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Wean Yourself

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

There is no "other world."
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating.

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks Only Breath

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks Wean Yourself

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Only Breath

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Wean Yourself