the “Sigh of Compassion” flows through the things of the world like the waters of a river and is unceasingly renewed.
His creation springs, not from nothingness, from something other than Himself, from a not-Him, but from His fundamental being, from the potencies and virtualities latent in His own unrevealed being.
Everything we call other than God, everything we call the universe, is related to the Divine Being as the shadow to the person. The world is God’s shadow. . . . The shadow is at once God and something other than God. Everything we perceive is the Divine Being in the eternal hexeities of the possibles.
The mystic Ka’aba is the heart of being. It has been said to him: “The Temple which contains Me is in your heart.” The mystery of the Divine Essence is no other than the Temple of the heart, and it is around the heart that the spiritual pilgrim circumambulates.
The Beloved becomes a mirror reflecting the secret face of the mystic lover, while the lover, purified of the opacity of his ego, becomes in turn a mirror of the attributes and actions of the Beloved.
O marvel! a garden among the flames… My heart has become capable of all forms. It is a meadow for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks, A temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’aba, The Tables of the Law and the book of the Koran. I profess the religion of Love, and whatever direction Its steed may take, Love is my religion and my faith.
Indeed as Jalaluddin Rumi also says, each of our eternal individualities is a word, a divine Word, emitted by the Breath of Divine Compassion. When this Word penetrates the mystic’s heart… that is, when the “secret of his Lord” unfolds to his consciousness, when divine inspiration invests his heart and soul, “his nature is such that there is born within him a spiritual Child (walad ma’nawi) having the breath of Christ which resuscitates the dead.”
“Love is closer to the lover than is his jugular vein.” So excessive is this nearness that it acts at first as a veil. That is why the inexperienced novice, though dominated by the Image which invests his whole inner being, goes looking for it outside of himself, in a desperate search from form to form of the sensible world, until he returns to the sanctuary of his soul and perceives that the real Beloved is deep within his own being; and, from that moment on, he seeks the Beloved only through the Beloved . . . the active subject within him remains the inner image of unreal Beauty, a vestige of the transcendent or celestial counterpart of his being. . . .
He who knows himself knows his Lord. This Lord is not the impersonal self, nor is it the God of dogmatic definitions, self-subsisting without relation to me, without being experienced by me. He is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me. . . .
the Beloved becomes a mirror reflecting the secret face of the mystic lover, while the lover, purified of
the opacity of his ego, becomes in turn a mirror of the attributes and actions of the Beloved.
the mystic Ka`aba is the heart of being. It has been said to him: “The Temple which contains Me is in
your heart.” The mystery of the Divine Essence is no other than the Temple of the heart, and it is around
the heart that the spiritual pilgrim circumambulates.
