Jalal al-din Rumi
Jalal al-Din Rumi, was born in Balkh 1 on the 30th September, 1207. His proper name was Muhammad, title Jalal al-Din and later “Khudawandagar”, “lord”. In his poetry he used the pen-name “khamush” (meaning “silent”) and from the 15th century came to be known as Mawlawi.
But he held back from letting the man out until all happened as it needed to happen.
Many actions which seem cruel
are from a deep friendship.Many demolitions are actually removations.
Theologians mumble, rumble-dumple, necessity and free will,
while lover and beloved pull themselves into each other.
The beauty of the Unseen Form is beyond description — borrow a thousand illuminated eyes, borrow!
Love makes forms in separation. But at the time of meeting, the Formless shows His head ands says, “I
am the root of the root of sobriety and intoxication; the beauty you see in forms is My reflection. Now I
have removed the veils, I have displayed Beauty without intermediary. Since you have become so
interwoven with My reflection, you have found the strength to view the Essence alone.”
It behooves us to strip away all our prejudices
and seek out a friend of God. However, when
we’ve spent our whole life in the company of people
who lack discrimination, then our own discriminative
faculty becomes weak, and that true
friend may pass us by unrecognized.
All the hopes, desires, loves, and affections that people have for different things — fathers, mothers,
friends, heavens, the earth, gardens, palaces, sciences, works, food, drink — the saint knows that these are
desires for God and all those things are veils. When men leave this world and see the King without these
veils, then they will know that all were veils and coverings, that the object of their desire was in reality
that One Thing… They will see all things face to face.
God says, “I will buy you…your moments,
your breaths, your possessions, your lives. Spend
them on Me. Turn them over to Me, and their
price is divine freedom, grace and wisdom. This is
your worth in My eyes.” But if we keep our life
for ourself, then we lose what treasures we have
been granted. Like the person who hammered the
dagger, worth a hundred pounds into the wall to
hang a gourd upon, their great fortune was
reduced to a nail.
Whatever you keep hidden in your heart, God
manifests in you outwardly. Whatever the root of
the tree feeds on in secret, affects the bough and
the leaf.
“Their mark is on their faces.”
If misguided and misdirected love for a phantom
can produce ecstasy, still it is nothing like the
mutual love enjoyed with a real beloved, who is
aware and wide awake to the lover’s condition.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
“This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.”
“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
“Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.”
“Knowest thou not the beauty of thine own face? Quit this temper that leads thee to war with thyself.”
The lesson to be learned from this is that we
must see one another very well indeed. We must
pass beyond the good and bad qualities that are
present temporarily in everyone, and must enter
into the other’s very essence. We must see with
exceptional clarity that these qualities people
observe in one another are not their original qualities.
“My eye is fixed upon another.” That means
you are seeking something apart from yourself,
like the dryness of the flour that longs for water
from the dough-maker’s hand. “What can I do?”
Know that you seek only yourself, that longing is
for you. The light you seek is your own light
reflected, but you will not escape this blinding
glare of the outward lights until your own Inner
Light becomes a hundred thousand times greater.
He does not see the Master at this
moment because in truth the desire that filled him,
namely to see the Master, was a veil hiding the
Master. So it is with all desires and affections, all
loves and fondnesses that people have for every
variety of thing—father, mother, heaven, earth,
gardens, palaces, knowledge, things to eat and
drink. The lover of God realizes all these desires
are truly the desire for God, and they are all veils
covering humanity’s eyes.
By God, we must always have
hope. Faith, itself, consists of fear and hope.
Someone once asked me, “Hope itself is good, but
what is this fear?” I said, “Show me a fear without
hope, or a hope without fear. The two are
inseparable.” For example, a farmer plants
wheat. Naturally he hopes that wheat will grow.
At the same time he is afraid some blight or
drought may destroy it. So, there is no hope without
fear, or fear without hope.
“Things are made clear by their opposite.”
It is impossible to know anything without its
opposite,
Although facing the truth is not attractive at
first, the longer one follows it the sweeter it
becomes.
