Come Back Again . . .

. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door.

And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not

know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come

into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his

father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this

most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek

the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a

stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

-- Thomas Wolfe --
("Look Homeward, Angel")

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rumi: The Sufi's Tavern of Love

"In the tavern are many wines," writes poet, Coleman Barks, "the wine of delight in color and form and taste, the wine of the intellect's agility, the fine port of stories, and the cabarnet of soul singing. Being human means entering this place where entrancing varieties of desire are served. The grapeskin of ego breaks and a pouring begins."

"Fermentation is one of the oldest symbols for human transformation," he points out. "When grapes combine their juice and are closed up together for a time in a dark place, the results are spectacular. This is what lets two drunks meet so that they don't know who is who. Pronouns no longer apply in the tavern's mind-world of excited confusion and half-articulated wantings."

"But after a time in the tavern," Barks warns, "a point comes, a memory of elsewhere, a longing for the source, and the drunks must set off from the tavern and begin the return. The Qu'ran says, "We are all returning." The tavern is a kind of glorious hell that human beings enjoy and suffer and then push off from in their search for truth. The tavern is a dangerous region where sometimes disguises are necessary, but never hide your heart, Rumi urges. Keep open there. A breaking apart, a crying out in the street, begins in the tavern, and the human soul turns to find its way home."

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi" p. 1.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

THE DRUNKARDS AND THE TAVERN

I'm drunk and you're insane, who's going to lead us home?
How many times did they say,
"Drink just a little, only two or three at most?"

In this city no one I see is conscious;

one is worse off than the next, frenzied and insane.

Dear one, come to the tavern of ruin
and experience the pleasures of the soul.
What happiness can there be apart
from this intimate conversation
with the Beloved, the Soul of souls?

In every corner there are drunkards, arm in arm,
while the Server pours the wine
from a royal decanter to every particle of being.

You belong to the tavern: your income is wine,

and wine is all you ever buy.
Don't give even a second away

to the concerns of the merely sober.

O lute player, are you more drunk, or am I?
In the presence of one as drunk as you, my magic is a myth.

When I went outside the house,
some drunk approached me,

and in his eyes I saw

hundreds of hidden gardens and sanctuaries.

Like a ship without an anchor,

he rocked this way and that.

Hundreds of intellectuals and wise men
could die from a taste of this yearning.

I asked, "Where are you from?"
He laughed and said, "O soul,

half of me is from Turkestan and half from Farghana.

Half of me is water and mud, half heart and half soul;

half of me is the ocean's shore, half is all pearl.

"Be my friend," I pleaded. "I'm one of your family."
"I know the difference between family and outsiders."

I've neither a heart nor a turban,

and here in this house of hangovers

my breast is filled with unspoken words.

Shall I try to explain or not.

Have I lived among the lame for so long

that I've begun to limp myself?
And yet no slap of pain could disturb
a drunkenness like this.

Listen, can you hear a wail

arising from the pillar of grief?
Shams al-Haqq of Tabriz, where are you now,

after all the mischief you've stirred in our hearts?

(Translation by K. Helminski, A, Godlas, and               L. Saedin)

[Kabir Helminski, "The Rumi Collection," pp. 32-24]

The "Journey From God"

"We all come from God, but when we are born into this world we forget. We forget from where we have come and that we are children of light. We take on the clothing of this world, leaving behind,"the clouds of glory' of our true Home. The Sufi calls this the "journey from God," a journey of forgetfulness in which we leave Paradise behind. But there are those who never quite forget, who keep a distant memory buried deep within them. As a result this world never quite seems like home; there is often a sense of not quite belonging, not fitting in. Mystics are strangers in this world, just because they remember their real home."

-- LLewellyn Vaughan-Lee --
("Love Is a Fire: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home")

 In his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth enters the sublime, echoing the teachings of the Sufi, with his intimations of the transmigration of the soul and his explicit recognition of  a universal "home" in the Godhead.

William Wordsworth

“ … Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home. ”

(William Wordsworth, from his poem, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.")

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

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, nor natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an enemy in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam or Eve or any

origin story. My place is pathless, 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.

    << >>                                            

There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes.

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi," p. 34.]

What Will Be When Ages Cease?

What will be when the moon
no longer pulls the tides,
when the sun rises in the north,
when ages cease?


What will be when man is no more,
when the land is sere,
when the air is foul, the sea inert,
when ages cease?


What will be when knowledge is lost,
when information loses all form,
when history ends,
when ages cease?


What will be when consciousness itself wanes,
when the night sky is stripped bare
by the motion of time's inexorable passage,
when ages cease?

What will be when suns cease birthing,
when galaxies dissipate,
when the universe goes dim,
when ages cease?


What will be when everything goes absolutely cold,
when light itself is snuffed out,
when even change becomes unchanging,
when ages cease?

Thomas Merton: First Lesson About Man

FIRST LESSON ABOUT MAN

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
Of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls,
He never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
A milk-drinker.

He fills his skin with coffee
And loses patience with the rest of his species.
He draws his sin on the wall,
On all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
Because he cannot find his joy,
Except in zoology.

Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
He gets the wrong number.
Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.
Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
But it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,

He drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
Who have learned the first lesson about man,
Answer your test:
“Man is the saddest animal.
He begins in zoology,
And gets lost
In his own bad news.

In Memoriam: "To One Shortly to Die"

What words do you say to the dying? I had watched my friend decline and knew that this was, perhaps, the last time we would meet together, the last time I would be able to comfort, perhaps, the man who had brought and opened up a new vista of consciousness and being to my awareness.

How to reassure a man who really needed no assurance save what each of us might want when a companion on the spiritual path meets with us one last time on what we know will be our death bed?

Socrates, before the poison took hold, told his friends: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows." What was I to say?

We had walked a long way together on paths that had too briefly merged, and together we had explored what other wayfarers had said. And as he was no fabulist, but a realist, I chose the following poem by Walt Whitman, a spiritual kinsman, to reassure him and to ease him on his way:

TO ONE SHORTLY TO DIE

From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
You are to die - let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate.
I am exact and merciless, but I love you - there is no escape for you.

Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you feel it,
I do not argue, bend my head close and half envelop it,
I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
I am with you, I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

"Apart from the physical pain," I asked him, "is there any fear or suffering?" (For I'd asked this of an enlightened man upon his death bed, and he had laughed heartily at the proposition.)

"No, just confusion," he replied.

"What confuses you?," I asked.

"Why," he asked me, looking up, "do I struggle to hold on?"

I told him that there was no longer any reason for him to hold on, that he had learned all that he had come here to learn, and that he had taught scores of others (including me) what he had learned.

"I'll have to consider that," he said. And then he asked me to help him lay back down.

I laid him down, and he slipped off his oxygen mask. I told him that I loved him, kissed his cheek and took my leave. I am told that shortly thereafter he slipped into a coma, where he lingered for a day or so before departing.

The next evening, as I sat with my father waiting for a chorale to be performed, my thoughts turned back to my friend, for he had been a musician. "How much he would like this," I thought. And just at that time, I'm told, he revived for a moment, surrounded by others who loved him, and to whom he'd taught peace.

He lingered for a moment in silence, closed his eyes, and then breathed his last. It was in a silent and smiling acceptance, I'm told, that he slipped into his final deathless sleep. He had evolved.

Rumi and the Soul of Persia

"Iran’s officially recognized “spiritual leader” today may be Ayatollah Khamenei," notes the Christian Science Monitor, "but for hundreds of years before the current establishment of mullahs and ayatollahs, Iranians of all creeds have looked to another spiritual leader: Jalal ad-Din Rumi."

Small wonder, as Rumi, the 13th-century Perisan Sufi master, voiced the wonder of an Islamic Enlightenment when Europe was still mired in its own Dark Ages. Today, worldwide (and not just in Iran) we are all reaching - knowingly or unknowingly - for the visions that Rumi expressed so contemporaneously over 700 years ago.

Attached below is a reading by Coleman Barks, Rumi's best-selling translator, which expresses the Sufi master’s impressive and ever-timely wisdom, a wisdom that speaks to evolution and the evolutionary imperative in surprisingly modern terms centuries before Darwinism and the rise of “modern science.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

THIS WE HAVE NOW

This we have now
is not imagination.

This is not
grief or joy.

Not a judging state,
or an elation,
or sadness.

Those come
and go.

This is the presence
that doesn’t.

It’s dawn, Husam,
here in the splendor of coral,
inside the Friend, the simple truth
of what Hallaj said.

What else could human beings want?

When grapes turn to wine,
they’re wanting
this!

This
That we are now
Created the body, cell by cell,
Like bees building a honeycomb.

The human body and the universe
grew from this, not this
from the universe and the human body.

"Don't Think All Ecstasies Are the Same!"

Our incarnations are those of a Wine-Taster. Each life the Wine-Taster raises a world-in-a-glass to the lips. The Wine-Taster sips and tastes each world for a time. And with every taste, a new and different life is lived, each with its own bouquet.

One sip may have a rich or earthy taste, the next fruity, sickly-sweet or oaken. Only the glass that is left aside and forgotten will turn to vinegar. It depends.

Rumi tells us there are "thousands of wines that can take over our minds." "Be a connoisseur, and taste with caution," he says.

"Judge like a king, and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with fear, or some urgency about, 'what's needed'."

"Don't think all ecstasies are the same!," he warns.

 In one sip the life will have a masculine or feminine sense. It may be fresh-pressed, aged, or so distilled it will taste like poison to the connoisseur. One sip may be an elixir, another God's own ambrosia.

Each sip will leave its aftertaste. It will cleanse the palate in one case, another sip may linger through the night and the imbiber will wake up sour-mouthed and thirsty. But unlike in a formal tasting, here the Wine-Taster does not spit and rinse, but drinks fully, casting off only the dregs.

And when having tasted the fullness of all the Estates in all the many Realms, and reeling in intoxication, laughing from the effects of his debauchery, he sleeps at last in drunken Bliss.

Raise your cup, Wine-Taster! Sat-chit-ananda . . . . .

Rumi: "Today . . . We Wake Up Empty"

When I was first shown the "inner path" that eventually we all must take, the wizened old seeker told me that, "if I was serious," I needed to read Patanjali's "Yoga Sutras" and the poetry of the great Sufi mystic, Jalalludin Rumi.

I ordered one of the many translations of Patanjali that were then available - there were over one hundred different translations and commentaries at the time - and purchased Coleman Barks' "The Essential Rumi." (In the interim, while I was waiting for the copy of Patanjali I had randomly picked out, an enlightened man loaned me a copy of his self-described "Book of Soul-Realization." It turned out to be the exact translation of Patanjali, by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, that I had randomly ordered.)

While you are waiting for a copy of your "Book of Soul-Realization" to land in your lap, or you want to set your reading of Rumi aside for a moment and listen to his transcendental verses from as close to the lips of the poet as we can now get, you may want to watch and listen to one of Coleman Barks'  readings of Rumi (below).

* * * * * * * * * * * *

"Today, like every other day, we wake up empty. . . . "

"Someone may be clairvoyant,
able to see the future, and yet have very little wisdom
. . . like the man who dreamed of water,
and began leading everyone toward the mirage. . . ."




"One night a man was crying, Allah! Allah!"




"Inside water, a water-wheel turns . . . . "




"What was said to the rose that made it open
was said to me, here in my chest. . . ."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Listen to the moan of a dog for its  master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the name of.

Give you life
to be one of them."

Coleman Barks, "Love Dogs," excerpt from, "The Incredible Rumi," page 156.

Poetic Transcendentalism

Nobody says it like a master poet. And William Wordsworth ( (1770-1850) - who has perhaps the most fitting name of all the bards - is without question a master poet. His work transcends the ordinary and reaches the Divine.

In his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth enters the sublime with his intimations of the transmigration of the soul and his explicit recognition of  a universal "home" in the Godhead.

William Wordsworth

“ … Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home. ”

(William Wordsworth, from his poem, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.")

 The two poems that seem to approach the same spiritual heights as the above passage from Intimations are William Blake's The Tyger and Emerson's Brahma. Blake (1757-1827) was one of those rare individuals to experience wholesale spiritual enlightenment, according to Richard M. Bucke in his groundbreaking treatise on Cosmic Consciousness, while Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) provided a good deal of the impetus to the American Transcendentalist movement that centered around his Concord, Massachusetts home.

William Blake

"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

Richard M. Bucke

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?


Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

(William Blake, The Tygre, 1794)

And last, but not least, is Emerson's Brahma, which reflects the impact that the introduction of Eastern wisdom traditions had on Western religious understanding,  particularly on the development of Emerson's Unitarianism.

If the red slayer think he slays,
  Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
  I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near, 
  Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
  And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
  When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
  And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
  And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
  Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

 (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Brahma," 1856)

Poetic Words on Our Expansive Universe

This poem was inspired by a selection (appended to the bottom of this post ) from Tzvi Freeman's "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth," a compendium of the teachings of the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe:

ON SEEING G_D

                As Earth to Sun,
and Sun to Milky Way,
so galaxies in clusters
spin outward from their origin,

from that primordial Word
of which all heavenly threads are spun.

                 And from these filaments,
these matted skeins of stars,

even planes of  Light shine forth,

uniform and translucent,
that are God' thoughts and Mind.

                 

It is in this Light we live, and move,

and have our being.

                 And when the Sun shines full upon the Earth,

to light both eyes and consciousness,

we clearly see the power of G_d

and feel His touch upon our skin.

                 With the passage of the Sun 'cross the heavens

the illusion of Time is born,

for now we can only know in part.

                 But when the Sun's light wanes

to reveal the night's panoply

of slowly wheeling stellar arms

that sweep across its sky,

our minds perceive the Depth of G_d

in which our Being merely is.

               - Bhuddini -
01/01/2007

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  *

Here (as promised) is the passage from Tzvi Freeman (as inspired by the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe) which sparked the composition of the poem, above:

"Einstein received acclaim for demonstrating that energy and matter are one. The scientist who demonstrates how all forces are one in a unified theory will receive even greater acclaim. So, since we all agree that someone will eventually establish this, why not accept it right now and call it G_d?"