Rumi & the Sufi Poet Saints

Sell your cleverness. Purchase bewilderment...

Close the language-door, and open the love-window...

Forget every touch and every sound that did not teach you how to dance...

One of the marvels of the world: the sight of a soul sitting in prison with the key in its hand...

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground... 

With life as short as a half taken breath, don't plant anything but love...
 

When you're with everyone but me, you're with no one. When you're with no one but me  you're with everyone. Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone. When you become that many, you're so free, so empty: nothing...

 

I wave my hands like leaves, I whirl dancing like the moon; my turning may seem earthly, but it is purer, far purer, than the turning of all the spheres of Heaven... 

 

Let the waters settle, and you will see stars and the moon mirrored in your own being... 

 

When your chest is free of your limiting ego, then you will see the ageless Beloved. You can not see yourself without a mirror. Look at the Beloved: He is the brightest mirror..

 

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I am a hole in a flute the Christ-breath moves through: listen to this music! - Hafiz 


The light of the moon is shamed by the beauty of your face. And here I am half in, half out of my body, lost, in the longing for union. - Hafiz

We entered the house of realization,
we witnessed the body.

The whirling skies, the many-layered earth,
the seventy-thousand veils,
we found in the body.

The night and the day, the planets,
the words inscribed on the Holy Tablets,
the hill that Moses climbed, the Temple,
and Israfil's trumpet, we observed in the body.
Torah, Psalms, Gospel, Quran-
what these books have to say,
we found in the body.

Everybody says these words of Yunus
are true. Truth is wherever you want it.
We found it all within the body.

~ Yunus Emr
______

Love came and emptied me of self,
every vein and every pore,
made into a container to be filled by the Beloved.
Of me, only a name is left,
the rest is You my Friend, my Beloved.

~Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
______ 

What is to be done, O Moslems? For I do not recognise myself.
I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Moslem.

I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea;
I am not of Nature’s mint, nor of the circling heaven.

I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire;
I am not of the empyrean, nor of the dust, nor of existence, nor of entity.

I am not of India , nor of China , nor of Bulgaria , nor of Saqsin.
I am not of the kingdom of ’Iraqian, nor of the country of Khorasan

I am not of this world, nor of the next, nor of Paradise , nor of Hell.
I am not of Adam, nor of Eve, nor of Eden and Rizwan.

My place is the Placeless; my trace is the Traceless;
’Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.

I have put duality away; I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.

He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward;
I am intoxicated with Love’s cup, the two worlds have passed out of my ken;

If once in my life I spent a moment without thee,
From that time and from that hour I repent of my life.

If once in this world I win a moment with thee,
I will trample on both worlds; I will dance in triumph forever.

~Maulana Rumi (Translate­d by Reynold A. Nicholson)