October 2004 Archives

This is one side of a chat with a friend earlier this evening, which connects with ideas from the entry on the beauty of existence:

Your nature is not you. It is only the carrier for your awareness. There is no “you”. There is only life, the experience of life. The experiencer is the experience. There is no separate reality which stands outside it all, dipping its hand in here and there. You are as much your experience of the sky when you look at it, as you are your experience of your nature when you become aware of it. You can appreciate it to a fuller or lesser extent, but there is no controlling it.

Now, you can take actions which change the particulars of the experience, and there is great value in doing so, but it does not change the underlying nature of experience itself. So, in wanting to control your nature as if to control yourself, you are dividing yourself in two, between the experience and the experiencer. There is only life. Point to anything that is not life. See if you can find even a shred of evidence for its existence. Look for it, you will not find anything other than your experience. Even memory is just the experience of remembering in the present.

Here’s what I think happens: we grow up with the message that we should become something. That’s a good message, especially when we are looking for direction in life. We are taught that becoming “good” is the highest form of becoming, and so many of us want that. Without any deeper understanding of life, that is a pretty awesome goal, actually. But what happens is that we become utterly absorbed in that task, because as children, our parents, our society, gave us the task. It sets in, very deep, the sense that we are fulfilling it for somebody; as if someday – maybe in the after-life – if we work hard enough to become good, somebody will put a gold star on our forehead and say, “Yes, you have now reached the stage I wished you to achieve.” We are looking to fulfill the original plan of our childhood, which is to become this “good” we wanted to fulfill.

And so we pursue it, by many different means. Some of these means are even the task of removing self. But the thing is, the entire scheme is a scheme of the self. There is no part of us which can “be” good, since we are only our experience. This doesn’t mean that pursuing goodness is wrong, just that we took it to heart in the wrong way. And even that was not wrong, it was just… suited to a different mentality. It was what we needed to motivate us. But here we go, seeking to acquire this “goodness” so that we can gain the ultimate approval we’ve always wanted. But when you start on the mystic path, for example, you reach a fundamental contradiction. You cannot hold absolute unity, and the concept of “becoming good”, in the same mind. They contradict each other.

Because what is it that can “be” good? Unity means there is nothing but what is. What part are you going to cut away, to put the gold star on? Once you cut it away, you undo the goodness you thought you had achieved. It becomes a fundamental paradox, achieving selflessness in order to “be good”. You have to have the idea of a self, in order for that self to “be good”. Otherwise, there is nothing that can be good. Now, this does not mean that pursuing goodness was wrong. It’s just, it’s not about the self acquiring goodness. The self is not a “thing”: it’s sight itself.

If experience is not deepened, it remains very shallow, like a form of blindness. Because of that blindness, the real good of existence cannot be seen. God’s very brilliance hides him, because eyes are unaccustomed to His Light. So the good that you seek is His good, not the acquiring of your own good. The deeper you go, the more one’s experience is of Him, and of His good. This is the good you’ve been seeking all along. You become that good by becoming the experience of that good – not by possessing it, or acquiring it.

The Law is there to assist you in opening your eyes. There is no existent evil, but there is the evil that blinds men’s souls. The reason for punishment is to help the individual avoid that transgression in future. But it’s all functional toward the experience of God’s manifest being. The whole world you think you see is your blindness, your self. The veil that’s pulled over your awareness. Everything is functional toward the end of union with God.

And not union of a “self” with God, but union through experience: baqá. I think heaven exists in the present moment. But that doesn’t mean we get to see all of it. If I were a man in a park, and then I turned into a bird, I could see much more of it without having to go to a new place. If baqá is knowing existence itself to be heaven, death is simply a broadening and deepening of that basic realization. But what is important is experiencing God, moving toward Him. Reaching out into His infinity.

To that end, we must leave the self behind, and the quest to “become good”. Christ said: “Why callest thou Me good? There is none good save the Father.” As another example, imagine you knew a girl, and realized she was the perfect woman for you. That would only be the beginning of really getting to know her. It would only grow from there, never reaching an “end”.

You see, all I’m saying is that existence is the only thing that exists: and this existence is the manifest will of God. We can either appreciate it, become fully aware, or no. All of the things that happen in this existence are still this existence, are still part of the constant unveiling of His will this existence represents. So, it is entirely compatible with having a family, a job, a “normal life”, etc. It’s not the content that matters, but our awareness of it. There is beauty in everything. It doesn’t need to be in a monastery on a mountaintop. It can be in counting out apples to sell in the market. The details do not matter. They only matter insofar as they help or hinder us in knowing God. All of the content of existence is functional toward the awareness of that existence. Beauty exists so we can know beauty.

To say that “normal life” doesn’t fit is like saying that the content of existence has no place in existence. This is exactly one kind of trap that some mystics fall into, because the content of existence is the awareness of existence. But there is only existence. There is only He. So whether you pray, or raise a family, or do your job, you are existing. Some things you do will help your awareness deepen, some things won’t. In those terms, you should choose. But there is no actual better or worse, evil or good. There is no self that can be any of those. There is only God. All that we see, that is our self. When we purify the nafs, we are purifying our sight, not some separate reality that needs purification. Just seek Him, and that is all you ever need to do, “with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind”, as the Jews say.

We worry relative to the gold star, to the task of “becoming good”. We fear we won’t be good enough when the time comes. But here’s the kicker: you will never be good; there is no “you”, there is no “being good”, and there is no “good” as opposed to evil. There are no gold stars handed out. All you will ever have is your experience. And your experience at any moment is the result of your own effort to truly know. Your experience itself is the reward, and the goal.

When I talk about blindness, I mean blindness as a lack of experience, relative to what could be experienced. However, even focusing on blindness is misleading, because blindness is not something separate that adheres to any “self”. Let’s just say that there is only experience, and experience is all there is. Experience never ends. In one sense, it can’t even be divided between “doing”, “done”, etc. There is just being, ipseity… is-ness. When you sit to pray, that is all there is.

If we choose rightly, we will appreciate and love existence. If we choose poorly, we will not. Religion is a guide to right living, right seeing, right knowing, right acting, all to the end of experiencing and appreciating the good. And that good can be experienced at any time, by anyone, anywhere. No qualities need to be “acquired” to achieve it, simply that we free ourselves from our blindness. And even that is not blindness in the typical sense. It’s more like you are talking to a friend, and suddenly you realize they have more quality than you’d earlier given them credit for. Now you value the relationship more, and you put more energy into deepening that relationship. And as you do so, your appreciation of their quality grows. And then you put in more effort, etc., and so on ad infinitum.

But the thing is, you are always with that friend, conversing with them, from day one. You don’t need to achieve a certain level to be talking with them. As you progress, you simply get more out of the relationship, you value it more, and see more fully what it has to offer. Prayer is one of the forms of conversation in that relationship, but there are many, many forms of relating to life. So really, it’s just that the deeper you go, the cooler it is to be, the cooler being is. However you want to play with the words. Our relationship with the Friend goes through infinite changes, forms, joys, etc.

And nowhere in all of that do we need to be “good”; our search for goodness is really a search to relate properly. The same way that an architect looks for good in his buildings by making things square. He does it because it makes the building livable, and not because the building then becomes “good” in any absolute sense. That is why being worried about virtue should make us laugh. Any fear is like fearing that suddenly that we will cease to exist. As long as you exist, you are with Him. It’s just a question of realizing it. And it only gets better from there.

Love is a beloved insanity.  
If tongues could speak the tale  
of love's madness,  
no hearers would remain.

They would, as one breath,  
ascend ash-like upon the breeze  
offering their hearts to the pyre --  
and not a one complain.

For when it touched my own lips,  
it ruined my heart's kingdom.  
Peace became a travesty:  
my very hope was my despair.

Where banners once flew in proud disdain  
a king now weeps for his kingdom's bane.

After writing yesterday’s entry, I came across the following quote from Alan Watts, in a chapter on “creative morality”, which summarizes quite beautifully some of my essential points:

Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence. Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are “itself.” It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the “well” it wishes to others is not security but liberty.

Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals [i.e., duty]. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting.

But there is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self-love all the bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

Reading this made me realize that only the self cares whether it is “good” or “dutiful”. For the soul, there is only what exists in the present, and the actions it calls for. That is life, rather than what life should be. A soul acts well because it chooses this, and not because it wishes its actions to be named “well”.

Further, I came to realize through this that God also does not care what our actions are. Why would He? Why would a Being of infinite power care what I choose to do with myself? Instead, I think He cares only that we grow up well and happy, since He is our Creator. To this end He gave us laws; not because our following those laws, in itself, makes any difference to Him.

When we choose to live out of duty to these laws, we create a null loop: we base our lives on the idea that He wants us to act a certain way, when in fact He does not care at all. The purpose of moral action is to benefit life. It is we who should care about how we act. It is we who must choose to live, and not live for the sake of any idea. In the same way that a well-constructed building will stand tall and long, a well-lived life is something to be happy about. This becomes a sincere basis for action, rather than duty to the thought that anyone – even God – wants us to live a certain way. He has our best interest at heart, not which virtues we come to emulate.

As an example of this, there is no such thing as becoming humble. Humility is a response to the presence of something seen as greater than ourselves. When we have that perception, we experience humility. “Being humble” is not possible. Perhaps if there were a constant perception of each moment as awesome in its potential, a man could experience such a thing perpetually. But it never becomes an attribute adhering to part of the individual. The belief that it might is exactly what the self is: the thought that in choosing to act a certain way, we accumulate virtues which endure beyond the present.

This scheme of cultivating virtue seems to me like a perversion of what spiritual teachings are intended to convey. In teaching about humility, they shows us how to know when reality is being perceived truly, because such a perception would produce the response of humility. But to take it as an abstract quality, that devotion can acquire for us? That feel like the self perverting religion to its own ends, and not the soul choosing to fulfill its potential.

I have often wondered why I do not find more joy in the world at being alive. Often I though it was the condition of things, but really our condition has never changed. Everything that existed then, exists now, and will continue to exist.

Mostly what I find is weariness, punctuated by diverting entertainments. I thought religion, if properly applied, would relieve this, but I’ve seen it have a much worse effect. Then I came across an idea which clarified the question for me, and revealed why I dislike “shoulds” and duty so much: it’s not duty that’s the problem, but the core of people’s relationship to it.

Duty, by itself, is part of getting things done. If you want health, for example, you have a duty to that choice to exercise and eat well. Wishing alone will not bring it into being. Duty in this sense is commitment to one’s choices, whereas the insidious form of duty has nothing to do with our intentions. My emphasis on joy as a guide for activity was about this, since lack of joy often reveals these false commitments.

It is not about joy or duty alone. It comes down to whether we choose to live: the will to be. To really choose life means fully accepting reality, and making one’s choices for his own sake, because he wills them from the depths of his being. This is the soul’s power: to create, to shine light into the void of pre-existence. But it must be the entirety of a man that does this, and not for the sake of anything but his own desire that it should be done. This sincere intention completes the link, and transforms a person into life giving life. At that moment, we wield the creative powers of the One who granted us potential to do so.

This is not a division between the believing and the non-believing, but the living and the dead. Those who are dead have yet to be born again in the spirit of a life fulfilled. They are lamps that wait to be enkindled. They seem bewildered by each passing day, when, in fact, every moment of life is a meaning unto itself. We live to live: in living is our purpose. It is a question of what we choose to do with that life. In making the right choices for the right reasons lies happiness.

How do we make the right choice? It has to be made by ourselves, for ourselves. We cannot make choices for the sake of others, for the plain reason that I would never want others to make choices for me. If I knew that someone were patterning their life around what made me happy, that knowledge would bring me sadness. Would anyone want a lover to say, “I love you because I think I should”? Should anyone marry a person whose only reason for commitment was a sense of duty? There is no room for duty in love; there is no lover who is duty-bound to his Beloved.

Similarly, if the world is the manifestation of our Beloved’s qualities, truly recognizing life implies falling in love with it. To live a life duty-bound is never to awaken to the choices we’ve been offered. As long as we make choices out of a sense of owing our lives to someone else, or something else, or some higher ideal, we might as well say we are living because someone else told us to. Such a life has no foundation of its own. If the sense of duty were taken away, there would be nothing left. This is the condition of someone who endures life for another’s sake, bravely carrying on until mortal existence releases them from their burden.

Dragging through life, one cannot know happiness because life itself is happiness. This weariness causes people to want others to make their choices for them, because they haven’t the heart for it. They don’t want inner freedom or to hear about life’s potential. They want a clear morality to point the way, prodding them along in hope of heaven or fear of hell. And because such a life is empty, one gets lost as often as possible in work, amusements, or other people, while complaining all the while about the unpleasantness of life.

Understandably, such people live for the future. In the future lies hoe, salvation, paradise. It may take the shape of longing for heaven, devoting themselves to offspring, or striving for lasting fame, but since present life does not offer comfort to their thirsting souls, they invest everything in “the life to come”. The present is viewed only in terms of its not being that future: meaningless, trivial, hopeless, petty, filled to the brim with ache and sorrow. As far as such people are concerned, physical death is all too welcome.

Who would choose this life? Yet the fact is that wishing is easier than doing; ideas are more palatable than reality; belief is less taxing than reason. Faced with the real duties of life, some withdraw into a protective cocoon. Attempts to draw them out can provoke anger, vituperation, or violence. I have come to visualize this state as a cozy house built around the soul, that one improves upon and defends with amazing energy. That “little house” is the self.

The soul longs for life, and reaches for it, but life demands a price: the acceptance of death. There can be no pleasure without pain, no building without decay. To know life is to struggle with ignorance; to practice wisdom means often seeming the fool. There are times when real life is anything but glorious – because in really living lies glory. Even if no one in the world understands or confirms your actions, it matters little: such action itself is a confirmation.

In a society of people who opt not to live, duty is all. There is duty to parents, friends, spouse, employer, society. Everyone wants to determine your path, because this is the easiest way to maintain security. What starts in childhood as a desire to live freely turns into following the latest novelty. Always following, being led, handing over our gift of life to whomever we think is better suited to make the choice for us. Some even see giving up freedom as the highest act of freedom. But how many people would really volunteer themselves for a stint in prison? Why do the same to the soul?

I think the Messengers of God came to reawaken people to their gift of life, since the proclivity of society seems to be death. Over time, knowledge of this choice gets suppressed. From age to age these Champions of the soul offer the choice of life to those who would have it – and are promptly persecuted for upsetting society’s time-honored ways. Until, that is, the Messenger’s teachings are later enshrined into doctrine, and used in the same fashion as before to yoke the soul’s freedom.

Once yoked, people want happiness provided for them. If freedom is relinquished to an idea of God, “God” is looked to for happiness and peace. Little wonder it never really comes. The believer assumes that his own deplorable state condemns him, which reinforces the concept of God they’re bound to. It’s a nearly inescapable cycle of self-defeat that rationality cannot hardly hope to breech. The mantra in this state is “try harder, do more”, until life becomes impossibly difficult – and all the more reason to long for escape. The “God concept” can turn life into a prison, with our own mind both jailer and inmate. How can anyone, comfortable in such patterns of being, ever see that there is a vastly different way to live?

Real life is infinitely joyous. It never ceases to amaze. If a spiritual life is the life of the soul, it happens whenever the soul is fully engaged in the act of living: when “God” is no longer the driver of our actions, but rather we act from our own desire. Then we can see God in the world – instead of in our minds – via the medium of our own life. Knowing life this way, we fall in love with it. We seek to act because acting is the fulfillment of living. If we fail to make choices for our own sake, who are we living for? If God had wanted robots, He could have saved us the trouble. But I think God created freedom so we could freely choose to live, and in that choice discover joy as a product of our own choosing – not simply the outcome of prayer, or wishing, or waiting for someone else to provide it.

the drops of the rain  
fall steadily down;  
the grey clouds  
the muted breeze  
the scents  
of a sodden earth.  
the water soaks  
into the ground's  
own marrow.  
the world is slowly  
being dissolved  
by a cleansing sky.

The Sufis tell that when the nafs (self, or individual soul) is finally conquered, it will disappear – like a drop into the Ocean. This disappearance is faná, or nothingness. When that happens, the drop rejoins the Ocean, and lives in a state of baqá, of eternal reunion. “Verily, we are from God, and to Him shall we return.”

My recent thinking has led me to think that existence itself is baqá. The “self” – or nafs – is created through the rejection of being. We create a room from our ideas of how life should be, and shield our soul in that room. There is a door leading out, but often we cannot see where it is, or even that it’s there. This is the [j2004](hidden door#thehiddendoor) I sought earlier. Because that room is made from shadow, unreality, opening the door means obliterating everything we have come to know (faná) and as such it requires the insanity of love, to open that door for the Beloved’s sake.

I think this phenomenon is told allegorically in the story of Satan and the fall of man. My soul was born in paradise. My entrance to heaven was the creation of my awareness. I turned away from this when I could not make sense of the world using my knowledge, and in so doing divided something perfect and simple into countless parts. I’ve spent a lifetime reassembling what was never divided, and judging in terms of my own ignorance – when the fracture all along was only in my view of things.

This is Sartre’s rift at the core of being between the for-itself and the in-itself. From this he founded a concept of awareness based on the perception of lack, or our awareness of what is not. This “void in the heart of being” sounds a lot like the nafs.

A true acceptance of being would have the nafs bow before creation and declare it absolutely good, no matter how it appeared to its limited understanding. This, Satan was unwilling to do when he saw the form of man’s creation. So too, my own will, by denying creation, is the author of my purgatory. A loving Father never rejected me, or waits to see if I will do wrong. Rather, I turned away in the infancy of my consciousness, like the Earth bringing on dusk. Religion does not teach how to enter heaven, but how to return, in the same way the mentally ill are encouraged to “return” to reality. There is no coming or going, ascent or descent. The body is not our prison, but the mind.

This choice and its outcome – the hell of self – must also be accepted. To reject it is the being of the nafs. For if evil is loathsome, how can loathing evil lead to anything but more evil? True good is good to the end. I look at my fallen self and see so many imperfections, it prompts self-loathing: this very reaction is the self. I perpetuate my exile.

The potential to fall, however, is also the potential to rise. In that wholeness lies a certain beauty. A sculptor does not hold the unformed block to be an abomination; only from what is unformed may he create. A finished piece may be more beautiful, but it offers nothing to the artist’s hands. Art is in the bringing forth as well as the result.

In my nature that turned away from true reality lies the chance to turn back. My own self begs the artist’s touch. But what sculptor can engage himself if he disdains the marble he’s given to work with? Michaelangelo’s David was created from a block that another artist had rejected forty years earlier for its flaws. That other artist could not find David in the marble, because he thought the medium unworthy of his attention.

My nafs, my self, is such a block. I have built up so many ideas about the world that my soul feels trapped in stone. This is my hell. I yearns to carve away the obscuring veils. To do this, my heart must be wholly devoted to the task, the way a sculptor loves to sculpt. Consider how he sees the block, the matrix of his art: there is no place for loathing. Just as the artist loves his vision, the stone can help him get there. He doesn’t flake away marble because it is corrupt, or evil – because it is the Mara, the satanic self. There is joy in the carving.

If we strive only to be rid of Mara, we fail to see that we need Mara, just as the artist needs the block. Mara is darkness, evil, deception; God is all that we know as good. Yet God has created a world in which Mara exists to a purpose.

Were there only light, only pure whiteness, the world would lack contrast. The edges of all shapes occur between light and dark places. The dark sculpts the light, making it apparent to the eye. In fact, one reason God is hidden is that He is perfect, without relief: “Yea, the intensity of His revelation hath covered Him, and the fullness of His shining forth hath hidden Him.”

Mara reveals God. God wished to be known, but His essence is unknowable: He shines too brightly for eyes to see. Because of Mara, shadows appear, and darkness. Now we can see the edges, the shapes. Beauty and goodness are perceptible because of Mara.

Mara is called the tempter, just as Satan and the nafs. How does he tempt? Because Mara is hateful, he tempts us to hate him. Because he is destruction, he tempts us to want to destroy him. Because he is death, he tempts us to want to kill him. He tempts us into feeding the substance of his being. The hatred of Mara is Mara.

To defeat the tempter, we must create where there is destruction, love where there is hate, and bring light where there is darkness. When we see God even in Mara, then even Mara is God. “There was God and there was naught beside Him.”

Another metaphor is that Godliness is a flower, and Mara is garbage. No one prefers garbage, they put it out on the street. But flowers grow from garbage. They also return to garbage, just as garbage later grows back into flowers. The truth is not one side or the other, but the cycle, and what it reveals in its ongoing movement.

If we reject Mara, we hold onto the flower, hoping it will not die and we will never have to deal with garbage again. But we all know that human nature is other than this. No matter how hard we try to be “pure” and “perfect”, the day always comes when we violate our new-found sanctity. Then we return to garbage, and perhaps despair that we can never change. Yet from that garbage flowers will appear. It is the cycle of death and rebirth.

Human beings are like agents of God’s manifestion. We act to manifest what is Hidden: We bring light into dark places; we demonstrate justice by defeating injustice; we reveal truth by banishing falsehood. We are knights of the ideal King, making His decree known: His wish to be known.

But for this, we need Mara. We need the dark that we may shine out. We need the bitter pain of life to prove our love by wholeheartedly embracing it. Mara is our friend because he is our enemy, and our enemy because he is our friend. There is no part that is “not God”, or outside the scheme of His creation. There is nothing that does not serve divine Will.

Mara is the canvas. He is no work of art, but a blank sheet on which to paint the inspirations of the soul. If we cast out Mara utterly, we lose our mode of expression. “To invite Mara to tea” is to let him take his place at the other side of the table, to participate in the dance of life. The painter covers up the empty canvas with art, but is there loathing for the canvas in its emptiness? It must be painted to be beautiful, but even in the emptiness there is the beauty of potential. Mara is the other side of holiness, its potential to be. “Holiness” is its manifestion. Mara is the silence before we speak.

If we were to eliminate Mara utterly, we would also eliminate the opposite. With Mara would go holiness, with ugliness would go beauty, with garbage would go all the flowers. Insofar as we love goodness and beauty, we must love Mara also, for He is part of the cycle of manifestation. A farmer cannot eat from an empty field, but there is no hatred of the field for its emptiness. Mara is that field, unable to satisfy us in any way; and yet offering the chance to bring forth amazing things from the soil of potentiality. Thus, we make God known.

We could spend our whole life chasing Mara and accomplish nothing; or we can engage Mara in the dance, and serve the purpose of creation. Everything has a role, and plays a part. We are afflicted with imperfection, not because we are flawed, but because we are perfect: so that, from emptiness, we may reveal beauty, goodness, value. We can be eager to cover up the emptiness, or reach for it like a poet for his pen. “[The lover] seeth life in death, and in shame seeketh glory.”

With Mara lies our potential to know God; in the very self we often hate, one may find God “standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.” “He hath known God who hath known himself.”

This is being as an artform, and what I mean by saying existence is baqá. Life is love given shape. Once I can accept it absolutely – say “yes” even to the most hated parts of myself – perhaps then I may return.

Once a poor man, burning with thirst, approached a merchant. He implored him for a cup of water, and the merchant gave him a drink from his flask. Refreshed, he thanked him and continued on his way.

After a time, wandering and distracted in his search for God, he became thirsty again, and roamed the scorched sands in quest of relief, praying fervently to God and anticipating a remedy.

He happened upon a dervish, an idiot of God, carrying a water jug. The seeker stopped him and asked for relief from his burning thirst. The dervish said, “Close your eyes, and I will give you something better to refresh you.”

The seeker closed his eyes and put out his tongue. When the dervish placed grains of salt there, he spat and swore, cursing this injustice, yelling, “O you who have quaffed from the streams of nearness, why do you offer a poor man salt! You are carrying water and I am in need, so why this cruelty?”

The dervish replied, “Because of the intensity of your thirst, I know God will grant what you seek. What I offer may seem the opposite of your desire now, but once you’ve found the river beyond the next hill, and tasted of its pure water, you will realize what sweetness I have given you, how greatly I have aided your tongue to appreciate such a drink.

“To take away your thirst too soon would rob you of your reward; truly my salt is sugar to one such as you, and a greater relief than what you had expected.”

A lover hasn't the heart for knowledge  
nor the patience for study.  
He already knows to perfection  
when the Beloved is near.

Does a thirsty man sit and  
debate the words for water?  
Give him one glass, and he will  
drink the truth of them all.

Such a one does not notice pain.  
In him, all things are consumed.  
He glows with inner heat;  
his eyes are embers from the fire.

Yet because of that negation  
he feels Her touch like no other;  
because he burns with unending thirst  
a drop tells the mystery of oceans.

Thus, the lover takes to pain  
like a student to a favored lesson:  
for insofar as he writhes in agony  
Her merest word of balm is revelation.