Don’t Go Back To Sleep
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
—Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks from The Essential Rumi.
Bronx boy
wondering
why he is here.
The
only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not
to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe
through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred
universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do,
with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star
to star.
Here is an
illuminating interview with James George, former high commissioner to
India and former ambassador to Iran. The Dalai Lama calls him “my old
friend.” Chogyam Trungpa referred to him as “a wise and benevolent man,
an ideal statesman.”
He has been a gentle teacher and a friend who has inspired many
to engage in a spiritual practice in the midst of life–one that can
bridge the external world with the inner world.
It
is useful to consider the body as the anchor for the senses and the
mind; they are all interrelated. Feel your entire physical body. Allow
your breathing to become relaxed and quiet. When your body and breath
become very still, you may feel a very light sensation, almost like
flying, which carries with it a fresh, alive quality. Open all your
cells, even the molecules that make up your body, unfolding them like
petals. Hold nothing back: open more than your heart; open your entire
body, every atom of it. Then a beautiful experience can arise that has a
quality you can come back to again and again, a quality that will heal
and sustain you.
We must
suppose that we go deep within ourselves, deeper and deeper into our
most hidden self. There in our innermost being, in the very core of
ourselves, we will find a place where there is peace, stillness, and
above all, love.
After having found the place, we must imagine
that we are seated there, immersed into, surrounded by the Love of God.
We are in deepest peace … All of us is there, physical body and all;
nothing is outside, not even a fingertip, not even the tiniest hair. Our
whole being is connected with the Love of God.
Nothing will remain.
—
Irina Tweedie,
Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master (California: The Golden Sufi Center, 2006)
Painting: Odilon Redon,
Le Silence, 1900
From
parabola-magazine.
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