clarity

 

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Love with no object. 
There is a way of loving not attached to what is loved.  

Observe how water is with the ground, always moving toward the ocean, though the ground tries to hold water’s foot and not let it go.

This is how we are with wine and beautiful food, wealth and power, or just a dry piece of bread: we want and we get drunk with wanting, then the headache and bitterness afterward.

Those prove that the attachment took hold and held you back. Now you proudly refuse help. “My love is pure. I have an intuitive union with God. I don’t need anyone to show me how to be free!”

This is not the case. A love with no object is a true love.
All else, shadow without substance.

Have you seen someone fall in love with his own shadow? That’s what we’ve done. Leave partial loves and find one that’s whole.

Where is someone who can do that? They’re so rare, those hearts that carry the blessing and lavish it over everything.

Hold out your beggar’s robe and accept their generosity. Anything not coming from that will damage the cloth, like a sharp stone tearing your sincerity.

Keep that intact, and use clarity; call it reason or discernment, you have within you a deciding force that knows what to receive, what to turn from.

—Rumi 

Mathnawi III: 2248-80

Coleman Barks version

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love is a place

 

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The Sky where we live
Is no place to lose your wings.

So love, love,

Love.


—Hafiz

 

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meta(morph

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See the dream as dream.

There is no need of a way out of the dream!
Can you see that a way out is also a part of the dream?

All you have to do is see the dream as dream.
The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory.

Why go anywhere? Just realize that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out.

The problem is not the dream.
Your problem is that you like one part of your dream and not another.

Love all, or none of it, without complaint.

When you have seen the dream as a dream,
you have done all that needs be done.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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No Man is an Island, excerpt

 

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When I am not present to myself, then I am only aware of that half of me, that mode of my being which turns outward to created things. 

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them. Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self toward God. 

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. My senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth. 

Recollection brings them home. It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God.


—Thomas Merton

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