Questioner: Why is it that we naturally seem to think of ourselves as separate individuals?

    

.

Maharaj: Your thoughts about individuality are really not your own thoughts; they are all collective thoughts. You think that you are the one who has the thoughts; in fact thoughts arise in consciousness.

As our spiritual knowledge grows, our identification with an individual body-mind diminishes, and our consciousness expands into universal consciousness. The life force continues to act, but its thoughts and actions are no longer limited to an individual. They become the total manifestation. It is like the action of the wind - the wind doesn't blow for any particular individual, but for the total manifestation.

... Cannot you see clearly that everything that appears to happen happens in consciousness? It is all imaginary, a temporary hallucination. Don't be led astray, none of it reflects your true state.

... The real is changeless. What changes is not real, what is real does not change.

... What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear, but not to be. The appearance may last very long on some scale of time, and very short on another, but ultimately it comes to the same. Whatever is time-bound is momentary and has no reality.

... Transiency is the best proof of unreality.

Know your Self to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. 

That is enough.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

human free(dom

  

.

... conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. 

Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. 

This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.


—Baruch Spinoza

.

In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart. 

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale. 

(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening's end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love. 

—Federico García Lorca
ditty of first desire 

.

 

 

con(sciousness —knowing(with another

.

Plants don’t get enough credit.

They move. You know this. Your houseplant salutes the sun each morning. At night, it returns to centre. You probably don’t think much of it. This is simply what plants do: Get light. Photosynthesize. Make food. Live.

But what about all the signs of plant intelligence that have been observed.

Under poor soil conditions, the pea seems to be able to assess risk. The sensitive plant can make memories and learn to stop recoiling if you mess with it enough. The Venus fly trap appears to count when insects trigger its trap. And plants can communicate with one another and with caterpillars.

Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery. Insights gleaned from the study may help doctors better understand the variety of anesthetics used in surgeries. But the research also highlights that plants are complex organisms, perhaps less different from animals than is often assumed.

The researchers trapped pea plants in glass chambers with ether, soaked roots of the sensitive plant and seedlings of garden cress in lidocaine and even measured the electrical activity of a Venus fly trap’s cells. An hour or so later the plants became unresponsive. The seedlings stayed dormant. And the Venus fly trap didn’t react to a stimulus similar to a bug crawling across its maw. Its cells stopped firing.

When the dope wore off, the plants returned to life, as if something had hit pause — almost like they were regaining consciousness, something we typically don’t think they possess. It’s all so animal-like.

“How organisms are perceiving the environment or responding or adapting are based on some very similar principles,” Dr. Baluska said.

Researchers already knew that anesthetics with different chemical structures or elements all seem to halt pain, consciousness or activity in plants and animals — even bacteria. But how they render us unconscious or how so many different kinds physically act on the human nervous system still elude us after more than a century of use. Some bind to receptors to turn off activity. But this can’t explain them all.

Under anesthetics, the physical properties of cell membranes change, becoming more flexible. Apply pressure to the cells, this effect is reversed and the anesthetic wears off. This suggests that something simple, like what is physically happening to a cell’s membrane, may be the common denominator explaining anesthetics’ effects across the plant and animal kingdoms, Dr. Baluska and colleagues suggest.

In some plant root cells under anesthesia, Dr. Baluska and his colleagues found that membranes were having trouble doing what they normally do, recycling bits of cellular material by transporting it in and out of cells.

Dr. Baluska can’t say what was altering membrane function in the plants, but membranes are important for transferring messages via electricity from one cell to another, messages that would lead to action or movement.

The electrical activity that moves across neurons is thought by some scientists to contribute to human consciousness. If electrical activity is being disrupted by anesthetic in plants, too, causing them to “lose consciousness,” does that mean, in some way, that they are conscious?

“No one can answer this because you cannot ask them,” said Dr. Baluska.

Even so, perhaps we’re more alike, us and plants, than we think.


—JoAnna Klein

.

nytimes.com

.

I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter as derivative from consciousness. —Max Planck

.

The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. 

It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, — or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.

[...] We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.


—William James
The Principles of Psychology

.

A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day.

A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.

It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it.


—John Berger
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

.

The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

—Joseph Campbell 

.

this is what I believe

.

This is what I believe: That I am I.

That my soul is a dark forest.

That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.

That I must have the courage to let them come and go.


—D. H. Lawrence

.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness,

will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

.

Someone put
You on a slave block
And the unreal bought
You. Now I keep coming to your owner
Saying
"This one is mine."

You often overhear us talking
And this can make your heart leap
With excitement.
Don't worry,
I will not let sadness
Possess you.

I will gladly borrow all the gold
I need
To get you
Back.


—Hafiz

.

Photo Beth Moon,

Ancient Trees: Portraits Of Time 

.

consolation

.

The tiny particles which form the vast universe are not tiny at all.
Neither is the vast universe vast.

These are notions of the mind, which is like a knife,
always chipping away at the Tao,
trying to render it graspable and manageable.

But that which is beyond form is ungraspable, and
that which is beyond knowing is unmanageable.

There is, however, this consolation:
She who lets go of the knife will find the Tao at her
fingertips.


—Lao Tzu
Hua Hu Ching

.

the wings

Fumihiko Hirai

.

we are occasional like that

.

We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.


—Jack Gilbert
Music Is In The Piano Only When It Is Played

.

whisper to your(self 

.

 

 

 

listen

.

Listen for presences inside poems, let them take you where they will

Follow these private hints and never leave the premises

—Rumi

.

fons vitae

.

in praise of mortality, excerpt

  

.

Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

.

where two or more are gathered

.

Those doing soul work, who want the searing truth more than solace or applause, know each other right away.

Those who want something else turn and take a seat in another room.

Soul-makers find each other’s company.


—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

.

The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me,
apparently two, really one, seeks unity and that is love.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

wonder(ful

. 

Once the realization is accepted that
even between the closest human beings infinite
distances continue to exist, a wonderful living
side by side can grow up,

if they succeed in loving the
distance between them which makes it
possible for each to see the other
whole against the sky.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

a plurality of worlds

.

It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation. The beloved appears as a sign, a "soul"; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted.

What is involved, here, is a plurality of worlds; the pluralism of love does not concern only the multiplicity of loved beings, but the multiplicity of souls or worlds in each of them. To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved.


—Deleuze
Proust and Signs

.

Run, my dear,
from anything that may not strengthen
your precious budding wings,

Run like hell, my dear,
from anyone likely to put a sharp knife
into the sacred, tender vision
of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
those aspects of obedience
that stand outside of our house
and shout to our reason
"oh please, oh please
come out and play!"

For we have not come here to take prisoners,
or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
our divine courage, freedom,
and Light.


—Hafiz

.

question

 

  

.

Why is the physical world experienced as external and the mental world experienced as internal?

[...] The physical world is res extensa, body with extension, and therefore subject to division. In other words, the physical world is distinguished by the division of micro and macro, the latter being conglomerates of the micro.

In the physical world, we do not have direct conscious access to the micro. We see the micro only with the amplifying help of the macro, the measuring-aid apparatuses. But there is a reward. Once the measurement is made and a particular pointer reading of the measurement apparatus has been chosen out of the myriad macro possibilities, the pointer does not run away, jumping on the train of quantum uncertainty. Its possibility waves are very sluggish, almost to the point of certainty, a certainty that can be shared by many observers. As a result, physical objects are experienced as parts of a shared reality, an external reality in awareness.

But the mind, res cogitans, is without extension, it is one thing. It is like the infinite medium of the physicist in which there can be waves, and thoughts are such waves. 

However there is no micro/macro distinction in the mental world. So we experience thoughts directly without the intermediary of amplifying apparatuses, but we pay a price. One price is that one person's experiencing a thought object effects the thought object due to the uncertainty principal, so that it is impossible (normally) for another person to experience the same thought object in an identical manner. Thoughts are private, thus experienced in awareness as internal.

The other price for the lack of micro/macro distinction in the realm of thought is that it is impossible to develop a tangled-heirarchical quantum-measurement apparatus. So mind can exist independent of the brain, but its movements can be registered and experienced in consciousness only when correlated with a physical brain.


—Amit Goswami
Quantum Doctor

.

The Mouth of Krishna

Albarran Cabrera

.

return with the bliss

.

All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker — no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential.


—Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Narcissus and Goldmund

.

The divine manifestation is ubiquitous, only our eyes are not open to it. Awe is what moves us forward.

Live from your own center. The divine lives within you.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.

Beyond the world of opposites is an unseen, but experienced, unity and identity in us all.

You must return with the bliss and integrate it.
The return is seeing that the radiance is everywhere.

The world is a match for us. We are a match for the world.
The spirit is the bouquet of nature.

Sanctify the place you are in.


—Joseph Campbell

.

a song on the end of the world

.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he is much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.


—Czesław Miłosz

.

just so the world

.

The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. 

Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention.

The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone.

In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently.

We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff.

Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! Your world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab!


—William James
The Principles of Psychology

.

pi

 

.

The admirable number pi:

three point one four one.

All the following digits are also initial,

five nine two because it never ends.

It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,

eight nine by calculation,

seven nine or imagination,

not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison

four six to anything else

two six four three in the world.

The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.

Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.

The pageant of digits comprising the number pi

doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.

It goes on across the table, through the air,

over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,

through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.

Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!

How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!

While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen

my phone number your shirt size the year

nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor

the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents

hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,

in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert

alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,

as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,

but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,

it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,

its uncommonly fine eight,

its far from final seven,

nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity

to continue.


—Wisława Szymborska

.

hummingbird nest image

 

 

no void, no darkness

.

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness,
When your fears surrender to your strengths,
You will begin to experience
That all existence
Is a teeming sea of infinite life.

In a handful of ocean water
You could not count all the finely tuned
Musicians
Who are acting stoned
For very intelligent and sane reasons
And of course are becoming extremely sweet
And wild!

In a handful of the sky and earth,
In a handful of God,
We cannot count
All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there
Behind the mysterious veil.

True art reveals there is no void
Or darkness.
There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic
In this luminous, brimming
Playful world.


—Hafiz

.

wherever you are on the way

. 

[...] they set out with him inside the dream,
while he is actually sleeping beside a river of pure water.

Sleep deeply wherever you are on the way.
Maybe some traveler will wake you.

Give up subtle thinking, the twofold, threefold
multiplication of mistakes.

Listen to the sound of waves within you.


—Rumi

.

You are sitting in a wagon being
drawn by a horse whose
reins you
hold.

There are two inside of you
who can steer.

Though most never hand the reins to Me
so they go from place to place the
best they can, though
rarely happy.

And rarely does their whole body laugh
feeling God's poke
in the
ribs.

If you feel tired, dear,
my shoulder is soft,
I'd be glad to
steer a
while.


—Kibir

.

The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions. —W. H. Auden

.

A man may go into the field and say his prayer and be aware of God, or, he may be in Church and be aware of God; but, if he is more aware of Him because he is in a quiet place, that is his own deficiency and not due to God, Who is alike present in all things and places, and is willing to give Himself everywhere so far as lies in Him.

He knows God rightly who knows Him everywhere.


—Meister Eckhart

.

Sit and be still

until in the time

of no rain you hear

beneath the dry wind's

commotion in the trees

the sound of flowing

water among the rocks,

a stream unheard before,

and you are where

breathing is prayer.


—Wendell Berry

.

listen

  

.

Wind blows the wheat down.

He calls it prayer.

—Dan Beachy-Quick

.

an embarrassment

 

.

“Do you want to ask the blessing?”

“No. If you do, go ahead.”

He went ahead: his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft thump.

If a lonely soul did ever cry out

in company its true outcry to God,

it would be as though at a sedate party

a man suddenly removed his clothes

and took his wife passionately into his arms.


—Wendell Berry

.

all good things

.

All good things approach their goal crookedly.

Like cats, they arch their backs,
they purr inwardly over their approaching happiness:
all good things laugh.


—Friedrich Nietzsche

.

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.​

You are silent. It says for you: I am.

And in comes meaning thousandfold​, comes at long last over everyone.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

pray(er

.

Four times a day—on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed—Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed.

He prayed that the seething factions merge and dissolve their hatred. He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart. 

Agnes’s struggle with the Ojibwe language, the influence of it, had an effect on her prayers. For she preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anama’ay, with its sense of a great motion upward. She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction—those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart.

Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light. What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation. Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien.  

She rose, once she was finished, rubbed her eyes like a child, went on in Father Damien’s skin. Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.


—Louise Erdrich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

. 

We have weaved our past into the present, a rhythmic pattern of long cotton strings pressing in and pulling out across the loom. It thunders through our existence like wild horses run across the desert. No matter how far we go, what kind of car we drive, how much money we make, how many degrees we pile up behind our name, we are still here. 

We are here, a tiny piece of woven stories, like pixels in a photo or molecules of mist in a rainbow. We are here, together on the same earth. It is important to notice one another smile, hug, dance, and sing together while our piece of thread is being woven into a bigger picture of a peaceful future.


—Tu Bears

.

the only true statement

.

'I do not know’ is the only true statement the mind can make.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

as light pours like rain

.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

.

God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.


—Hafiz

.

saying grace

.

... when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:

Your seeds shall live in my body,

And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,

And your fragrance shall be my breath,

And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.


―Kahlil Gibran

.

question

.

 

‘What is grace?’ I asked God.

And He said,
‘All that happens.’

Then He added, when I looked perplexed,

‘Could not lovers
say that every moment in their Beloved’s arms
was grace?

Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me

until the heart has
wisdom.’


—St. John of the Cross
Love Poems from God
Daniel Ladinsky

.

However smart we may be, however rich and clever or loving 

or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, doesn't help us at all. 

The real power comes in to us from the beyond.

Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless,
and from below, where we do not understand.

And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might
and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown,
we shall continue empty.


—D. H. Lawrence

.

please bring your heart near me

.

We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities.

Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind.

This total mind we call ‘heart.‘


—Kabir Helminski

.

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:
Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.

Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one's self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.
You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.

I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love's
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering the Beloved,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me,
For I am a Sweet Old Vagabond
With an Infinite Leaking Barrel
Of Light and Laughter and truth
that the Beloved has tied to my back.

Dear one,
Indeed, please bring your heart near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love.


—Hafiz

.