Here are the chapter headings and introductory quotations to give you a feel for the contents of this book. The presentation style is thoughtful and filled with subtleties. I have spent many hours pondering what this man has to say about the genius of each of us and the need for silence in which each of us can hear and be heard.
Breakfast
at the Victory
In one of the great court banquets, everyone was
seated according to rank, waiting for the entry of the King. In came a
plain, shabby man and took a seat above everyone else. His boldness
angered the prime minister who ordered the newcomer to identify himself.
Was he a minister? No. More. Was he the King? No. More. "Are you then
God?" asked the prime minister. "I am above that also," replied the poor
man. "There is nothing beyond God," retorted the prime minister. "That
nothing," came the response, "is me."
A Sufi parable
A Philosopher Needs a Cat
Abu Yazid made his periodic
journey to purchase supplies at the bazaar in the city of Hamadhan -- a
distance of severl hundred miles. When he returned home, he discovered a
colony of ants in the cardamon seeds. He carefully packed up the seeds
again and walked back across the desert to the merchant from whom he ahd
bought them. His intent was not to exchange the seeds but to return the
ants to their home.
A Sufi legend
An Eye for
Killing Buddhas
One morning the teacher announced to his
disciples that they would walk to the top of the mountain. The disciples
were surprised because even those who had been with him for years
thought the teacher was oblivious to the mountain whose crest looked
serenely down on their town.
By midday it became apparent that the
teacher had lost direction. Moreover, no provision had been made for
food. There was increasing grumbling but he continued walking, sometimes
through underbrush and sometimes across faces of crumbling rock.
When
they reached the summit in the late afternoon, they found other
wanderers already there who had strolled up a well-worn path. The
disciples complained to the teacher.
He said only, "Those others
have climbed a different mountain."
A Higher Ignorance
I will teach you the best way to say Torah: not sensing yourself at
all, only as an ear listening to how the world of speech speaks through
you. You are not yourself the speaker. As soon as you begin to hear your
own words, you should stop.
Dov Baer, the Maggid of Metztrich
The Way the Soul Sees
As soon as I attained to His Unity I
became a bird with a body of Oneness and wings of Everlastingness, and I
continued flying in the air of Quality for ten years, until I reached an
atmosphere a million times as large, and I flew on, until I found myself
in the field of Eternity and I saw there the Tree of Oneness ... and I
looked, and I knew that all this was a cheat.
Abu Yazid
Bistami, known as Bayazid
A Deeper Dreamer
Then
even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor
the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose
keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
Then
there was neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the
touch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and
self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.
In the beginning desire descended upon it --
that was the primal
seed, born of the mind.
The sages who have searched their hearts
with wisdom
know that which is kin to that which is not.
But,
after all, who knows, and who can say
whence it all came, and how
creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
so
who knows truely whence it has arisen?
Whence all creating had its
origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he
who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows -- or maybe even he
does not know.
Rig Veda, X:129
Vision in a
Deathwrap
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking
life imparted by a gentle rolling sip; by here, borrowed from the sea;
by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep,
this dreamis on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hould at
all; and your identity comes back in horror. OVer Descartian bortices
you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest of weather, with one
half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the
summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
Herman Melville, on riding the crow's nest of a whaling ship
How Far We Are from God
For thirty years I sought God. But when
I looked carefully, I saw that in reality God was the Seeker and I was
the sought.
An anonymous Sufi
Like a Random
Bear
By God, I detest poetry. In my eyes there is nothing worse.
Sufi poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi
A Shared Silence
I've heard it said there's a window that opens from one mind to another,
but if there's no wall, there's no need for fitting a window, or the
latch.
Jalal Al-Din Rumi
Losing the Way Is the
Way
A lover came to the dwelling of the Beloved and asked to be
admitted.
"Who is there?" the Beloved asked.
"I am here," the
lover answered.
The Beloved refused to admit the lover. After
wandering in grief and longing for years, the lover returned to the
Beloved and begged to be admitted.
"Who is there?"
"You alone
are there," the lover responded.
The door opened.
A Sufi
story
Shadows in the Eye of God
It is related
that David was in the sanctuary. An ant passed in front of him. He
lifted his hand with the intention of throwing the ant away from the
place of prostration.
"O David," the ant protested, "what wantonness
is this that you intend to inflict upon me? It is scarely your task to
lay hands upon me in God's own house!"
David was grief-stricken and
said: "O God, how should I deal with Your creatures?" A voice was heard:
"Make it your habit to act out of fear of God so that none has to suffer
on your account! Do not locate the true source of creatures in their
bodies! Look rather at the mystery of their creation! If We were to
order an ant to come out of its black robe, so many indications of
divine unity would radiate from its breast that the monotheists of the
whole world would be put to shame."
Sharafuddin Maneri