“They walked down a narrow market alley with high, vaulted, stone ceilings. Cooing doves serenaded them as they passed stalls piled high with figs, oranges, dates, and raisins; with elaborately decorated shoes and simple slippers; with heaped spice mounds of red and black pepper, thyme, mint, cumin, sumac, bay leaf, and cinnamon; with candies of […]
Continue reading“Rumi scanned the faces of all his guests. He smiled in an utterly childlike, innocent manner. “It is unimportant for us to put all these labels, these words, on things. The labels are, after all, the problem in the first place. We separate ourselves from God’s Being by constantly attaching words to what we ought […]
Continue reading“Rumi, for it was indeed him, wore a simple brown woolen cloth robe, the ‘suf’ from which ‘Sufi’ is derived, and a white turban. But the man’s face was the pure distillation of love. His small mouth was as delicately sculpted as a masterpiece miniature; his nose, long and narrow. Rumi’s eyes, shaded by thick […]
Continue readingSkylar Seequn observed an immense hall, every inch of which was filled with objects and furnishings of all imaginable sizes, colors, and shapes. The hall was cacophonous and its air replete with odors. But there was no room to sit or dance or pray. “This is everything!” someone told him. He then came to an […]
Continue reading“But then something extraordinary occurred. The woman in white, whom they had earlier encountered at Love’s Travel Stop, appeared a few feet away from Dev. She pointed to Amante and Dev. Two powerful angels, blue in color and glowing with radiance, took hold of the poet by her shoulders. She felt the oddest of sensations: […]
Continue reading“Once again, they saw Vairochana come to life. And this time he communicated with them, sending each one specific, though extremely subtle, messages. They felt as if their subtle essence had been drawn into that of the Buddha. Floods of compassion and tenderness inundated their souls. They became aware of hierarchical worlds that existed above, […]
Continue reading“Somewhere below their intellects, the friends understood that Gyatso was creating a divine order in the mandala, a reminder to them of the perfect grace, balance, and beauty that existed in the hidden world that lay behind this visible one, which was, quite to the contrary, often notable for its crudity, distortion, and ugliness. From […]
Continue reading“The perfect beauty of his Oneness with everything: of sitting merged with the ocean that pulsed with his heartbeat; of melting into the sand, undifferentiated from it; of gazing at the stars while simultaneously staring down from them—gave way to the taste of bittersweetness, the bittersweetness of mortal life itself, of its exquisite, fragile joys […]
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