One sufi image of the lines of transmission (silsila) is a great branching rosebush that grows elegantly on many levels and within several worlds at once. Initiation and guidance come through the saints and keep the present moment dynamic and quivering with new growth. Majesty is that composite attention felt as a presence, dawn, a company of friends, a splendor that is prior to, and the source of, the universe. Rumi says it is a state of awareness best spoken of in terms of what it is not.
This we have now
is not imagination.
This is not
grief or joy.
Not a judging state,
or an elation,
or sadness.
Those come
and go.
This is the presence
that doesn’t.
It’s dawn, Husam,
here in the splendor of coral,
inside the Friend, the simple truth
of what Hallaj said.
What else could human beings want?
When grapes turn to wine,
they’re wanting
this.
When the nightsky pours by,
it’s really a crowd of beggars,
and they all want some of this!
This
that we are now
created the body, cell by cell,
like bees building a honeycomb.
The human body and the universe
grew from this, not this
from the universe and the human body.
Husam,
tell about the visions of Daquqi,
who said,
“I have traveled East and West not knowing
which way I was going, following the moon,
lost inside God.”
Someone asked, “Why do you go bare
footed over the stones and thorns?”
“What,” he answered.
“What.”
A bewildered lover doesn’t walk on feet.
He or she walks on love. There are no “long”
or “short” trips for those. No time.
The body learned from the spirit how to travel.
A saint’s body moves in the unconditioned way,
though it seems to be in conditionedness.
Daquqi said,
“One day I was going along
looking to see in people the shining of the Friend,
so I would recognize the ocean in a drop,
the sun in a bright speck.
I came to the shore
at twilight and saw seven candles. I hurried
along the beach toward them. The light of each
lifted into the sky. I was amazed. My amazement
was amazed. Waves of bewilderment
broke over my head.
What are these candles that no one seems to see?
In the presence of such lights people were looking
for lamps to buy!
Then the seven became one,
in the middle of the sky’s rim.
Then that
fanned out to seven again. There were connections
between the candles that cannot be said.
I saw, but I cannot say.
I ran closer. I fell. I lay there awhile.
I got up and ran again. I had no head and no feet.
They became seven men, and then seven trees,
so dense with leaves and fruit
that no limbs were visible.
Flashes of light
spurted from each fruit like juice!
And most marvelous of all was that hundreds
of thousands of people were passing beside the trees,
risking their lives, sacrificing everything,
to find some scrap of shade.
They made peculiar parasols
out of pieces of wool. They tried anything.
And no one saw the trees with their tremendous shade!
The caravans had no food, and yet food was dropping
all about them. If anyone had said,
‘Look! Over here!’
they would have thought him insane, or drunk.
How can this happen? Or am I dreaming?
I walk up to the trees. I eat the fruit.
I might as well believe.
And still I see people
searching so desperately for an unripe grape,
with these vineyards around them,
heavy with perfect bunches.
Then the seven trees became one, and then seven again.
At every second they were both seven and one.
They were doing the ritual prayer, kneeling and bowing,
without knees or waists!
Then they were seven men
seated in meditation for the sake of the one reality.
I came closer and waved. They called,
‘O Daquqi,
the glory and the crown!’
‘How do they know my name?’
I thought. ‘They’ve never seen me till now.’
Immediately they knew my thought,
and smiled at each other.
‘Honored one,
is this still hidden from you? How can anything
be hidden from one so dissolved in God?’
‘If this is the spirit-reality,’ I said to myself,
‘how is it we’re speaking words and saying names?’
One of the seven answered, ‘Names, sometimes
the names slip away, but it’s not forgetfulness.
It’s our being so absorbed.’
Then they all said to me,
‘Would you lead us in prayer?’
‘Yes. But wait awhile.
I am still in some temporal confusion
that will be solved by companionship with you.
Through companionship with the ground a grapevine
grows. It opens into the earth’s darkness
and flies. It becomes selfless
in the presence of its origin and learns
what it really is.’
They nodded, as though saying,
‘Whenever you’re ready.’ That nodding
was a flame in my heart.
I was freed from hourly time,
from sequence and relation.”
Everyone has a stable
and a trainer appointed to him or her. If you break away,
the trainer comes and gets you. You think
you’re making choices, but the trainer is actually
leading you around.
You like to deny
that you have a keeper. You say,
“It’s my powerful
animal urges.”
This is how a human being can change:
there’s a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he’s no longer
a worm.
He’s the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn’t need
to devour.
When it’s cold and raining,
you are more beautiful.
And the snow brings me
even closer to your lips.
The inner secret, that which was never born,
you are that freshness, and I am with you now.
I can’t explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,
and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty.
You are the king’s son.
Why do you close yourself up?
Become a lover.
Don’t aspire to be a general
or a minister of state.
One is a boredom for you,
the other a disgrace.
You’ve been a picture on a bathhouse wall
long enough. No one recognizes you here, do they?
God’s lion disguised as a human being!
I saw that and put down the book
I was studying, Hariri’s Maqamat.
There is no early and late for us.
The only way to measure a lover
is by the grandeur of the beloved.
Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.
Shams is invisible because he is inside sight.
He is the intelligent essence
of what is everywhere at once, seeing.
The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.
We must get up and take that in,
that wind that lets us live.
Breathe before it’s gone.
of all the East is here.
A flickering storm cloud
shows his lightnings to you!
Your words are guesswork.
He speaks from experience.
There’s a huge difference.