BECOMING HUMAN

Once a man came to me and spoke for hour about
"His great vision of God"he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
"Are these wondrous dreams true?"

I replied, "How many goats do you have?"

He looked surprised and said,
"I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!"

And I spoke again saying,
"Yes, brother-how many do you have?"

"Well, Hafiz, I have sixty- two,"

"And how many wives?"
Again he looked surprised, then said,
"Four"

"How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?"

And to all he answered.

Then I said,
"You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know."


HAFIZ

REFRENCE: THE GIFT POEMS BY HAFIZ
TRANSLATIONS BY DANIEL LADINSKY

DO WHAT YOU PREACH

There was a saint who wanted to stop hunters catching songbirds for sale at the market. He trained a parrot so that whenever it saw a net covered in bird food it squawed, "Don't eat the food! It's a trap! When the other birds heard the parrot's warning they flew away and were saved.The parrot, however, had no idea what he was saying and, seeing the food, flew down to eat it and was captured. When we pay wisdom lip-service but don't live it, we are like that parrot. No matter how wise we seem to be, we will end up getting caught in the net of illusion.

Reference: THE HEART OF ISLAM BY TIMOTHY FREKE

LOUSY AT MATHS

Once a group of thieves stole a rare diamond
Larger than a goose egg.

Its value could have easily bought
One thousand horses

And two thousand acres
of the most fertile land in Shiraz.

The thieves got drunk that night
To celebrate their great haul,

But during the course of the evening
The effects of the liquor
And their mistrust of each other grew to such
An extent

They decided to divide the stone into pieces.
Of course then the priceless became lost.

Most everyone is lousy at math
And does that to God-

Dissects the Indivisible One,

By thinking, saying
"This is my beloved, he looks like this
And acts like that,
How could that moron over there
Really
Be
God"

Hafiz

Reference:THE GIFT poems by HAFIZ the great sufi master
Translations by DANIEL LADINSKY

THE SERVANT WHO LOVED HIS PRAYERS

A dawn a certain rich man
wanted to go to steam baths.
He woke his servant, Sunqur,
"Ho! Get moving! Get the basin
and the towels and the clay for washing
and let's go to the baths."
Sunqur immediately collected what was needed,
and they set out side by side along the road.
As they passed the mosque, the call to prayer sounded.
Sunqur loved his five-times prayer.
"please, master,
rest on this bench for a while that I may recite sura 98,
which begins,
'you who treat your slave with kindness.'"
The master sat on the bench outside while Sunqur went in.
When prayers were over, and the priest and all the worshipers
had left, still Sunqur remained inside. The master waited
and waited. Finally he yelled into the mosque,
"Sunqur
why don't you come out?"
"I can't. This clever one
won't let me. Have a little more patience.
I hear you out there."
sever times the master waited,
and then shouted. Sunqur's reply was always the same,
"Not yet. He won't let me come out yet."
"But there's no one
in there but you. Everyone else has left.
Who makes you sit still so long?"
The one who keeps me in here is the one
who keeps you out there.
The same who will not let you in will not let me out."

The ocean will not allow its fish out of itself.
Nor does it let land animals in
where the subtle and delicate fish move.

The land creatures lumber along on the ground.
No cleverness can change this. There's only one
opener for the lock of these matters.

Forget your figuring. Forget your self. Listen to your Friend.
When you become totally obedient to that one,
you'll be free.

Rumi

Reference: THE ESSENTIA
RUMI
TRANSLATIONS BY
COLEMAN BARKS
WITH JOHN MOYNE

WASTEFUL ACCOMPLISHMENT

A sultan once said, "I will give a bag of gold to anyone who has accomplished the most unusual thing." People came to the court with all kinds of accomplishments. One man had a friend hold a needle at one end of the courtyard. The man then took a thread and threw it a hundred feet through the air. It went through the eye of the needle. It was the most unusual thing, and the sultan gave him the bag of gold, saying, "you've accomplished a feat that I learned has taken you twenty years to perfect, and it is truly a remarkable feat, but it is useless. And because you're spent twenty years of your life accomplishing such a useless thing, I also give you one hundred lashes."

Refference:When You Hear Hoofbeats Think Of A Zebra by Shems Friedlander

THE EAGLE'S TALE

One day an eagle rose up from his rock
and, full of greed, spread all his plumage out,
arranged his wings correctly and spoke thus:
'Today the world is all beneath my wings!
If I fly high the sun no longer see me,
While I see dust specks in the ocean's depth;
and should a gnat be crawling in the dust,
My eye behold the insect's movements too !
Thus he showed off, not fearing God's decree-
What happened to him from the cruel sphere?
For suddenly from out a hidding place
an arrow came, shot from a mighty bow.
The piercing arrow hit the eagle's wing
and cast him from the cloud onto the dust.
He wriggled in the dust just like a fish
and all his plumage fell there left and right.
'How strange!' said he, 'this thing is steel and wood.
How could it be so swift, so piercing sharp?'
He looked and saw his feathers on the arrow
and screamed: 'From me come what come over me!'
Cast out your ego and your selfishness
Look at this eagle, full of selfish pride!


Refference: Make A Sheild From Wisdom
selected verses from Nasir Khusraw diwan translated by
Annemarie Schimmel

KNOCK AND THE DOOR WILL OPEN

Prayer is a the way that we can ask to be brought closer to Allah. Salih of qazwin assures us. "Knock and the door will open for you." When the sufi saint Rabia heard this, however, she admonished him. "What are you talking about. Salih, the door has never been shut."
There is nothing dividing us from Allah except our own sense of separation, for in reality Allah is our own deeper identity. Rumi exclaims, "I knocked and the door opened, but I found I'd been knocking from the inside!"

Refference:The Heart of Islam by Timothy Freke

WAIT A MINUTE IS IT ALL REALLY DIFFERENT

The Sufiis tell the story of a man who gave some money to four friends- a Persian an Arab, a Turk, and a Greek. The Persian suggested " Let's spend this on 'angur' . "No" said the Arab, " I want to spend the money on 'inab'. The Turk demanded, "we should spend the money on 'uzum' The Greek shouted, "stop all this arguing. We're going to buy 'istafil'. And so they began to fight. All because they did not know that each one of them was talking about grapes.

reference:The Heart of Islam by Timothy Freke

A MOUSE AND A FROG

A mouse and a frog meet every morning on the riverbank. They sit in a nook of the ground and talk.
Each morning, the second they see each other, they open easily, telling stories and dreams and secrets, empty of ant fear or suspicious holding back.
To watch and listen to those two is to understand how, as it's written, sometimes when two being come together, Christ becomes visible.
The mouse starts laughing out a story he hasn't thought of in five years, and the telling might take five years!
There's no blocking the speech flow-river-running- all carrying momentum that true intimacy is.
Bitterness doesn't have a chance with those two.
The God- messenger, Khidr, touches a roasted fish, It leaps off the grill back into the water.
Friend sit by Friend, and the tablets appear. They read the mysteries off each other's foreheads.
But one day the mouse complains, "There are times when I want sobat, and you're out in the water, jumping around where you can't hear me. We meet at this appointed time, but the text says, Lover pray constantly. Once a day, once a week, five times an hour, is not enough. Fish like we are need the ocean around us!" Do camel bells say, Let's meet back here Thursday night? Ridiculous. They jingle to gather continuously, talking while the camel walks.
Do you pay regular visit to your self? Don't argue or answer rationally-
Let us die,
and dying, reply-

Rumi

Refference The Essential
Rumi
Translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

REASON TO HEAVEN

One of the friends of great sufi al-Shibli tells of seeing him in a dream after he had died. He asked him what God had done with him, to which al-Shibli replied that God had placed him before Him and asked him if he knew why He had forgiven him his sins. Al- Shibli had suggested that it might be because of the good works he had done, the prayers he had performed, his fasting and pilgrimages, his having associated with pious people and his journeying in search of knowledge. To all this God replied that these were not the reason. Al-Shibli had answered that these were the only things he could think of that might have saved him, to which God had said: ‘Do you remember when you were walking in the lanes of Baghdad and you found a small cat made weak by the cold creeping from wall to wall because of great cold and ice, and out of pity you took it and put in inside a fur you were wearing so as to protect it from the pains of cold? Because of the mercy you showed that cat I have had mercy on you.

AL-DAMIRI

Reference: The Island of Animal

TIME TEST

Did you hear? There was a gourd that grew

twenty days long near a plane tree high;

then it asked; ‘How many days have you?’

Said the plane ‘it’s more than thirty years!’

And the gourd laughed: ‘Look, in twenty days

have I grown so high! Say, what’s old age?’

Said the tree: ‘today, my little gourd,

Is no time for quarrel between us!

Wait! Tomorrow, when the winter storm

Blows we’ll see who is a real man!’

Nasir-i-Khusraw

Reference: MAKE A SHIELD FROM WISDOM

(title is given by me for the convenience of a reader)