Here is how Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, describes the compulsion of the mystic to capture the fleeting unity of consciousness:
YES IT IS TRUE; THE ECSTATIC [MYSTIC] CANNOT SAY THE UNSAYABLE. HE SAYS THE OTHER THING—IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS—NOT UNITY. HE SPEAKS, HE MUST SPEAK, BECAUSE THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. . . . HE DOES NOT LIE WHO SPEAKS OF UNITY IN IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS, WHO STAMMER OF UNITY.. . . HE SAYS THE FORMS AND SOUNDS AND NOTICES THAT HE IS NOT SAYING THE EXPERIENCE, NOT THE GROUND, NOT THE UNITY, AND WOULD LIKE TO STOP HIMSELF AND CANNOT, AND FEELS THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SAYING IT, LIKE A SEVEN-LOCKED GATE WHICH HE RATTLES, KNOWING THAT IT WILL NEVER OPEN, YET HE MUST GO ON RATTLING IT. FOR THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. ECSTASY IS DEAD, STABBED IN THE BACK BY TIME, WHICH CANNOT BE MOCKED; BUT, DYING, IT HAS FLUNG THE WORD INTO HIM, AND THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. AND HE SPEAKS, SPEAKS, HE CANNOT BE SILENT, THE FLAME IN THE WORD DRIVES HIM, HE KNOWS THAT HE CANNOT SAY IT, YET HE TRIES OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL HIS SOUL IS EXHAUSTED TO DEATH AND THE WORD LEAVES HIM. THIS IS THE EXALTATIO OF THE ONE WHO HAS RETURNED INTO THE COMMOTION AND CANNOT RESIGN HIMSELF TO IT; THIS IS HIS INSURRECTION, THE INSURRECTION OF A SPEAKER: RELATED TO THE INSURRECTION OF THE POET, SLIGHTER IN POSSESSION, MIGHTIER IN EXISTENCE, THAN HIS. THIS IS THE BENDING OF THE BOW FOR THE SAYING OF THE UNSAYABLE, AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK, A LABOR IN THE DARK. IT’S WORK, THE CONFESSION, BEARS ITS MARK. (9-10)
I would venture to say that we all know the burning of the Word. We know the work in the dark. And indeed, such confessional work bears its mark.
Like prophets, we go into our caves. We know the peace beyond the commotion of the every day, and we cannot entirely resign ourselves to this ordinary commotion. There is something deeper. Something below the surface, beyond the clatter. There are ways to transcend the commotion and seek an inspired insight that transforms human life.
“If, at some point in your life,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “you should come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage—it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.”
I think the greatest lesson in life is beyond all work and play, it’s learning to love and be loved.
It’s the only true thing in my experience.
Do not seek for your own gain, seek to lift others up and you will be great!
Leaders, serve the people you lead. Seek their best and not your own. This is true capitalism.
We have certainly lost our way to greed and progress and fear of not having what we want.
I have found nothing greater than forgiveness, kindness and patience. Lifting up the least of us, makes us great.
Make yourself available to invest in others and you will be great.
I’m just a dreamer you may think, no, I stand in the sun sunny I know the hard won freedom of true love.
One has to learn to love themselves first and best and from there, give from an overflowing abundance.
This is all I have really learned of value in my life and I will never cease sharing it, until my dying breath.
I ran from love terrified Until I could go no further There I collapsed…finished But I heard something In my dirt filled ears Lying in the land of the dead It was the softest music at first Like nothing I had ever heard before Slowly I began to feel the tug of gravity Suddenly it lifted me up up up Out of the dirt All the way into the big endless sky Suddenly clouds of dark matter split wide A golden light Unlike anything I had ever seen Shot right through me I felt love in every cell screaming Love had raised me from the dead Then I heard thunderous words Echoing from everywhere at once
NOTHING COULD EVER SEPARATE YOU FROM MY ❤️
Then I heard every cell In me singing I found the music Was always in me I just never heard it Like Apollo singing Through the underworld Nothing can touch me now I’ve got the music in me
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
—Henry David Thoreau
This begins my master class on how best to apply philsophy. Henry spent a long time in the woods, he went a little crazy. Bodhidharma stared at a wall for years. Cold Mountain lived on a cold mountain. Diogenes lived in a wine barrel. What do most of us do?
Consume and get fat and die of rich person diseases, most without a positive balance in their checking accounts, how absolutely ironic and funny.
Give up the ghost, you are already dead.
Let’s start there, you are a goner. You are not going to win life. Your purpose isn’t to be free or have a happy life or be rich or poor, it’s to spread your DNA and die, to be consumed, to allow the next wave of being.
But let me tell you something, this is the doorway to joy, to Eden.
Failure is freedom!
I feel most folks are utterly asleep and full of 💩 There, I said it. We live in a fishbowl full of turds. I don’t want to be a winner. I don’t want fame or riches. I ain’t gonna start a YouTube channel or TikTok. I mean, I have a YouTube channel that gets 1-100 likes mostly per post. No one likes what I like really and that’s just fine by me.
“The straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat— you know when they are in the room with you.”
—Marcus Aurelius
I’m weird, a misanthrope, a smelly 🐐 but I love life on this little blue marble, I really do. So I ain’t all bad. Hell is other people Sarte mused and he was close, what he should have said is, hell is yourself, enjoy your stay.
I was one of the walking dead 💀 how did I find my groove, I failed and failed and failed. I became a bum. I wrote my heart. I puked my guts out. I read broadly and saw I was just another bastard. Welcome to the party.
The funniest thing, once you finally embrace the above and stomp around and splash in it, a funny thing happens, people hear you and see you. Your worst fears realized. They want your freedom. Some hate you for it, others sit at your feet.
Well, I don’t have anything to offer the little birds but a kick in the ass out of my nice comfy nest.
There you go, that’s lesson one in how to be a loser.
I couldn’t sleep and the Lion told me to offer myself as a lamb to itself. It said it is all that is moving. It told me love kills. To take my small flame I have cultivated and merge it with the only real 🔥
And I wrote this with some help from my friends…
“Love is like the lion’s tooth.” —W.B. Yeats
I’ll tell you a secret about love Life is love and love is life A riddle and plainly known
I’ll tell you a secret about love You can cultivate your little flame But love will kill you when you come close
I’ll tell you a secret about love Though love may slay you as a lamb You shall be raised up a lion
—smelly goat
“You that come to birth and bring the mysteries, your voice-thunder makes us very happy. Roar, lion of the heart, and tear me open!” – Rumi
Only now do I realize I have prepared myself as an offering to the Lion.
My secret beloved Send me a secret message Give me your soul Give me your life
Wander like a drifter Now on a journey
Walk into this fire embrace Be like a salamander Come into a source of flame Fire transmutes to a rosebud
Don’t you know that my thought Is better than the queen of roses? Don’t you know my heresy Is the essence of spirituality?
Then surrender your spirt Surrender your life For God I know That darkness is better than a cage!
Walk into this fire embrace Be like a salamander Come into a source of flame Fire transmutes to a rosebud
Don’t you know that my thought Is better than the queen of roses? Don’t you know my heresy Is the essence of spirituality?
Then surrender your spirt Surrender your life For God I know That darkness is better than a cage!
I know a palace is better than a ruin And the owl in this world Loves to live In the ruins of love
I am always learning how to read better between the lines of language and life. Words are just representations. Of what, is the mystery. They are magick in a way. Evoking and caging sometimes something in us. I’ve practiced Zen now for a bit, this is the essence of Zen, to know our true nature where we are, nothing more, nothing less.
I know a palace is better than a ruin And the owl in this world Loves to live In the ruins of love
I studied these lyrics a bit years ago and meditated deeply on what is said and not said. I looked into the Sufi path and what they meant by flame and the beloved. I am not trying to be clever here, but I have felt all the deities are within us, drawn to the light/flame, as we are a shadow, a portal to the nameless faceless. The owl, in this world, loves to live in the ruin of love. I choose not to name or make distinctions. The deity is the one who I point at, when I point back at myself. This is cutting to the root. This is going headless. This is directly perceiving beyond words.
I love Rumi, but I really know Shams, who was behind Rumi. Somehow I feel Shams is close to me and represents my secret beloved. He showed me to let the distinctions go.
“A life without love is of no account. Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, eastern or western…divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”
–Shams Of Tabriz
“The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”
That’s a koan.
When I listened to this song first, I felt the flame inside me leap. Yearning for freedom. I felt it. I felt like crying and laughing at the same time. Fire loves water.
Rumi said sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment, that’s got to be one of my favorite written poetic lines.
I think the lyrics point to the freeing of the flame within us, which is always free. This awareness transmutes us, by realizing our lives are not cages, that we are already free. This is the real Alchemy. This returns us to Eden. The world of matter is a ruin in away, a compromise, in between chaos and light.
Somehow it can know itself better in the ruin, but this world is a sham. It is not that the flame needs escape, but that it simply is uncovered.
The water is all around us, love is not the flame, it is the water, which the flame is attracted to. We would think flame fears water, and perhaps it does for awhile, then it seeks to dowse itself in love. When fire loves water, the universe turns differently.
If the bird can get just a glimpse of what is around it and within it, instantly it is transmuted and free. So the body is the cage.
This awareness does not make me want to fly away, it deepens my connection, Aslan, there is no where else to go, here we are. Allah is clothed by rational thought, occulted by matter, but known through awareness. The lion. In Hebrew,
Aslan means ‘satan‘ which means ‘lucifer/first light in the morning’ which means ‘daybreak’. The circle is closed around the point, the central sun. Everything is contained within the circle.
I could not always see with my real eyes I was in a cage. But I embraced the prison and it opened to Eden through my heart, to the point, naked singularity. I can’t show anyone, I can’t really tell anyone, but like knows like. We can point to it. We can sing about it. We can dance around it. Flame joins with And we embrace water seemingly a crazy thing for a flame to do, and then the universe turns differently for us.I was withering in my life 10 years ago, dying. But a great wind blew through me. It lifted me high into the air and brought me face to face with the Our source, itself only a representation. Like words, all form is just a representation.
What appeared to trap me, turned to dust and I flew for the first time.
But I returned, and now I rest here, in the center of it all. I rest in the chaos, in the center of my life. I feel the heat, which is behind all form and I love it, for this is loving and knowing myself. I saw what was behind all esoteric and what was occulted, what was behind all religious and secular symbols.
Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna hide from love?
The morning light dawned inside me.
I don’t cry anymore. I’m smiling and laughing with joy. I feel Aslan within me, laying on the savannah, roaring within. This is the true path to god/love, an ever present connection, it ends where it began, full circle. I drink deeply now from this ocean, I could hardly believe it was real. I was dying because I was thirsting for this love, but terrified of it. This never dies. Anywhere this light breaks into the world, matter forms around it, cults form, religions are born. The matter longs to connect with it or naturally is attracted to it. So we have the planets rotating around the outer sun, as what is inside us rotates around the inner sun.
Bound by gravity.
Bound together by love.
Sometimes I do cry because it is too damn beautiful to contain.
I weep blood into the dirt through my cries and words.
The birds are returning.
All deity reflects love.
All deity seeks to free us.
We are only held back through this egoic force.
In Rumi’s allegories, amongst the free birds, the Owl and the Falcon represent the two primary options once one is freed from the cage. The Owl lives in the dark, far from civilization, only relating with its own kind, whereas the Falcon rests upon the arm of the king, staying close to the power source and maintaining his relations and connection with any and all who venture to the court. The Falcon holds a pure, open vision, flying during the day and returning to his master’s arm at night, while the Owl lives in seclusion, coming out in the dark, lost without the guidance of a master. The Falcon represents a follower who has fallen off track, one who has insight but has pointed it in a skewed direction. Falcon as an exemplary option working in contrast with the Owl who has lost his way after enlightenment.
For Rumi, the last and most powerful bird is the Phoenix, a bird so exquisite it nearly plays the role of God himself. The Phoenix is rare, and when sighted acts as an omen, serving the purpose of reminding humans to stay in awe of God’s power. The Phoenix reminds one to soak up moments with the divine because they may be fleeting and far between. The Phoenix is quite likely an unreal creature and therefore its existence can only rely on faith. The Phoenix reminds us to have faith even when we cannot see it, to hold God close and be open to any help He may have to offer us because He is always there.
The pagan and the religious and secular all experience life differently perhaps but rotate around the same source, are of the same stuff.
The fire is the force, the purpose, the will, that pushes us through life.
The bird knows the way back.
I can’t judge the paths others take in life, but I can see the intensity of the within them. I call out to it in others. Tempt them to let it break free, as they tempt me. Passion reminds us of this contact with the unseen, it celebrates it in whatever form it burns.
All words can provide guidance, but no answers ultimately. I feel that we all must search for the things that we love and feel passionately about and then follow them until death do us part.
I don’t make many waves anymore But lately I been feelin this itch I can’t explain it It feels like summer It feels like winter It feels like fall It feels like…springtime Funny thoughts rise up Words come Feelings groove along They flow and taste bubbly red with sparkles Sometimes I feel salty tears Leaking from my eyes I feel laughter erupting from my lungs I feel and hear my heart beating I feel so alive Something whispers… This is what a human being is Don’t forget But you are not just a human being it whispers You are an ocean of stars And all those stars are connected Each finds their place I found something it seems In all this chaos that made it real I found a love I am not worthy of I found a golden eyed girl who loves me She makes me feel like the sky is kissing me She loved me when I didn’t love myself Her smile makes me feel stars Before I found love I left my head on the road I left this nation behind I left my faith on the road I let my name go I forgot my face I lost my family They turned away from me They cast out their sweet son and brother I had a huge wipeout and then two Then three then the Tao I felt the force behind the waves I found this rhythm inside me Something wonderful Something so filled with light All else faded into black All my doubts just flew away Like bluebirds I almost faded into black too But as my mind was dissolving And I got all wobbly and such And began to dissapear A hand from nowhere reached out And it steadied me Then it pointed to this mountain And I heard on the wind
Go there Go there Go there
But there was no path or road So I made a path But I got lost so quick And then I came upon a forest So dark and deep It felt like the bluest blue And like the darkest night And it seemed like monsters were everywhere And they were going to eat me Then something called to me on the wind again
This way This way This way
Before I knew it I was out of the blue woods Heading toward a snowy topped mountain The past feels forever ago now I made friends along the way I let them see through me No apologies Most turned away But some came close So close we could almost See into each other’s hearts I love to see people become I really do I love to see them find their groove I really do I was lost once too Like all the rest But now wherever I am I’m never lost But all those years ago I was a fool living for nothing But I found something I found…no one is true or right There is no set path I found…within myself Deep mystery Now I have no creed Now I have no name But I am a citizen now of a golden city All of humanity lives there I don’t remember how I got here The wind reminds me This is where all human beings live Those who were and are and will be A city my ancestors built Something sees me now Where I felt alone before Now something is here with me Something lets me know This journey to the big mountain is worth it Somehow I know this Something lets me know You will not fail again And I won’t I won’t quit I won’t stop What does it all mean I wish I could tell you I wish I could take away All the pain and doubt I wish I could make the way clear But how would that help anyone I am someone worthy I found I am someone who will not steal from you I am someone who will not stab you in the back I may even show you my flowers I have not found the mountain yet But I won’t ever stop trying to get there I see it a good ways off in the distance still Let me get back to it I got some walking to do
inside me leap. Yearning for freedom. I felt it. I felt like crying and laughing at the same time. Fire loves water.
I was in a cage. But I embraced the prison and it opened to Eden through my heart, to the point, naked singularity. I can’t show anyone, I can’t really tell anyone, but like knows like. We can point to it. We can sing 
about it. We can dance 
around it. Flame 
seemingly a crazy thing for a flame to do, and then the universe turns differently for us.I was withering in my life 10 years ago, dying. But a great wind blew through me. It lifted me high into the air and brought me face to face with the 
Our source, itself only a representation. Like words, all form is just a representation.
and laughing with joy.
because it is too damn beautiful to contain. 
Quantum Heart 