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August 12 - September 8, 2022
no one can say that God was revealed in one consistent shape delivering one consistent message—quite the opposite. Somehow revelations can be divine and contradictory at the same time.
But to say that God evolves implies that he began in an immature state and then grew into fullness, when every faith holds that God is infinite to begin with. What actually evolved was human understanding.
God stands for our need to know ourselves, and as awareness evolves, so does God.
Then Job knew that Satan’s greatest power was not that he could inflict evil. His greatest power was to make the sons of God forget who they were.
Now he believed in nothing and everything.
and guilt hovers even when events are external, random, and beyond our control.
The human mind can tolerate anything but meaninglessness,
And the answer is that adversaries no longer exist when good stops warring against evil.
Chaos nibbles at the edges of everyday existence.
Where God is, the ego cannot be.
Everything that Job loses—wealth, social status, possessions, and a secure family—are irrelevant to the soul’s journey.
“Most men are condemned, as you can see. But it’s a strange prison that holds them, because each inmate has been handed the key to his cell.
We get the key when we’re born, and we could escape anytime we chose.” “Then why don’t we?” “Because our jailer is the mind, and a fiercer one never existed.
If you can’t live with dying, you are not really living.” Like
Debauchery can be as good as philosophy.
Their reasons were the same: it defeats truth to use words, since words imply that you know what you are looking for. Instead, truth is an experience.
Socrates was a kind of archseducer. He aimed to make truth so seductive that it overtook the mind, purified it of all false beliefs, and ignited a lifelong hunger for a higher reality.
We are seeking the ideal, starting with everyday experience but rising higher and higher—if we are true philosophers, lovers of wisdom—until the pure ideal is revealed.
The status quo depends on conformity, not just the dronelike conformity of bees in a hive, but a shared agreement not to look too deeply into human nature.
“Know thyself” is buried a new belief, that human nature is capable of
reaching God without dogma, authority, and fear.
“This is wisdom you cannot learn; you must become it.”
History is written by the victors, which is never more true than in the history of the early church.
The soul is an experience, not a thing. All experiences take place in consciousness.
Miraculous worlds only await the touch of awareness.
“Ignorance is more arrogant,
“A guest at the door is God. We are taught that this is more important than daily prayers.”
your house is full of hope for God, as an empty vase is full of hope for roses. Yet you can have the experience, and then your hope will be fulfilled. God wants to be felt, seen, touched.
He is lonely sitting apart from us. In finding God you find your own essence.
When potential unfolds, it’s not like a bag of sugar that you steadily empty. The more sugar in the bag, the more you can pour out. But there is nothing physical stored somewhere giving rise to more and more creativity. Instead, an invisible potential (such as musicality or a knack for numbers) finds a way to emerge into the physical world.
the only God that could exist is not a person, even a vast, superhuman person, but something invisible and yet alive, a kind of infinite potential that can create, govern, control, and bring to fruition everything that exists. This God cannot be limited; therefore, he cannot be described.
The first is “I am that.” I am not a self bound by a body and trapped in the brief space between birth and death. I am made of the same essence as God. What is that essence? It can’t be put into words. It is “that.” This is a highly personal experience,
To stub your toe on a rock is just as personal, just as subjective, and just as much a product of consciousness.
The second awakening occurs when the divine is seen in someone else. “I am that” expands into “You are that.” This widening continues until the whole world is consumed,
the third awakening, “All of this is that.” Once the entire world is experienced as divine, one enters the state of unity consciousness. There is nothing...
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But if God is pure potential, things change radically. Potential is infinitely flexible. A God of potentiality doesn’t need to be obeyed, feared, or placated. He exists to unfold anything and everything.
Our agonies arise because we do not realize the divine potential in ourselves, which can alter our fate. If you realize this fact, you may seek only to wake up from the horrors of the dream. In that case, your goal will be to return to the light, where total peace and complete absence of pain exist.
At the same time, you know that no one made the dream but yourself, which is why it holds no danger.
Jesus names as being in the world, but not of it.
Poised on that edge before you wake up from your jungle adventure, you know that the dream belongs to you. Suddenly you are an author.
To exchange learned words delights a scholar’s heart. It bores the world, however.
He had traveled to the far reaches of the sultan’s empire visiting holy shrines. But if God was beyond time and space, none of it mattered.
attracting anyone who heard the soft call of the soul to be free.
This longing for Shams was the same longing we have for a God who disappears, not because he hates us, but because all of life is a search—for love, for truth, for beauty. Whatever God stands for must be elusive; otherwise, we would all feast like a lazy rich man and fall asleep from excess and dullness.
Fortunate is he who does not walk with envy as his companion.
What saves both paths is that the course of the unfolding of the soul is well mapped. You may feel exhausted and empty, and in your struggle the condition feels unique. It isn’t. The tradition of seekers is the longest in recorded history. For as long as we have records about God, we find seekers working their way to the divine presence.
Here he is in detached mood, speaking as if from an otherworldly perspective, a perch in eternity:
the word ecstasy comes from the Latin meaning “to stand outside or apart.
Yet as a torch held aloft at the beginning of the path, who is more inspired? There is a bright flame inside Rumi, and his hope is that he makes you see the same flame inside yourself.
evolution of God, holding on to the image of a patriarch sitting above the clouds becomes more and more a stubborn habit. This is especially so when, as with Rumi, the divine is a feeling in the heart that expands into all-consuming bliss. Bliss has no name or face. The world’s visionaries go in a different direction. Their paths mingle, but still no single picture of God emerges. A deeper transformation is taking place.
