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Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you want what visible reality can give, you’re an employee. If you want the unseen world, you’re not living your truth.
Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being.
Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk to the language-river. Listen to the ocean, and bring your talky business to an end.
If you have a body, where is the spirit? If you’re spirit, what is the body? This is not our problem to worry about. Both are both. Corn is corn grain and cornstalk.
Invisible, visible, the world does not work without both.
I give you this opened heart as God gives gifts: the poison of your spit has become the honey of friendship.”
The Mathnawi itself is a love story that obliterates lovers. “Don’t look for me in a human shape.”
We should always ask for discipline. One who has no self-control cannot receive grace. And it’s not just himself he hurts. Undisciplined people set fire to the landscape!
The secret of her pain opened to him, but he didn’t tell the king what it was. It was love, of course. The ailments of love are different from any other. Love is the astrolabe that sights into the mysteries of God.
The teaching began again. Rumi’s poems are like firecrackers on a funeral pyre. They won’t allow much public posturing, and they point us away from misery.
In December of 1273 when Rumi died, representatives of every major religion came to his funeral. In the midst of the crusades and violent sectarian conflict he said, “I go into the Muslim mosque and the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church and I see one altar.”
He can’t see the whole. That’s why God wants you to deny your desires, so you will learn how to give up self-interest. It’s the love of the manifest world that makes you an unreliable witness.
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk now drinks wine and honey mixed.
A secret turning in us makes the universe turn. Head unaware of feet, and feet head. Neither cares. They keep turning.
I circle your nest tonight, around and around until morning when a breath of air says, Now, and the Friend holds up like a goblet some anonymous skull.
No better love than love with no object, no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.
I am so small I can barely be seen. How can this great love be inside me?
Last night the elephant wandered India again and tore the darkness to shreds. Let our daylight lives be like last night.
You have heard how the night is wide and long for the sake of lovers and thieves. We do the work of both.
There are values in pain that are difficult to see without the presence of a guest. Don’t complain about autumn. Walk with grief like a good friend. Listen to what he says. Sometimes the cold and dark of a cave give the opening we most want.
Shopkeepers work for themselves, not for the flow of communal exchange. We all look to ease our pain, and this keeps civilization moving along. God made fear the architect here. Fear keeps us working near the ark.
This story has no end. Whatever Pharaoh plots entangles his own feet. Imagine the painting of a hand trying to stop the hand of the artist.
The story of Pharaoh and Imran’s wife takes place inside of us.
Heat this horse so hot it rises off the track into the emptiness of soul.
No metaphor can hold this truth that knows how to keep secret and when to show itself.
Final lines of the book.
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
