read part 2 here and part 1 here if you haven’t already
………….. and His own Substance is love.
I always remember somebody who came to our center it was for a retreat and she was… she told me she walked up the hill – we have a hill that goes to the meditation room – and she walked up there and on the way she had the experience that every leaf on every tree was made of love. I looked at the light in her eyes it was so beautiful it was like a curtain had been lifted and for a moment she had glimpsed the mystery of creation.
Everything in creation is love. Because of course it is love what else could it be. In the same way as every blade of grass, every bird sings the praises of God. Of course it does; it is his world how could it be otherwise. It is strange we have forgotten that but we have forgotten so many things, so many things, more than we can every remember I suppose but everything in creation is love. When you meet someone it is love meeting love and you can experience that and I would say a simple thing, you can touch a table with love and you feel the table respond. How can a table respond? because a table is also love but no one notices that it’s love so it pretends to just be a table.
It is the same for a human being, if you approach a human being with love something in them wakes up something in them rejoices, “Somebody notices that I am love”! The lover standing alone and forlorn in the marketplace is for a moment seen for what he is, a lover, not just a person, not just a wayfarer,not just a tramp…but a bit of love longing for its Beloved. Everything is the reed torn form the reed bed everything is a cry of the soul. “Because I am a hidden treasure and I longed to be loved so I created the world.” Everything is love looking for it’s Beloved.
It is such a relief that, you know you just step outside of ourself and you step into this whole drama of love,this whole extraordinary orgasmic experience of love, because everything is being recreated with love every moment. The people you are now are not the same as those who came in 15 minutes ago. I can assure you have already been recreated with love, already each moment Love is recreating itself, Love is re-experiencing itself.
And the beauty is, is that because I say we have this privilege of being Sufis we are allowed to consciously participate in this revelation of love, if we can of course for a moment step outside ourselves, and all of the ego and all of that drama you know only too well, then you realise that we are love recreating itself, re-experiencing itself each moment, each moment is different, each moment is this it’s the Beloved breathing in and breathing out with love. It is very simple
References
The Reed
A craftsman pulled a reed from the reed-bed,
cut holes in it, and called it a human being.
Since then, it’s been wailing a tender agony
of parting, never mentioning the skill
that gave it life as a flute
I was a hidden treasure
“I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known.” This is the beginning of probably the most famous hadith qudsi, or extra-Qur’anic Word of God, ḥadiṯs-e kanz-e maḵf. A better translation might be:
“I was a Treasure unknown then I desired to be known so I created a creation to which I made Myself known; then they knew Me.”
Related Articles
- Who is the Beloved Part(1) words from Rumi, Nurbakhsh, Sanai Ghaznavi (mycaravanofdreams.com)
- Silence and the Sufi Conception of Love (mycaravanofdreams.com)
You speak my language David (((♥)))