Posts Tagged ‘Coleman Barks’

There’s Nothing Ahead ~ Rumi


“Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.”
~ Rumi

“The Past, the Future, O dear, is from you;
you should regard both these as one.”
~ Rumi

“Fling me across the fabric of time and the seas of space.
Make me nothing and from nothing-everything.”
~ Rumi

“The Eternal looked upon me for a moment with His eye of power,
and annihilated me in His being,
and become manifest to me in His essence.
I saw I existed through Him.”
~ Rumi

“I am an ark in the swift flood of time,
and my companions, a fellowship.
Who throws in with us sails into light.”
~ Rumi

“Forget the future.”
“The day is conscious of itself.”
~ Rumi



There’s Nothing Ahead ~ Rumi

Lovers think they’re looking for each other,
but there’s only one search:
wandering this world is wandering that,
both inside one transparent sky.
In here there is no dogma
and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself,
not what he said or did about the future.
Forget the future.
I’d worship someone who could do that.

On the way, you may want to look back, or not.
But if you can say, There’s nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms
and take hold of the cloth of your clothes
with both hands.
The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed.
If you don’t have both,
you don’t belong with us.

When one of us gets lost,
is not here, he must be inside us.
There’s no place like that
anywhere in the world.


Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi,
Translation: Coleman Barks

There’s Nothing Ahead ~ Rumi



Voice: Md Taufikur Rahman
background Music:
🎵 Song: ‘Juan Sánchez – Now The Silence’ is under a Free for YouTube license.
https://soundcloud.com/juansanchezcom…

Wean Yourself ~ by Rumi

You were born with wings.
Why prefer to crawl through life?

~ Rumi
The world is a prison and we are the prisoners:
Dig a hole in the prison and let yourself out!

~ Rumi
Why do you stay in prison 
when the door is so wide open?

~ Rumi
I long to escape the prison of my ego
 and lose myself in you.

~ Rumi
You have been a prisoner of a little pond,
I am the ocean and its turbulent flood.

Come merge with me, leave this world of ignorance.

Be with me, I will open the gate to your love.

~ Rumi




Wean Yourself

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.

From any embryo, whose nourishment comes from the blood,
Move to an infant drinking milk,
To a child on solid food,
To a searcher after wisdom,
To a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo,
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheat fields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”


You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world.”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.



Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Say I am You ~ by Rumi

“There is no reality but God,
says the completely surrendered sheik,
who is an ocean for all beings.”
~ Rumi




Say I am You ~ by Rumi

I am dust particles in sunlight,
I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.

I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering

in metal. Both candle,
and the moth crazy around it.

Rose, and the nightingale
lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,

and the falling away. What is,
and what isn’t. You who know

Jelaluddin, You the one
in all, say who

I am. Say I
am You.

 

(Translation by Coleman Barks)





The Circle Around the Zero ~ by Rumi

“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
 all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”
~ Rumi
“When you do things from your soul,
you feel a river moving in you,
a joy.”
~ Rumi
“I have lived on the lip
of insanity,
wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door.
It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.”
~ Rumi




The Circle Around the Zero ~ by Rumi

A lover doesn’t figure the odds.

He figures he came clean from God
as a gift without a reason,
so he gives without cause
or calculation or limit.

A conventionally religious person
behaves a certain way
to achieve salvation.

A lover gambles everything, the self,
the circle around the zero!
He or she cuts and throws it all away.

This is beyond any religion.

Lovers do not require from God any proof,
or any text, nor do they knock on a door
to make sure this is the right street.

They run,
and they run.

~ Rumi

Translation: Coleman Barks, Feeling the Shoulder of the Lion