Looking Deeper In

(ca. 1986/7)

Look into my eyes, look
with the mirror of your heart –
Look beneath my humor, and my eccentricity;
Even my intellect, or the gentle care
with which I regard, even touch you –
Dare to penetrate what seems;
If you heard the song of my soul,
how it surrounds you:
Truly you'd catch the secret
of your own true nature,
revealing to you the Path of Love,
how it comes and goes,
like a single breath, a steady symphonic chord
drawn from the first Humans,
extending through the Ages.

Delicately I walk that Path and serve it.

Kul ad-duniya b'tedowwr b'il-'amr –
W'anti ajmal min al-qamr –
Inna 'ishq-allah m'abud l'illah –
Wa b'kul al-khalaq 'ahubb al-amraa'h.

(All the world turns according to order –
And you are more beautiful than the moon –
Indeed! God is Love, Lover and Beloved –
And out of all Creation I love the Sovereign Order of Love.)

"Getting Religion"

Religion is a cultural attempt to approach God, to approach the Divine, to approach Soul. That is all it is, and to confuse it with either of these is like confusing an image with the thing being imaged, or da Vinci's "Last Supper" with Christ himself. There are those who argue for religion and never get this, and there are those who argue against religion and
never get this. I'm for Religion, so I'll address this.

Soul doesn't evolve really, for it's already eternal, but mind evolves, culture evolves, so religion evolves as well. One would hope. Any religion, whatever the culture or geographical placement or history, which does not view the mere notion of slavery and holding slaves as unthinkable, and its practice as the antithesis of its own Teaching, has not yet arrived at being rightly called Religion. Any religion which foments bigotry, supremacy over others, strife and violence – even while, or especially while, lulling its apologists or its target audience with phrases like "peace" and "peaceful" - cannot rightly be said to have evolved to being a Religion.

Any religion which has failed to teach, to demonstrate and to get across to all hearers, from the most simple person to the most sophisticated thinker: that God is Love, that Soul is nothing but That; that Religion, if it is worth its salt, draws us toward and binds us to that very Love, embracing all souls, seeing ourselves in all embodied sentient Beings – with whichever cultural phrasing one cloaks this – arousing in each more empathy, more lovingkindness, more compassion, and out of this: more wisdom - any religion which has failed to do this has not evolved to the place of being Religion.

Some will find this redundant, or offensive or silly. Do I care? I'm concerned only with conforming my life and breath to what I just asserted. So wherever this shoe fits, let it be worn.

Worth

This evening I heard the voice of thousands,
silently asking, "What is my self-worth?"
Ever harping, ever picking, seeking distraction
from this gnawing, desperate measure drenched
in our own illusion that there is a "self-worth,"
and that mine or yours might come up short.

And the answer which uproots the question
is also a question but a better one, namely:
What is my Self worth?

The answer to that question being:  pursue Inquiry.
That Self can neither be bought nor sold, nor
measured nor priced nor given nor taken.
What is this Self worth - to me, to you?

As Soul was before religion or psychology,
approaching and addressing the Self is
the stuff of clean sincerity, not vapid ideology;
of conscious desire, not self-conscious flattery.

Love will awaken the interest, Love will guide
and bring us guides, Love will sustain the effort,
Love will inspire and nourish and teach patience,
Love will reveal itself as the very Self that is sought.

Gazing in the Glance

Having gazed at the Sun unwavering,
braving the intensity and losing yourself
in its magnitude for longer stretches,

Something occurs which tastes of fearlessness,
most unassuming yet great in heat,
reminiscent of Moses, or of the Son of Man.

You burn through every personality encountered,
to the manifest Unmanifest,
catching a hint of Soul.

Rumi's catalyst was the Sun of Tabriz,
in the Glance which they shared
a Legacy was born.

Without an I, seeing occurs of itself,
where ego becomes a servant, Am is master:
this doesn't happen overnight or from reading a book.

But a most passionate desire for union helps,
as one-pointed as a breath between two lovers,
concentrating, refining, opening to grace.

The stature is majestic, the gait royal,
though you own much or nothing, no one owns you.
And while you walk the Earth, it turns in your orbit.

Light One . . .

Light one candle or as many as you like, it doesn't matter -
the flame will be the same anyway, with each it burns
more or less alike, but it burns.

Let it be slender and elegant, or plain, or ostentatious,
let it be tiny on a birthday cake, let it be round and massive,
or short and plump: but when I light the tea-candles to my Puja

I see that every flame is one.
If a flame is poor or dirty or foul,
either the surrounding air is bad or the candle sucks.
 
Just so is the soul,
and just so is the essence of any religion:
if that religion is understood to be a bond
between a soul and it's origin in this present incarnation.

Soul is just soul, and a flame is also just that.
I have never joined a religion, so can I never leave one;
and the one I was born into I needn't reject,

yet no religion can make me it's member
if that excludes me from any other,
as my faith knows and embraces all faiths.

The Bhakti Path or the Path of Sufis
has no members, and no membership,
so can neither be joined nor left.

Like the prodigal son who returns, begging
his father: "take me back!"
and Dad says, "oh get off it, when were you ever 'not mine'!"

Two flames meeting or a hundred flames,
a matchstick or a bonfire – and there are great-souls
and there are deeply underdeveloped ones.

Flame is one, soul is one, religion is one,
lovingkindness is one, beauty is one, Being is one -
all else is the scenery of incarnations.

Lover Addresses Beloved

Many are my sins, I stand empty and unprepared before my Lord.

Few if any are my redeeming virtues, on whose scale shall I measure?

Yet with the breadth of my heart and the focused passion of my soul,

for you, my beloved, I would cover you and stand by you,

argue on your behalf spanning a thousand lifetimes of sins,

with a prayer, a word, an action, unto my last breath, 

hold your hand preciously in my hand

and walk with you into perfect union, praising God.