Love Is Most Great!

The night’s vigil ended at break of dawn.
After breaking fast together over wine, pork, and song,
the Mad Fool of God left my presence;
he told me he’d now climb naked
the minaret of the Spheres,
and proclaim there a better Calling:

"Love is most great, Love is most great!
Love is most great, Love is most great!
I bear witness that there is no reality but Love,
I bear witness that there is no reality but Love!
I bear witness that Love is its own Prophet,
I bear witness that Love is its own Messenger!
Come to celebrate, come to surrender!
Come to consciousness, come to completion!
Love is most great, Love is most great!
There is no reality but Love!"

I told him he was mad, he answered,

No, he wasn’t angry at all, and we laughed, and he left.

But like that Great Woman of Basra

he’d carry torch and water pail,

to burn down paradise and put out hell’s fire – so that

Muslims might just once find something better to do

in the Name of God, than sparing themselves no effort

in erasing the "competition," and to reflect for once,

try loving God – without hope or fear, but for Love –

and after 14 centuries finally learn to dominate

themselves rather than "everyone else."

Opening exerpt from "Sam's Notes From The Underground, 1998-9, Berlin"

In the privacy of your heart, seek the stilllness

and learn to surrender yourself to it.

In the inner stillness choose your own atmosphere.

In your own atmosphere learn to praise God according to inspiration.

Praising God you write your own future.

There you will find yourself, you will make your way.

What Is Being Looked At Is What Is Looking (Assisi-Frank)

(mid- to late-'80s)
Heart of human being accomodates all longing
and all deviations from longing.
Put aside the literature of ages,
go and feel the pulsation of the heart
transcending all ages
transcending all places
spanning vast ranges of the sane and the grotesque.

Every self is born believing,
every belief a longing to know the Self.
I have tasted a mother's salty tears
watching her child being dragged to the auction block,
herself led helplessly away to be probed and raped.
And the man clutching gut and groin
from kicks administered by smiling guards
watched his wife and oft-held children ushered into
the extermination wagon
while his mother entered a barracks with a crude and leering officer –
I was that man
long ago shattered and alone.

For all this human heart has travailed
yet this mind is free;
like the unnamed unheard-of sisters of faith
who braved every terror and abuse to succor the will-broken
children in the maelstrom,
for the sake of the love they carried in their own wounded bodies.

I have been shown in dream "the balm to heal the suffering masses"...




The Names of God will clear of all fantasy
that mind which seeks refuge in the stillness of the Self
residing in all;
residing even in that one holding the whip and the goad,
even the pimp and the cocaine boss,
the magistrate and the power-broker,
the drinking wife-masher or the barb-tongued wife,
the abuse offender and those in positions who give him cover,
yes, even the landlord,
evenso the child in my arms, as they all once were, reflecting

my Original Innocence.

Free of lust – through hard work;
free of greed and of anger – through hard work;
free of all rambling judgement idiocy by dull self-conscious mind;
free of religious arrogance and the effort of manipulation –
through hard work and through
Surrender's grace-bestowing power.

The heart which harbors layered knots of pain, horror, cheapened existence,
and the heart which holds to childish naive optimism –
both house the Self without even knowing it.
The heart which cares for neither pleasure nor pain
just sings the Beloved Name
is the very temple of that Self.

 
There is no dignity like Original Innocence,
no persuasion so subtle, so sovereign,
no generosity so free, genuine, fair.
One who's found it has a clear and forgiving mind,
a mind which can span the ages
and touch hearts in all times in all worlds –
and clean up any life which has just enough glimmer left
to remember what it once knew.

Practice is remembrance.
Kindness is remembrance.
Sincerity and integrity are remembrance,
all this is certain.
Original Innocence is reborn by turning;
this turning is begun and completed
through an act of surrender.
And with us the Guru has left this Principle for all time.

The Goddess' Armpit

(to that Goddess in every Woman)

One speaks of her auspicious gaze,
the many facets of her all-embracing,
and in the same moment, penetrating glance.

In every aspect I agree, all parts of her form
are addressed in one hymn or another,
whether carved in marble, in wood or in sandstone,

whether painted, or in paean sung,
or embodied in dance, or costumed staging,
and be it Grecian or Roman or Tantra with bindu:

in all these depictions I hear
of her eyes, her lips, her arms and her thighs,
I see in the art how robust and alive

those breasts can be, and those sweeping hips,
a turn of the neck just so,
the feet with the anklets . . .

and yet . . .
And yet and yet and yet:
what is missing, but that I sometimes

may catch it – no, rather
be caught by it, yes, caught up!
Such that every fibre of my all-too male being

can barely bring my tongue to sing
to that which it longs rather to touch,
to meet most intimately there, and lose itself

in that place where hair
may also grow, and the form and the shape
of this, that Goddess' armpit, unsung, unsung!

It is not unfair, it is alone intended
for me to discover, as I had with such yearning
from earliest of memory beholding her form.

The erotic statement of it cannot be spoken,
there is nothing in the literature giving mention,
it is for me most privately, intimately, erotically winning

her approval so, for me alone to go there and to know it.
It is a world and an opener of worlds, as there are
many gates to her erotic majesty, this is only for the seeing,

bestowing its aroma – ah, yes, laugh you world,
and remain bereft of this particular blessing few of us
can appreciate, and appreciating thus

with finger strokes and tongue and eyes
full of desire and homecoming
there in the cleft of it,

spread for me, inviting, open and sovereign,
sharing, laughing, cooing, surrendering
as with no other door, there

beloved, beloved nectar of scented
perspiration, completely natural,
intoxicating beyond any words, please, no words!

This tongue is not for words here, but for surrendering,
as every male part of me is ordered to this attention
now.

The smile of her mouth is enticing indeed,
but still more so, is
the Goddess' armpit.

For Mevlana (I)

(March 1977, Boulder)

 

The lover knows why he is born:
When pierced for blood
   milk flows from the heart of the lover,
   nourishing even the one who adminsters the wound;
      that one is blessed by the lover,
      who now holds the dagger
         firmly rooted in his heart,
         withdrawing it and replanting it

            again and again,

        as a constant reminder.
The lover carries no fear
   for he carries his manhood in his heart.
       Therefore he is tender like a petal,
           while protected like the pomegranite.
He is veiled and allows himself to be unveiled
   when in the presence of the beloved.
       The lover may be shattered


           over and over again,


       but his pieces will always fall scattered
   to the soil to regenerate as an army of lovers!
Only the lover knows the meaning of constancy.

                 Love has made a fanatic of me;
                 and to the Source of all this
                 I gladly offer my head
                 again and again.
                 Pain rends the veil
                 which hid the cup of ecstasy.


                 Friend, cover yourself
                 with the mantle of secrecy
                 and go naked into the night.
                 There you will find a brilliance
                 which no eye can perceive.

Without the cup of sobriety,
how shall I contain this ecstasy?


It runs over the edge anyway,
and spills on the one whose lips
parted to taste.

                 Beloved Mother, teach me
                 the secret of the spring rain,
                 how it nourishes the earth
                 and makes all life fertile with its weeping.

My heart is with the Brotherhood,
the lovers whose eyes are brilliant with desire
   to serve the One who made them feel this.


   Their feet never leave the ground
   until the Turn is complete.
Their pride is in the One who causes this Turning,
their dignity is testimony of their surrender.