Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Not Being--Rumi
Not Being
What is the mirror of Being? Not-Being.
Choose Not-Being, if you want to see the King.
Being can only be seen in Not-Being;
The Millionaire shows his lavishness to the beggar.
- Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
(Translated by Andrew Harvey)
(image from Hubble site)
Last night I had a curious "dream" which contained a message. Someone was holding a small mirror and a voice said, "Mirrors are the way the living communicate with the dead." Today I "accidentally" ran across this Rumi poem and somehow it seemed connected, especially if you think of "the dead" as including all those realities that exist only as spirit, not as material beings.
Here is my tentative interpretation of Rumi's poem: Being is final reality, the divine in all its glory. Not-Being includes all who realize that they exist only as an infinitesimal particle of that great final reality, not as the "ego self" they imagine themselves to be.
Only when we surrender the sense of separate self and accept that we are, in fact, nothing, will we be graced with "enlightenment," the gift of knowing the ultimate cosmic
essence as it truly is.
