Watering Thorns

Those who are scattered, simplify your worrying lives. There is one righteousness: Water the fruit trees and don’t water the thorns.

Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God’s luminous reason-light. Don’t honor what causes dysentery and knotted-up tumors.

Don’t feed both sides of yourself equally. The spirit and the body carry different loads and require different attentions.

Too often we put saddlebags on Jesus and let the donkey run loose in the pasture.

Don’t make the body do what the spirit does best, and don’t put a big load on the spirit that the body could carry easily.

Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic, talks about the ego without ever mentioning it. We do water the thorns in our ego, and forget to water the fruit it protects. The ego is designed to skim the top level of our reality and form a cohesive relationship between the self and the physical environment. This incredible tool of consciousness is capable of perceiving much more than we allow. Our fears, superstitions and ignorance limit the scope of its power.

The ego can’t directly experience psychological experiences that occur outside of the boundaries of our beliefs, but it can become aware of them on an intellectual basis. We don’t accept our intuitions because intuition touches the ego in a very annoying way. Our intuitions attack our reality with unproven weapons, and the naked ego runs for cover.

The purpose of the ego is physical awareness. But when it becomes a hard shell full of antiquated beliefs and fears, it turns into a prison that snuffs out important data from the inner self. It is up to us to coat our reality with our intuitions, and then feel that coat blend with the ego and other portions of the self. When that happens, we are watering the fruit instead of the thorns.