Moses And The Shepherd!

Rumi, the 13th century mystic, wrote the short story about Moses and a Shepherd. One English translation is in Coleman Barks's book The Essential Rumi. It's an old story, but the message is as important now as it was back then. Unity within diversity is the key to peace, especially within the self. Honoring the act of connection to the source of all energy is a lesson we are here to learn. Rumi the ever-present teacher explains how Moses and the Shepherd learned that all roads lead to the same place.

Moses And The Shepherd

Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying, "God where are you? I want to help you, to fix your shoes and comb your hair. I want to wash your clothes and pick the lice off. I want to bring you milk to kiss your little hands and feet when it's time for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room and keep it neat. God my sheep and goats are yours. All I can say, remembering you, is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhhh."

Moses could stand it no longer, "Who are you talking to?"

"The one who made us, and made the earth and made the sky."

" Don't talk about shoes and socks with God! And what's this with your little hands and feet? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like you're chatting with your uncles. Only something that grows needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God! Even if you meant God's human representatives, as when God said, 'I was sick, and you did not visit me,' even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent.
Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name for a women, but if you call a man Fatima, it's an insult. Body and birth language are right for us on this side of the river, but not for addressing the origin, not for God."

The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed and wandered out into the desert.

A sudden revelation came then to Moses. God's voice:

You have separated me from one of my own. Did you come as a prophet to unite, or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong to you is right for him. What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship, these mean nothing to me.
I am apart from all of that. Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do. It's all praise, and it's all right.
It's not me that's glorified in acts of worship. It's the worshipers! I don't hear the words they say. I look inside at the humility.
This broken-open lowliness is the reality, not the language! Forget phraseology. I want burning, burning.
Be friends with your burning. Burn up your thinking and your forms of expression!

Moses, those who pay attention to ways of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who burn are another.
Don't impose a property tax on a burned-out village. Don't scold the lover. The "wrong" way he talks is better than a hundred "right" ways of others.
Inside the Temple it doesn't matter which direction you point your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn't need snowshoes! The love-religion has no code or doctrine.
Only God.
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it! It doesn't need markings.

God began speaking deeper mysteries to Moses. Visions and words, which cannot be recorded here, poured into and through him. He left himself and came back. He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.
It's foolish of me to try and say this. if I did say it, it would uproot our human intelligences. It would shatter all writing pens.

Moses ran after the shepherd. He followed the bewildered footprints, in one place moving straight like a castle across a chessboard; in another, sideways, like a bishop.
Now surging like a wave cresting, now sliding down like a fish, with always his feet making geomancy symbols in the sand, recording his wandering state.

Moses finally caught up with him.
"I was wrong. God has revealed to me that there are no rules for worship. Say whatever and however your loving tell you to. Your sweet blasphemy is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world is freed. Loosen your tongue and don't worry what comes out. it's all the light of the spirit."

The shepherd replied,
"Moses, Moses, I've gone beyond even that. You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped out of itself. The divine nature and my human nature came together. Bless your scolding hand and your arm. I can't say what happened. What I'm saying now is not my real condition. it can't be said."
The shepherd grew quiet.

When you look in a mirror, you see yourself, not the state of the mirror. The flute player puts breath into the flute, and who makes the music? Not the flute. The flute player!
Whenever you speak praise or thanksgiving to God, it's always like this dear shepherd's simplicity. When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again,
"This is certainly not like we thought it was!"


Rumi wrote those words over 700 years ago. He believed that we are all one in this pot of diversity.

Interior Portrait!

Interior Portrait

You don't survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing's strength.

What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.

I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less.

A swan swims on the water
surrounded by itself
like a gliding picture;
thus at certain moments
a being that we love
is utter space in motion.

Like this swimming swan,
doubled, it comes closer
on our troubled soul...
which to this being adds
the rippling image
of happiness and doubt

All my goodbyes are said. Many separations
slowly shaped me since my infancy.
But I come back again and I begin again;
this fresh return releases my attention.

What's left for me is to replenish it,
and my joy, forever unrepentant
for having loved the things resembling
these absences that make us act.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875. He is known as one of Europe's most prolific writers. In the German-speaking world, Rilke is considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century.

We keep wanting to sense and feel our own interior portrait. We want to emotionally touch our inner self; the self that is not bound by time and space. We want to swim in the deep waters of our own awareness, and enjoy every drop of it. We want to embrace the physical self with the invisible arms of our essence,and we do, but we forget we do.

Our imagination and emotions create our physical reality, but the inner self creates our interior portrait. Our interior portrait is constantly changing as we move through time. We want to experience and love each one of our portraits. We may believe we are one portrait, but we are a gallery of portraits, and they all hang in splendid awareness of our consciousness.

The Seed Market!

Every time I open one of Rumi's books it doesn't take me long to find something that rings a bell within me. The poem, "The Seed Market," from the book, The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, is one of those works. Rumi talks about connected awareness in a way that is easily understood.

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?

Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where
for one seed
you get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath,
the divine wind?

You've been fearful
of being absorbed in the ground
or drawn up by the air.

Now, your waterbead lets go
and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.

It no longer has the form it had,
but it's still water.
The essence is the same.

This giving up is not a repenting,
It's a deep honoring of yourself.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God's sake!

Don't postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching
will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and becomes yours.

A Basket Of Fresh Bread!

Rumi's thoughts don't conform to a certain religion or time period. He expresses the unity within all religions, and he uses simple thoughts to do it. His thoughts have grown in stature with the globalization of the world. His messages are everywhere. Try this one on for size. A Basket Of Fresh Bread.

The Prophet said, "There is no better companion on this way than what you do. Your actions will be your best friend, or if you're cruel and selfish,

your actions will be a poisonous snake

that lives in your grave."

But tell me, can you do good work without a teacher? Can you even know what it is without the presence of a Master? Notice how the lowest livelihood requires some instruction.

First comes knowledge, then the doing of the job. And much later, perhaps after you're dead, something grows from what you've done.

Look for help and guidance in whatever craft you're learning. Look for a generous teacher, one who has absorbed the tradition he's in.

Look for pearls in oyster shells.

Learn technical skill from a craftsman.

Whenever you meet genuine spiritual teachers,

be gentle and polite and fair with them.

Ask them questions and be eager

for answers. Never condescend.

If a master tanner wears an old, threadbare smock,

that doesn't diminish his mastery.

If a fine blacksmith works at the bellows in a patched apron, it doesn't affect how he bends the iron.

Stripe away your pride, and put on humble clothes.

If you want to learn theory, talk with theoreticians. That way is oral.

When you learn a craft, practice it. That learning comes through the hands.

If you want sainthood, spiritual poverty, and emptiness, you must be friends with the ancient one.

Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices don't help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.

The mystery of spiritual emptiness may be living in a pilgrim's heart, and yet the knowing of it may not yet be his.

Wait for the illuminating openness as though your chest were filling with light, as when God said, "Did We not expand you?"

Don't look for it outside yourself. You are the source of milk. Don't milk others!

There is a milk fountain inside you.

Don't walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean, and yet you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only on THAT. The Prophet says,

"And He is with you."

There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, and yet you go door to door asking for crusts.

Knock on your inner door. No other.

Sloshing knee-deep in fresh river water,

yet you keep wanting a drink from other people's water bags.

Water is everywhere around you, but you see only barriers that keep you from water.

The horse is beneath the rider's thigh, and still he asks, "Where's my horse?"

Right there, under you!

"Yes, this is a horse, but where's the horse?"

Can't you see!

"Yes I can see, but whoever saw such a horse?"

Mad with thirst, he can't drink from the stream running so close by his face. He's like a pearl on the deep bottom, wondering, inside his shell, "Where's the ocean?"

His mental questionings form the barrier. His physical eyesight bandages his knowing. Self-consciousness plugs his ears.

Stay bewildered in God, and only that.

Those of you 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 rumors.

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

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.

Body Intelligence!

Rumi, the Sufi poet, lived over 700 years ago. Rumi knew about connection and awareness. He saw himself as more that a Turkish villager who worked hard, and experienced the pain of living in the Middle Ages. He wrote about the life he experienced, and he used his connection to pull himself and those who read his work out of their daily feeling of separation. He connected to an expanded version of the self. He described the thoughts of the people in a simple way, and explained that in that simplicity there was a greater good. He taught them to feel their inner senses.

His work Body Intelligence,is all about that message:

Body Intelligence

Your intelligence is always with you,
overseeing your body, even though
you may not be aware of its work.

if you start doing something against
your health, your intelligence
will eventually scold you.

If it hadn't been so lovingly close by,
and so constantly monitoring,
how could it rebuke?

You and your intelligence
are like the beauty and the precision
of a astrolabe.

Together, you calculate how near
existence is to the sun!

Your intelligence is marvelously intimate.
It's not in front of you or behind,
or to the left or the right.

Now try, my friend, to describe how near
is the creator of your intellect!

Intellectual searching will not find
the way to that king!

The movement of your finger
is not separate from your finger.


You go to sleep or you die,
and there's no intelligent motion.
Then you wake and your fingers
fill with meanings.

Now consider the jewel-lights in your eyes.
How do they work?
This visible universe has many
weathers and variations.

But uncle, O uncle,
the universe of the creation-word,
the divine command to Be, that universe
of qualities is beyond any pointing to.

More intelligent than intellect
and more spiritual than spirit.

No being is unconnected to that reality,
and that connection cannot be said.
There, there's no separation and no return.

There are guides who can show you the way.
Use them. But they will not satisfy your longing.
Keep wanting that connection
with all your pulsating energy.

The throbbing vein
will take you further
than any thinking.

The prophet said, "Don't theorize
about essence!" All speculations
are just more layers of covering.
Human beings love coverings!

They think the designs on the curtains
are what's being concealed.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don't claim them. Feel the artistry
moving through, and be silent.

Or say, " I cannot praise You
as You should be praised.
Such words are infinitely
beyond my understanding."

From My Heart And Eyes...

Love is a dormant state of awareness in most of us. It is a mysterious force that implants itself in the hearts and souls of humans. At conception this mystery expresses itself through two people and at birth it becomes a physical being through nature. Every child born in physical form, is love manifested in pure expression. I don't think there is anyone who would dispute the fact that a newborn is the essence of love, formed by the seed of this great mystery that lives within us.

We all are an example of that love. We are filled with it. It is the whole part of who we are, and it never leaves us. But, we forget that fact as we travel through time, and view the self as someone who does not know what love is or how to find it.

We search everywhere for this feeling of connection; Love is an elusive entity that we see and sense around us, but we can't find within us since we are conditioned to look outside of the self.

The foremost reason for dis-ease is not remembering who we are. We believe we are not worthy of love. We attract fear and suffer the effects of separation simply because we do not love this self in physical form. We say, it's too big or small, too poor or wealthy; too ugly or beautiful; too sinful or hateful. Little by little we destroy our physical form, because we conform to the rituals of self-worthlessness. We don't love the self; that would be an act of conceit and egomania.


Guiraut de Bornelh explains love this way:

So, through the eyes love attains the heart:

For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,

And the eyes go reconnoitering

For what it would please the heart to possess.

And when they are in full accord

And firm, all three, in the one resolve,

At that time, perfect love is born

From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.

Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement

Then by this birth and commencement moved by inclination

By the grace and by command

Of these three, and from their pleasure,

Love is born, who with fair hope

Goes comforting her friends.

For as all true lovers

Know, love is perfect kindness,

Which is born- there is no doubt- from the heart and eyes.

The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it;

Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.

A Loftier Race?

These things shall be- a loftier race Than e'er the world hath known shall rise With flame of freedom in their souls, And light of knowledge in their eyes

John Symonds, the English novelist, children's author, and playwright, was born in 1914. His poem of a loftier race sounds like it came from a children's book. But, not just kids take those thoughts to heart and imagine them to be real. We all like to read about such myths and fantasies. We put the self in dreams and live them for a moment, and find the experience real in some innate way.

Ken Wilbur one of our modern day philosophers had something to say about that sort of experience:

Notice what it is that you call "you"- you might notice two parts of this "self": (1) there is some sort of observing self, an inner subject or watcher. (2) there is some sort of observed self, some objective things that you can see or know about yourself, such as I am a father, mother, doctor, clerk etc.

The first is experienced as an "I," the second as a "me" or even mine. The first self is the proximate self since it is closer to "you"; and the second is the distant self since it is objective and father away. Both of them together, along with other sources of selfness are called the overall self.

Ken's thoughts and Symonds poem are related in the fact that the inner self is watching the distant self, and lighting a flame of knowledge. This knowledge is an aspect of awareness. Knowlwdge is realizing that this journey through time and space is the playground of dreams, and the theater for the play we write for ourselves. It is the manifestations of our impulses, thoughts, beliefs, and desires.

We all are part of that enlightened race. A race with the knowledge of eternity in our souls. A race with love deeply rooted in our bodies and minds. A race that is a whole part of another whole.

We experience our beliefs and become what we believe. Our flame of freedom burns every life experience. All we need to do is become aware of what makes that flame brighter.