The Holy Dance

Photo courtesy of Nail Kesova Dede, Mevlevi Sheikh

Dance only where you mortify yourself and when you tear away the cotton from the sore of lust.

Holy men dance and wheel on the spiritual battlefield: they dance in their own blood.

When they are freed from the dominion of self, they clap a hand; when they escape from their own imperfection, they make a dance.

From within them musicians strike the tambourine; at their ecstasy the seas burst into foam.

You see it not, but for their ears the leaves too on the boughs are clapping hands.

You do not perceive the clapping of the leaves: one must have the spiritual ear, not this ear of the body.

Close the ear of the head to jesting and lying, that you may see the resplendent city of the soul.

Mathnawi Book 3, vv. 95-101

(from the words of Hazreti Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi)

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Dreams Within Dreams

Rumi said that life is…..
“khayalun fi khayalin fi khayal”
“dreams within dreams within dreams………”

He who is ruled by spiritual intelligence, without being asleep, puts his senses to sleep, so that unseen things may emerge from the world of the Soul.
Even in his waking state he dreams dreams (visions) and opens withal the gates of Heaven.

The Prophet said of this world, which is substantial in appearance, that it is the sleeper’s dream.
You have accepted this statement conventionally, but the travellers on the mystic Way have beheld this truth clairvoyantly, without relation from the Prophet.
You are asleep in the daytime: do not say that this is not sleep. The shadow is derivative, the origin of it is naught but the moonlight.
Know, O comrade, that your sleep and waking is as though a sleeper should dream that he has gone to sleep.
He thinks, “Now I am asleep”, and is unaware that he is really in the second sleep.

From Rumi’s Mathnawi Book 3