Today, I'm back helping the rosarians at the Rose Garden in Eugene, OR—a small cathedral of scent and thorn. - Sometimes, the seasons of life turn and I find myself back on the compost heap. And sometimes, when her glance finds me again, I am back in the Rose Garden. #Shabestari
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With Latif, surrounded by roses.
@stephenrjmullan @lukeburgis 2/ Shabestari: "Think that the light of God's existence lies within thy eyeballs." Whether Believer or adept matters not a whit: this quotidian locus of supernal profundity is democratically and immediately accessible to all, even as the metaphysics remain dizzyingly enigmatic.
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Lahiji's 17c. commentary on Shabestari’s words: 'By love has appeared everything that exists, And by love, that which does not exist appears as existing.' “Shabestari means here that man is the eye of the world, and that the world is the reflection of God, and that God himself is the light of this eye. Man is the eye which looks in the mirror, and like the mirror reflects the face of the person who is looking into it, the reflection possesses itself an eye, and in the same time that the eye looks in the mirror, the reflection of this eye looks at it also. God, which is the eye of man, looks at himself through man. “This point is very subtle: from one side God is the eye of man; from another, man is the eye of theMen God and man exists between man and the world.”
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Andrew Harvey: "If you are following in your light-mind the way in which the light travels between all mirrors in this passage, you will be close to having an insight of the enlightened state. Lahiji has perfected the entire experience in a series of simple images that become very more resonant as you meditate upon them...The perfect being is the one who has understood consciously, through relationship, dedication, and the purity of a disciplined life lived in devotion and passion, that God is looking at himself through him or her; he or she has understood that the Divine is tasting the wine of the Divine Presence through his or her mouth. The perfected being has understood that the sole purpose of being here is to live, looking into the eye of the eye that is looking back at you, to see that the entire swirl of life is the magic of Divine Love, that Love by which everything that exists appears, that Love by which everything that "does not exist", this passing theater, also appears."