Myth Is Myth

Until someone decides to transform it into reality.

Lines From The Masnavi

O brother! Collect your wits for an instant and consider how, from moment to moment, there is autumn and spring within you!

Behold the garden of the heart: green and moist and fresh! Full of rosebuds and cypresses and jasmine! Boughs hidden by the multitude of leaves, vast plain and high palace, hidden by the multitude of flowers...

How should a rock be covered with the verdure of Spring? Become earth that you may grow flowers of many hues! For years you have been a heart-jagging rock; just once, for the sake of experiment, be earth!

~Mevlana, Masnavi, Bk. I: 1896-98, 1911-12.
Nicholson translation, slightly amended.

Hafez Again

Because there is no escaping him, and it would be madness to try.

Dr. Annemarie Schimmel (Part-4)

Dr. Annemarie Schimmel (Part-3)

Dr. Annemarie Schimmel (Part-2)

Dr. Annemarie Schimmel On Attar, Rumi, And Sanai

Abol Hasan Kharaqani

This Gate won't open except to true need and true longing.

# 156 in Vraje Abramian's collection of Shaykh Abol Hasan's sayings (entitled The Soul and a Loaf of Bread).

Dervish University Class Of 1901

Faqir Chand: Inner Visions And Running Trains

Persian Poetry, German Romanticism

And music.

Scenes Of Central Asia

The Samovar

The Gleaners

The Cup

Reading Tolstoy always ravishes my heart.

He was the Transgressive Transcendentalist par excellence. In the words of Isaiah Berlin, by nature a fox, he believed in being a hedgehog. He recognized the importance of constructing a "comprehensive vision" and yet, at the same time, was too "foxy" to fool himself into believing that, by doing so, he had somehow managed to solve the riddles of existence.

Heidegger was his disciple--announcing this fact, albeit stealthily, no later than Being and Time. But Heidegger shared with his master a capacious genius that refused to be stamped and labeled. This very refusal is an expression of the transcendental impulse. It is, likewise, a gesture towards the "name that is beyond all naming" (the cipher Allah).

The way of the Transgressive Transcendentalist is the way of the few: it is what Kierkegaard termed the willing of "one thing." It is to accept, as Ibn Bajjah declared, the way of the Solitary One (tadbir al-mutawwahid): the endless road, the road of restlessness.

The defining characteristic of this way is the practice of relentless inquiry.

The symbol of this practice is the cup.



The point of filling the cup is to empty it again.