The Beloved Guest (from The Secret Rose Garden)

[Guest guest]

Dear friends,

 

Shabistari's Secret Rose Garden is considered to be one of the great works of

Persian Sufism. In

this work, Shabistari expresses a viewpoint of Sufi realization similar to the

perspective of the

great Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, and Rumi, but expressed through the rich

Persian poetic

tradition.

 

Again and again the great mystics and saints remind us to "cast away your

existence entirely."

This is expressed in many ways in the various world traditions: to die in order

to live, to lose

yourself in order to be found.

 

Why all this insistence in every tradition on self-negation? It is important to

understand which

"self" is being negated. The self that must be "cast away,"

"discarded" is the

false self, the

little self, the ego, the false sense of "me' .

 

Until the ego self is truly dropped, it rules your perception of reality like a

miser. That ego

has a secret it desperately must hide from your everyday awareness: it doesn't

really exist. At

best you could say the ego is like a tension in the psyche, but it isn't a real

thing in and of

itself.

 

So long as a person believes in the reality of that phantom ego, so long as he

or she identifies

with that nagging cramp of the "me"-sense, then stepping outside of it is

inconceivable,

terrifying. The loss of ego is mistakenly assumed to be the death of self.

Recoiling from that

fear, the psyche reflexively limits your perception of everything around you,

crippling the

consciousness, all in order to protect you against "death." The result,

however, is that the

simple truth remains hidden: The ego does not exist, and you are not the ego;

you will survive the

loss of ego.

 

The way out of this trap is to -- with deep love, infinite patience, elegant

balance, and

unshakeable determination -- loosen the ego's bindings until it falls away

naturally.

 

When you accomplish that, you'll stand in mute amazement. For, when the ego

"you" has left, "when

you go forth," the Divine One "will come in," and "unveil His beauty"

to you.

And, although that

radiant beauty reveals itself to be everywhere, it is also recognized as

contentedly abiding in

the "heart's chamber."

 

from Ivan Grainger's, Chaikhana site

 

Love to all ,

 

Alan