Rumi’s Persuasion

Life rolls so sweetly lately… and yet I feel such an aching need for hard-core spiritual guidance. Someone to guide me with deep compassion, and someone to even chastise me.

I close myself off to guidance sometimes. I offer my dead heart, I offer dry, hypocritical prayer, I break my vows, and my doubts are hundred-fold. Yet Krishna… ah, Krishna in His mercy accepts my terrible coin.

I pray to be a beggar.

What Is Bounty Without a Beggar?

What is bounty without a beggar? Generosity without a guest?
Be beggar and guest; for beauty is seeking a mirror,
water is crying for a thirsty man.
A beggar shows his blindness and palsy, he does not say,
“Give me bread, O, people! I am a rich man with
granaries and palaces!”
Bring a hundred sacks of gold and God will say, “Bring the heart.”
And if you bring a dead heart carried like a coffin on your
shoulders, God will say, “O, cheat! Is this a graveyard?
Bring the live heart! Bring the live heart!”
If you haven’t any knowledge and only opinions, have good
opinions about God. This is the way.
If you can only crawl, crawl to Him.
If you cannot pray sincerely, offer your dry, hypocritical,
agnostic prayer; for God in His mercy accepts bad coin.
If you have a hundred doubts of God, make them into ninety
doubts. This is the way.
O, Seeker! Though you have broken your vows a hundred times,
come again! come again! For God has said, “Though you
are on high or in the pit consider me, for I am the Way.”

- Excerpt of a poem by Jalaluddin Rumi

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A Purport for Rumi

Out beyond ideas of
wrong-doing and right-doing
there is a field
I’ll meet you there
when the soul lies down in that
grass
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase,
each other
doesn’t make any sense.

- Rumi

The other evening I attended a sanga amongst devotees of Ananda Mayi. As we sang together and I looked around, I felt utterly humbled. Here are devotees of the Lord, maybe wearing a different dress and singing different songs. The persons I encountered were – as Srila Prabhupad put it – ladies and gentlemen.

Although their philosophy may teach “all is one” – which is diametrically opposed to the teachings that I follow – I felt myself rise above judgment. How? Simply, I did not feel judged.

I felt a deep appreciation for their devotion to God and their teacher, Ananda Mayi. And my favorite moment in the evening was when the visiting Swami, Nirvananda Swami, sang the maha-mantra and in the interlude he sang, “And Krishna comes and plays flute…. on the banks… of my heart.”

I closed my eyes. Krishna does not belong to ISKCON, Gaudiya Math, or to Ananda Mayi. Who am I to say that Krishna “prefers” anyone? But one day, maybe my heart shall be clean and simple enough that He does come and play His flute on the banks of my heart.

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