Mahmud Shabistari: The Beloved Guest (from The Secret Rose Garden)

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The Beloved Guest (from The Secret Rose Garden)

Mahmud Shabistari, Mahmud Shabistari poetry, Muslim / Sufi, Muslim / Sufi poetry, poetry, [TRADITION SUB2] poetry, poetry

by Mahmud Shabistari
(1250? - 1340) Timeline

English version by
Florence Lederer

Original Language
Persian/Farsi

Cast away your existence entirely,
for it is nothing but weeds and refuse.
Go, clear out your heart's chamber;
arrange it as the abiding-place of the Beloved.
When you go forth, He will come in,
and to you, with self discarded,
He will unveil His beauty.

-- from The Secret Rose Garden: Mahmud Shabistari, Translated by Florence Lederer / Edited by David Fideler

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/ Photo by Powderruns /

Themes

Lover and Beloved

Recommended Books

	Beyond Faith and Infidelity: The Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud Shabistari, Edited by Leonard Lewisohn
	Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
	The Secret Rose Garden: Mahmud Shabistari, Translated by Florence Lederer / Edited by David Fideler

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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 morbid 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 .

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 seeing its inherent unreality is inconceivable, terrifying. The absence of ego is mistakenly assumed to be the death of self. Recoiling in fear, the psyche reflexively limits your perception of everything around you, crippling the consciousness, all in order to perpetuate the illusion of the ego and so 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 unshakable 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."

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Sacred Poetry from Around the World