What Hurts the Soul?

We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve
into non-existence, but non-existence fears
even more that it might be given human form!

Loving God is the only pleasure.
Other delights turn bitter.

What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting
the water of its own essence.

People focus on death and this material earth.
They have doubts about soul-water.
Those doubts can be reduced!

Use night to wake your clarity.
Darkness and the living water are lovers.
Let them stay up together.

When merchants eat their big meals and sleep
their dead sleep, we night-thieves go to work.

From Rumi’s Mathnavi – a version by Coleman Barks
Printed in “Say I Am You”
Maypop, 1994

7 Comments

Aadil

March 4, 2008 10:53 am

What does Rumi point about while saying “we night thieves go to work” plz do explain..

billo

March 4, 2008 12:13 pm

“Loving God is the only pleasure.
Other delights turn bitter.”

Oh, I dunno. What about white rice and sheljum?
Obviously Rumi wasn’t Kashmiri 🙂

But seriously, raz. Is that what you REALLY think?

(sorry, after the monistic theories of economics I’ve had a bit of a reaction!).

I think to see only one pleasure is as wrong as seeing many unconencted: unity IN diversity, no?

Hope all is well.

Salaams,

IMeMy

March 5, 2008 1:20 am

If it is the soul should it hurt? Isn’t it above and beyond pain? ‘Pleasure’ and ‘pain’ are worldly attributes that apparently don’t touch the soul so why does the soul ‘hurt’?

March 5, 2008 7:51 pm

interesting questions with not so interesting answers..

Aadil: the night work means the labour of Love – Raati jagan kuttay – those who are in love and devoted cannot sleep as the pursuit of the beloved keeps them awake – prayer is also best handled in the night – in a temporal sense, night is also the time when people are not distracted and can be singulalry devoted to whatever they undertake

Billo: ha ha! Rumi was surely not a Kashmiri ..my dear friend, Love for God in the mystical sense is abotu self knowledge and getting close to what lies within us..So if one tastes that pleasure, other known pleasures are meaningless..Indeed this is a heightened state and not all of us can reach there to know what it actually means –
and you make a very incisive point about unity in diversity – well well, this pleasure is holisitc and incorporates all pleasures or what is associated with that..

Id: I think these odd translations often result in such phrases – it is so difficult to get the nuance correct. But then Rumi makes many such references to the soul.. I think here a better usage would have been what ails or affects or hanuts the soul.. the poem is about Darkness and the living water – sort of a stream that flows within and if the inner self has not experienced these two states of being- night and the stream of self-knowledge – then it ends up undiscovered, unfulfiled and partial..hope i am making sense – lol

billo

March 6, 2008 3:35 am

Raz, is it really about “knowledge”? If one is bewildered what or who can be ‘known’?

And who knows what lies within us: ‘beauty is the spelndour of the true’!

“all other pleasures meaningless”?
can’t say I agree with you there old chap 🙂

Don’t the people in heaven say” we tasted a fruit like this before?

Doesn’t the Prophet (pbuh) return to the earth?
(please read the Allama’s wonderful lines on this in the reconstruction:finitude is not a misfortune.

I think the greatest follower of Rumi would ditch Rumi. Then he would be simply Raza !

Keep well shazada.

Rahat

October 11, 2012 2:40 pm

Does soul travel from one living body to another living body …? Plz explain