The Divine Presence

Though Paradise is a manifestation of Him the soul reposes not, save in the vision of Him.

We are veiled from our Origin; we are as birds who have lost our nest.

If knowledge is perverse and evil of substance it is the greatest curtain before our eyes;

but if the object of knowledge is contemplation it becomes at once the highway and the guide

laying bare before you the shell of being that you may ask, ‘What is the secret of this display?’

Thus it is that knowledge smoothes the road, thus it is that it awakens desire;

it gives you pain and anguish, fire and fever, it gives you mid night lamentations.

From the science of the interpretation of the world of colour and scent your eyes and your heart derive nourishment;

it brings you to the stage of ecstasy and yearning and then suffers you like Gabriel to stand.

How shall love bring any soul to the Solitude, seeing love is jealous of its own eyes?

Its beginning is the road and the companion, its end, travelling the road without companion.

I passed on from all the houris and places and hazarded the soul’s skiff on the sea of light.

I was drowned in the contemplation of Beauty, which is constantly in eternal revolution;

I became lost in the heart of creation till life appeared to me like a rebeck

whose every string was another lute, each melody more blood drenched than the other.

We are all one family of fire and light, man, sun and moon, Gabriel and houri.

Before the soul a mirror has been hung, bewilderment mingled with certainty;

today’s dawn, whose light is manifest, in His Presence is yesterday and tomorrow ever present.

God revealed in all His mysteries, with my eyes makes vision of Himself.

To see Him is to wax ever without waning, to see Him is to rise from the body’s tomb;

servant and Master lying in wait on one another, each impatiently yearning to behold the other.

Life, wherever it may be, is a restless search; unresolved is this riddle—am I the quarry, or is He?

Love gave my soul the delight of beholding, gave my tongue the boldness to speak:

‘Thou who givest light and vision to both worlds, look a little while on yonder ball of clay.

Uncongenial to the free servitor, from its hyacinths springs the sting of thorns.

The victors are drowned in pleasure and enjoyment, the vanquished have only to count the days and nights.

Thy world has been wasted by imperialism, dark night ravelled in the sleeve of the sun.

The science of Westerners is spoliation; the temples have turned to Khaibar, without a Hyder.

He who proclaims ‘No god but God’ is helpless; his thought, having no centre, wanders astray,

slowly dying, pursued by four deaths— the usurer, the governor, the mullah, the shaykh.

How is such a world worthy of Thee? Water and clay are a stain upon Thy skirt.’