The Mysterion: Rumi and the Secret of Becoming Fully Human

this desire to gain the approval of others leads us further and further away from our inner being, our essential self.

Where have you dimmed the luster of your eye?

The ego’s strategies attempt to avoid reality, but obviously there is a price to pay for denying reality. In the end, the ego will prove to be its own worst enemy. The harm the ego does, it does mostly to itself.

In our heedlessness we live our lives expecting that there should be no resistance to our search for pleasure, no disturbance of our ego’s expectations, no lack of approval from others. When we meet suffering, disturbance, the judgment of others, our immediate reaction is to either blame something outside ourselves or blame ourselves rather than si

“Perhaps you’re coming to see your journey up to this point with new eyes? This is what realization feels like. You’re beginning to see how much of your life has been wasted seeking personal gratification, going from one path to another, avoiding the truth more often than committing to it.” “And yet here in the graveyard of the great saint, I met t

Having recognized how much of our lives have been lived in a state of heedlessness, our attention merely being drawn to this or that, or merely reacting to events, we can now recognize the possibility of assuming responsibility for the precious substance of our attention. When I can become attention itself, it feels as if attention is arising withi

At its best, Sufism is a framework for transformation that can help us to purify our perception and remove the distorting factors in ourselves. Only then can we experience, be aware of, and perceive the mercy, generosity, and beauty of reality.

Political propaganda is easier to discard than the lies we tell ourselves. We must confront all sorts of personal defenses and illusions: our vanity, judgments, self-importance, and fears.

Until we are in a state of conscious presence, we are merely whatever commands and occupies our attention. We want to keep “the rose” in mind, but our minds are drawn to judgment, worry, regret, discontent, desire. Passive attention merely reacts to whatever is strongest in our environment, especially whatever threatens or exalts our ego. As long a