The Mysterion: Rumi and the Secret of Becoming Fully Human

study your reactions, judgments, and opinions, to not give them so much importance,

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

We have to ask ourselves honestly whether some of our activities might be a defense against becoming empty and opening ourselves to the transformative action of God.

The saints and prophets are those who make a lasting contribution to civilization and humanity through new forms of art, literature, music, architecture, and society, above all by indicating and embodying the work of the soul.

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.

Faithlessness is to get caught in trying to satisfy all the ego’s contradictory desires. Faithlessness is to take life as an end in itself and to forget that there is a greater reality behind the circumstances and immediate satisfactions of life. It is the tendency of the lower self to make life, and even the spiritual path, into an arena for its o

Assuming responsibility for ourselves will begin with wresting attention from trivialities and distractions, and reconnecting it with the soul.

When our sense of self is confined to the prison of the ego’s habits and patterns, that self is, to a great extent, perpetuating its own misery. Rumi described egoism as “an inch-deep river in which we drown.”

This work is not undertaken for the sake of “earning heaven” but for the sake of self-knowledge and discovering who we truly are. In time, we realize that what is most precious and real is invisible, that the true life is the life of the soul, and the true work is the work of the soul.