"They are the privileged lovers who create a new world with their eyes of fiery passion." ― Rumi

Mystic Lovers Talon Abraxas

On the surface this reads as a love poem. And it is. But Rumi was a

Sufi master, and in the Sufi tradition, love is not a feeling between two people. It is a cosmic principle. The engine of existence itself.

When Rumi speaks of the beloved, he is speaking on multiple levels simultaneously. The human beloved, yes. But more fundamentally, the divine beloved, the presence that animates all of creation. And his central teaching, the one that runs through every poem, every whirling, every moment of his transformed life, is that this presence is not located somewhere else. It is not in a distant heaven or a future moment of enlightenment. It is here, now, in everything that exists, waiting to be recognized.

The mystics of every tradition have called this realization by different names. The Hindus call it the recognition of Brahman in all things. The Christian mystics speak of finding God in all creatures. The Hermetic tradition teaches that the divine is equally present in every particle of existence. Rumi calls it seeing the beloved everywhere, because for him the entire universe had become the face of the one he loved.

This is not a metaphor for optimism. It is a description of a specific state of consciousness that becomes available when the self stops insisting on its own separateness. When the membrane between the observer and the observed becomes permeable. When love expands beyond its object and becomes the medium through which you perceive everything.

At that point, you do not search for the sacred. You cannot look anywhere and fail to find it.

The flower, the moon, the night sky, the ground beneath your feet. All of it. All of it the face of the one you love.

Seb McKinnon

Temptations, 2001

Autumn   -     Isabel Quintanilla , 1992

Spanish, b.1938-

Oil on canvas,  130 x 100cm.