 Hi, welcome to the 12th episode of We Are Only One. In episode 11, we had Andrew Harvey giving us the reasons for activism and sacred activism based a lot contained in his book The Hope. And today, we're going to talk about the inspiration behind the sacred activism. So stay tuned, we'll be right back. Today is my pleasure to introduce spiritual teacher, mystical scholar, roomy scholar, Andrew Harvey. Welcome. How did you be with you? We previously spoke about the desperate need for activism. Informed by sacred consciousness. Yes. A new kind of activism. Yes. A divine activism, a sacred activism. Yes. Yes. And so today, we're hoping that you'll share with us some of the inspiration behind this sacred activism. Well, one of the things that happened to me when I was writing The Hope, and The Hope is really the consummation of my life's work, and it's a manifesto for the transformation of our world, and a revelation of the laws of sacred action, of how we can actually cooperate with God to transform the world. And for me, this is the greatest hope that we have. The last hope, the best hope, the richest hope, the wildest hope. And what happened to me when I was writing the book is that I found myself quoting constantly from roomy. I have been working on and with and in and through and roomy for now, God, 30 years. And for me, roomy is the voice of the divine in time and the voice of the birth of the divine in the human. And to me, this whole crisis, this whole evolutionary crisis is a great death that is leading to a great birth. And that this great birth, which I believe will be inaugurated by sacred activism, is a birth of a new kind of human being, an empowered, active, compassionate, awake, enlightened, richly, intensely passionate human being. And this kind of human being is one who lives an inspired life, an inwardly inspired life that leads to outward sacred action. So for me, when I was writing the book, I was completely amazed at how I constantly turned to roomy. If you remember in the book, there's many, many quotes from him at crucial moments. Because for me, roomy's work transmits the entire relationship between the human and the divine. And the magic of that relationship and the agony of that relationship and the ecstasy of that relationship in a way that anybody, whatever their religion, whatever their dogma, whatever their understanding of God can relate to, because roomy speaks as a lover. And when you speak as a lover, I think, since everybody is hungry for love, passionate for love, you immediately reach people where they live most deeply and most vulnerably. And part of roomy's enormous power in the world is that he speaks from this vulnerable place that we all have, this longing to love, to be loved, and to be loved. Yes. Well, believe it is our essence and whether we're in touch with it or not. Yes. I think that's the universal appeal of roomy, because he's getting to our core. I think everybody is born with original divine consciousness. I think that is the original blessing which we all come in with. And I think one of the catastrophic failures of the religions, and I separate the religions from the mystical traditions, is that they've intimidated people with a God of judgment, a God of devastating, harsh judgment, a God that has to be submitted to. But I think the great mystics revealed to us is firstly that we do have this divine consciousness as an extravagant and gorgeous divine blessing. Second is that there is a path, a real path, to realizing this divine consciousness. And thirdly, that when you begin to, it fills your life with great peace, great passion, great joy, and great energy. And it's this great peace, joy, passion, and energy that we are going to need on a global scale as the fuel for a massive revolution of love in action. Without this kind of deep, sacred, mystical inspiration, we're not going to be able to be strong enough, wise enough, brave enough to do the work ahead. With it, there is no danger we can't confront, no defeat we can't survive, no horror we can't work with divine grace to transform. There's a poem by roomy which really is addressed to the whole human race and really sums up what I've been trying to say in words so much more beautiful than anybody else could ever find, because roomy is the supreme master of beauty, the divine beauty. He says, the wine of divine grace is limitless. All faults come only from the faults of the carp. Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon. How much it can fill your room depends on its windows. So grant a great dignity, my friends, to the cup of your life. Eternal love has designed it to hold his eternal wine. This is a very, very complete message from a very, very realized mystic, and what it's saying to everybody is, the whole universe is created out of this mysterious love energy. And the expression of that love energy in reality is grace, this amazing power to redeem, to transform, to take the worst in us and make it a door into the potential best, to take horror and chaos and make them the foundations of a wholly new way of being and doing everything. This is divine grace, and divine grace is expressing itself in what we call good and in what we call evil, in what we call happiness, in what we call grief, in what we call success, in what we call disaster. They're all forms of grace because they're all designed to lead us deeper into a fundamental abandon to our own divine essence. And he says, how much the wine of divine grace is limitless? All faults come only from the faults of the carp. If you don't see this, and if you don't really respond to life like this from this place of realizing that love is reaching you from every direction, including the directions which you can't stand and loathe and are terrified of, if you can't get this, it's not God's fault, it's your fault. It's because you just haven't done the work to be evolved, to be open, to be subtle, to be embracing enough. So do the work for God's sake. Do the work so that you could have this experience. And then he says it in another way. He says moonlight is flooding the whole sky from horizon to horizon. And what he's talking about is the awakening experience that all mystics of all traditions have when they've completed the first major stage of the journey. And that is that you see the entire universe as light, divine white diamond light, billows and billows and waves and waves of this massive transcendent light force. And that everything that exists, that tree, these walls, you and I, the chairs, are all manifestations of that light energy, crystallizations of it. And this is a massive revelation because it's the revelation of a moonlight, a presence that stretches from horizon to horizon. Everything is God. Everything is a part of God. Everything is a creation out of the depths of this light, the whole cosmos, everything in it. And how much you can have that experience depends on how big your windows are. If you have a tiny little slit of a window mark, reason, very little light of that great light is going to come through. If you have a little, mostly bigger window called fundamentalist Islam or fundamentalist Christianity, you're only going to get what your whole system has set you up for. But if you go on the authentic mystical journey and if you strip yourself of yourself progressively, and if you go through the fire of authentic transformation, and if you abandon yourself and your notions and your concepts and your dogmas and allow the divine to take you ever deeper and ever wider into the authentic, eternal, absolute, all embracing presence that is in everything and is appearing as everything, then you're living in a house which is only windows and which the light is pouring in at all moments. And that is the state in which Rumi himself is in, and that is the state that he knows all humans can be in if they love enough and if they pray enough and meditate enough and serve others enough and give of themselves enough. It's the great reward for the lovers and the givers. And then he says in those last two lines, which is really so important for all of us, all human beings to hear, he says grant a great dignity, my friends, to the cup of your life. Uses the word dignity, which is a very important word. It's not a word you hear a great deal of in the new age, but it is the core word because to realize, even to begin to realize that the divine lives in you as your essential nature makes you aware of how sacred and precious and beautiful and holy the human is. And then makes you aware of something even more aculous and more amazing and gobsmacking and astounding, which is that you are the beloved of the beloved, the divine creator of all of the universes for some reason completely unknown to me but and to you, is madly and eternally in love with us as we are. And responding to that love and realizing how loved you are by that love bitch slaps you awake into claiming your true dignity, your truest deepest dignity. And the dignity isn't a dignity that's rooted in the ego. It's a dignity that's rooted in the divine self and rooted in the knowledge that the divine itself has designed you as a body, as a mind, as a heart with these amazing psychospiritual centers, which we call chakras, so that you can gradually wake up to being the temple of God in reality. And this is an amazing dignity that we've been given, an amazing gift that we've been given. Honoring that gift is what makes you into a sage, a sacred activist, someone who lives from the dignity of their innate consciousness and treats everyone else as they know they are, God in drag. I had two remarkable experiences that showed me expand in my windows exponentially and it had to do with midwifing my father into the next life and then my sister. And I'd like to share with you with my father, near the end, he had to wear diapers and in the middle of the night and this image has burned in my heart, he had an accident on his way to the bathroom and so I cleaned it up and as I was cleaning up his excrement, he said in his, thank you Jesus, and the room filled with white light. I believe you. And I felt because I was, there was no ego involved in this mission, it was a divine mission and love. And here came the white light in cleaning up our shit. And I thought, remember this, you know, and with my... What a wonderful image for sacred activism that here we are with the patriarchy on its last legs, shit all over the room. And here we are a sacred activist turning up in humble love to clear away the shit. And our true commitment will be met by this overwhelming love from God. I think that's an amazing story. I'm so glad you have that experience. I am too. I really am. It was phenomenal, really. It was such a blessing to me in giving, you know, the whole in giving we receive. Yes. And with my sister. In giving we become divine. Yes. Because it's what the divine is giving all the time. Yes. And that is so much what you talk about in the whole. Right, right. We need to give and give and that's what you do, traveling so much, is giving at a much deeper level than we're used to, I think, because it does take you out of the ego's comfort zone into your spirit essence, which is really, I think, what we're here for. But we get detoured on the road of pleasure and what we think is fulfillment. Yes. And as you were speaking about in episode 11, just lulled into complacency and don't start to feel apathy. Well, the whole culture is a culture of dissociation. Yes. And one of the reasons why Rumi is so powerful is that Rumi is the least dissociated person who ever lived. He's not a hysteric, but he's filled with divine emotion. He is a being of divine emotion, the immense emotions that belong to the experience of the world as sacred and of every being as sacred. But there was a second experience that you were going to talk about. Yes. My sister, as she breathed her last breath, I asked her if she could communicate with me where she was and what she was experiencing right after that last breath. And she did. And I saw her as a comet and she said, I am light. I am free. I am free was the first word. I am free. And I felt the expanse of energy in the room just and I am light. I am love. And she said, it is beautiful over here. You're going to love it. And she said that like three times, you're going to love it. It's beautiful and the warm energy. And I felt so privileged to get a peek behind the veil and into feeling what the sacred truths tell us, which Rumi is so all about, that we really are free, luminous, expansive beings. And so often we're not in touch with that or mindful of that. You know? And what a gift it is to see how beautiful and magnificent our divine essence is. And to me, the hope and sacred activism is a call, a wake-up call, a snap out of it wake-up call to really act on that. And to act from that kind of consciousness that you're talking about. Because what I'm saying is really mystics, as we know them, are totally ineffective because basically they're transcendental narcissists and they're drunk on the light and they cultivate their own sensational, mystical experiences and don't seem to give a damn for the actual agony of the world. So they're in their own little bubble up there, oaming and shmoming while the last tree burns down, right? And then you have the activists who are amazingly brave people often, but fantastically self-righteous and enunciate tree and projecting their own unhealed shadows onto the people who they demonise and adulating burnout and often riddled with messiah complexes. So you have the two most sensitive groups of people turning up, being actually in their depths very narcissistic, the mystics narcissism being the addiction to transcendence and the activist narcissism between being the addiction to self-righteous action. Neither are going to be of any use in this crisis because don't think that the corporations or the politicians or the people in power give a damn about what the mystics are doing because they know perfectly well that they're never going to do anything. They're just going to be adjusting their yoga mats and buying a lovely little Tibetan carpet to sit and do their meditation on compassion. They're not going to actually say the corporations have to change and the media has to change and the governments have to change so they don't worry about them and they don't actually worry about the activists either because they know that nobody will fund them, that they'll burn out and they'll become virulent and say frightening things which will scare off the already complacent and then if they do do something like what has happened with Occupy they'll bring in full force of the law and take the media away and starve the movement of its roots. So these two solutions have failed but there is another solution which is what my work is dedicated to inspired by Rumi which is to bring together the best of the mystic with the best of the activists. The best of the mystic is the fire of the passion that the mystic has for God, that fire of longing to be one with the one and it's this fire that has burnt in all of the great traditions, it's this fire that created the pyramids, it's this fire that lives in the blaze of the windows at sharch, it's this fire that speaks in Rumi so eloquently and gorgeously, it's this fire that you hear bursting into flame in Beethoven. What you have to do is to bring that fire and then unite it with the best of the activists which is the fire of the activists passion for justice, really to see the poor housed, the trees and nature honored, animals protected, women honored and protected, gay people all over the world given the dignity at last that they deserve. When you bring these two immense fires which have been kept apart by the narcissism of both camps together then a third fire is created and this fire is the fire of the divine for transformation, that's the evolutionary fire of the god, Talat Shadr described it brilliantly when he said one day after we have been bended, no one day after we have mastered the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love and then for the second time humanity would have discovered fire, it's this fire that is sacred activism, it's this fire that is burning in the poetry of Rumi and Rumi is the voice of this third fire because for him and for all beings who come to the level at which he lives the world is a sacred temple of divine presence created by divine love, the creation is saturated with holiness on every level, every human being and every animal is holy and what that means is that having had that experience, living in that experience you need to be that experience in action in the world radiating from your presence, radiating from your words, radiating from your choices in life, radiating from your actions, the power of that transforming presence so that the world can become the living mirror of divine law and divine compassion and not this bestial craze destructive obscene madhouse that we've created out of our adoration of the death machine out of our adoration of power so it's a vastly transformative consciousness, a consciousness which by virtue of its existence is acting with divine passion, Rumi is the supreme poet of divine passion and it's that passion that holy sacred purified passion that we need more than oxygen at the moment because it's that passion that's going to give us the energy to change the situation there are many many spiritual transmission systems and they all have a very deep truth to communicate but many of them stress what I would call the peace aspect of the divine and can lead people to be excessively chilled out in the face of the extreme crisis we are in so you have a lot of people sitting on their cushions being peaceful but where is the action there is another side to God that's the side of the becoming and that's the side that is wildly in love with life because it has created life it is the mother side it's the passion of divine love that passion has peace at its core but it has something more than peace it has energy it has wildness it has courage it has the intensity of purpose that can take the unjust structures of the world and shake them to their core and it's this passion aligned with the deep peace married to the deep peace that really provides the energy for the kind of transformation that we now desperately need as you are speaking of that the passionate mother yes I was feeling like a mother jungle cat yes fiercely protecting yes it's young yes and how we need the divine mother to protect the planet and her children well she's going to do her best we've got to turn up with her oh yes you know stop let's stop talking about her she's she's always been here she'll always be here she's waiting for us to activate the mother love in ourselves so that she can really fill us with her power and Rumi although he's a Muslim and that tradition in overt ways doesn't have a lot to say about the mother power actually Sufism has a tremendous tradition of the sacred feminine and in the core of Islam there is a very deep vision of God as mercy as compassion and Rumi has aligned himself totally with this outpouring of passion and vision and his work is the work of this mother love so if you want to activate this mother love in yourself this passion for life this passion to protect and honor you couldn't have a more powerful source of inspiration in Rumi because is that passion speaking he's that passion in the body he's that passion in life and it's such a great gift to us that at this moment of our deepest desolation we have returning to us globally Rumi because he's was always been the greatest poet of the of the east he's been revered the the math Nabi his mystical epic was called the second Quran he's been revered all over the east but now in the last 30 40 years through kohman boxes translations through my translations from Robert Bly's translations to Jonathan Stahl's translations through his explosion in the west he's become the most famous the most best red part in the west and I the whole world now is part of his influence his sphere of activity just before he died he wrote an amazing quatrain to Shams of Tabriz the beloved his beloved his sacred beloved and he said those tender words we said to one another have been stored in the secret heart of heaven and one day like the rain they will fall and spread and the whole world will grow green with our love and I think that Rumi I believe that Rumi knew that his work would unfold gradually over time but be available at the moment when it would be needed most which is the moment when the whole of human history is coming together into a great death that is potentially the crucible the birthing ground of a new humanity and Rumi who has lived through this birth is now available to all beings as a source of massive empowerment to go through whatever we have to go through to birth the divine and to act from that birthing divine in reality it's immense it's an extraordinary and unprecedented journey you see Rumi does something that nobody else has ever done in the whole history of humanity this is something that has come clear to me over the years of working with him and being with him because he's not dead for me I don't experience Rumi as a dead poet he is absolutely intensely overwhelmingly alive because he's a flame of the eternal presence and his work is an initiatory work what I've come to understand about him is that he is one of the supreme figures of humanity because he fuses together the grandier of realization of a Christ or a Buddha very very highest level of evolution with the philosophical intellect of a Schopenhauer or a Plato or a Kant or a Nagarjuna the most brilliant lucid multifaceted mind with the literary gifts of a Shakespeare because he's the Shakespeare of the soul he's the Shakespeare of the immense drama of the soul's journey to the beloved imagine a being who is Christ Plato Shakespeare all in one and we begin to have an understanding however dim of what Rumi what happened in Rumi what was birthed in Rumi a new state of initiatory genius and it's what has been happening in human history is that this genius is unfolded first of all in the creation of the Sufi order the Matlabhi and the spreading of the wonderful vision of love that he had but now that the whole future of the planet depends upon a birth of a universal mysticism in action of love divine love in action now his work is here to flood the entire planet to give anybody who wants it Buddhist Hindu who cares British American anybody anybody who wants it a direct infusion of the power of this love from the voice of the beloved himself it's amazing it's an amazing grace for humanity do you feel it will light the fire of sacred activism in people who read Rumi and feel him I feel that Rumi is the key fire of this third fire there are many fire bringers Jesus is a tremendous fire bringer Rumi's a tremendous fire bringer the Buddha is a little calmer but he's also bringer of fire the fire of insight the fire that ends the fires of delusion ignorance and greed the fire that is in the prophets the great prophet Muhammad's vision of justice in a society these are immense tributaries of flame that are feeding this vast fire of universal outraged compassion that is arising now in people who dare to let it arise to really help us use this chaos and horror to galvanize our will to create a whole new way of being and doing everything which is our one hope and our best hope we're in an evolutionary crisis you see we cannot go on as we are if we try to solve this crisis from where we are we will continue to do what we're doing which is just making everything far far far worse far more difficult far more painful there has to be a transformation in consciousness that leads directly and nakedly to real action on every level there has to be a baptism in this sacred fire of divine passion an infusion of that sacred fire of divine passion at every level and a program of concerted organized action on every level in every round infused by the wisdom and power and energy of this immense passion that is the birth of the divine and the human and Rumi is the great master of the various processes that lead to this birth and is the great trumpet of this birth the trumpet that this birth is sounding to wake us up from our druged sleep he says in one of his poems he says king and queen of this time awaken from your drug sleep straddle the horse of joy and ride it into the palace of justice that's what we have to do as a human race this is not the time he says to stay in the garden this is the time to go out of the garden and give your life for the garden that is what his work is summoning us to not simply an experience but to the sacred action born out of that experience making our whole lives a prayer in action infused by divine love and wisdom and passion that is a universal message and it is the message of our time and it is such a grace that it comes to us in these incredibly beautiful words this holy poetry that anybody can work with if they have the humility and the hunger it's a wonderful thing i wish i knew more and i will certainly be reading more i am somewhat familiar with Rumi and i had the privilege of of seeing a film that you put together and i wonder if we could give our cameraman a moment to see if he has that image of the the dvd oh yes well i think with you know when what people no need to know about Rumi to begin with is that he lived in the 14th century he was afghani wrote in persian wondered in his childhood all over the place but settled with his father in southern turkey and lived there for the rest of his life and that his life was profoundly and absolutely altered by the magnificent and terrible and beautiful and holy love affair that he had spiritual mystical love affair that he had with his great teacher shams of terberies and this transformed him from an intellectual into the highest ecstatic mystic and the supreme mystical poet of humanity the great genius of the birth and that when he died which he did when he left his body in 1273 when he was 67 what happened was is that in between he left his body about four between four and five in the afternoon when he actually left the whole sky in kornia turned red to signal that the divine heart the sacred heart was welcoming back its own voice and that's why when the devishes of the meblevi order dance for him on his death day which they call his marriage day the chebel aruz they always have a carpet present that is little carpet that is the color of the sky at the moment that he left his body because the whole universe signaled him as its beloved as he left beautiful it's amazing yes this is this is that's what you need to know about this guy this is not first of all he's a poet yes but the poetry is the poetry that comes from super consciousness that comes from the direct connection so it's the lover speaking out of the making love with the divine beloved directly out of the naked experience he never wrote anything down he would go into trance he would start dancing he would come to a pillar and these perfectly formed couplets that come from the deepest level of the word the parabhat that which is the hindu's called the parabhat that's sublime word that creates the universe they would pour out for him and would be taken down by people so he was in this ecstatic union and allowed to speak out of it by the beloved and the words that poured out were the beloved's own words using his mouth as their transmission so truly the voice of god the voice of god because the voice of the lover and the voice of the beloved of the beloved and when you know these things just the house that gives you a tremendous sense of what's really happening in his work so that you can approach it with the kind of humility and reverence and deep excitement and unbelievable sense of gratitude that can then open you up slowly to the levels of meaning in it because actually Rumi's work is a comprehensive mystical human education you can learn everything you need to learn about being a human being in relation to god from this one person if you if that's all that survived in human history was Rumi's poetry we would have a complete guide to the complete embodiment of the divine in the human this is an amazing amazing grace i can't wait to take the journey everyone what's so extraordinary about our time i think is that everybody who comes to and i wherever i go i meet people who love Rumi who discovered Rumi so he's coming through every crack and just this morning i was told that there was a Rumi cafe in Miami which i'm dying to visit and it's wonderful because it means that this work is seeping through but what i would love people to do is to take their passion for Rumi to another level i've written six books on Rumi translated five and written a book called the way of passion a celebration of Rumi and for years to answer a question about the film i've been looking for someone who could bring Rumi to life in dance and years ago i actually in 2007 which is the 800th birthday of Rumi common box and i were at a um a conference in kripalu the center kripalu and we saw that there was sufi dancing at the end and i must say i have seen enough bad sufi dancing to last me for a whole lifetime so i was extremely depressed at the thought of having to sit through another tepid display of bad dancing supposedly called sacred i just couldn't stand it but i did go and what happened was one i had one of the great autistic experiences of my life this amazingly vibrant and beautiful and utterly wild and utterly grounded dancer called banafha sayad s a y y ad banaf she's the greatest dancer i think in the world the greatest sacred dancer in the world a legend in iran her father pavis sayad is the charlie chaplin and robert deniro of iran so she comes from a family that is a really very famous autistic family in iran i cried all the way through her performance and afterwards i just said we have to work together and very beautifully and graciously she consented to and we traveled all over the world's uniting my vision of rumi's path to divine love with her wonderful teaching from the depth of her practice and then last year we made a film we called in the fire of grace and in this film what we did was to bring together all of the different stages of the path to divine union that are described so beautifully and matchlessly in rumi with seven dances that take you through from the beginning the call through all of the rapture of falling in love through the agony of the dark night through the intense peace and intense passion of union into the difficulties of radically embodying that in the last three dances to the final flowing out of divine human incarnation and energy it's a massive transmission that we tried to make this film last two days ago we had a premiere at the ruby museum which was an amazing occasion people really get it when they see it they get that they're in the presence of a divine dancer someone who has used her entire life to marry the deepest technique to the highest passion and is manifesting the divine in the body in the most exquisite beautiful way and i sort of play rumi i don't actually play rumi but what i do is that i talk a little bit about him and i read the poems and i talked to banafsh about the different stages so that people are led by the words into the depths where the dances can explode so i'm very thrilled that it's out and as part of my continuing passion to get rumi out on every level and in every way because i think it's so important to use in the best sense the media in every way at this moment i've just finished in fact it came out last week what i call a rumi symphony i've had this hunger for years and years and years to work with a great composer a great musician and make a long it's 73 minutes long symphonic poem which has four stages the four stages of love to divine union the four stages of the mystic part and i found in this amazing composer called hance christian who was playing in a mystery school i co-founded in shart i was so moved by his marriage of deep classical knowledge and sobriety and profound love of beauty with his experimental inventive sorry so i just went up to him i said hance we've got to do this together and he consented and we he what happened was is that i recorded all the most wonderful texts of rumi that i really have loved for so long in these different stages and categories and then he worked for about five months to provide the rich symphonic musical background so what we've produced is a initiatory musical mystical symphony that you can listen to constantly to put you into the field of this love energy through music so through dance and through music and through my own work and through my own translations i'm trying to bring the full force as far as i can and with all my flaws of rumi to the world because rumi himself was not only the world's greatest mystical poem but part of his discipline with his beloved shams was to dance and the mevlevi's created his son sultan bilad created the incredible beauty of the samer of the whirling devishes this massive gorgeous at practice of adoration that is whirling from rumi and shams his own example so rumi was also a musician a dancer and used all of the arts to explode the beauty of divine consciousness and that's what i'm trying to do through him with him for him first in the film in the five grace and then in the rumi symphony and i have a another project that i'm working on at the moment with ben afshay and with a choreographer from from lasik to soley to really create a mystical explosion in dance and music and poetry on a global scale that will take this vision of transforming passionate compassion to the whole world and make it unbelievably powerful and vibrant so rumi has inspired everything in my life fabulous i know there are dvds are are there available can people find them on your website yes on my website there are a lot of talks i've given on rumi if you go to mace.com caroline maces invited me she's a great friend to talk at her seamad and i've given several talks on rumi which are available on her.com and also on my website andrewharvey.net there are films i've made and participated in about rumi the rumi the return of rumi which is also available on my website or can be contacted on my website i think it's extremely important for anybody who's really listening or excited by anything i would say now to just go out and plunge into rumi and colman bucks is a wonderful translator of rumi if you buy his book the red book that'll be a very rich plunge and i wrote a translated book called light upon light which comes from the Quran the heart is light upon light endless expansion of light through the glory of god and that has my favorite texts from every single aspect of his work organized as a massive musical symphony so that would be a wonderful thing to read alongside colman and if you want an introduction go to my book the way of passion because that was um after 20 years of loving rumi i was given the privilege to talk for 10 weeks to um some people in san francisco and out of those talks was created this book so it's really out of my own explosion of love for him that this book was born so it's a child of our love and i feel i still read and i then i i feel my god how did i get away with saying things like this but i really wasn't saying them it was uh one of the few times in my life truly that i felt completely possessed by something much larger than myself and i think what the book can give people is like his life his journey but also why this inspiration is so essential for us now why is it coming back now and why is it infusing us now so if people would like that that's available the way of passion the way of passion and you also quote rumi a lot in the hope yes well one of the things that i think is so important and is that we're living through this evolutionary crisis and it has two aspects it has a very great death something that really is going to get rid of all of our illusions and agendas and it's going on the environmental crisis the poverty the strip mining of the world the crazy fundamentalism the growth of nuclear madness the whole thing but there's also a great birth taking place and this process is known in the mystical traditions that we're living through on a global scale they've known it on a personal scale it's now a global scale and in the christian mystical tradition it's called the dark night and it's a and in the sufi mystical tradition it's known as fanar which is annihilation of the false self of the nafs of the ego and this has always been known on an individual scale as part of the process of divinization and now it's being lived on a global scale so what is really important for people to grasp is the truth of this archetype of the dark night leading to the birth and why it's necessary and what it actually feels like and what it will make available for people if we're going through a dark night archetypal global mystical evolutionary transformation we sure as heaven need to know what the dark night is why it's necessary what it feels like and the great part of the dark night because he's the great part of the birth is roomy so there's a poem I'd love to show with you which is the greatest poem on the process we are living through I know the grapes of my body can only become wine after the winemaker tramples me I surrender my body like grapes to his trampling so my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy although the grapes go on subbing blood and screaming I cannot bear any more anguish I cannot bear any more cruelty the trample stuffs cotton in his ears and says it is I who am the master of this work I am not working in ignorance you can deny me if you want you have every excuse but when through my passion you reach perfection you will never be done praising my name the whole teaching is in that poem and I think every single human being needs to memorize that poem and needs to understand it line by line because it is a complete revelation of what is happening on a global scale in our world the grapes of my body can only become wine after the winemaker tramples me this shattering is necessary because we're living in sealed off dogmas sealed off cyberspace sealed off little worlds sealed off narcissistic little constructs and all of them have to be shattered and will be for the wine of divine passionate compassion inaction to be released then he says I surrender my body like grapes to his trampling the only way we're going to be able to get through this crisis is through surrender surrender to the need for the crisis to the necessity for this radical shattering that is a radical healing surrender to the terms of this crisis that is going to be very bloody and menacing without fear surrender to the divine so that it can guide and protect and ennobles and strengthen us I surrender my body like grapes to his trampling so my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy I would not be able to be sitting here without roomie and what roomie has taught me is that you can see without illusion the complete nightmare and horror of in a very extreme process such as the one we're living through and not be afraid and not be miserable and live in peace and live in joy because you have surrendered to the terms of the transformation and your inner state of constant tuning of your whole being to God and of love of God and trust in God's inscrutable alchemy and the amazing power that the divine has to transform the worst into the beginning of the best the great death into the birth and then roomie shows you what happens in the dark night which is that it's very ferocious because a dark night in an individual mystical life is designed to eradicate the false self and the false self of course can't do this on its own because the false self is always going to cheer itself up about itself saying well I'm pretty awful here but I'm so sweet here right and divine mercy is merciless in this moment of the path because what divine mercy does is give us a series of terrifying or deals in which we experience the brutality of the world the craziness of ourself and that were stripped of all of our fantasies of domination exploitation and power reduced to nothing at which moment we really do start to know that every step is taken through grace every breath is taken through grace and a holy new level of consciousness can be installed in us because the old has been systematically raised to the ground and burned away this is a terrifying process and it's an amazing process and nobody described it like he does although the grapes go on sobbing blood and screaming I cannot bear any more anguish any more cruelty because it's oh my god oh my god and you could see this in our world now you were sitting here the the idiots in Durban are not doing anything about the environment we've had Fukushima this year we've had endless hurricanes and tornadoes we've had the unspeakable inanity of the Republicans and Republican candidates for the presidency we've had a president who is completely paralyzed it seems and unable to move on any level we have the euro about to fail the I cannot bear any more anguish I cannot bear any more cruelty but this is all part of a systematic demolition of all of our illusions the whole thing is going to collapse it's all going to collapse it has to collapse to be able to release for the new energies to be released the new energies aren't going to keep this rotten old system going they're going new wine is never poured into old bottles there's got to be new bottles for that new wine and this is a horrific process for all of us because we may think that the human race is going to wake up after 31 disasters but God may know that the human race is going to have to be taken to the edge of extinction before it wakes up and we have to be prepared for that so I cannot bear any more anguish I cannot bear any more cruelty but the Trampler stuff's gotten in his ears the one who is doing this is not listening to our screaming whining petulant narcissistic howling we would like God to listen and of course if you believe the rubbish of the secret God is just waiting in hot pants to do whatever we want but this has had nothing to do with the divine and he said I'm not working in ignorance I know exactly what I'm doing you are lost you are hopelessly addicted and you are now massively destructive and you can deny this work because it's atrocious and difficult if you want and you have some excuse you have every excuse because it's terrifying it's painful this collapse is painful but when through my passion you reach perfection when you really get it really do the work really surrender really love enough really serve out of that humble heartbroken ecstatic love the world when you really get real and you really know that I am living in you and guiding you and protecting you and building through even your mistakes the foundations of a holy new way of being and doing everything when you get it you will never be done praising my name you will stop all this screaming and realize that I am here the crisis is the manifestation of my will it's going to be complete the collapse is going to happen but a new human race will be born and you must get with the birthing process right now and bless what's happening and surrender and give everything to create a new world that's what's in that poem and that's just the beginning of what's in that poem there's so much it goes on and on but this is a complete psychological spiritual emotional map for us at this time and it makes sense it does divine sense it does make sense and I feel the hope which I feel the hope and when I talk like this the hope is not in this this divine human right if we go on with these structures and this is this fake mysticism and this smiley face pseudo cheerfulness and this passivity and this apathy there's no hope in that even if it goes on blathering about hope selling the hell out of hope it's false hope because it's based in illusion real hope is based in one thing and one thing only and that is God the divine within when you experience that you realize that undreamed of powers through divine grace are possible undreamed of courage is possible undreamed of rise and influential action is possible that's where the hope comes from not from trying to prop up a decadent destructive addicted annihilating death machine I want to thank you for sharing so much about Rumi Rumi for sharing your grace and I see that Rumi I see him as one of the masters in in your networks of grace he's for me he's the fountain of divine passion yes can I end with a Rumi poem oh please do instead of a prayer yes because I think we have a lot of prayers but we don't have enough of the energy that comes from this poem so this is my gift to you thank you passion burns down every branch of exhaustion and the word passion that I've translated by passion is one of the great words of of persian and arabic mysticism it's called ishq and it means gorgeous love energy of the godhead ishq is the energy that you see in the the Hubble telescope beautiful photographs that while flaming gorgeous the big bang energy yes and that's yes here it is and so it's much more than passion although passion is probably the only english word that can get close to it it is a vast while gorgeous force of embodied love in action the whole thing if you want an image of it think of a white lion springing right gorgeous and that's waiting to be uncoiled and unleashed and to spring in all of us that passion for love and life and justice and the transformation of the planet so passion burns down every branch of exhaustion passion is the supreme elixir and renews all things so don't sigh heavily your brow bleak with cynicism and boredom and apathy dare to look for passion passion passion passion passion futile solutions deceive the force of passion they are marshy bandits who extort money through lies run run run far away my friends from all false solutions let divine passion triumph and rebirth you in yourself well roomie is really saying to us at this moment is peace and goodwill are not going to be enough peace and serenity and goodwill in the face of this overwhelming catastrophe are just the beginning they're an important foundation but they are only the beginning and any mystical teaching or religious teaching that tells you that they're enough is lying to you because what you also need to connect with is the enormous while sacred sacred energizing passion of the divine becoming of the mother side of the divine of this great creative blood force the ish that is manifesting all the multiple universes at every moment you've got to be plugged into that you've got to take the plug of your narrow little life and put it shove it into the socket of this electricity of divine passion because it's only that that will give you the wildness the hoodspot the courage the magnificence the dignity the ferocity the majesty to get going and shake the structures of cold evil and bring in the new with everything you are exclamation point thank you so much my pleasure get going that's a good phrase get going god is a verb thank you so much for sharing your ish and your passion and roomie and i know people listening and seeing this are going to want to explore more oh i hope so they have a great treasure waiting now yes so many blessings to everyone i will see you out there in our networks of grace thank you thank you and listen