Words are the Shadow of Reality

Excerpts from the Discourses of Rumi....

Discrimination is a quality
that is always hidden in a person. Don’t you see that an insane person possesses
hands and feet but lacks discrimination? Discrimination is a subtle essence within you.
Yet, day and night you have been occupied with nurturing the physical form that does not
know right from wrong. Why have you devoted all your energies to looking after the
physical, entirely neglecting that subtle essence? The physical exists through that
essence, but that essence in no way depends on the physical.

Those who have been moved by
God to see the one reality and learn Its ways through the astrolabe of their own being,
behold moment by moment, flash by flash, the testament of God. Indeed, it is an infinite
beauty that never leaves their mirror.

God has servants who cloak
themselves in a wisdom, knowingness and grace invisible to others. Out of their excessive
jealousy and love for God these servants cloak themselves, just like Mutanabbi says of
beautiful women:

Figured
silks they wore, not to beautify

But to guard their beauty from lustful eyes.