mystic-poets

"I am all afire I am pain all over. I twist my hands in despair, For I find not my Love. Annoyed art Thou with me, But' tis my own fault, I perceived not the Truth of Thee; I have wasted away my youth, And now can only regret and repent. Rise, O Farid, do your ablutions, Say your morning prayers. The head that bows not to the Lord Should be cut apart from the trunk."

"I fear not the passing of youth if the Beloved desert me not; Youth withers and loses bloom without the sustenance of Love... Saith Farid: Sugar and candy, Sweets and honey, rich milk– All these Lord, are sweet; but nothing to Try devotees so sweet as Thou."

"Farid, time was when these frail thighs scoured over desert and hill; Now, feeble with age even the prayer-jug looks as though lying miles away."

"Lord, give it not to me to Supplicate favours at another's door; Should such be Thy will, Take then life from this body."

"No night passes when my sorrow-stricken heart does not bleed, No day I spend that does not completely divest me of honour, Never in my life did I drink a draught of water in peace, Which did not irrigate the dry earth through the channels of my eyes."

"If a Brahmin male/ Is known by the thread he wears, / How is a woman known? A Muslim is marked by the sign/ Of circumcision; but how should you / Mark a woman?"

"The Spirit is light, life and peace. If consequently you are illumined by the Spirit your own life is imbued with peace and serenity. Because of this you are filled with the spiritual knowledge of created beings and the wisdom of the Logos; you are granted the intellect of Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 2:16); and you come to know the mysteries of God's kingdom (cf. Luke 8:10). Thus you penetrate into the depths of the Divine and daily from an untroubled and illumined heart you utter words of life for the benefit of others; for you yourself are full of benediction, since you have within you Goodness itself that utters things new and old (cf. Matt. 13:52)."

"Stillness is an undisturbed state of the intellect,"

"The rays of primordial Light that illumine purified souls with spiritual knowledge not only fill them with benediction and luminosity; they also, by means of the contemplation of the inner essences of created things, lead them up to the noetic heavens. The effects of the divine energy, however, do not stop here; they continue until through wisdom and through knowledge of indescribable things they unite purified souls with the One, bringing them out of a state of multiplicity into a state of oneness in Him."

"Dhanna was born in the village of Dhuan, in Tank, Rajputana.*¢ He was a simple peasant and taught Bhakti to the people through his simple songs. Pip& was the Raja of Gagraungarh, but being of saintly temperament, became the disciple of Ramananda. “Pipaji Ki Bani’ has not been published, but a hymn in the Adigranth shows the same tendency as is found in other contemporary saints, that is, worship must be internal and discipleship of Guri helps one to attain God. Sain was a barber. His hymns are both in Mara- thi and Hindi, which shows that his message influenced both the south and the north. Ravidas or Raids belonged to Varanasi. He was a worker in leather and the people of his family used to do the work of removing carcasses.” It was in consonance with the spirit of the fifteenth century that such a very low caste reformist came to be known as a saint (sant). It is said that Jhali Rani, a princess of Mewar, became his disciple. His poems, retailed in stray publications, show his heart completely saturated with the love of God."

"Arrogance cannot bear to see itself scorned and humility held in honor."

"Then sit down in a quiet cell, in a corner by yourself, and do what I tell you. Close the door, and withdraw your intellect from everything worthless and transient. Rest your beard on your chest, and focus your physical gaze, together with the whole of your intellect, upon the centre of your belly or your navel. Restrain the drawing-in of breath through your nostrils, so as not to breathe easily, and search inside yourself with your intellect so as to find the place of the heart, where all the powers of the soul reside. To start with you will find there darkness and an impenetrable density. Later, when you persist and practise this task day and night, you will find, as though miraculously, an unceasing joy. For as soon as the intellect attains the place of the heart, at once it sees things of which it previously knew nothing. It sees the open space within the heart and it beholds itself entirely luminous and full of discrimination."

"One day, as he stood repeating more in his intellect than with his mouth the words, 'God, have mercy upon me, a sinner' (Luke 18:13), suddenly a profuse flood of divine light appeared above him and filled the whole room. As this happened the young man lost his bearings, forgetting whether he was in a house or under a roof; for he saw nothing but light around him and did not even know that he stood upon the earth. He had no fear of falling, or awareness of the world, nor did any of those things that beset men and bodily beings enter his mind. Instead he was wholly united to non-material light, so much so that it seemed to him that he himself had been transformed into light. Oblivious of all else, he was filled with tears and with inexpressible joy and gladness. Then his intellect ascended to heaven and beheld another light, more lucid than the first. Miraculously there appeared to him, standing close to that light, the holy, angelic elder of whom we have spoken and who had given him the short rule and the book."

"Christ takes on the appearance of each of the poor and assimilates Himself to all of them so that no one who believes in Him will be arrogant towards his fellow being. On the contrary, he will look on his fellow being and his neighbor as his God, regarding himself as least of all in comparison just as much with his neighbor as with his Creator, honoring his neighbor as if he were his Creator, and exhausting his all in his service, just as Christ our God poured out His blood for our salvation."