“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi

Jalaluddin Rumi was a 12th century Sufi mystic, whose approach to the ‘real’ was remarkably modern. This should not surprise us. Anything spiritually true will have that immediate and familiar ring about it – the sense of a homecoming, something ‘just there’ beneath the surface of our consciousness.

The Sufi mystics knew that there is no need to use an ornate symbolic system to describe the psychologically-real in the human being. Most of those that do were created, in times of religious persecution, to enable teaching in secret. Today, there is the danger that they become the tools of egoic gurus who use them to veil the truth, rather than light a path to it. This is not always true, but is a danger for those new to a path, who might not know the difference.

In the previous post, we examined how the primary behaviour of the egoic self is to react. Rumi’s quote, above, is directly related to this. Distilled, his words describe a self that has has built a shell around our essence – something that dwell in ‘love’. Love was the language of the Sufis: the seeker becomes besotted – intoxicated – with the discovered presence of what seems like another being inside themselves. Only much later do we see that we are the reflection of it and not the other way round…

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