Let silence take you to the core of life. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you? Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop. It’s your road and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you. The spirit is so near that you can’t see it! But reach for it… don’t be a jar, full of water, whose rim is always dry. Don’t be the rider who gallops all night and never sees the horse that is beneath him. I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think. These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them. When the world pushes you to your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray. I am not this hair, I am not this skin, I am the soul that lives within. Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wild flowers will come up where you are. Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. I know you’re tired but come, this is the way. You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life? You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly. Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake. There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveller, if you are in search of that, don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek that. Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth. Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out. If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished? When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it. Concentrate on the Essence, concentrate on the light. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? The soul has been given its own ears to hear things mind does not understand. Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death. Anything which is more than our necessity is Poison. It may be power, wealth, hunger, ego, greed, laziness, love, ambition, hate or anything. O, happy the soul that saw its own faults. Do not worry if all the candles in the world flicker and die. We have the spark that starts the fire. When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety; If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it. To me nothing in the world is as precious as a genuine smile, especially from a child. Whenever sorrow comes, be kind to it. For God has placed a pearl in sorrow’s hand. Don’t be sad! Because God sends hope in the most desperate moments. Don’t forget, the heaviest rain comes out of the darkest clouds. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. Sorrow… It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. The wound is the place where the light enters you. Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure. Be patient where you sit in the dark. The dawn is coming. Prayer clears the mist and brings back peace to the soul. Do good to the people for the sake of God or for the peace of your own soul that you may always see what is pure and save your heart from the darkness of hate. Whatever happens to you, don’t fall in despair. Even if all the doors are closed, a secret path will be there for you that no one knows. You can’t see it yet but so many paradises are at the end of this path…Be grateful! It is easy to thank after obtaining what you want, thank before having what you want. On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others’ faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear. You have no need to travel anywhere – journey within yourself. Enter a mine of rubies and bathe in the splendor of your own light. Wherever water flows, life flourishes: wherever tears fall, divine mercy is shown. How do I know who I am or where I am? How could a single wave locate itself in an ocean.
The Prophets accept all agony and trust it. For the water has never feared the fire. On what is fear: Non-acceptance of uncertainty. If we accept that uncertainty, it becomes an adventure! When you go through a hard period, when everything seems to oppose you, when you feel you cannot even bear one more minute, never give up! Because it is the time and place that the course will divert! Those who don’t feel this love pulling them like a river, those who don’t drink dawn like a cup of springwater or take in sunset like a supper, those who don’t want to change, let them sleep. Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you?
There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveler, if you are in search of That Don't look outside, look inside yourself and seek That.
Excerpt from Rumi, 'Thief of Sleep' translated by by Shahram Shiva
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
When actions come from another section, the feeling disappears.
Don't let others lead you. They may be blind or, worse, vultures.
Reach for the rope of God. And what is that? Putting aside self-will.
Because of willfulness people sit in jail, the trapped bird's wings are tied, fish sizzle in the skillet.
The anger of police is willfulness. You've seen a magistrate inflict visible punishment.
Now see the invisible. If you could leave your selfishness, you would see how you've been torturing your soul. We are born and live inside black water in a well.
How could we know what an open field of sunlight is?
Don't insist on going where you think you want to go. Ask the way to the spring. Your living pieces will form a harmony.
There is a moving palace that floats in the air with balconies and clear water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained under a single tent.
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid, and it doesn't move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.
Extracts of the article:
'Indeed, Galen titled one of his volumes That the Best Physician Is also a Philosopher. The division between humanism and science is recent, an Enlightenment idea, a Cartesian duality, and like many such ideas, it served at first to advance a discourse it may now impede. The two modes of thought are now too often posed as opposites rather than as twin vocabularies for the same reality.' 'But medical writing of today has its own complexion. As medical information has become increasingly technical, patients are asked to trust what they cannot comprehend. Recondite information complicates their already anguished experience of poor health. In a bid for control, such patients seek the logic behind their ailments and the proposed cures. More than that, they seek to use available knowledge to make basic decisions about the value of their own lives and those of the people they love. They need this information in order to resolve dialectical thoughts about mortality and intervention, pleasure and pain, quality and length of life.
A rising literature attempts to reconcile these modes of thought. Voltaire complained, “Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.”'
Some diseases make their recognition and diagnosis especially hard to achieve.
I am thinking very much of one which is close to me, but some aspects apply readily to others.
Hypothyroidism results in numerous issues including what so many sufferers call brainfog. Formal descriptions include term like "slow mentation". The impact of inadequate thyroid hormone on the brain and mind, the senses, even the very self that is at the core of being, is such that many do not get their disease recognised.
The sufferer may realise something isn't right and even look for medical help. But they are often told it is age, depression, or other issue. This can go on for many years - possibly going back and forth to the doctor, or accepting that there is nothing wrong which can be treated. Their ability to see what they are themselves going through can be severely compromised. Still more compromised is their ability to convince others. Words stop arriving at the end of the tongue, ready for despatch when needed. Memory fails to see the deterioration, even on the occasions that it is fast.
The word insidious could have been created expressly for the almost invisible way that hypothyroidism creeps up and overtakes.
How could anyone describe this with any amount of lucidity? Every cell of the body requires thyroid hormone. Without an adequate supply, every system of the body deteriorates. The eyesight which allows us to see lucidly when well, cannot cope with foussing, oncoming headlamps, proper colour.
Yet despite the long list of symptoms (you can easily find lists if many dozens of symptoms - all of which have been reported in medical literature, not just the figments of what is left of the sufferer's imagination), even the best doctors hardly ever even think of hypothyroidism.
So, yes, the ability to describe lucidily to an alert doctor would be a major benefit, but is all too often impossible.
Friday, November 25, 2016
"Much medical training is about information and knowledge and less about traveling the more difficult path of feeling…it’s crucial for doctors to stay with the feeling, listen feelingly, and not turn away from the pain and suffering in patients and themselves. There is one shining difference between knowledge and understanding: We doctors may forget knowledge, but we never forget what we understand. We understand through feeling."
“You’ll put down strangers,/ Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,/ And lead the majesty of law in lyam/ To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas! Say now the King/ As he is clement if th’offender mourn,/ Should so much come too short of your great trespass/ As but to banish you: whither would you go?/What country, by the nature of your error,/ Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,/ To any German province, Spain or Portugal,/ Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:/ Why, you must needs be strangers.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/15/william-shakespeare-handwritten-plea-for-refugees-online-sir-thomas-more-script-play-british-library-exhibition
William Shakespeare's handwritten plea for refugees to go online
The last surviving play script handwritten by William Shakespeare, in which he imagines Sir Thomas More making an impassioned plea for the humane treatment of refugees, is to be made available online by the British Library.
The manuscript is one of 300 newly digitised treasures shining a light on the wider society and culture that helped shape Shakespeare’s imagination. All will be available to view on a new website before an extensive exhibition on the playwright at the library next month.
The powerful scene, featuring More challenging anti-immigration rioters inLondon, was written at a time when there were heightened tensions over the number of French Protestants (Huguenots) seeking asylum in the capital.
“It is a really stirring piece of rhetoric,” said the library’s curator, Zoe Wilcox. “At its heart it is really about empathy. More is calling on the crowds to empathise with the immigrants or strangers as they are called in the text. He is asking them to imagine what it would be like if they went to Europe, if they went to Spain or Portugal, they would then be strangers. He is pleading with them against what he calls their ‘mountainous inhumanity’.
Drawing of Shakespeare’s house by George Vertue. Photograph: British Library
“It is striking and sad just how relevant it seems to us now considering what is happening in Europe.”
The original play, written in approximately 1600 about the life of Henry VIII’s councillor and lord chancellor, was not by Shakespeare and was not staged because of fears it might incite unrest.
Shakespeare was one of several writers brought in to rework the piece, and it is his contribution which remains the most remarkable.
He writes: “You’ll put down strangers,/ Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,/ And lead the majesty of law in lyam/ To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas! Say now the King/ As he is clement if th’offender mourn,/ Should so much come too short of your great trespass/ As but to banish you: whither would you go?/What country, by the nature of your error,/ Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,/ To any German province, Spain or Portugal,/ Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:/ Why, you must needs be strangers.”
John Dee’s self-portrait. Photograph: British Library
Wilcox said all the evidence suggested the writing was by the hand of Shakespeare, making it a unique manuscript. “All we have other than that are the six authentic Shakespeare signatures, so this is really amazing. It is not even a fair copy, it is something he was drafting as he was mid-composition.”
Other highlights on the Discovering Literature: Shakespeare website include:
• Some of the earliest images of Native Americans brought back by the first European settlers.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s personal copy of The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, which includes extensive annotations and his famous comments on Iago’s “motiveless malignity”.
• The only surviving portrait of John Dee, the Elizabethan polymath thought to have inspired Shakespeare’s Prospero.
There will also be essays and films as part of an effort by the library to bring to life the world in which Shakespeare was writing. “We are trying to help students understand the context of Shakespeare’s time because many English teachers tell us that students struggle to understand him and the world he came from,” Wilcox said.
