You Are Not ThIs Body You Are That SpIRItual Eye

 

The ant trembles for a grain (of wheat) because it is blind to the goodly threshing-floors.

It drags a grain along greedily and fearfully, for it does not see such a noble stack of winnowed wheat (as is there).

The Owner of the threshing-floor is saying (to the ant), “Hey, thou who in thy blindness deemest nothing something, Hast thou regarded that (alone) as belonging to My threshing-floors, so that thou art devoted with (all) thy soul to that (single) grain?”

O thou who in semblance art (insignificant as) a mote, look at Saturn; thou art a lame ant: go, look at Solomon. Thou art not this body: thou art that (spiritual) Eye. If thou hast beheld the spirit, thou art delivered from the body.

Man (essentially) is eye: the rest (of him) is (mere) flesh and skin: whatsoever his eye has beheld, he is that thing. A jar will submerge a mountain with (its) water when the eye of the jar is open to the Sea. When from the soul (interior) of the jar a channel is made to the Sea, the jar will overwhelm the Jayhún (Oxus).

For that reason whatsoever the speech (voice) of Ahmad (Mohammed) may utter, the words are (really) uttered by the Sea. All his words were pearls of the Sea, for his heart had a passage into the Sea. Since the bounty of the Sea is (poured) through our jar, what wonder (that) the Sea (itself) should be (contained) in a Fish?

The sensual eye is fixed on the form of the thoroughfare: thou art regarding it as a thoroughfare, but he (the Perfect Man) as a permanent abode.

This dualism is characteristic of the eye that sees double; but (in reality) the first is the last and the last is the first.

THE MASNAWI 6, 810