This embrace of catastrophe is really an embrace , it isn’t based in fear. The Mother isn’t just saying , “Open, suffer, die,” she’s also saying , “I will give you the peace of my love to help you bear this distress. I will take you into my heart that can bear anything, and give you that heart.” Only a heart that breaks again and again can ever be strong enough to bear everything. That’s the sacred paradox of the divine feminine. A heart that defends itself will be shattered to smithereens. A heart that consents to break again and again will be strengthened with each break, strengthened to break again, to break more and more open to empowering divine grace.”
~Andrew Harvey, The return of the Mother
After the winemaker tramples me.
I surrender my spirit like grapes to his trampling
So my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy.
Although the grapes go on weeping blood and sobbing
“I cannot bear any more anguish, any more cruelty”
The trampler stuffs cotton in his ears: “I am not working in ignorance
You can deny me if you want, you have every excuse,
But it is I who am the Master of this Work.
And when through my Passion you reach Perfection,
You will never be done praising my name.”
— Rumi (from ‘The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi’ by Andrew Harvey)
“Although the grapes go on weeping blood…
A large part of the spiritual journey is having the courage, the great crazy courage, to ”go on weeping blood.” There is more blood to weep at every stage, and more sobbing to do at every encounter with deepening reality. There is no place where the tears stop. The tears go on, they stop being sentimental tears and become tears of love, but they go on. The blood-shedding goes on, what stops is self-protection. In another quatrain Rumi says:
Blood Must Flow
For the garden to flower.
And the heart that loves me
Is a wound without shield.
For reality to become alive with gnosis, there have to be many people prepared to make the journey into love. For people to be prepared to take the journey into love, they must be willing to die, to let themselves sob and weep blood, and cry out again and again at different steps of their life, what Rumi cries out , “I cannot bear any more anguish, any more cruelty!” What these deaths feel like, don’t let us pretend otherwise, are, as Rumi says, ‘anguish’ and ‘cruelty’. They are felt as the cruelty of the divine, giving us something we think we can’t bear. It happens again and again on the path of real love.
~Andrew Harvey, The return of the Mother
~”It is a pity to reach the sea and to be satisfied with just a little water. This existence, this life, is the great sea…
There are great pearls in the sea and from The sea myriads of precious things can be produced. This world is just false coin gilded. It is a fleck of foam on the great sea of love.
Man is the astrolabe of God, the astronomical instrument in which the heavens movements are charted and reflected. Just as the copper astrolabe is the mirror of the heavens, so the awakened human being is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God…
The awakened human being is the theater, the place, in which the divine mysteries appear. When God causes a human being to have knowledge of Him, and to know Him, and to be familiar with Him through the astrolabe of his own being, he beholds moment by moment, and flash by flash, the manifestation of God and His Infinite beauty, and that beauty is never absent from his mirror.”~
….:::Let’s enter into what these words are promising to be true about the awakened heart, the awakened soul: the heart that has been matured by the ecstasy of adoration and opened by the ecstasy of adoration sees in every moment, every event, every face, every sentient loving thing, nothing less than the appearance of infinite Beauty.:::
:::~”when the Mother causes a woman to have knowledge of Her and to know Her, and to be familiar with Her through the astrolabe of her own being, she beholds moment by moment, and flash by flash, the manifestation of the Divine”~:::
~Andrew Harvey, the Return of the Mother
BlissNinja 