Learning from Hafez

For many years I've been captivated by the spiritual wisdom of Marianne Williamson. She is a feisty American lady who holds court with the modern "spirituals" of America such as Deepak Chopra et al.  Even if it is to YouTube her, do so - her Books were enormously popular in the US in the late 1990s, too - most of them New York Times Bestsellers.

Well, back to our own Spiritual Guru - HAFEZ. I was recently reading something Marianne Williamson had said and it was so beautifully echoed by our own Persian Maestro, some 700 years ago! The talk is of the delicacy of the moment of "union" - and how most of us, through fear and doubt, lose sight of the elevated beauty we have just reached; start questionoing it, and in most cases fall right off the heights of our joyous delirium.

Marianne Williamson: (Once a union with a Beloved has been attained) - "We go back to our judgementalness; we go back to our focus on personality rather than spirit; we go back to our focuse on attachment to past and future, rather than the present; we go back to our focus on externals rather than internals... and so, the essence of the person which we had grasped in that very short time is lost to us."

HAFEZ: Hafez is also telling us to be mindful of all the fear and questioning that we get bombarded with once at the threshold of Beloved's door. It is this very doubt inducing process that could hurl us to down to a bottomles pit, from the peaks of the bliss we had reached!

Dar astan-eh janan az asseman mayandish

K'az oj-eh sar bolandi ofti beh khak-eh pasti

Question not, when at the threshold of Beloved's door, the Heavenly reasons

Lest you find yourself hurling down from the heights of your pride and interrogating

Our "Learnging from Hafez" gatherings here in Washington, DC:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUhIXQoxwzE