“When a blind man gets his sight back, he says “I am a divine seer, an oracle.” With the excitement of the change he’s a little drunk. A drunk becoming sober is very different from the ecstatic change that comes in the living presence of an enlightened one. There’s no way to say how that is, even if Abu ibn Sina were here. Only by the great Names, or by meditation inside music that plays without instruments, can coverings be lifted. Not by sermons or mental effort. One who tries to do that will cut off his hand with his famous sword. This is all metaphoric: there is no covering or hand. It’s like the country saying, Yeah, if my aunt had testicles, she’d be my uncle. It’s what-if talking: the distance from words to living is a journey of a hundred thousand years, but don’t be discouraged! It can happen any moment. It takes thirty-five hundred years to get to Saturn, but Saturnine qualities are constantly here making us solemn and serious. Influence goes the other way too. An enlightened master, which is to say the inner nature of each of us, is continually affecting the universe. Philosophers say a human being is the universe in samll, but it is more true that the essence of a human is the whole from which the cosmos grew. It looks as if fruit grows from a branch, but growth comes more truly from the gardener’s hope and the work of sowing the seed that grew inside the fruit. The tree of the universe grows out of the fruit and its seed, even though in form the tree bears the fruit.”
