Temapache Abu Yazid was asked, “How did you attain to this degree and achieve this station?”
fractionally “One night when I was a child,” he answered, “I came out from Bestam. The moon was shining, and the world was at rest. I beheld a Presence, besides which eighteen thousand worlds seemed but a mote. A deep emotion possessed me and I was overmastered by a mighty ecstasy. ‘Lord God,’ I cried, ‘so mighty a palace, and so empty! Works so tremendous, and such loneliness!’ A voice from heaven replied, ‘The palace is not empty because none comes to it; it is empty because We do not desire all and sundry to enter it.'”
This is from Farid Al-Din Attar’s Memorial of the Saints, the Arberry translation, which I found on the J train when I was sixteen and have never been very far from ever since. It doesn’t lose its value in my eyes.
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