The Truth of Who We Are

"The Dream That Must Be Interpreted"

(credit : Une Hirondelle)

This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.

Then death comes like dawn,
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief.

But there's a difference with this dream.
Everything cruel and unconscious
done in the illusion of the present world,
all that does not fade away
at the death-waking.

It stays,
and it must be interpreted.

All the mean laughing,
all the quick, sexual wanting,
those torn coats of Joseph,
they change into powerful wolves
that you must face.

The retaliation that sometimes comes now,
the swift, payback hit,
is just a boy's game
to what the other will be.

You know about circumcision here.
It's full castration there!

And this groggy time we live,
this is what it's like:
A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived,
and he dreams he's living in another town.

In the dream, he doesn't remember
the town he's sleeping in his bed in.
He believes the reality of the dream town.

The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities
settles over us like a forgetful dose,
but we are older than those cities.

We began as a mineral.
We emerged into plant life,
and into the animal state,
and then into being human,
and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring
when we slightly recall
being green again.

That's how a young person
turns toward a teacher.
That's how a baby leans toward the breast,
without knowing the secret of its desire,
yet turning instinctively.

Humankind is being led along
an evolving course, through
this migration of intelligences,
and though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,

and that will eventually startle us
back to the truth of who we are.

(credit : shadowness)

  Mathnawi IV, 3628-3652, 3654-3667
Version by Coleman Barks
"The Essential Rumi"
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995