THUS MAN BECOMES GOD

 
One can find volumes and volumes of prose and poetry about love, but there are very, very few persons who have found love and experienced it. No amount of reading, listening and learning can ever tell you what love is. Regardless of how much I explain love to you, you will understand it less and less if you think you can grasp it through the intellect or imagination.

Hafiz describes the bare truth about love when he says:

Janab-e ishqra dargah basi bala tar-azaq'l ast:
Kasi in astan busad kay jan der astin darad.

The majesty of love lies far beyond the reach of intellect;
only one who has his life up his sleeve dares kiss the threshold of love.

The difference between love and intellect is something like that between night and day; they exist in relation to one another and yet as two different things. Love is real intelligence capable of realizing truth; intellect is best suited to know all about duality, which is born of ignorance and is entirely ignorance. When the sun rises, night is transformed into day. Just so, when love manifests, not-knowing (ignorance) is turned into conscious-knowing (knowledge).

In spite of the difference between a keenly intelligent person and a very unintelligent person, each is equally capable of experiencing love. The quality which determines one's capacity for love is not one's wit or wisdom, but one's readiness to lay down life itself for the beloved, and yet remain alive.

One must, so to speak, slough off body, energy, mind and all else, and become dust under the feet of the beloved. This dust of a lover who cannot remain alive without God — just as an ordinary man cannot live without breath — is then transformed into the beloved. Thus man becomes God.