"Rare are the men and women who know how to love, which explains why people are unhappy, even when they believe they have found the so-called 'love of their life'. To love does not mean to concentrate all your attention on one man or woman, and when you limit yourself in this way, you become poorer. When you truly love, your love for another is enriched with your love for the entire universe - for all creatures and all creation, from the stones to the stars. In this way you pour treasures

into the soul of your beloved. To say to a man or woman: 'I love no one

but you' is of no real advantage to this person, and in fact it is the surest way to impoverish him or her. Unless your heart is already full of love for others, your love brings your beloved nothing."

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

LOVE

Whoever is loved is beautiful

Whoever is loved is beautiful, but the opposite is not true, that whoever is beautiful is loved.  Real beauty is part of loved-ness, and that loved-ness is primary.  If a being is loved, he or she has beauty, because a part cannot be separate from the whole.  Many girls were more beautiful than Laila, but Majnun did not love them.  "Let us bring some of these to meet you," they used to say to Majnun, and he would reply, "It's not the form of Laila that I love.   Laila is not the form.  You're looking at the cup, whereas I think only of the wine I drink from that cup.  If you gave me a chalice studded with gemstones, but filled with vinegar or something other than wine, what use would that be? An old broken dipper-gourd with Laila-wine in it is better than a hundred precious goblets full of other liquid."


  Passion is present when a man can distinguish between the wine and the container.  Two men see a loaf of bread. One hasn't eaten anything for ten days. The other has eaten five times a day, every day.  He sees the shape of the loaf.  The other man with his urgent need sees inside into the taste, and into the nourishment the bread could give.  Be that hungry, to see within all beings the Friend.


  Creatures are cups.  The sciences and the arts and all branches of knowledge are inscriptions around the outside of the cups.  When a cup shatters, the writing can no longer be read.  The wine's the thing! The wine that's held in the mold of these physical cups. Drink the wine and know what lasts and what to love.  The man who truly asks must be sure of two things: One, that he's mistaken in what he's doing or thinking now.  And two, that there is a wisdom he doesn't know yet.  Asking is half of knowing.


  Everyone turns toward someone.  Look for one scarred by the King's polo stick.


  A man or a woman is said to be absorbed when the water has total control of him, and he no control of the water.  A swimmer moves around willfully.  An absorbed being has no will but the water's going.  Any word or act is not really personal, but the way the water has of speaking or doing.  As when you hear a voice coming out of a wall, and you know that it's not the wall talking, but someone inside, or perhaps someone outside echoing off the wall.  Saints are like that.  They've achieved the condition of a wall, or a door.

--Rumi