The Soul Salons: Exploring Our Spiritual Heritage

Love between the Creator and the created one is a core theme of The Hidden Words – one the most mystical works in the Bahá’í Faith.

“O Son of Man! Veiled in My immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of My essence, I knew My love for thee; therefore, I created thee, have engraved on thee Mine image and revealed to thee My beauty.”

An update – and a brief bit of inspiration – for the end of Season 1. 

Revisiting some 19th and 20th Century poems that, in a crazy time, call us to a place of introspection and tranquility. 

I know no birth, I know no death that chills;
I fear no fate nor fashion, cause nor creed,
I shall outdream the slumber of the hills,
I am the bud, the flower, I the seed:
For I do know that in whate’er I see
I am the part and it the soul of me.
John Spence Muirhead

Revisiting some 19th and 20th Century poems that call us to a place of introspection and tranquility.

“I know no birth, I know no death that chills;

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, artist, and spiritual philosopher who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his seminal work The Gitanjali, which explores devotion, service, loss, and renewal. 

“The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.
The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of    wishing in my heart.
The blossom has not opened, only the wind is sighing by.
I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.”
Rabindranath Tagore

Saadi Shirazi, Persian poet and prose writer of the Middle Ages, combines wit and wisdom to convey lessons to live by. 

“Perceivest thou not that in a garden there are musk-willows as well as withered sticks? And likewise in the crowd of the rich there are grateful and impious men, as also in the circle of dervishes some are forbearing and some are impatient. …The greatest of rich men is he who sympathizes with dervishes and the best of dervishes is he who looks but little towards rich men. Who trusts in Allah, he will be his sufficient support.”
Saadi Shirazi

Sikh writings address many themes, including rejecting the world’s false attachments and waking up to our spiritual purpose. 

This world is sunk in doubts and vices, but the enlightened can swim across.
The one who is woken, the one who is given a sip of elixir, knows the story that cannot be told.
Make that transaction for which you came into this world, through the Guru, deposit the Divine in your mind.
Guru Arjan from “The Hymn of Praise,” Sikh scripture

Catholic St. Teresa of Àvila reflects on the journey of the soul through the seven mansions of “The Interior Castle.”

The soul [like the little white butterfly] “despises the work it did while yet a caterpillar—the slow weaving of its cocoon thread by thread—its wings have grown and it can fly; could it be content to crawl?”
St. Teresa

Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran struggled in a material world, but learned to find peace in two different realms.  

“I once told you that my life is divided into two lives and that I spend the one in working and being with people, the other in the mist. But that was yesterday, for now my life has been unified and I work in the mist, meet people in the mist, even sleep, dream and wake up in the mist.”
Khalil Gibran

Roman philosopher Seneca claimed that most people wasted their time instead of staying focused, or knowing how to truly live. 

“For men who leap from one purpose to another, or do not even leap but are carried over by a sort of hazard, – how can such wavering and unstable persons possess any good that is fixed and lasting? There are only a few who control themselves and their affairs by a guiding purpose; the rest do not proceed; they are merely swept along, like objects afloat in a river.”
Seneca the Younger