The Stories Never Stop...

The Cat and the Meat

There once was a sneering wife

Who ate all her husband brought home

And lied about it.

One day it was some lamb for a guest

Who was to come. He had worked two hundred days

in order to buy that meat.

When he was away his wife cooked a kabob

And ate it all, with wine.

The husband returned with his guest.

"The cat has eaten the meat,"she said.

"Buy more, if you have any money left!"

He asks a servant to bring the scales,

and the cat. That cat weighs three pounds.

"The meat was three pounds, one ounce.

If this is the cat, where is the meat?

If this is the meat where is the cat?

Start looking for one or the other!"

If you have a body, where is the spirit?

If you are a spirit where is the body?

This is not our problem to worry about.

Both are both. Corn is corn grain and cornstalk.

The divine butcher cuts a piece from the thigh,

and a piece from the neck.

Invisible, visible, the world

Does not work without both.

If you throw dust at someone's head,

Nothing will happen.

If you throw water, nothing.

But combine them into a lump

That marriage of water and dirt

Cracks open the head,

And afterward there are other marriages.

Rumi ‘s story, like most of his thoughts are all about unity; it does seem like I need to be hit over the head to understand what unity means. I'm selective when it comes to unity; it must fit into my belief system in order to for me to accept a person, place or thing and then bond and unite as one consciousness. This process of selective unity is the method that I choose in order to remember the unity of consciousness that is not selective or fragmented. In physical life I forget that I am united in birth and death. In between those two events a united mass of water and dust come together and becomes a self. That self creates the lessons that allow it to experience the contrast of disassociation with other aspects of consciousness.

 In that process I find reason and live a story, just like Rumi's story about the cat and the meat. I do it in order to hit my self over the head with the water and dust of physical life, so I remember I am always united within my self. Unity of consciousness in body and spirit is a choice that has already been made and is being fulfilled in between the physical events of birth and death. Every story has a beginning and an end and between those physical illusions countless events reconstruct a structure that already exists. Just like Rumi's cat, meat, wife, husband and guest everything is significant in remembering that I am always united in body and spirit, and am married to my self in the vastness of consciousness. The stories never stop and the moral of those stories are the same: Feeling and appreciating the joy of being, is the union that I know and want to remember.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/