Eclipse

Sheba's Gifts to Solomon

Queen Sheba loads forty mules with gold bricks as gifts for Solomon. When her envoy and his party reach the wide plain leading to Solomon's palace they see the top layer of the entire plain is pure gold. They travel on gold for forty days.

What foolishness to take gold to Solomon, when the dirt of his land is gold. You think to offer your intelligence, reconsider. The mind is less than road dust. The embarrassing commonness they bring only slows them down. They argue. They discuss turning back, but they continue, carrying out the orders of their queen.

Solomon laughs when he sees them unloading gold bars.

"When have I asked you for a sop for my soup? I don't want gifts from you. I want you to be ready for the gifts I give.

You worship a planet that creates gold. Worship instead the one who creates the universe. You worship the sun. The sun is only a cook Think of a solar eclipse. What if you get attacked at midnight? Who will help you then?"

These astronomical matters fade. Another intimacy happens, a sun at midnight, with no east, no night or day.

The clearest intelligences faint, seeing the solar system flickering, so tiny in that immense lightness. Drops fall into a vapor and the vapor explodes into a galaxy. Half a ray strikes a patch of darkness. A new sun appears. One slight, alchemical gesture and saturnine qualities form inside the planet Saturn. The sensuous eye needs sunlight to see. Use another eye. Vision is luminous. Sight is igneous and sun-fire light very dark.

That is Rumi telling an ancient story that expresses several messages. Awareness is not always age-related. Individuals from different centuries had acute awareness of inner consciousness and expressed it using different forms. Art is an expression of consciousness and it is always telling a story and sending a message to me. When I begin to accept the messages rather than restrict them is when I begin to sense the beauty that surrounds me. I am immersed in a magnetic bubble that is always in a state of change. I attract what I believe and continue to attract what I resist.

Rumi explains that my inner senses are paved with the gold of awareness. There is nothing I need to bring, I only need to accept and appreciate the power of my own consciousness and see with the eye that needs nothing but my complete acceptance. Worship is an act of separation; acceptance is an act of unity. Self created suffering is not the road that is paved in awareness, it is a road paved in resistance.

Rumi's 700 year old message is being sent now as I continue to experience the eclipse of my own body consciousness.