The Guest House | Jalaluddin Rumi

By Steve Beckow, September 14, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

Rumi: The Guest House – Part 1/2

The Guest House

Jalaluddin Rumi

Translated by Coleman Barks

(https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/guest-house/)

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Tomorrow I’d like to comment on Rumi’s poem.

Jalaluddin Rumi

from Rumi: Selected Poems, trans Coleman Barks with John Moynce, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson (Penguin Books, 2004)

Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd



By Steve Beckow, September 15, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

Rumi: The Guest House – Part 2/2

(Concluded from Part 1, yesterday.)

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

There might be said to be two kinds of univited guests or feelings: pleasant and unpleasant. You might think I’d start by looking at the unpleasant, but, far from it. I’d like to make sure we’re clear about welcoming the pleasant.

You’ve heard me talk about taking a wisp of bliss and mounting it like a surfboard and surfing it to the big wave. That was yesterday.

Today I found it even easier. Today I recognized in my field of awareness a little patch of bliss, like a gold bar of it, say. I immediately welcomed it, as Rumi suggested, and breathed it up and my mood yielded to bliss immediately. That was a much easier and more direct experience of expanding bliss.

I believe that it’s now a bit easier to enter divine states like bliss than it was perhaps a year ago. For a student of awareness, today’s experience suggests progress.

So just think of the pleasant feelings as the up escalator. We’re very clear about welcoming the pleasant guests.

Now the down escalator. We don’t like the unpleasant feelings and so we mostly seem to avoid experiencing them – or “welcoming” them, as Rumi says.

Fatal mistake. What we resist persists. The unpleasant feelings hang around forever.

We need to welcome them too; we need to experience them until they leave of their own volition. Not fun. I know. But it leads to release whereas the other leads to constant denial and compensation. And the unpleasant feelings hang around forever.

He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

“He” [turns out it’s “She”] is definitely clearing us out for some new delight. What’s on the menu? Love, bliss, ecstacy. Joy, peace, harmony. We’ve never experienced delights like these, I guarantee.

The best is definitely yet to come. And welcoming everything that comes our way seems to me the surest way of speeding it along.