Sufistic - Heroes

Everyday I check the Sufistic Thoughts & Readings Blog (one of my favourites) to see if more wonderful material has been added...after weeks of checking, to my delight, there's a new post on 'Heroes' from Maulana Jalalludin Rumi's Mathnawi IV, 2881 (translated by Kabir Helminski).

Heroes

Does any artist paint for the sake of the picture itself,
without the hope of offering some good?
No, but for the sake of the viewers and the young
who will be drawn by it and freed from cares.
Or does any potter hastily throw a pot or a bowl
without any thought of what it will hold?
Does any calligrapher write for the script alone
without any regard for the reader?

The external form is for the sake of something unseen
and that took shape for something else unseen.
Just as the moves in a game of chess
reveal the results of each move in what follows.
They make one move to conceal another move,
and that for something else, and so on and on.
So move on, aware of reasons within reasons,
one move after another to checkmate.

One step is for the sake of another,
like the rungs of a ladder, to reach the roof.
The hunger for food produces semen;
semen is for procreation, and the light in the parents’ eyes.
Someone with dulled vision sees no further than this:
his intelligence has no movement; it vegetates.
Whether a plant is summoned or not,
it stays planted within the soil.
Don’t be deceived if the wind bends it.
Its head says, “We obey the zephyr’s request,”
while its feet say, “Leave us alone!”
Since he does not know how to move,
he advances on trust like the blind.
Consider what acting on trust means in a war:
it’s like the gambler trusting the throw of the dice.

But if someone’s insight is unfrozen, it penetrates the veil.
He sees with his own eye in the present
What will come to pass in ten years’ time.
In the same way, everyone sees the unseen and the future,
both good and bad, according to the measure of his insight.
When the barriers in front and behind are removed,
the eye penetrates and reads the Tablet of the Unseen.
When he looks back to origin of existence,
the beginning and all the past display themselves,
including the argument between the angels of earth
and the Divine Majesty, their resistence
to recognize our Father Adam as God’s steward.

And when he casts his eyes forward,
he sees all that will come to pass until the Gathering.
Therefore he sees back to the root of the root,
and forward to Day of Decision.
Anyone, to the degree of his enlightenment,
sees as much as he has polished of himself.
The more he polishes, the more he sees,
the more visible do the forms become.
If you say purity is by the grace of God,
this success in polishing is also through that Generosity.
That work and prayer is in proportion to the yearning:
People have nothing but what they have striven for.

God alone is the giver of aspiration:
no rough brute aspires to kingliness,
nor does God’s gift of good fortune preclude
one’s own consent and will and choice.
But when He brings trouble upon some ill-fated person,
he ungratefully packs off in flight.
Whereas when God brings trouble upon a blessed man,
he just draws nearer to God.
In battle the cowardly, from fear of their lives,
have chosen their means of escape.
But heroes are borne forward by their fear and pain.
From fear, too, the weak soul dies from within itself.
Tribulation and fear for one’s life are touchstones
to distinguish the cowardly from the brave.

From The Rumi Collection. Barak Allahu fi kum.