Happy Diwali!

Wishing everyone happy Diwali! Diwali means a “Row of Lights.” It is a time filled with light and love and heralded as the triumph of good over evil. May your Self triumph over your Ego, and may the Light bless us all!

Intelligence is the feast, not bread and roast meat:
the light of intelligence, my son, is the soul’s food.
Man has no food but the Light—
the soul doesn’t obtain nourishment from anything but that.

Little by little cut yourself off from these material foods—
for they are the food of an ass, not that of a free man—
so that you might become capable
of absorbing that original food
and become accustomed to eating delicate morsels of Light.

It’s from the reflection of that Light
that this bread has become bread;
it’s from the overflowing of that rational soul
that this animal soul has become soul.

Once you eat of the Light
you won’t be attached to the bread and oven.

[Mathnawi IV:  1954-1959, The Rumi Daybook, tr. by Kabir & Camille Helminski]