Kabir
18
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive -
Jump into experience while you are alive -
Think and think while you are alive!
What you call salvation belongs to the time before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you are alive, do you
Think ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just
Because the body is rotten -
That is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, during the next moment you will have
the face of satisfied desire.
Plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says: when the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of
the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Take a look at me, you will see a slave of that intensity.
19
I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves the
Birds and animals and the ants.
Perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb.
Is it logical that you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?
The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew.
And that's why everything you do has some weird failure in it.
20
I know the sound of the ecstatic flute,
But I don't know whose flute it is.
A lamp burns and has neither wick nor oil.
A waterplant blossoms and is not attached to the bottom!
When one flower opens, ordinarily dozens open.
The moon-bird's head is filled with nothing but
thoughts of the moon
and when the next rain will come is all
the rain-bird thinks of.
Who is it we spend our entire life loving?
21
What has death and a thick body dances before
What has no thick body and no death.
The trumpet says, "I am you."
The spiritual master arrives and bows down
To the beginning student.
Try to live to see this.
22
I have been thinking of the difference between water
And the waves on it. Rising,
The water's still water; falling back
It is water. Will you give me a hint how
To tell them apart?
Because someone has made up the word, "wave", do I have to distinguish it
from water?
There is a Secret One inside us;
The planets in all the galaxies
Pass through his hands like beads.
That is a string of beads one should look at
With luminous eyes.
23
The bhakti path winds in a delicate way.
On this path there is no asking and no not asking.
The ego simply disappears the moment you touch him.
The joy of looking for him is so immense that you
Just dive in, & coast around like a fish in the water.
If anyone needs a head, the lover leaps up to offer his.
Kabir's poems touch on the secret of this bhakti.