Mahmud Shabistari wrote only one book. It took him a single night. In 1317, a fellow Sufi sent him fifteen questions about the mystical path. He answered them in verse, and the result — "Gulshan-i Raz," the Secret Rose Garden — became one of the most beloved mystical poems in the Persian language.
"What is thought?" the questioner asked. "It is a journey from the false to the true," Shabistari replied. "What is the journey? It is the purification of the heart from all that is not God."
"The universe is a single mirror;
In each atom a hundred suns blaze.
If you split the heart of any drop of water,
A hundred pure oceans emerge from it.
Every grain of sand, if examined,
Contains a thousand Adams."
Shabistari's teaching is one of radical immanence: God is not distant but intimately present in every particle of creation. The world is not an obstacle to the divine but its manifestation. "Look closely at any thing," he wrote, "and you will find God looking back at you."
Of the self and its annihilation, he wrote: "What is the self? A phantom, a dream, a thought that believes itself solid. When you see through the illusion of the self, what remains? Only the Beloved, who was there all along, hidden by the fiction of 'I.'"
"Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.
Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
When you depart out, He will enter in.
In you, void of yourself, will He display His beauties.
The 'I' and the 'you' are but lattices
In the niches of a lamp
Through which the One Light shines."
Asked about the meaning of "I" and "you," Shabistari answered: "These are the veils that hide Reality. Remove them, and what remains? Not two, not one, but That which is beyond counting. The Beloved is both the seeker and the sought, the lover and the loved."
The poem ends with a warning and a promise: "These words are veils upon veils. Do not mistake the veil for the face. Use my words to pass beyond words. Then forget them and be what you have always been."
Teaching 37
The universe is a mirror — in each atom, suns blaze. The self is a fiction hiding the Beloved who was always there. Sweep the heart clean, make room, depart from yourself, and the One Light shines through. These words are veils — pass through them to what lies beyond.