On Burning Down the House

This is Andrew Harvey commenting on Rumi:

Desperation, let me always know

How to welcome you

And put in your hands the torch

To burn down the house.

When you are desperate, it is often a clue that you need to leave an old way of being, and old way of life, an old understanding.  Often, we smother that desperation, we cuddle it, we comatize it.  But Rumi says, "Have the courage of your desperation" and put in the hands of your desperation the torch, the flame of Love and insight, and burn your house down.  Allow desperation to be a Master instead of something that drives you deeper into coma.

We are at a desperate moment in human history.  The world is in terrible denial of what is actually going on, because people are simply afraid of the level of desperation that they would feel if they faced what is going on.  The point is that we have to face what is going on and allow that desperation to rise in us, and we have to follow that desperation right to its home which is in Divine initiation, Divine transformation.  We have to let that desperation "take a torch and burn down" all our concepts, limits, fantasies, and banal solutions, because it is far too late and none of them are going to work.

Light the incense!

You have to burn to be fragrant

To scent the whole house

You have to burn to the ground.

Incense is made out of all sorts of dark things, just like the ego.  If you want the incense to scent the house, you have to light it, light the ego.  In disappearing, it releases the Divine perfume everywhere.  If you want to scent the whole universe as Rumi did, you have to burn away.  That is the Law.                    

 

 - Andrew Harvey, The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1994), p. 70 -71 

 

Or, as Jesus said, "Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." - John 12:24-25