Nuruddin Abdur Rahman Jami was one of the most remarkable poet, a great scholar, and a great mystic of 14th century Persia. Absorb this beautiful verse about the non-duality of the Infinite.
Passage
From all eternity the Beloved unveiled His beauty in the solitude of the Unseen;
He held up the mirror to His own face, He displayed His loveliness to Himself.
He was both the spectator and the spectacle ; no eye but His had surveyed the universe.
All was One, there was no duality, no pretence of ‘mine’ or ‘thine.’
The vast orb of Heaven, with its myriad incomings and outgoings, was concealed in a single point.
The Creation lay cradled in the sleep of non-existence, like a child ere it has breathed.
The eye of the Beloved, seeing what was not, regarded nonentity as existent.
Although he beheld His attributes and qualities as a perfect whole in His own essence,
Yet He desired that they should be displayed to Him in another mirror,
And that each one of His eternal attributes should become manifest accordingly in a diverse form.
Therefore He created the verdant fields of Time and Space and the life-giving garden of the world,
That every bough and leaf and fruit might show forth His various perfections.
The cypress gave a hint of His comely stature, the rose gave tidings of His beauteous countenance.
Wherever Beauty peeped out, Love appeared beside it; wherever Beauty shone in a rosy cheek, Love lit his torch from that flame.
Wherever Beauty dwelt in dark tresses, Love came and found a heart entangled in their coils.
Beauty and Love are as body and soul; Beauty is the mine and Love the precious stone.
They have always been together from the very first: never have they travelled but in each other’s company.
Reynold A. Nicholson. Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose. Cambridge University Press, 1922.
