"Whatever they say or think I am in you and I am you, No one can understand this Until he has lost his mind. And now this: After the certainties, the visions, This final loneliness You flower in." After all the visions, after all the ecstasies and merging, what is called by the Sufis the great Peace begins. At first it seems like a state of neutrality, almost of death, but it is a state of infinite delicacy and refinement in which you are no longer experiencing as a human being but as a Divine being. It is in that loneliness in which the Beloved flowers becomes aloneness in which the Beloved is. You have to go into that loneliness where you lose everything including your ecstasies, your visions, and your insights. Everything is taken away and you wait. And right in the center of that loneliness the ultimate mystery begins, the ultimate tenderness arrives. It is really like the end of the night in India. Right at the end of the night when you can't believe that the night can get any darker, any more intense, suddenly the most miraculously tender light appears, this very soft, very alone grey, subtly suffused with pink, and this extraordinary silence and peace open. . . From Rumi: The Way of Passion by Andrew Harvey . . Artwork: A Whisper by Marc Fishman @marcafishman . . #sufi #beloved #Rumi #lovers #mysticlove