Ruminating with Rumi
Why do you grieve? There is no loss. You have nothing. The joy in you is total and complete. It has no end. It flows in you like a river through the valley, bringing nourishment from the mountain on its way to the sea. Joy is the whole of the all. It is consciousness in existence. It waits within your grief for you to know. It has no form. It seeps into everything, expanding to crack open the world that you know as the me of the body. Joy has no attachments, no desire, no expectation. Joy is reality. Through joy you are all things. You sleep for now, dreaming of this and that, while finding pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow. You are neither this nor that. You are the whole of the all. You wait in the darkness of grief like an ember ready to burst into flame. You are the light of love that is without fear of loss. What can you lose when you are all?
The me of the body is form with thoughts, emotions, and beliefs in relationship with other forms in spacetime. Beliefs drive your thoughts and emotions. Your beliefs are your world, created by thoughts and felt as emotions. Your emotions do not require names. They are to be observed and released. What lingers in mind is memory, and memory is past judgment. Remove judgment. Enter the moment. Leave the past to itself. Inside such billowing emotions as grief is joy, or your true nature. Joy is unchanging and real. You are joy, and joy can be your expression always. To know that you are joy-expressing will change your world.
Empty yourself of all but joy. What is it to empty yourself? To remove desire and expectation. These fuel pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow. As do judgment and hope. Listen to the moment that ends your worldly ways. To realize that you are not your thoughts and emotions, that they do not have to be acted on, this is when you are empty of self. To be empty of self is to be in the moment, outside of time. Do nothing. Sit in the still silence and be free. Freedom is to know your true nature by doing nothing. There is nothing that you gain from the world that keeps you from the void, which is the abyss of oblivion that you fear. Accepting your true nature brings an emptiness of self that relieves you of fear and reveals your true nature as joy.