Listen to Rumi...#1

Don't confuse Religiosity with a true relationship to God, or Spirit. Don't confuse the menu for the meal, or the map for the road itself. Think less of commandments and more of confabulation. A spiritual way of living shouldn't limit you, it should unlock your life.


(from "Moses and the Shepherd", translated by Coleman Barks)
...
(God's voice)
You have separated me from one of my own.
Did you come as a Prophet to unite, or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.

What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.

Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.

It's not me that's glorified in acts of worship.
It's the worshipers! I don't hear the words they say.
I look inside at the humility.

That broken-open lowliness is the reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.

Be friends with your burning. Burn up your thinking and your forms of expression!
Moses, those who pay attention to ways of behaving and speaking are one sort.
Lovers who burn are another.
...