"This balance and humility inform Rumi's teaching at every level and are the source of its extreme clarity about the dangers, temptations, fantasies, and various forms of inflation, hysteria, and pride that threaten the authentic seeker. They are also the source of perhaps its most challenging, even frightening aspect — that of Rumi's fearless and scathingly truthful embrace of the ordeals that true transformation demand. Rumi's own awakening was at the price of a vast suffering, or rather, a series of sufferings, that led to his death and rebirth in the dimension of Resurrection. Rumi knew from bitter and glorious experience, that the life of the real lover of God is often one of frightful ordeal and exposure to bewilderment and grief of every kind. Yet, because Rumi both lived and survived such appalling experience, he is able to speak with ennobling courage and hope about the gnosis that is born from it and about the glory of sustained divine human being that Annihilation opens onto, the inner 'Rose garden' that only a pure-souled dying-into-Love can uncover in all its amazing rapture and loveliness.

"All authentic seekers will, if they are sincere, come by Divine Grace to the test of the Cross, of the Great Death in which the false self and all its fantasies and games are systematically destroyed to reveal the presence of the Divine and deathless Self within. In this time of ordeal, when everything depends on a capacity for sustained adoration, blind, half-mad faith and the ability to expose the heart again and again to radiant and sometimes murderous danger, Rumi's work will provide the most luminous guidance and a clear and holy encouragement to ever-deeper surrender. Such encouragement is especially important in a time like ours when the entire planet and nature itself are passing through an experience of prolonged breakdown, even crucifixion. More than ever we need guides to ordeal and its hidden meanings, and Rumi, of all mystics and teachers, is the most experienced in what might be called the 'alchemy of agony.' The splendor of his fearlessness, humility, and endless courage can help us all develop those powers of insight and trust that could enable us to transmute catastrophe into an opening for massive spiritual growth."

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