If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable.

I simply wanted to experience the presence of this man who had revolutionized my understanding. After a while we sat in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls. And the mute desert seemed to carry on our conversation for us.

Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.

It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.

...conversation can be as mutually incomprehensible as foreign languages. We need the different and complementary perspectives of the various yogas - and ideally of all religions - not only to reach God but to reach each other.

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation.