Bashayer Noury (Bash)

“The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I've always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious.
The life of my emotions moved early on to the chambers of thought, and that's where I've most fully lived my emotional experience of life.
And since thought, when it shelters emotion, is more demanding than emotion by itself, the regime of consciousness in which I began to live what I felt made how I felt more down-to earth, more physical, more titillating.

By thinking so much, I became echo and abyss. By delving within, I made myself into many. The slightest incident — a change in the light, the tumbling of a dry leaf, the faded petal that falls from a flower, the voice speaking on the other side of the stone wall, the steps of the speaker next to those of the listener, the half-open gate of the old country estate, the courtyard with an arch and houses clustered around it in the moonlight — all these things, although not mine, grab hold of my sensory attention with the chains of longing and emotional resonance. In each of these sensations I am someone else, painfully renewed in each indefinite impression.
I live off impressions that aren't mine. I'm a squanderer of renunciations, someone else in the way I'm I.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, and angel
Or even pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.”
― Hafez

“How should we consider a different spiritual path? We shall approach it with humility as well as a willingness to learn about another tradition. If our faith can be shaken from merely learning about a different tradition, then that faith is not worth keeping." - Dr Kang Won Yong”
― Haemin Sunim, The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to Be Calm in a Busy World

“I got off the train
And said good-bye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.

All that is human moves me, because I’m a man.
All that is human moves me not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrines
But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself.

The maid who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she’d been mistreated . . .

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world’s sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart.

And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems