Towards Understanding Transcendent Unity Of Being Poem by Mystic Qalandar

Are we those freed slaves
who, at their former master's threshold,
still refuse to leave?
Still keeping vigil through long nights,
still lighting torches at his door—
this imposed servitude
we rename light,
molded into such radiance
it becomes mere echo
of all those false lessons
from the schools of duality.

Sufism, perhaps,
is nothing but
scattered fragments.

I wonder
how my ancestors truly thought
about Oneness—
that transcendent, pure,
unknowable Being.
I am certain
they never knew
the human soul
cannot be severed
from the Unity of Existence.

And I, in blind imitation,
failed to master
the emptiness of duality,
failed to draw near
to the true thought of the Real.
How many wings of freedom did I clip,
wearing their philosophy of spirit
like a borrowed emblem?

No wonder
my forebears considered
self-forgetting itself a power.
In moments of heedlessness toward the Truth,
they mistook paper flowers
for living ones.
I can feel
their self-deception,
that final wish for escape—
when, hand in hand,
they leapt from the minaret.

Now I am weary of their religion.
Yet perhaps
weariness too was a veil.

At last I have come to know:
the Self, even in its solitude,
needs no incarnation.
It is, in its own oneness,
transcendent, beyond, complete.
Nothing merges into it.
No soul falls separate from it.
All relations shatter
where the Self,
beyond its own limit of knowing,
stands silent.

Now I have fixed in my eyes
not the grey of monotheism
but that cold light of transcendence
in which
every shadow, in its negation,
bears witness to
that same single Being—

Lā ilāha illā Hu.

—MyKoul