Dreaming when Dawn’s left hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
'Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.'
From the darkness of sleep Omar hears a voice, a message from his heart or spirit.
The tavern represents life as a whole, as well as the body. The tavern is your body, but your body is in life. The work on yourself is done in ordinary life and society, not by withdrawing from it.
The voice within the tavern is a cry from the heart. The little ones, the parts of yourself that are striving for something better, are told to wake up, join the battle, otherwise there will be no hope of winning. When you fill the cup, you are going to fulfil your potential, achieve everything you are capable of. You are going to see everything and fill up your life. It is a basic principle of the Work that you need to fill things up before you can empty them. Throughout your work on yourself, you are putting some things in and taking others out, inasmuch as you work against a negativity in yourself and replace it with something positive. If you wanted to you could fill your ego, or your idea of yourself, but throughout the poem, wine, or liquor, usually means the spirit. You are being exhorted to develop your spiritual potential.
In your youth, or in the beginning of your work on yourself when you should have some zest for life, you must throw away your
winter garments, or get rid of your negative attitudes. At this stage you will know you do not have much time. The sequence of
the seasons symbolises growth within yourself, from spring, summer, autumn, to winter. You must be very careful at the beginning
to protect and nurture the new growth because you are not given much time before everything dies and returns to the dead ground
within yourself. You are told to keep working, to not waste time. The winter represents the negative or passive aspect. Once you
have struggled through the winter, something new is created in the spring, the new arising. The spring is your new birth. In the
Christian gospels, Jesus told Nicodemus he had to be born again, not as a baby, but in the spirit.
There is another scale of time that can only be understood spiritually. It cannot be explained. These quatrains picture time as we normally experience it but also indicate a different time in a spiritual dimension. Another way of stating this would be to say that we live in the third dimension within our normal conception of time, but our spiritual part relates to a different time scale. When our spirit finally merges with God, it becomes part of this other time scale. No one can say how that is done, but we want you to understand that it does happen. We know it happens.
When you experience a genuine silence you are in a different dimension of time. At the beginning, you must struggle to be silent but when you achieve a real silence it begins to flow through you without any effort on your part. Although Abdullah has personally experienced this, it is impossible to explain to someone else. The silence is something within yourself, beyond your own comprehension of what you are experiencing. Through silence you are aware of another sense of time.
We see the night and the day but we do not understand that there must be a third force between them. Always we must seek the third force. Living constantly in the pairs of opposites puts us to sleep. Gurdjieff said that men are third-force blind, but if you listen to the birds when dawn comes or dusk falls, you will hear the third force, if you have ears to hear. People can live their entire lives without hearing it even once, but it is there to be heard every day. The birds know the third force.
You know, my Friends, how long since in my House
For a new Marriage I did make carouse:
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
We teach that you must make your body obedient so that another part of you, your 'name part' (the three brains or centres), becomes strong, then the name part has to become passive to the spirit – this is the new marriage. But up to this point, your reason must develop. This is the whole thrust about what we are teaching you about becoming balanced human beings. Reason is the most important attribute in your development, but it only pertains to the third dimension and has no function in the fifth dimension. This is why Omar says reason is barren. At a certain point it becomes sterile and can go no further.
In all religious teachings, whether Sufi, Hebrew, Hindu or Buddhist, it is understood that in the end you have to jump above the intellect if you are ever going to experience real understanding. You rid yourself of the intellect’s domination and jump, and by doing this you take the daughter of the vine and receive the 'blind understanding'.
People often say that they do not know if their prayer is heard. We tell them that all prayers are heard. Firstly, they are
heard by their subconscious mind. Then they would be heard by the guide to the conscience. They would also be heard further
afield, depending on the intensity of the prayer. Your guide to your conscience is God in you, which is at a very personal
level. So when you say that 'Allah knows', this does not necessarily mean that Allah as His Endlessness knows. His
Endlessness would only be concerned with the galaxies and the cosmos; for our level of existence he delegates his authority.
Everyone has God in them, therefore, God knows. The same principles apply through the cosmos from beginning to end. Allah is
actually in us but we are misled by our sense of separation. Few people realise that what holds us all together is space.
Space is the third force which holds us together and makes us, living separately in different countries, all a part of the
Earth. In the same way, inwardly our spirits are a part of God.
84 pages, hardcover