Love and Fear (love with beauty, fear with Majesty )
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Love is fearless in the midst of the sea of fear.
~
In the sight of LOVE, fear isn't even as great as a single hair; in the law of LOVE, everything is offered as a sacrifice.
~
“Keep walking, though there's no place to get to. Don't try to see through the distances. That's not for human beings. Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move.”
~ Rumi ~
Fear is never love, and love is never afraid.
People ordinarily think hate is the opposite of love. That is wrong, absolutely wrong. Fear is the opposite of love.
Love is outgoing, fearlessly reaching to the other, tremendously trusting that it will be received—and it is always received. Fear is shrinking within yourself, closing yourself, closing all the doors, all the windows so that no sun, no wind, no rain can reach you, you are so afraid. You are entering into your grave alive.
Be afraid of your ego, be afraid of your lust, be afraid of your greed, be afraid of your possessiveness; be afraid of your jealousy—but there is no question of being afraid of love. Love is divine! Love is like light. When there is light, darkness cannot exist. When there is love, fear cannot exist.
“Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living
In better conditions.
~ Hafiz ~
O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell
and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
But if I worship You for Your Own sake,
grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.
~
I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise. They block the way to Allah. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of Allah.
~ Rabia Basri ( RadhiAllahu'anha) ~
Kabir says that without an element of fear, it is difficult to feel happiness or sorrow. Fear is important even to feel affection for the Guru. In the absence of fear, one loses reverence for his master and can easily abandon all ethical behaviour, resulting in a loss of his own identity
~ Kabir ~
Your Beauty is revealed
in all reality;
Nothing can hide it
but Your Majesty.
~ Qashani (from al-Shaybani) ~
Majesty and Beauty are two notions which have aroused, among the Sufis, the interest of the 'verifiers', the 'knowers of God'. Each one of them has spoken about both divine aspects according to their state,
Most of them have established a correspondence between intimacy and Beauty, on the one hand, and between reverent fear and Majesty on the other. Now, although in one sense this correlation is correct, [in another sense] the question is not exactly as they have expressed it. It is true to say that Majesty and Beauty are both divine qualities, while fear and intimacy are both human qualities. It may also be said that when the essential realities of the gnostics contemplate Majesty, they then feel reverence and constriction, whereas when they contemplate Beauty they feel spiritual relaxation and expansion. Therefore they have established that Majesty corresponds to coercive divine Power and that Beauty corresponds to Compassion, basing their judgement on the experiencing of this relationship in their own interior.
Majesty, in so far as it is a divine aspect, is a meaning that comes from Him (God) and returns to Him alone, the knowledge of which He has made inaccessible to us. On the other hand, Beauty is a meaning proceeding from Him, but directed towards us, and it is this aspect which allows us to accept the knowledge that we have of Him, making possible the descents, the contemplations and the states that He offers us. And its turn, this divine aspect of Beauty manifests itself in us in two ways: either as reverential fear or as intimacy. This is due to the fact that this Beauty has [two forms of manifestation]: 'elevation' and 'proximity'. We call elevation the Majesty of Beauty, and it is to this that the gnostics refer when they talk [simply] about Majesty, since, on its m
