Only Breath - Rumi

Not Christian or Jew, or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, Sufi or Zen...

Not any religion or cultural system.

I am not from the East
or the West,
not out of the ocean
or up from the ground,
not natural or ethereal,
not composed of elements at all.

"I" do not exist,
am not an entity in this world
or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve
or an origin story.

My place is the placeless,
a trace of the traceless.

Neither body or soul.

I belong to The Beloved,
have seen the two worlds as one
and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner,
only That Breath breathing
human being.

Rumi

recited by Coleman Barks

"The Hymn of Creation" - The Rig Veda

Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it?  Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?

There was neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat...

But after all, who knows, and who can say
whence it all came, and how creation happened?

The gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe he does not know.

~

The Rig Veda is one of the oldest texts [creation stories]
dating from somewhere between 4000 and 2000 BC

~

This version is from a wonderful book for the serious
explorer of the Truth of Existence called,
The Recognition of Our Own Heart:
Pratyabhijnahrdayam

by the late Joan Ruvinsky.

It is a modern day interpretive translation of
the Pratyabhijnahrdayam -
loosely meaning "Primordial Recognition" -
from the 11th century Kashmir Shaivism tradition.

The basic concept of Kashmir Shaivism is that an
individual's existence is the unlimited manifestation of
Universal Consciousness (the Luminous Unmanifest)
that embodies everything.
It is also available on Amazon here.