بخش 170 - تشبیه دنیا کی بظاهر فراخست و بمعنی تنگ و تشبیه خواب کی خلاص است ازین تنگی

(This world is) like a bath-room which is very hot, (so that) you are distressed and your soul is melted (with anguish).

Although the bath-room is broad and long, your soul is distressed and fatigued by the heat.

Your heart does not expand (you feel no relief) till you come out: what advantage, then, is the spaciousness of the room to you?

Or (it is) as though you should put on tight shoes, O misguided one, and go into a wide desert.

The spaciousness of the desert becomes narrow (distressing); that desert and plain becomes a prison to you.

Whoever sees you from afar says, “He blooms like a fresh anemone (he is cheerful and happy) in that desert”;

He does not know that you, like the wicked, are outwardly in the rose-garden, (while) your soul is in lamentation.

Your sleep is to put those shoes off, for (then) your soul is free from the body for a while.

To the saints, O reader, sleep is a kingdom, as (it was to) the Men of the Cave in this world.

They (sleep and) dream, and no (physical) sleep is there; they go into nonexistence, and no (material) door (is there).

“(The body is) a narrow house, and the soul within is cramped: He (God) ruined it in order that He might make a royal palace.

I am cramped like the embryo in the womb: I have become nine months old: this migration has become urgent.

Unless the throes of childbirth overtake my mother, (what should I do?): in this prison I am amidst the fire.

My mother, namely, my nature (natural body), in consequence of its death-throes, is giving birth (to the spirit), to the end that the lamb (the spirit) may be released from the ewe,

So that the lamb may graze in the green fields. Come, open thy womb, for this lamb has grown big.”

If the pain of childbirth is grievous to the pregnant (woman), it is, for the embryo, the breaking of (its) prison.

The pregnant woman weeps at childbirth, saying, “Where is the refuge?”—but the embryo laughs, saying, “Deliverance has appeared.”

Whatever mothers (bodies) there are under the sky—mineral, animal, or vegetable—

They are heedless, every one, of another's pain, except those persons that are discerning and perfect.

How should the man with a bushy beard know of his own house that which the man with a few hairs on his chin knows of (other) people's houses?

What the man of heart (the clairvoyant mystic) knows of your condition you do not know of your own condition, O uncle.