“Thy will be done, O my Lord and Master! Thy will be done, O my purpose and meaning! O essence of my being, O goal of my desire, O my speech and my hints and my gestures! O all of my all, O my hearing and my sight, O my whole and my element and my particles!” The enraptured Sūfī who has passed beyond the illusion of subject and object and broken through to the Oneness can either deny that he is anything or affirm that he is all things. As an example of ‘the negative way,’ take the opening lines of an ode by Jalāluddīn which I have rendered into verse, imitating the metrical form of the Persian as closely as the genius of our language will permit: “Lo, for I to myself am unknown, now in God’s name what must I do? I adore not the Cross nor the Crescent, I am not a Giaour nor a Jew. East nor West, land nor sea is my home, I have kin nor with angel nor gnome, I am wrought not of fire nor of foam, I am shaped not of dust nor of dew. I was born not in China afar, not in Saqsīn and not in Bulghār; Not in India, where five rivers are, nor ʿIrāq nor Khorāsān I grew. Not in this world nor that world I dwell, not in Paradise, neither in Hell; Not from Eden and Rizwān I fell, not from Adam my lineage I drew. In a place beyond uttermost Place, in a tract without shadow of trace, Soul and body transcending I live in the soul of my Loved One anew!” The following poem, also by Jalāluddīn, expresses the positive aspect of the cosmic consciousness: “If there be any lover in the world, O Moslems, ’tis I. If there be any believer, infidel, or Christian hermit, ’tis I. The wine-dregs, the cupbearer, the minstrel, the harp, and the music, The beloved, the candle, the drink and the joy of the drunken--’tis I. The two-and-seventy creeds and sects in the world Do not really exist: I swear by God that every creed and sect--’tis I. Earth and air and water and fire--knowest thou what they are? Earth and air and water and fire, nay, body and soul too--’tis I. Truth and falsehood, good and evil, ease and difficulty from first to last, Knowledge and learning and asceticism and piety and faith--’tis I. The fire of Hell, be assured, with its flaming limbos, Yes, and Paradise and Eden and the Houris--’tis I. This earth and heaven with all that they hold, Angels, Peris, Genies, and Mankind--’tis I.” What Jalāluddīn utters in a moment of ecstatic vision Henry More describes as a past experience: “How lovely” (he says), “how magnificent a state is the soul of man in, when the life of God inactuating her shoots her along with Himself through heaven and earth; makes her unite with, and after a sort feel herself animate, the whole world. He that is here looks upon all things as One, and on himself, if he can then mind himself, as a part of the Whole.”