Change the World by Changing Me

The Sufi Bayazid says this about himself:

I was a revolutionary when I was young and all my prayer to God was: ‘Lord, give me the energy to change the world.’  

As I approached middle age and realised that half my life was gone without my changing a single soul, I changed my prayer to: ‘Lord, give me the grace to change all those who come in contact with me. Just my family and friends, and I shall be content.’  

Now that I am an old man and my days are numbered, my one prayer is: ‘Lord, give me the grace to change myself.’ If I had prayed for this right from the start I should not have wasted my life.

 SOURCE : “THE SONG OF THE BIRD” ANTHONY DE MELLO, S.J. (ANAND: GUJARAT SAHITYA PRAKASH), 1987

Seven Stages of Love

Arabic literature and sufi traditions describes seven stages of love 

Seven Stages of Love

1. Attraction: The first stage of love where eyes meet,spark is initiated and the journey of love begins.
2. Attachment : The second stage starts with fondness where a feeling of strong connection comes.
3. Love: The most blissful of all stages. Here you started feeling at top of the world unaware of other things in life just lost in thoughts of your beloved.
4. Trust/Reverence : This stage initiates the process in love which ultimately leads to death. Here one started trusting someone more than anything and anyone. After this there is no turning back in love.
5. Worship : In this stage love reaches at the extend of worshipping the beloved where nothing can be wrong with the object of worship.Here love not ends even after a denial by the beloved instead leads to the next stage of love.
6. Madness : In this stage one finds his own identity incomplete without beloved thus his urge to have love reaches to the level of obsession and madness. 
7. Death : The final stage of love now the self identity is completely lost. Here the existence of lover depends on the existence of beloved.

We can link all this stages of love with a person's quest to find god. One's mere attraction towards god leads him to the level of love where is own identity becomes the identity of his loved god. This attaches this concept of love to sufi traditions.

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