An Interpretation of Kahlil Gibran's Passage "On Houses"
Be quick to use your imagination to create a sanctuary of reality in which you abide and rest, and slow to separate yourselves from others with meaningless walls, divisions and fortresses.
For just as your soul yearns to return home and leave the obscurity of this godforsaken world, the unreal part of yourself that has wandered from God also seeks the comfort of unreality in this darkness. When the sun dips below the horizon and your soul sinks below the heart, the wanderer in you seeks the solace of familiar people and places to appease its desires.
The space in which you reside is not a man-made structure, but rather a vast universe comprised of every atom and electron that serves God, and therefore is that God.
This universe of reality in which your soul lives and breathes grows in the light and becomes dormant when the dark prevails. It is not a static structure, but rather a living, breathing connection of particles of light that desire that which God desires. Does not the God presence within you dream of another world? And when it dreams of its return to the land hidden behind the energy veil, does it not drift out of its perceived constraints and separateness, and rise to the summit of freedom?
If I could, I would pluck each man-made creation that divides men from each other and keeps them separate from God and, like a farmer, scatter them like seeds of magnificent cosmic potential throughout the fields and meadows of reality.
If only I could show you how your paved roads and well-worn paths, which you have made more and more sophisticated over the centuries, fall drastically short of the magnificent, God-ordained streets that have no name. Then you would seek each other through the bountiful vines of love that smell of the violets from God’s own heart — that fragrance of the alchemical process by which everything unreal is transformed into something magnificent — rather than the stench of death.
But reality is not fully anchored yet on the earth.
Fear caused by mankind’s separation from God has caused us to bind together too closely for centuries and become entangled and enmeshed, furthering distancing us from God and creating even greater fear.
The fear caused by this separation from God will last a little longer.
This binding and subsequent blinding of mankind, which was created through our attraction to “otherhood” and our senseless pledge to fight each other, will keep our souls separate from the fields of God's reality for a little while longer.
Tell me, people of the fictitious place you call home, what do you own in your fictitious houses?
What real treasures do you hoard and protect with locked doors?
Do you guard the peace that surpasses all understanding, the desire to be reunited in God's oneness, or the power of contentment, which dissolves both craving and aversion?
Do you own the memory of unity or the glimmering arches that connect your God presence, shipwrecked on the shores of unreality, to the twinkling shores of reality?
Do you guard the process by which your soul flows into the river of life and reunites with that from which it comes?
Do you hoard the true beauty of the mother of the world, which extends from the earth to the heavens?
Tell me, beloved, do you have these things in the man-made dwellings, limitations and constraints you call home?
Or do you only hide comfort and the lust for comfort in your house?
The lust for comfort is like a calculating and charming creature you first allow in and entertain as a guest. Soon it offers to carry your burden and convinces you to let it help by becoming a host to those it invites in and entertains. It becomes a creature on which a dark and parasitic energy lives and, before you know it, this creature — this lust for comfort — has enslaved and imprisoned you.
Yes, the lust for comfort trains you, as a brutal animal trainer tames a lion. With whips and hooks it turns the desires of your soul into lifeless puppets that it alone animates, guides and controls.
It lures you in with gentle, seductive, enticing hands but has a heart as dead and hard as iron.
As if a crafty serpent singing a babe to sleep with a forked tongue, it mesmerizes you into a hypnotic coma and stands guard over your stagnant vessel while mocking the human body that would otherwise be a divine being, an emissary of love.
It laughs with scornful joy at the true power of the gifts of God you would otherwise wield, carefully placing your divine gifts in the fluffy down of thistle seeds — those fuzzy parachutes that enable thistle seeds to blow in the wind and plant new thistles far and wide.
Truly the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul and then walks into its funeral with a blood-drunk, Cheshire grin.
But those of you who receive the kingdom of God like a little child, who accept your role as a citizen of cosmos and are weary of your dis-empowered, dormant condition — you will not be trapped or enslaved by this holograph of unreality.
The place of light in which you abide and find your rest shall not be a millstone around your neck, like the houses of men, but rather the mast that guides your vessel home.
It shall not be the sticky, oozing fluid that congeals over a wound, but rather a miraculous guard that vigilantly stands watch over your God vision.
You will not fold your angelic wings to fit through the passages that separate men, or shrink to avoid hitting your limitless height on a man-made boundary.
You will not be afraid to expand into the oneness for fear your expansion will cause the walls of your human vessel to break and collapse, causing the contents of your pride and shame to spill before both men and God.
You will not abide in caves of death made by the lifeless, who seek to enslave the citizens of cosmos and steal their light by tricking them into “living” and hiding in the dark.
Although your real house, which is your larger body, is magnificent and glorious, it will not hide your shame or protect the prized possessions of your pride. Nor will it keep safe your attractions and repulsions, your desires to have and have not, or your efforts to have pleasure and resist sacrifice.
The God presence within you is boundless. It lives eternally in the mansion of the light, whose door is the promise of a new day and whose windows are the songs and stillness that comfort you in your darkest hours, reassuring you of the warmth of being at home in a cosmos, even on a cold winter’s night.
