Welcome to the Daily Quote, the podcast designed to kickstart your day in a positive way. I'm your host Andrew McGivern and this episode is brought to you by the Great News podcast and the link is right here in the show notes.
Today's quote comes from Rumi, 13th century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic, considered one of the greatest poetic geniuses and spiritual masters of all time.
From his Masnavi, he wrote:
”You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.”You know the phrase he's pushing back against. You are just a drop in the ocean. It's meant to be humbling, to place you in proportion to the vastness of the world, the cosmos, all of time and space. The scale of everything that exists beyond the edges of your individual life.
And there is something true in it. We are small. The universe is incomprehensibly large. By every measure of scale, one human life occupies an almost imperceptible fraction of everything that is.
Rumi accepts the image. And then he inverts the entire meaning of it.
You are not a drop lost in the ocean, an insignificant particle of something too vast to comprehend. You are the ocean itself, present in full within the drop.
This is the beating heart of Sufi mysticism, the belief that people's relationship to God, to the universe, and to each other is not one of separation but of intimate, total presence.
Think about what it means to carry an ocean inside you. Every capacity for compassion, creativity, courage, and connection you have ever witnessed in another human being, that capacity lives in you too, in some form, waiting for the conditions that call it forward.The drop doesn't need to become the ocean. It already is the ocean. The real question is whether you believe it.I remember getting a serious setback at work years ago. At first I was angry and frustrated. And then I said my little problem is nothing compared to all the suffering around the world. I guess I should look at it that way. And my manager said no… Don't try to reduce yourself and impact this situation has on your life.
And I thought about that and said yeah, you're right. Because it is easy to reduce your level of importance down to nothing when you look at the entire universe (infinity) and then add in unlimited parallel universes or dimensions.
And then add all of time and your problems get less smaller and less significant the wider your viewpoint. But the problem is it isn't just the problems it is everything to do with YOU that is reduced by thinking this way.And if you think about it, in economics the more scarce something is the more valuable it becomes.
So by making yourself so rare you are actually increasing your value. Remember you are unique, just like everyone else!You are not just a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.
Rumi's quote tells us to look deeper than the surface of the drop. To trust that what's inside is more than what appears from the outside. That the ocean isn't somewhere I'm trying to reach. It's what I already am, and what you already are, in whatever form this particular life has taken.So here's the question: Where in your life are you thinking your just a drop, when you are actually an ocean?Where are you making yourself small in your ambitions, your voice, your sense of what you're capable of in proportion to a vastness you don't yet recognize as your own?Because Rumi spent his entire life pointing at the same truth from every possible angle: what you are looking for is not out there. It is in here. All of it. Already.You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.
That's it for today. I'm Andrew McGivern and I'll see you in the next one with another Daily Quote.
