The following brief passage is taken from the tenth of Fakhruddin Iraqi’s Divine Flashes. For more about this 13th century Persian Sufi, see this earlier post.

When the lover contemplates the Beloved’s beauty in form’s mirror, pain and pleasure are born, grief and joy are manifest, fear and hope come together, contraction and expansion make their rounds. But when he strips off the robes of form and dives into Unity’s All-embracing Ocean, he knows nothing of torment or bliss, expectation or dread, fear or hope, for these depend on past and future, and he now drowns in a sea where Time is abolished, where all is Now upon Now.

Translation William C. Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson