It’s interesting that if you talk to anyone who has had a spiritual vision and you ask them what triggered it, very frequently you’ll hear the response that it was a song they heard or a poem they read or some little verse that came to them from their childhood. In many ways, poetry is, indeed, the language of the soul.

There are many ways of exploring reality—the first of these being the eyes of the flesh. These eyes are the sensory apparatus through which we explore the world of material reality. If I want to know, for example, if there are craters on the Moon, I use the eyes of the flesh. There’s a deeper way of exploring reality and that’s through the eyes of the mind. If I want to understand the theorem of Pythagoras, I have to know Euclidean geometry. If I want to understand quantum physics, I have to use the eyes of the mind and participate in the thought experiments of Einstein and his colleagues. But there is an even deeper level of exploring reality, and that is through the eyes of the soul.

Definitely, poetry springs from the eyes of the soul. Poetry is illumination, insight, inner vision, epiphany, and at the same time it is the inspired expression of that illumination. If you want to trigger what I’m coming to understand as the great response—just read a great poem. You’ll see that it will act almost as a little button on that holographic template inside you which contains the knowing of everything that has ever existed in the universe.

I was brought up with the poetry of Rumi and the poetry of Tagore. I remember reading a long time ago something that Rumi said—the most important thing you can have in your life is passion. You have to learn to become a passionate lover of life. If you can be a passionate lover of life, you will be a lover at death; you will be a lover in the tomb; you will be a lover at the resurrection or in paradise. You’ll be a passionate lover forever. If you don’t become a passionate lover, then don’t count your life as having been lived. At the day of reckoning, it will not be counted.

Another time Rumi said, “I am so mad with love that mad men have to stop me and say, ‘Be still.’” For words like these, I have felt a deep debt of gratitude to the great poet Rumi. When he was asked for the secret that inspired his poetry, Rumi said, “I have tried caution. I have tried forethought, From now on I will make myself mad.” He was describing total surrender to the realm of the soul. Beyond the body and mind is a realm of awareness that is both very real and very mysterious. That awareness is you, the timeless presence that is reading these words. That presence is able to read and be inspired by poetry.