Don't search for heaven and hell in the future. Both are now present. Whenever we manage to love without expectations, calculations, negotiations, we are indeed in heaven. Whenever we fight, hate, we are in hell.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that our emotional experiences of heaven and hell are determined by our actions in the present.
Shams Tabrizi's quote encourages us to understand that both joy and suffering are not distant concepts or reserved for the future, but are feelings we can access in our daily lives. By loving unconditionally and without expectations, we experience a state of bliss akin to 'heaven.' In contrast, feelings of hate and conflict lead us into a state of distress, reflective of 'hell.' Thus, our choices in how we interact with others shape our current reality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of love in personal relationships.
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexplicably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remained closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied.
If you are insulted, if you are accused, if they gossip about you, don't say anything bad. Don't be the one who sees the shame, be the one who corrects it.
Be sure that someday you'll praise and thank God for your unanswered prayers that once you had wept for them.
Remove all the walls and curtains so you can get closer and purely love. Have principles but do not use them to exclude or to judge the others. Stay far from idols, specially from those you made from your own principles. Have a powerful faith, but do not play the powerful.
You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover.
I can see he's not in your good books,' said the messenger. 'No, and if he were I would burn my library.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.
The blacklist was a time of evil...no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil...[Looking] back on this time...it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims.
I have no religion,’ says Borneau, ‘but I respect the religion of others. Religion is sacred.’ Why this privilege, this immunity?... A believer creates God in his own image; if he is ugly, his God will be morally ugly. Why should moral ugliness be respectable?
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
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