Rough Metaphors

From Chapter 16: ROUGH METAPHORS
Book III, Verses 3669-3685
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Consider this open secret, so you may know Noah and not know him.  
The issue of the annihilation and survival of the dervish.  
The speaker said there is no dervish in the world, and if there is, that is not the true dervish.  
He exists in the essence of his being, but his attributes have vanished in the attributes of the divine.  
Like a candle flame before the sun, it is not, yet it is, in the reckoning.  
His essence exists, so if you place cotton, it burns from that spark.  
It does not exist, it gives you no light, the sun has annihilated it.  
In two hundred pounds of honey, one ounce of vinegar, when you mix it and it dissolves in it.  
The taste of vinegar does not exist when you taste it, yet the ounce is more when you weigh it.  
Before a lion, the deer becomes unconscious, its existence is veiled in his existence.  
This is the flawed reasoning of those who work for the Lord; the boiling of love is not from a lack of manners.  
The pulse of the lover leaps without manners, placing himself in the hand of the king.  
There is no one more ill-mannered in the world, yet no one more well-mannered in secret.  
Understand the harmony of these two opposites, with manners and without manners, O chosen one.  
He is ill-mannered when you look outwardly, for his claim of love is a rivalry.  
When you look inwardly, where is the claim? He and the claim are before the sovereign of annihilation.  
Zayd is dead if he is the doer, but he is not the doer, for he is idle.

Barks Interpretation

Someone said, “there is no dervish, or if there is a dervish, that dervish is not there.”