The pain of love is the dynamite that breaks up the heart, even if it be as hard as a rock.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
The effect of love is pain. The love that has no pain is no love. The lover who has not gone through the agonies of love is not a lover, and claims love falsely. … Rumi describes six signs of the lover: deep sigh, mild expression, moist eyes, eating little, speaking little, sleeping little, which all show the sign of pain in love. Hafiz says, ‘All bliss in my life has been the outcome of unceasing tears and continual sighs through the heart of night.’
The sorrow of the lover is continual, in the presence and in the absence of the beloved: in the presence for fear of the absence, and in absence in longing for the presence. According to the mystical view the pain of love is the dynamite that breaks up the heart, even if it be as hard as a rock. When this hardness that covers the light within is broken through, the streams of all bliss come forth as springs from the mountains.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
The natural condition of the heart is to be soft, ever in a state of living expansion and contraction. When the breath is confined to the region of gross vibrations which are beneath the mind-mesh, there are no finer vibrations which can reach the heart, which slowly hardens like cooling rock. Then it ceases to be pliable and may be brittle like hardened rubber. Nevertheless it is never entirely dead.
If the heart is called into action after it has lost its mobility, it will suffer pain even as a muscle long in disuse will suffer pain when it resumes activity. But the only energy that can touch the heart is love, and this often comes in a shock, surprise or catastrophe. Be it ever so hard, there is always the possibility of the heart awakening, and sometimes people who have fallen very low will be shocked into great activity by a disaster. This would not be necessary if the person had lived a holy life.
The kindlier person sometimes suffers pain without this deeper experience, but arrives much sooner at the state when the ordinary disturbances of life no longer cause hurt. The indifference of the sage, far from showing absence of heart activity conceals the sage’s greatness of heart and wisdom.