Coleman Barks - A Children's Game lyrics

Listen to the poet Sanai, who lived secluded: "Don't wander out on the road in your ecstasy. Sleep in the tavern." When a drunk strays out to the street, children make fun of him. He falls down in the mud. He takes any and every road. The children follow, not knowing the taste of wine, or how his drunkenness feels. All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire. God said, "The world is a play, a children's game, and you are the children." God speaks the truth. If you haven't left the child's play, how can you be an adult? Without purity of spirit, if you're still in the middle of lust and greed and other wantings, you're like children playing at s**ual intercourse. They wrestle and rub together, but it's not s**! The same with the fightings of mankind. It's a squabble with play-swords. No purpose, totally futile. Like kids on hobby horses, soldiers claim to be riding Boraq, Muhammad's night-horse, or Duldul, his mule. Your actions mean nothing, the s** and war that you do. You're holding part of your pants and prancing around, Dun-da-dun, dun-da-dun. Don't wait till you die to see this. Recognize that your imagination and your thinking and your sense perception are reed canes that children cut and pretend are horsies. The knowing of mystic lovers is different. The empirical, sensory, sciences are like a donkey loaded with books, or like the makeup woman's makeup. It washes off. But if you lift the baggage rightly, it will give you joy. Don't carry your knowledge-load for some selfish reason. Deny your desires and willfulness, and a real mount may appear under you. Don't be satisfied with the name of HU, with just words about it. Experience that breathing. From books and words come fantasy, and sometimes, from fantasy comes union.