[This] mirror reminds me of a story I once heard about a Persian dervish.
They say that a dervish arrived at a temple and asked the doorman, “What kind of place is this?”
The doorman answered: “This is a place where you must leave envy, lust, greed, anger, hostility, meanness, and the like behind to enter.“
To this, the dervish said, “If I were able to put all these negative traits behind, why would I need to enter this place? I need a place where I can carry in my impurities, and emerge without them.“
Alireza Taghdarreh, Light and Language in Thoreau and Rumi
