This original “Heart’s Work” painting by Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (Ral.), “The Rocky Mountain of the Heart,” was completed on January 28, 1980, and it illustrates the stone-hearted qualities we have grown within ourselves; this mountain is harder than the hardest mountain in creation, and is layered with arrogance, selfishness, religious differences, religious arrogance, conceit, and desire for name, fame, and titles. This hard heart is unmelting and shows no compassion for other lives.
The animals that surround this rocky mountain are representative of the animal qualities that have entered the hearts of mankind. All these animals and even the shrubs and bushes illustrate the distractions that we need to clear from within ourselves. We must then build a place of worship to remember God.
The seven colors in the painting represent the seven states of consciousness within mankind: feeling, awareness, intellect, judgment, wisdom, divine analytic wisdom, and divine luminous wisdom. The fish represent creation, and the swan represents subtle wisdom, the perfection that accepts only purity.
This “Rocky Mountain of the Heart” has to be split open and blasted away, and in its place the house of God’s qualities must be built within our own hearts and within our own lives.
(Sources: From a discourse by M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (Ral.) given on January 28, 1980 and from The Tree That Fell to the West: Autobiography of a Sufi, Chapter Seven, “The Rocky Mountain,” December 22, 1983.)
Full Color Poster
Size 22 3/4″ x 16 3/4″
