Discourses of Rumi

FIHI MA FIHI V 227is sweet, whose herbs are wholesome, whose peopleare healthy. Do you desire to move to thatother farm and drink the sweet water that wouldrid you of all diseases and ailments? No, you say,“We found this farm with its salt water and its ailments,and we hold on to what we found.”God forbid! This is not the action or the wordsof an intelligent person possessed of sound senses.God gave you an intelligence of your own separatefrom your parents’ intelligence, a sight ofyour own other than your father’s sight, a discriminationof your own. Why do you nullifyyour sight and your intelligence, following anintelligence that will mislead and destroy you?Yutash—his father was a cobbler. Yet when heattained the Sultan’s presence, learning the mannerof kings and how to be Master of the Swordand the Sultan conferred on him the highest rank,he never said, “I found my father a cobbler, so Ido not want this post. Give me, O Sultan, a shopin the market so I can practice cobbling.” Indeed,even a dog, for all its baseness, once it has learnedto become a hunter for the Sultan, forgets how itwas raised, skulking in rubbish heaps and waste-