No love is more consuming and passionate than that one has for God. And nothing is more beautiful than that love when it is expressed as poetry.
In The Soul in Love, Deepak Chopra presents us with five great writers whose lives span seven centuries: Rumi, the sublime Persian poet who sang out his verses in ecstatic longing for God. Mirabai, an Indian princess who walked away from her life of privilege to be closer to her Dark Lord. Kabir, born to a lowly family of weavers in India, only to rise to the heights of wisdom and song. Hafiz, an Islamic master who reveled in the joys of the flesh as a way to the soul. And Tagore, the celebrated modern Indian writer who first made the West aware of the richness of Eastern devotional poetry.
Returning to the theme that inspired The Love Poems of Rumi and On the Shores of Eternity, Deepak Chopra gives us a rapturous experience of human passion, inspired by the soul's yearning for the sacred source
of love.
"Immortal love doesn't need poetry. However, it is our good fortune that some of the God-intoxicated have written words that permit access into their ecstatic world. Particularly in the East, in that exotically woven
belt of lands that stretches from Arabia to the Indian subcontinent, poets and saints are never far apart.
In this collection I have gathered a few of the most revered, beginning in the medieval period and extending to this century. The name of Rumi has gathered much luster recently, but the others -- Kabir, Hafiz, Tagore, and Mirabai -- deserve just as much recognition. In their own cultures they stand as beacons of inspiration, largely because the common people have taken them into their hearts andcontinue joyfully to sing their words to this very day.