This implies a Creator on whom we are utterly dependent, and I hear a sense of aching vulnerability in this word “createdness”. But the prime realisation on discovering the soul, Shams tells us, is not our own immortality, nor our inner strength and beauty, but the stark realisation of our “createdness”. Ramadan is an opportunity to be more aware of our bodies, their appetites and desires, thirsts and hungers, and, in so doing, to possibly pass beyond them to our souls. “If you pass beyond the body and reach the soul, then you will have reached ‘createdness’”.
Shams offers us a vision of “The Palace of the Ancient One”. And Shams is clear that it is not “desire” in the sense of our ego’s desire to be enlightened and exalted it is something much deeper, closer to the earth, more embodied, humble, and aware. Very far from being “neediness”, it might even be called “Self-reliance” with a capital “S”. I sense that such “poor ones” must be aware of this need not merely on an intellectual level (which many of us could claim), but at the level of the heart. It is a deep sense of our need for, and utter dependency on, God, to whom everything belongs and in whom everything is sourced. The “poor ones” mentioned above are those who are aware of their own existential poverty, who are aware that they can claim nothing as their own.
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