M1:1580 — عاشق کلست و خود کلست او / عاشق خویشست و عشق خویش‌جو

This couplet is the philosophical peak of a passionate digression on the nature of divine love. Rumi has just described a paradoxical lover who embraces both God's severity (qahr) and grace (luṭf), like a nightingale that eats thorns along with the roses. He now explains the metaphysical reality behind this state.

The lover, by annihilating their partial, individual self in the divine, becomes a manifestation of the Whole (kull). They are no longer a separate entity loving a distant God; they are the Whole Itself. From this perspective, the act of loving is no longer directed outward from a small self to a great Other. Instead, it is the universal Self loving its own manifestation, a love that seeks and finds its own essence. The distinction between lover, beloved, and love collapses into a single, unified reality.

This concept is central to the Sufi doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd (the Unity of Being). The lover's journey culminates not in possessing the Beloved, but in realizing that their own true identity is the Beloved. Their seeking is, in the end, the Whole's own pull towards Itself.