The Prophet summary

Almustafa now turns to joy and sorrow. Rather than divide these emotions, the prophet counsels people to view them as intertwined and inseparable. No life can be without them, and they can’t be without each other. He says, “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” In this way, knowing immense sadness helps you understand and experience true happiness.

A resident of Orphalese then approaches and begs the sage to speak about pain. Pain comes, Almustafa says, from a “breaking of the shell.” This shell contained a spiritual truth which was hidden or ignored. 

Next, our oracle moves on to the subject of houses. He understands that dwellings and cities are necessary parts of human existence – but he appeals to the citizens of Orphalese not to lose a spiritual connection with the forests and meadows. 

Almustafa longs for a world where the valleys are our streets, and the rows of vineyards are our alleyways. He wishes that humans would “come with the fragrance of the earth in [our] garments” – and warns that we risk losing our spiritual relationship with the natural world. 

Our spiritual guide is not a fan of laws – the human-made ones, anyway. Comparing the legal system to children building and breaking sandcastles, he says that we make and break laws on a whim. 

First, we should seek freedom from the laws we’ve created by ignoring them – obeying only the responsibility to harm no one and to love all living creatures. In doing so, we can find spiritual happiness.

The oracle goes on to speak about two things often set in opposition to each other: reason and emotion. 

Rather than seeing these things as eternally at war within our souls, we should learn to view them as being equally vital to what makes us human. In truth, they exist in harmony, each one completing the other.

We now arrive at some profound meditations on friendship. This is a critical subject for the prophet, because it refers back to his emphasis on love.

For Almustafa, friendship is a spiritual connection of two hearts and souls. Friends nourish us by freely sharing love, joy, comfort, and peace, and by creating an atmosphere of trust where we can share ideas.

For a sage so in touch with the spiritual dimensions of life, who privileges silence and nature over talking and cities, it might be a surprise to learn that Almustafa encourages pleasure.

Pleasure, he teaches, is one of the great gifts of life; we should look back on moments of pleasure with fondness, not regret. We shouldn’t deny ourselves pleasure because we’re concerned that we will harm our spiritual health – in fact, the opposite is true. If we deny ourselves pleasure, a desire builds up inside us, causing pressure and pain that look for an escape.

To end, let’s explore two of Almustafa’s most eternal subjects: time and death.

We humans, he says, have a strange obsession with measuring, dividing, and controlling time – but this distorts the reality of what time really is. The soul in us, the essence of life itself, is timeless. Since our soul is the most vital part of our being, we as a whole are timeless and eternal. And if we look deep enough, we can feel this eternity within us.