What is today’s phantasy?

Yes—but I would make your interpretation a little more precise. Rumi is doing something deeper than saying, “everyone wakes up with an obsession for the day.”

The key is the sequence:

Guarded Tablet → intellect reads → phantasy/desire arises → person acts → people mistake their different pursuits for objective truth.

1. The “morning lesson” is a metaphor for how destiny becomes psychologically operative

When Rumi says:

“Like the Angel, the intellect receives (reads) every morning its daily lesson from the Guarded Tablet.”

he is comparing the individual intellect to Gabriel receiving the divine decree from the Lawḥ Maḥfūẓ (the Guarded/Preserved Tablet).

But there is an important distinction. The Tablet is not simply a heavenly notebook containing a list of today’s errands. It represents the divine ordering/decree underlying manifested existence.

Rumi’s striking image is that the intellect somehow reads what has been inscribed there, and then the person experiences that decree as his own thoughts, desires, inclinations and activities.

So your phrase “takes up an obsession for the day” catches something real in the passage, but “obsession” is somewhat stronger than Rumi’s Persian.

2. The crucial word is

khayāl

— خیال

The repeated word here is khayāl, usually translated as:

• imagination

• phantasy

• image

• mental conception

• fancy

This is extremely important because Rumi is not simply talking about rational thought.

A khayāl is an image or conception that captures the mind and makes something appear desirable or significant.

Thus:

• one man imagines wealth → he goes toward the mountains;

• another imagines pearls → he goes toward the sea;

• another imagines religious attainment → he enters the church;

• another imagines profit → he becomes a farmer/merchant;

• one imagines destruction → he becomes a waylayer;

• another imagines healing → he becomes a physician/healer.

The external diversity of human lives is generated by differences in the inner images that possess the mind.

That’s why Rumi concludes:

“Since the gibla (the true object) of the soul has been hidden, every one has turned his face to a different quarter.”

That is really the punch line.

3. He isn’t necessarily condemning all these activities

This is an important subtlety.

Rumi isn’t saying:

“Pearl diving is bad, farming is bad, religious practice is bad, seeking wealth is bad.”

Rather, he is asking:

What is directing the person toward these things?

Two people can perform outwardly respectable actions while being inwardly governed by completely different khayāls.

One person may seek religion because of an image of status or reward. Another may seek wealth because of an image of security. Another may seek knowledge because of an image of superiority.

The external action doesn’t reveal the ultimate qibla of the soul.

4. Why does Rumi bring in the intellect?

This is perhaps the most interesting part.

The intellect thinks it is the reader, but it doesn’t necessarily understand the source of what it reads.

Rumi says God:

“made the intellect a reader of those figured characters, that thereby He might put an end to its contrivances.”

In other words, the intellect’s elaborate calculations and plans are not ultimately autonomous.

The intellect wakes up and says:

“Today I am going to accomplish X.”

But Rumi asks us to look one level deeper:

“Where did the desire for X come from?”

Why does this person desperately want pearls while another desperately wants gold, another spiritual attainment, another fame, another conquest, another sex, another knowledge?

Each has a different inner image.

And once that image captures the imagination, the intellect becomes extraordinarily clever at pursuing it.

That is very close to something you have noticed in your own reading of Rumi: the intellect can become the servant of a prior orientation rather than the independent master of the person.

5. “Everyone is infatuated with some phantasy”

This is the most psychologically recognizable line in your passage.

Rumi essentially says:

Every person is digging somewhere for a buried treasure.

That’s a wonderful image.

The treasure may be:

• money

• recognition

• pleasure

• knowledge

• religious achievement

• mystical experience

• power

• security

• love

• liberation

And because each person has a different conception of what the treasure is, everyone digs in a different place.

Then they look at someone else and say:

“What on earth is he doing?”

And the other person looks back and says essentially the same thing.

“Every taster denies the other (whose taste is different).”

That is because each person is experiencing the world through his own taste.

6. So what does “daily lesson” mean?

I would interpret it less as:

“God gives every person a new obsession every morning.”

and more as:

“The individual continually receives an inner configuration of perception, inclination and circumstance from the deeper divine order, and then the intellect interprets and pursues it as its own meaningful reality.”

The “morning” emphasizes continual renewal.

Every day consciousness is freshly configured.

You wake up and there is already a world of significance:

“This matters.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I want this.”

“I need to do that.”

“That person is important.”

“This problem must be solved.”

Rumi is asking: Where did that entire structure of significance come from?

7. And then comes the mystical turn

The final statement about the qibla/gibla is decisive:

“Since the gibla of the soul has been hidden, every one has turned his face to a different quarter.”

The problem isn’t merely that people have different interests.

The deeper problem is that the soul’s true orientation has become concealed.

Consequently, the imagination supplies substitute objects.

So the chain can be represented:

True object of the soul hidden

↓

khayāl / imagination produces an apparent object

↓

desire attaches to it

↓

intellect calculates how to obtain it

↓

action follows

↓

person thinks his particular pursuit is reality

↓

he wonders why everyone else is pursuing something different

That is much more radical than ordinary advice about “don’t become obsessed.”

8. This also explains your phrase “obsessed with one thing or another”

I think you are onto an important psychological dimension of Rumi.

For Rumi, ordinary human consciousness tends toward attachment to an object constructed or presented by imagination.

One person is possessed by wealth; another by religious practice; another by romance; another by intellectual knowledge; another by mystical experience.

The objects differ, but the structure of captivity can be the same.

And that is why Rumi can put apparently opposite people into one category.

The question isn’t:

“What are you pursuing?”

It is:

“What has captured your imagination, and therefore governs your intellect and action?”

That distinction is very close to the heart of this passage.

One further nuance about the Guarded Tablet

I would also resist reading the passage as strict fatalism.

Rumi is not necessarily saying:

“Everything you desire today was mechanically predetermined, therefore you have no responsibility.”

The Tablet imagery belongs to a much larger Islamic metaphysical framework concerning divine knowledge and decree. Rumi is using it to undermine the ego’s assumption that “I, independently, am the author of my entire mental world.”

The paradox is:

You experience yourself as the chooser, while Rumi directs your attention backward toward the source of the very desires from which your choices arise.

And then, implicitly, the spiritual question becomes:

Can the soul cease being governed by the multitude of imagined objects and recover its true qibla?

That, I think, is where these verses are heading.

If you want, we can go line by line through the Persian of 315–330, especially the exact meanings of khayāl, lawḥ maḥfūẓ, ʿaql, nafs, and qibla, because the English translation “phantasy” makes Rumi’s argument sound more psychological—and perhaps less metaphysical—than the Persian actually is.