(Rumi)nations: Reading the Renowned Sufi Poet in a Secular Age
Considered worldwide as a poet of the soul and spiritual wisdom, Jalalu’ddin Rumi painted beautiful, bountiful images of divine light and love that have transcended religious, national and language barriers through centuries. His treasuries of wisdom have been widely translated, and he was the US’ best-selling poet a mere eight hundred years since his writing, in 2014.
Rumi’s moving love poetry first captivated me at the green age of fifteen with its passion and professions of infinite devotion to unidentified lovers, but equally common themes in his works are that of God and spiritual contemplation. Particularly adhering to Sufism, the inward-looking and mystical dimension of Islam, many of Rumi’s poems explore the notion of oneness within the universe, between all beings and in all of life. This is particularly pertinent in the poems ‘On Separation and Words’ and ‘The Friend who Said “I”’ which I will explore.
I was a proclaimed atheist throughout my teenage years, and no more religious now than I was then (though more spiritual), so some of his poetic subjects might have been lost on someone like me. Yet rediscovering Rumi during a recent two-week home isolation period (a member of my household tested corona-positive) marked a tangible shift in my perspective. With nowhere else to turn but inwards, his words resonated deeply with me, and spoke volumes of our ability to liberate ourselves from the confines of an immediate situation through mere self-reflection.
Rumi’s poetry reminds us of our transcendental, pure nature as consciousness. Serene and simple glimpses of the natural world in his poems hark upon metaphysical ideas of oneness between all beings, and resonate with even those of us whose beliefs differ to those which informed the Sufi mystic’s graceful poetic voice.
‘On Separation and Words’
In this moving depiction of the power of listening, Rumi likens us to reeds, who speak of us as ‘lost friends’. ‘Listen to the reeds swaying apart’ he says, for
At birth, you were cut from your bed,
crying and grasping in separation.
Everyone listens, knowing your song.
[...] We are all the same… longing to find our way back;
Back to the one, back to the only one
Rumi paints a tender image of our origins in oneness, whether this be referred to by some as God, the Universe, source, or any other names. In the world of this poem, we are souls born from the same essential life-force that makes up both the natural world and our human experience.
The speaker presents an alternate way of listening that is, paradoxically, comparable to deafness: ‘The sensible are deaf; though the mindless listen, the tongue wags only for the ear.’ Often imbued with riddles like these, Rumi’s poems present deep philosophical stances in deceptively simple ways. There is an inner state of silence and perception, the poem suggests, that allows a type of ‘listening’ which incites reflection, and enables the realisation of our nature as one with all in existence, even the reeds.
If ‘the tongue wags only for the ear’, then listening through the ears, a mere physical sense, only reinforces the ‘veil’ created by ‘danger and delight’, and ‘satyr and repletion’, while ‘the reed engorges and depletes’ these. So ‘let these loathsome days go by, who cares?’ is the speaker’s retort to our worldly preoccupations, such as words and other ‘veils’ perceived by the immediate senses. Listen from an inner place to the sound of the reeds, who remind us of our oneness with all.
Stay in the moment, that holy moment,
your only moment, until the next -- holier still.
We are thirsty fish in His blissful water,
like the starving buried in the feast of His sustenance.
[...] So young our understanding, so mature
our surrounding -- say less, learn more, depart.
We don’t need to believe in God to recognise the impermeable message of this poignant stanza: we only have to drop into the infinite stillness of each moment, in order to realise the bounty of nature, and of the immediate realities already around us, so it suggests. The pervading messages of peace, oneness, abundance and life, provide a way of seeing the world that liberates readers from the suffering we experience from its vices; of words and separation.
The Friend who Said “I”
In this short prosaic piece too, Rumi illustrates the notion of oneness, but more particularly, of nonduality. Judith Blackstone best provides a general description of the word, which is also applicable in a Sufi context:
Nondual realization is the lived experience of oneself as made of very subtle, unified consciousness… “made of” [meaning] that every bit of one’s body - all the way through the internal space of oneself - is experienced as subtle, unified consciousness. At the same time, everything outside of oneself is also experienced as made of this same one consciousness.
‘A man came knocking at the door of his friend, “Who are you?” the friend asked from within’ - so starts this poem, already framing its events as a metaphor for self-reflection.
“It is I who come to your door,” said the man,
“Go away, not now, this isn’t the time,
No place exists here for the raw.”
The door here is as much a door to a house as it is a door to depths beyond the mind; when the friend who said “I” - a representation of the egoic self - returns after years of traveling and after ‘his mind and heart were burned by the world’, true awareness lets him in to find the hidden, essential truth behind the door of oneness.
“Who’s there at my door? his friend asked.
“Is it you, my closest of hearts?”
“No, it’s you at the door, not I anymore.” “Then come inside my house, for here I can tell,
There’s little or no room for two.”
The literal merging of the friend and the man suggested by the poem’s ending illustrates both the recognition between two people of their essential shared oneness, as well as an allegory of the practice of self-reflection over time and of transcending the egoic ‘I’.
Author Charles Taylor proposed that we were in a secular age in his 2007 book (titled precisely ‘A Secular Age’), and asked: ‘why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in say, 1500 in our western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?’
What Rumi’s poetry and the resulting introspection and self-enquiry it inspired made me consider, was that perhaps it isn’t our disbelief in God as we have understood the figure through religious descriptions, that needs remedying, but precisely this understanding of God itself. Although Rumi does frequently refer to God in an Islamic, traditional monotheistic sense, he succeeds in bringing readers together through his poetry by going beyond the doctrinal and institutional definitions of him, and offering an inward-looking perspective on the nature of God as the consciousness that pervades us all.
Sources:
The Illustrated Rumi, translated by Philip Dunn, Mannuela Dunn Mascetti, and R. A. Nicholson (New York: HarperOne, 2000).
Nondual Realization and the Personal Self by Judith Blackstone. International Associatioin of Sufism, 2010.
Image Credit:
Thumbnail: Power of Positivity, Photography by Graiden Berger