The Way of the Lover
Rumi is and always has been one of my favorite poets. His writing transcends religion and speaks of man's relationship to God as that of two lovers. His writing has transcended time and the barriers of ethnicity, congregation and race. Yes he was Muslim, but I believe Rumie honored the ACTUAL peace preached by the Quran, not the hate & violence. This sort of transcendent feeling about God is very needed with all the hate and divisiveness being spread nowadays. (no no, I am not about to sing Kumbaya... just sharing a favorite with you!)
If you haven't ever read him -- give Rumi a read.
Rumi: The Way of the Lover
by Kabir Helminski
HOW DID A MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC ASCETIC BECOME, IN the last 20 years, the most popular poet in America (and perhaps the world)? Who was this Rumi, honored by UNESCO, celebrated by Hollywood, quoted by Buddhists, and beloved by people who previously had never cared for poetry?
From the sublime to the ridiculous, Rumi has been viewed and used in many ways: His six-volume masterpiece, The Mathnawi, has been called the “Qur’an in Persian.” Even reactionary ayatollahs dare not pick a fight with Rumi, so great is the love for him in Iran to this day. I recall speaking with a former minister in the government of the late Shah of Iran, who, though a Marxist and an atheist, covered his heart when Rumi was mentioned and said, “Ah . . . he is our best.” And then there was the middle-aged literary celebrity who used Rumi’s quatrains to start conversations with pretty girls on the boulevards of Santa Barbara, and the literary soft-porn magazine editor who called me to order cases of Rumi’s quatrains as favors for new subscribers.
Yet his biography surprises people. Rumi was a devoted husband and father. He was thin from frequent fasting. He disciplined his soul with night vigils and endless prostrations. Even after Rumi left his academic chair and became the ecstatic poet we love, he made his modest living writing fatwas (legal opinions based on shariah, or Islamic law). One of his famous quatrains notes:
Even so, if there is anything like a Muslim Dalai Lama — that is, someone who is viewed almost universally as a man of God — it is Rumi. He recognized that one spiritual force moves behind all religions and, indeed, behind all human aspirations. People have different descriptions and names for it, but it is one.
What accounts for the endurance and passion of Rumi’s popularity? As a publisher of the new wave of Rumi translation, including Coleman Barks’ first four books, I follow the requests for permissions to quote and reprint Rumi poems, and I offer these two examples from among our top ten:
The above quatrain is a potent remedy for many people in our culture who live with an unnamed sense of shame yet few, if any, sacraments of atonement.
Coleman Barks intensifies the meaningfulness of these inspired translations by inserting concrete detail that is implied — but not stated — in the original. As we read these words, we feel that Rumi is a friend who would understand the struggles of our lives today. But these selections tell us less about Rumi and more about the needs (and neediness) of our current society, among which is the need for a soul-to-soul relationship, for heart dialogue.
ENTERING A CULTURE OF LOVE
IN THE LATE SIXTIES I BECAME A STUDENT of spiritual traditions, East and West, and practiced with Zen Buddhists, Raja Yogis, and some of Gurdjieff’s students. Sufism was the last of the great traditions I encountered. Having studied Latin and Sanskrit previously, I began to explore Persian through the poetry of Rumi, under the guidance of a remarkable woman who lived in a small town in New Hampshire. One thing led to another, and I eventually found myself traveling to Konya, Turkey, to be with my first Sufi mentor, Suleyman Hayati Dede. I quickly recognized that although I had been acquainted firsthand with various spiritual masters — masters of will, masters of knowledge, and masters of consciousness — in Dede, I met a genuine master of love, and — in Rumi’s tradition — I entered a culture of love. I experienced what it was to be loved, unsentimentally and unconditionally, through a man in his eighties.
Whatever my wife, Camille, and I experienced in those five years of regular visits to Konya, I can only say it felt like a process of being tuned. Dede took no credit for this great love; he always referred to “Hazrati Mevlana,” which is how Rumi is referred to in the tradition.
As we began to deepen in the teachings of Rumi, we found that Rumi took no credit and, instead, referred to his beloved mentor, Shams of Tabriz. Eventually, after we tracked down the hastily transcribed conversations of Shams (he wrote nothing himself), we found the seeds of what became a beautiful garden in Rumi. We also found that Shams took no credit himself and reserved his greatest admiration for the Prophet Muhammad. Finally, looking into the life of Muhammad, we were led into the universe of the Qur’an. I refer to it as a universe, because the experience of entering into its consciousness is like entering a landscape of gnosis where the Divine Intelligence directly addresses the human heart.
What the Qur’an is saying is that there is (and has been) only one God behind all religious traditions and revelations, even if human beings typically have distorted the simple message for their own purposes. It is all quite simple, really, and although human beings have the free will to bring some very bad karma upon themselves, the fundamental quality of the universes (note the plural) is overwhelming, breathtaking compassion and mercy. I was beginning to understand where Dede was coming from.
Each year, we returned, as if to remind ourselves that the tangible atmosphere of love was real. We lived for that. And gradually, too, we assimilated some of the knowledge of love that is found in Rumi’s teachings and in the primary sources of the tradition: the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet.
AWAKENED BY BEAUTY
IN THE SUFI UNIVERSE, BEAUTY IS A SIGNIFICANT PRESENCE, and it is beauty, in whatever form, that awakens love. Rumi’s own awakening took place in a scandalous relationship with Shams of Tabriz. The scandal was not that there was an erotic attraction (the evidence from much collateral material suggests that was very unlikely); the scandal was that in an adamantly monotheistic religious context, in which idolatry was the greatest sin, Shams virtually became Rumi’s God. Shams’ spiritual authority must have been unearthly, transcendent, and inimitable. Rumi sacrificed status, privilege, security, friendship, and family to give himself totally to this relationship.
Shams had searched the world for one human being who was capable of receiving his message. Rumi was, above all, the one who was capable of receiving it and passing it on to the world. They became like two divine mirrors, reflecting each other, inspiring each other to new levels of beauty and realization. If the cosmic drama of Jesus is about self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection, the Passion enacted by Rumi and Shams models the revelation of divinity in a relationship that deepens beyond the individualities of those in the relationship.
Rumi knew, deep in his heart, that the love he was experiencing was leading him back to the deepest level of himself and his own intimate connection with the divine.
In the less mature stages of love, we desire and want to possess the object of our love. Rumi and Shams gave themselves unequivocally to a spiritual relationship — not a relationship in which one ego fed and flattered another ego with unlimited attention and devotion but a relationship that would tear each down to his essence. Shams demanded of Rumi that he die in a thousand ways, for Shams knew the secret of love is in this dying.
The encounter of Rumi and Shams is something rare in human spiritual history — a fire that consumes everything but itself. In the cosmic drama lived by these two great, loving souls, these two greatest friends, there was no other conclusion than that Rumi would have to lose that friendship that had become the reason for his existence. And one day Shams disappeared, leaving only a few drops of blood on the threshold, probably murdered by some self-righteous thugs who thought they were doing God a favor. In a way, they were. And as the Qur’an says:
With Shams gone, the final veil was removed, and the sun (Shams) of Rumi’s own heart could be revealed. The love that had been awakened could now be realized as an attribute of Rumi’s own self. Rumi would later be able to teach with conviction:
Rumi was left with a profound, continuing awareness of the awesome love at the heart of existence. He had experienced that love with Shams, but he could not realize it for what it was until Shams was gone.
Despite his great loss, Rumi was intoxicated with the realization that love was everywhere and in everything, working its own purpose. But if Rumi had been only a drunkard of love, we wouldn’t have the great teaching he left.
In Sufism it is taught that there is a sobriety that contains drunkenness. Rumi also had this sober intelligence that was capable of formulating a wisdom teaching, which would become a guide for the soul’s journey. His Mathnawi — six volumes of interwoven stories, poems, metaphysical discourses, and ecstatic prayers — contains enough wisdom for a lifetime. And yet the point of every story and poem, the essence of every page, is a reality not necessarily evident to the senses, nor to the intellect, but apparent to the heart: that all of existence is the creation of love, and the purpose of that love is to reveal itself in the full magnitude of its beauty and generosity.
Rumi didn’t compose a self-help book for lovers. But he did reveal that love is the only teacher and that the lessons of love are the most significant in our lives. He demonstrated that one could live through the greatest tragedy imaginable and still trust and be true to that love.
We are drawn to Rumi, not for the sentimental consolation of his love but for its courage and fierceness:
If you haven't ever read him -- give Rumi a read.
Rumi: The Way of the Lover
by Kabir Helminski
Those sweet words we shared between us,
the vault of heaven has concealed in its heart.
One day, they will pour down like rain.
Our secrets will germinate in the soil of this universe.
— Quatrain 1112
translated by Kabir Helminski and Lida Saedian
the vault of heaven has concealed in its heart.
One day, they will pour down like rain.
Our secrets will germinate in the soil of this universe.
— Quatrain 1112
translated by Kabir Helminski and Lida Saedian
HOW DID A MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC ASCETIC BECOME, IN the last 20 years, the most popular poet in America (and perhaps the world)? Who was this Rumi, honored by UNESCO, celebrated by Hollywood, quoted by Buddhists, and beloved by people who previously had never cared for poetry?
From the sublime to the ridiculous, Rumi has been viewed and used in many ways: His six-volume masterpiece, The Mathnawi, has been called the “Qur’an in Persian.” Even reactionary ayatollahs dare not pick a fight with Rumi, so great is the love for him in Iran to this day. I recall speaking with a former minister in the government of the late Shah of Iran, who, though a Marxist and an atheist, covered his heart when Rumi was mentioned and said, “Ah . . . he is our best.” And then there was the middle-aged literary celebrity who used Rumi’s quatrains to start conversations with pretty girls on the boulevards of Santa Barbara, and the literary soft-porn magazine editor who called me to order cases of Rumi’s quatrains as favors for new subscribers.
Yet his biography surprises people. Rumi was a devoted husband and father. He was thin from frequent fasting. He disciplined his soul with night vigils and endless prostrations. Even after Rumi left his academic chair and became the ecstatic poet we love, he made his modest living writing fatwas (legal opinions based on shariah, or Islamic law). One of his famous quatrains notes:
As long as I have life, I am the slave of the Quran.
I am dust at the door of Muhammad the Chosen (Empowered).
If anyone makes anything else of my words,
I am disgusted with him and whatever he says.
—Quatrain 1331
I am dust at the door of Muhammad the Chosen (Empowered).
If anyone makes anything else of my words,
I am disgusted with him and whatever he says.
—Quatrain 1331
Even so, if there is anything like a Muslim Dalai Lama — that is, someone who is viewed almost universally as a man of God — it is Rumi. He recognized that one spiritual force moves behind all religions and, indeed, behind all human aspirations. People have different descriptions and names for it, but it is one.
What accounts for the endurance and passion of Rumi’s popularity? As a publisher of the new wave of Rumi translation, including Coleman Barks’ first four books, I follow the requests for permissions to quote and reprint Rumi poems, and I offer these two examples from among our top ten:
Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing
there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The above quatrain is a potent remedy for many people in our culture who live with an unnamed sense of shame yet few, if any, sacraments of atonement.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
Coleman Barks intensifies the meaningfulness of these inspired translations by inserting concrete detail that is implied — but not stated — in the original. As we read these words, we feel that Rumi is a friend who would understand the struggles of our lives today. But these selections tell us less about Rumi and more about the needs (and neediness) of our current society, among which is the need for a soul-to-soul relationship, for heart dialogue.
ENTERING A CULTURE OF LOVE
IN THE LATE SIXTIES I BECAME A STUDENT of spiritual traditions, East and West, and practiced with Zen Buddhists, Raja Yogis, and some of Gurdjieff’s students. Sufism was the last of the great traditions I encountered. Having studied Latin and Sanskrit previously, I began to explore Persian through the poetry of Rumi, under the guidance of a remarkable woman who lived in a small town in New Hampshire. One thing led to another, and I eventually found myself traveling to Konya, Turkey, to be with my first Sufi mentor, Suleyman Hayati Dede. I quickly recognized that although I had been acquainted firsthand with various spiritual masters — masters of will, masters of knowledge, and masters of consciousness — in Dede, I met a genuine master of love, and — in Rumi’s tradition — I entered a culture of love. I experienced what it was to be loved, unsentimentally and unconditionally, through a man in his eighties.
Whatever my wife, Camille, and I experienced in those five years of regular visits to Konya, I can only say it felt like a process of being tuned. Dede took no credit for this great love; he always referred to “Hazrati Mevlana,” which is how Rumi is referred to in the tradition.
As we began to deepen in the teachings of Rumi, we found that Rumi took no credit and, instead, referred to his beloved mentor, Shams of Tabriz. Eventually, after we tracked down the hastily transcribed conversations of Shams (he wrote nothing himself), we found the seeds of what became a beautiful garden in Rumi. We also found that Shams took no credit himself and reserved his greatest admiration for the Prophet Muhammad. Finally, looking into the life of Muhammad, we were led into the universe of the Qur’an. I refer to it as a universe, because the experience of entering into its consciousness is like entering a landscape of gnosis where the Divine Intelligence directly addresses the human heart.
What the Qur’an is saying is that there is (and has been) only one God behind all religious traditions and revelations, even if human beings typically have distorted the simple message for their own purposes. It is all quite simple, really, and although human beings have the free will to bring some very bad karma upon themselves, the fundamental quality of the universes (note the plural) is overwhelming, breathtaking compassion and mercy. I was beginning to understand where Dede was coming from.
Each year, we returned, as if to remind ourselves that the tangible atmosphere of love was real. We lived for that. And gradually, too, we assimilated some of the knowledge of love that is found in Rumi’s teachings and in the primary sources of the tradition: the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet.
AWAKENED BY BEAUTY
IN THE SUFI UNIVERSE, BEAUTY IS A SIGNIFICANT PRESENCE, and it is beauty, in whatever form, that awakens love. Rumi’s own awakening took place in a scandalous relationship with Shams of Tabriz. The scandal was not that there was an erotic attraction (the evidence from much collateral material suggests that was very unlikely); the scandal was that in an adamantly monotheistic religious context, in which idolatry was the greatest sin, Shams virtually became Rumi’s God. Shams’ spiritual authority must have been unearthly, transcendent, and inimitable. Rumi sacrificed status, privilege, security, friendship, and family to give himself totally to this relationship.
I am in love with You.
What’s the use of giving me advice?
I have already drunk the poison.
What’s the use of candy?
They say, “Bind his feet in chains,”
but they can’t bind up my crazy heart.
— Quatrain 670
The Pocket Rumi
translated by Kabir Helminski
What’s the use of giving me advice?
I have already drunk the poison.
What’s the use of candy?
They say, “Bind his feet in chains,”
but they can’t bind up my crazy heart.
— Quatrain 670
The Pocket Rumi
translated by Kabir Helminski
Shams had searched the world for one human being who was capable of receiving his message. Rumi was, above all, the one who was capable of receiving it and passing it on to the world. They became like two divine mirrors, reflecting each other, inspiring each other to new levels of beauty and realization. If the cosmic drama of Jesus is about self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection, the Passion enacted by Rumi and Shams models the revelation of divinity in a relationship that deepens beyond the individualities of those in the relationship.
I could reach great heights with Your love,
and with longing for You
I will increase a hundredfold.
They ask, “Why are you circling him?”
O ignorance, I am circling myself.
— Quatrain 1138
and with longing for You
I will increase a hundredfold.
They ask, “Why are you circling him?”
O ignorance, I am circling myself.
— Quatrain 1138
Rumi knew, deep in his heart, that the love he was experiencing was leading him back to the deepest level of himself and his own intimate connection with the divine.
In the less mature stages of love, we desire and want to possess the object of our love. Rumi and Shams gave themselves unequivocally to a spiritual relationship — not a relationship in which one ego fed and flattered another ego with unlimited attention and devotion but a relationship that would tear each down to his essence. Shams demanded of Rumi that he die in a thousand ways, for Shams knew the secret of love is in this dying.
You have suffered much agony, but you are still behind a veil,
because dying was the one thing needed, and you
haven’t fulfilled it.
Your agony will not end until you die:
You cannot reach the roof without ascending the ladder.
When two rungs out of a hundred are missing,
the climber will be prevented from reaching the roof.
When the rope lacks one foot out of a hundred,
how should the bucket reach the water in the well?
O Prince, you will not experience the wreck of this ship
until you put into it the last kilo that will sink it.
Let your candle be extinguished in the dawn!
Know that as long as our little stars are visible,
the Sun of the world has not appeared.
Wield the mace against yourself: shatter egoism to pieces.
— Mathnawi, VI, 753
Translated by Kabir Helminski
because dying was the one thing needed, and you
haven’t fulfilled it.
Your agony will not end until you die:
You cannot reach the roof without ascending the ladder.
When two rungs out of a hundred are missing,
the climber will be prevented from reaching the roof.
When the rope lacks one foot out of a hundred,
how should the bucket reach the water in the well?
O Prince, you will not experience the wreck of this ship
until you put into it the last kilo that will sink it.
Let your candle be extinguished in the dawn!
Know that as long as our little stars are visible,
the Sun of the world has not appeared.
Wield the mace against yourself: shatter egoism to pieces.
— Mathnawi, VI, 753
Translated by Kabir Helminski
The encounter of Rumi and Shams is something rare in human spiritual history — a fire that consumes everything but itself. In the cosmic drama lived by these two great, loving souls, these two greatest friends, there was no other conclusion than that Rumi would have to lose that friendship that had become the reason for his existence. And one day Shams disappeared, leaving only a few drops of blood on the threshold, probably murdered by some self-righteous thugs who thought they were doing God a favor. In a way, they were. And as the Qur’an says:
There is no power nor agency except through God the Exalted.
With Shams gone, the final veil was removed, and the sun (Shams) of Rumi’s own heart could be revealed. The love that had been awakened could now be realized as an attribute of Rumi’s own self. Rumi would later be able to teach with conviction:
There is no Love greater than Love with no object.
For then you, yourself, have become love itself.
For then you, yourself, have become love itself.
Rumi was left with a profound, continuing awareness of the awesome love at the heart of existence. He had experienced that love with Shams, but he could not realize it for what it was until Shams was gone.
Despite his great loss, Rumi was intoxicated with the realization that love was everywhere and in everything, working its own purpose. But if Rumi had been only a drunkard of love, we wouldn’t have the great teaching he left.
In Sufism it is taught that there is a sobriety that contains drunkenness. Rumi also had this sober intelligence that was capable of formulating a wisdom teaching, which would become a guide for the soul’s journey. His Mathnawi — six volumes of interwoven stories, poems, metaphysical discourses, and ecstatic prayers — contains enough wisdom for a lifetime. And yet the point of every story and poem, the essence of every page, is a reality not necessarily evident to the senses, nor to the intellect, but apparent to the heart: that all of existence is the creation of love, and the purpose of that love is to reveal itself in the full magnitude of its beauty and generosity.
Rumi didn’t compose a self-help book for lovers. But he did reveal that love is the only teacher and that the lessons of love are the most significant in our lives. He demonstrated that one could live through the greatest tragedy imaginable and still trust and be true to that love.
We are drawn to Rumi, not for the sentimental consolation of his love but for its courage and fierceness:
THE PULL OF LOVE
I pulled a thorn from the fence of
His garden,
and it has not stopped working its way into my heart.
One morning a little of His wine
turned my heart into a lion hunter.
It’s right that this separation He
helped me feel
lurks like a monster within my heart.
Yet heaven’s wild and unbroken colt
was trained by the hand of His love.
Though reason is learned and
has its honors,
it pawned its cap and robes for a
cup of love.
Many hearts have sought refuge
from this love,
but it drags and pulls them to its own refuge.
— The Pocket Rumi,
Translated by Kabir Helminski.
(Shambhala, 2001)
I pulled a thorn from the fence of
His garden,
and it has not stopped working its way into my heart.
One morning a little of His wine
turned my heart into a lion hunter.
It’s right that this separation He
helped me feel
lurks like a monster within my heart.
Yet heaven’s wild and unbroken colt
was trained by the hand of His love.
Though reason is learned and
has its honors,
it pawned its cap and robes for a
cup of love.
Many hearts have sought refuge
from this love,
but it drags and pulls them to its own refuge.
— The Pocket Rumi,
Translated by Kabir Helminski.
(Shambhala, 2001)
Comments