Rumi
(1207-1273)
Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi was born in Afghanistan to a wealthy Persian family. His family fled the invasion of the Mongol tribes, traveling widely in the Muslim lands, and made a pilgrimage to Mecca before finally settling in Anatolia. His father was a respected theologian and professor in religious sciences. When he died in 1231, Rumi, at 24 years old, took his place. At this young age, he was already an accomplished scholar in spiritual sciences, having been instructed by his father first, and then a close friend of his father's. He was also schooled by the greatest religious minds of the time in Damascus.
Rumi had a life changing experience when he met Shamsuddin of Tabriz, a wild looking wandering dervish. He seemed to appear out of nowhere, and from the start, he and Rumi were inseparable. It is said that what Shams awoke in Rumi was direct awareness of the Beloved within, as Shams helped Rumi awaken to who he really was. Rumi moved from studying texts about The One to seeing The One, in fact, to realizing that in the depths of his being, he was The One. Shortly after this meeting, the two men went into retreat together, emerging 90 days later in full radiance. In the book Rumi: Gazing At The Beloved, by Richard Lang the author tells us, “The exact nature of what transpired between them has remained a mystery for the past 750 years.” In his book, he claims to reveal for the first time “the actual esoteric practice that Rumi and Shams were engaged in behind the closed doors of their retreat room.” Through a extensive research into the life and writings of Rumi, Richard tells of the “radical practice,” that involves gazing intently into the eyes of another until the “other” becomes a mirror of one's self, and finally, all sense of separation dissolves.
Rumi gathered many disciples around him by this time, and they became jealous of his relationship with Shams. Twice they drove Shams away. The first time Rumi sent his son to bring him back, but the second time he disappeared for good, and some suspected that Rumi's disciples had killed him.
Following this experience, Rumi became a virtual river of poetry, flowing out words of love and divine realization almost constantly. His disciples recorded his words, and he became the greatest and most prolific poet of Islam. He also began to perform the dance of the whirling dervish, to the sound of the reed flute and drum. In this practice, one spins round and round, watching the world spin around yet abiding in the stillness within, eternally. He would experience this spinning movement, and yet exist as the nothingness in the center of it all. In his article at www.innertraditions.com, Richard Lang tells us:
“Rumi had become an intensely passionate poet and mystic. By good fortune he had found the Beloved, awakened to his innermost identity by the wild Shams. But more profoundly, as his poetry makes clear, it was The Beloved within which had called out to him, again and again beckoning him home. In fact, at that deepest level it was The Beloved stumbling upon its Self through him, God rediscovering his own wonderful, inexplicable being in the midst of this extraordinary, wild, unexpected, living cosmos. May each of us hear the call of the Beloved.”
Rumi's
life ended in 1273, at the age of 66, yet his legacy lives on. His words
are acknowledged as some of the deepest and most beautiful expressions
of language ever uttered. Below are some examples of his work:
Say Yes Quickly
Forget your life. God is great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It's time to pray.
You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don't knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?”
And no one says, “How aren't you?”
Tomorrow
you'll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there is an artist you don't know about.
He's not interested in how things look different in the moonlight.
If
you are here unfaithfully with us,
You’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God's love,
You’re helping people you don't know
and have never seen.
~Rumi
Two
Kinds Of Intelligence
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teachers says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With
such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There
is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning
This
second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
~Rumi
Explore more of this divine inspirational poetry of the mystic. There is a lot of poetry about transcendental meditation, love, the cosmos strange and divine. Many consider love poetry to be the most passionate, but Rumi was quite transcendental and passionate with his poetic technique when it comes to mindfulness about divine law. Poetry is open for any interpretation, though many of these great spiritual teachers speak of similar ideals, which can be considered evidence of a divine matrix linking the cosmos through mystic force. When writing inspirational poetry, many great poets have used meditation as a way to open them up to the divine. There’s no specific meditation technique, but often a guided meditation is the best place to begin.