25 Life Changing Lessons To Learn From Rumi / Luminita Saviuc

“Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.” ~ Rumi

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, also known as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic who, in my personal opinion, wrote some of the most beautiful and most profound words that were ever written. You won’t believe it how much wisdom and how so much power there is in his words. It’s incredible.

Today I would like to share with you 25 life changing lessons to learn from Rumi, lessons that have the power inspire and empower you to live a more authentic, beautiful, loving and meaningful life.

 

1. Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

• “You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.”
• “You sit here for days saying, This is strange business. You’re the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine. You’re some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace, so you won’t have to become coins.”
• “Why should I stay at the bottom of a well when a strong rope is in my hand?”
• “Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.”
• “Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that.”

 

2. Your job is to live your life in a way that makes sense to you, not to “them”.

• “Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.”

 

3. Never give up on yourself.

• “When you go through a hard period, When everything seems to oppose you, … When you feel you cannot even bear one more minute, NEVER GIVE UP! Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!”
• “Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
• “Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”

 

4. Ignorance is God’s prison.

• “Ignorance is God’s prison. Knowing is God’s palace.”

 

5. The treasures that can be found outside of you can’t even compare with the treasures that can be found inside of you.

• “You wander from room to room Hunting for the diamond necklace That is already around your neck!”
• “If you knew yourself for even one moment, if you could just glimpse your most beautiful face, maybe you wouldn’t slumber so deeply in that house of clay. Why not move into your house of joy and shine into every crevice! For you are the secret Treasure-bearer, and always have been. Didn’t you know?”
• “Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”
• “Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you?”
• “You go from village to village on your horse asking everyone, “Has anyone seen my horse?”
• “Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar. Reach your long hand 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?”
• “There is a fountain inside you. Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.”

 

6. When you let go of who you are, you become who you might be.

• “Knock, And He’ll open the door Vanish, And He’ll make you shine like the sun Fall, And He’ll raise you to the heavens Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.”
• “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.”
• “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
• “Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.”
• “Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.”

 

7. There is something you can do better than anyone else.

• “Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.”
• “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”

 

8. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

• “As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.”

 

9. When you commit to something, do it with all your heart.

• “Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses.”
• “When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When action come from another section, the feeling disappears.”
• “Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.”

 

10. Good things come to an end so that better things can fall together.

• “Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”

 

11. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

• “What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.”
• “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”
• “Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.”
• “Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”
• “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”

 

12. Do what you love and do it with love.

• “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
• “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”
• “Be occupied, then, with what you really value and let the thief take something else.”

 

13. Think less. Feel more.

• “Reason is powerless in the expression of Love.”
• “Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.”
• “Only from the heart can you touch the sky.”
• “There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you?”
• “Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison When the door is so wide open?”

 

14. Love is worth it all.

• “Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. If not, leave this gathering.”
• “Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be.”

 

15. Appreciate both the good and the bad in your life.

• “Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
• “If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?”
• “When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.”

 

16. You change your world by changing yourself.

• “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

 

17. We are made of Love and made to Love.

• “We are born of love; Love is our mother. “
• “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
• “Through Love all that is bitter will be sweet, Through Love all that is copper will be gold, Through Love all dregs will become wine, through Love all pain will turn to medicine.”
• “I have no companion but Love, no beginning, no end, no dawn. The Soul calls from within me: ‘You, ignorant of the way of Love, set Me free.’ “
• “That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquillity.”

 

18. Your Soul is not of this world, your body is.

• “All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
• “When I die, I shall soar with angels, and when I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.”

 

19. At the Soul level, we are all ONE.

• “All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.”
• “What shall I say, O Muslims, I know not myself, I am neither a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim.”
• “I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.”

 

20. Your Soul is more precious than anything.

• “You know the value of every article of merchandise, but if you don’t know the value of your own soul, it’s all foolishness.”

 

21. Choose your life partner wisely.

• “Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: he’s free.”

 

22. Real love transcends the material plane and no matter if your bodies are apart, your souls will forever be connected.

• “Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”

 

23. Raise your words, not your voice.

• “Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”

 

24. Silence is the language of God.

• “Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”
• “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
• “In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.”

 

25. Just to be alive is not enough.

• “You think you are alive because you breathe air? Shame on you, that you are alive in such a limited way. Don’t be without Love, so you won’t feel dead. Die in Love and stay alive forever.”

 

Rumi

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Persian: جلال‌الدین محمد رومی‎), also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī (جلال‌الدین محمد بلخى), Mawlānā (مولانا, “our master”), Mevlânâ, Mevlevî (مولوی Mawlawī, “my master”), and more popularly simply as Rūmī (September 30, 1207, Vakhsh, Tajikistan – 17 December 1273, Konya, Turkey), was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic.

Rumi’s influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Tajiks, Turks, Greeks, Pashtuns, other Central Asian Muslims, and the Muslims of South Asia have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world’s languages and transposed into various formats. Rumi has been described as the “most popular poet” and the “best selling poet” in the United States, among Muslims.

Rumi’s works are written mostly in Persian, but occasionally he also used Turkish, Arabic, and Greek,in his verse. His Mathnawī, composed in Konya, may be considered one of the purest literary glories of the Persian language. His works are widely read today in their original language across Greater Iran and the Persian-speaking world. Translations of his works are very popular, most notably in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the United States, and South Asia. His poetry has influenced Persian literature, but also Turkish, Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu, as well as the literature of some other Turkic, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan languages including Chagatai, Pashto, and Bengali.

Names Mawlānā and Rumi

Mawlānā means “our master” in the Arabic language. The terms مولوی Mawlawi (Persian) and Mevlevi (Turkish) which mean “my master” in Arabic are more often used for him.

According to the authoritative Rumi biographer Franklin Lewis of the University of Chicago, “[t]he Anatolian peninsula which had belonged to the Byzantine, or eastern Roman empire, had only relatively recently been conquered by Muslims and even when it came to be controlled by Turkish Muslim rulers, it was still known to Arabs, Persians and Turks as the geographical area of Rum. As such, there are a number of historical personages born in or associated with Anatolia known as Rumi, a word borrowed from Arabic literally meaning ‘Roman,’ in which context Roman refers to subjects of the Byzantine Empire or simply to people living in or things associated with Anatolia.”

Life

Rumi was born to native Persian-speaking parents, originally from the Balkh city of Khorasan, in present-day Afghanistan. He was born either in Wakhsh, a village located on the Vakhsh River in the greater Balkh region in present-day Tajikistan, or in the city of Balkh, located in present-day Afghanistan.

Greater Balkh was at that time a major centre of Persian culture and Sufism had developed there for several centuries. Indeed, the most important influences upon Rumi, besides his father, are said to be the Persian poets Attar and Sanai. Rumi in one poem express his appreciation: “Attar was the spirit, Sanai his eyes twain, And in time thereafter, Came we in their train” and mentions in another poem: “Attar has traversed the seven cities of Love, We are still at the turn of one street”. His father was also connected to the spiritual lineage of Najm al-Din Kubra.

He lived most of his life under the Persianate Seljuq Sultanate of Rum, where he produced his works  and died in 1273 AD. He was buried in Konya and his shrine became a place of pilgrimage.[Following his death, his followers and his son Sultan Walad founded the Mevlevi Order, also known as the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, famous for its Sufi dance known as the Sama ceremony. He was laid to rest beside his father, and over his remains a splendid shrine was erected. A hagiographical account of him is described in Shams ud-Din Ahmad Aflāki’s Manāqib ul-Ārifīn (written between 1318 and 1353). This hagiographical account of his biography needs to be treated with care as it contains both legends and facts about Rumi. For example, Professor Franklin Lewis, University of Chicago, in the most complete biography on Rumi has a separate section for the hagiographical biography on Rumi and actual biography about him.

Rumi’s father was Bahā ud-Dīn Walad, a theologian, jurist and a mystic from Balkh, who was also known by the followers of Rumi as Sultan al-Ulama or “Sultan of the Scholars”. The popular hagiographer assertions that have claimed the family’s descent from the Caliph Abu Bakr does not hold on closer examination and is rejected by modern scholars. The claim of maternal descent from the Khwarazmshah for Rumi or his father is also seen as a non-historical hagiographical tradition designed to connect the family with royalty, but this claim is rejected for chronological and historical reasons. The most complete genealogy offered for the family stretches back to six or seven generations to famous Hanafi Jurists.

We do not learn the name of Baha al-Din’s mother in the sources, but only that he referred to her as “Māmi” (Colloquial Persian for Māma) and that she was a simple woman and that she lived in the 13th century. The mother of Rumi was Mu’mina Khātūn. The profession of the family for several generations was that of Islamic preachers of the liberal Hanafi rite and this family tradition was continued by Rumi (see his Fihi Ma Fih and Seven Sermons) and Sultan Walad (see Ma’rif Waladi for examples of his everyday sermons and lectures).

When the Mongols invaded Central Asia sometime between 1215 and 1220, Baha ud-Din Walad, with his whole family and a group of disciples, set out westwards. According to hagiographical account which is not agreed upon by all Rumi scholars, Rumi encountered one of the most famous mystic Persian poets, Attar, in the Iranian city of Nishapur, located in the province of Khorāsān. Attar immediately recognized Rumi’s spiritual eminence. He saw the father walking ahead of the son and said, “Here comes a sea followed by an ocean.” He gave the boy his Asrārnāma, a book about the entanglement of the soul in the material world. This meeting had a deep impact on the eighteen-year-old Rumi and later on became the inspiration for his works.

From Nishapur, Walad and his entourage set out for Baghdad, meeting many of the scholars and Sufis of the city. From Baghdad they went to Hejaz and performed the pilgrimage at Mecca. The migrating caravan then passed through Damascus, Malatya, Erzincan, Sivas, Kayseri and Nigde. They finally settled in Karaman for seven years; Rumi’s mother and brother both died there. In 1225, Rumi married Gowhar Khatun in Karaman. They had two sons: Sultan Walad and Ala-eddin Chalabi. When his wife died, Rumi married again and had a son, Amir Alim Chalabi, and a daughter, Malakeh Khatun.

On 1 May 1228, most likely as a result of the insistent invitation of ‘Alā’ ud-Dīn Key-Qobād, ruler of Anatolia, Baha’ ud-Din came and finally settled in Konya in Anatolia within the westernmost territories of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm.

Baha’ ud-Din became the head of a madrassa (religious school) and when he died, Rumi, aged twenty-five, inherited his position as the Islamic molvi. One of Baha’ ud-Din’s students, Sayyed Burhan ud-Din Muhaqqiq Termazi, continued to train Rumi in the Shariah as well as the Tariqa, especially that of Rumi’s father. For nine years, Rumi practised Sufism as a disciple of Burhan ud-Din until the latter died in 1240 or 1241. Rumi’s public life then began: he became an Islamic Jurist, issuing fatwas and giving sermons in the mosques of Konya. He also served as a Molvi (Islamic teacher) and taught his adherents in the madrassa.

During this period, Rumi also travelled to Damascus and is said to have spent four years there.

It was his meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi on 15 November 1244 that completely changed his life. From an accomplished teacher and jurist, Rumi was transformed into an ascetic.

Shams had travelled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could “endure my company”. A voice said to him, “What will you give in return?” Shams replied, “My head!” The voice then said, “The one you seek is Jalal ud-Din of Konya.” On the night of 5 December 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. It is rumoured that Shams was murdered with the connivance of Rumi’s son, ‘Ala’ ud-Din; if so, Shams indeed gave his head for the privilege of mystical friendship.

Rumi’s love for, and his bereavement at the death of, Shams found their expression in an outpouring of lyric poems, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. He himself went out searching for Shams and journeyed again to Damascus. There, he realised:

 

Why should I seek? I am the same as

He. His essence speaks through me.

I have been looking for myself!

 

Mewlana had been spontaneously composing ghazals (Persian poems), and these had been collected in the Divan-i Kabir or Diwan Shams Tabrizi. Rumi found another companion in Salaḥ ud-Din-e Zarkub, a goldsmith. After Salah ud-Din’s death, Rumi’s scribe and favourite student, Hussam-e Chalabi, assumed the role of Rumi’s companion. One day, the two of them were wandering through the Meram vineyards outside Konya when Hussam described to Rumi an idea he had had: “If you were to write a book like the Ilāhīnāma of Sanai or the Mantiq ut-Tayr of ‘Attar, it would become the companion of many troubadours. They would fill their hearts from your work and compose music to accompany it.” Rumi smiled and took out a piece of paper on which were written the opening eighteen lines of his Masnavi, beginning with:

 

Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,

How it sings of separation…

 

Hussam implored Rumi to write more. Rumi spent the next twelve years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Masnavi, to Hussam.

In December 1273, Rumi fell ill; he predicted his own death and composed the well-known ghazal, which begins with the verse:

How doest thou know what sort of king I have within me as companion?

Do not cast thy glance upon my golden face, for I have iron legs.

 

Rumi died on 17 December 1273 in Konya; his body was interred beside that of his father, and a splendid shrine, the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb, قبه الخضراء; today the Mevlâna Museum), was erected over his place of burial. His epitaph reads:

 

When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.

 

Georgian Queen Gürcü Hatun was a patron and a close friend of Rumi. She was the one who sponsored the construction of his tomb in Konya. The 13th century Mevlâna Mausoleum, with its mosque, dance hall, dervish living quarters, school and tombs of some leaders of the Mevlevi Order, continues to this day to draw pilgrims from all parts of the Muslim and non-Muslim world. Jalal al-Din who is also known as Rumi, was a philosopher and mystic of Islam. His doctrine advocates unlimited tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness, charity and awareness through love. To him and to his disciples all religions are more or less truth. Looking with the same eye on Muslim, Jew and Christian alike, his peaceful and tolerant teaching has appealed to people of all sects and creeds.

 

Teachings

 

The general theme of Rumi’s thought, like that of other mystic and Sufi poets of Persian literature, is essentially that of the concept of tawhid — union with his beloved (the primal root) from which/whom he has been cut off and become aloof — and his longing and desire to restore it.

The Masnavi weaves fables, scenes from everyday life, Qur’anic revelations and exegesis, and metaphysics into a vast and intricate tapestry. In the East, it is said of him that he was “not a prophet — but surely, he has brought a scripture.”

Rumi believed passionately in the use of music, poetry and dance as a path for reaching God. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. It was from these ideas that the practice of whirling Dervishes developed into a ritual form. His teachings became the base for the order of the Mevlevi, which his son Sultan Walad organised. Rumi encouraged Sama, listening to music and turning or doing the sacred dance. In the Mevlevi tradition, samāʿ represents a mystical journey of spiritual ascent through mind and love to the Perfect One. In this journey, the seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth and arrives at the Perfect. The seeker then returns from this spiritual journey, with greater maturity, to love and to be of service to the whole of creation without discrimination with regard to beliefs, races, classes and nations.

In other verses in the Masnavi, Rumi describes in detail the universal message of love:

 

The lover’s cause is separate from all other causes

Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.

 

Rumi’s favourite musical instrument was the ney (reed flute).

 

Major works

 

Rumi’s poetry is often divided into various categories: the quatrains (rubayāt) and odes (ghazal) of the Divan, the six books of the Masnavi. The prose works are divided into The Discourses, The Letters, and the Seven Sermons.

 

Poetic works

 

Rumi’s major work is the Maṭnawīye Ma’nawī (Spiritual Couplets; مثنوی معنوی), a six-volume poem regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Qur’an. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest works of mystical poetry. It contains approximately 27,000 lines of Persian poetry.

Rumi’s other major work is the Dīwān-e Kabīr (Great Work) or Dīwān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī (The Works of Shams of Tabriz; دیوان شمس تبریزی), named in honour of Rumi’s master Shams. Besides approximately 35000 Persian couplets and 2000 Persian quatrains, the Divan contains 90 Ghazals and 19 quatrains in Arabic, a couple of dozen or so couplets in Turkish (mainly macaronic poems of mixed Persian and Turkish) and 14 couplets in Greek (all of them in three macaronic poems of Greek-Persian).

Prose works

Fihi Ma Fihi (In It What’s in It, Persian: فیه ما فیه) provides a record of seventy-one talks and lectures given by Rumi on various occasions to his disciples. It was compiled from the notes of his various disciples, so Rumi did not author the work directly.[58] An English translation from the Persian was first published by A.J. Arberry as Discourses of Rumi (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972), and a translation of the second book by Wheeler Thackston, Sign of the Unseen (Putney, VT: Threshold Books, 1994). The style of the Fihi ma fihi is colloquial and meant for middle-class men and women, and lack the sophisticated wordplay.

Majāles-e Sab’a (Seven Sessions, Persian: مجالس سبعه) contains seven Persian sermons (as the name implies) or lectures given in seven different assemblies. The sermons themselves give a commentary on the deeper meaning of Qur’an and Hadeeth. The sermons also include quotations from poems of Sana’i, ‘Attar, and other poets, including Rumi himself. As Aflakī relates, after Shams-e Tabrīzī, Rumi gave sermons at the request of notables, especially Salāh al-Dīn Zarkūb. The style of Persian is rather simple, but quotation of Arabic and knowledge of history and the Hadith show Rumi’s knowledge in the Islamic sciences. His style is typical of the genre of lectures given by Sufis and spiritual teachers.

Makatib (The Letters, Persian: مکاتیب) is the book containing Rumi’s letters in Persian to his disciples, family members, and men of state and of influence. The letters testify that Rumi kept very busy helping family members and administering a community of disciples that had grown up around them. Unlike the Persian style of the previous two mentioned works (which are lectures and sermons), the letters is consciously sophisticated and epistolar, which is in conformity with the expectations of correspondence directed to nobles, statesmen and kings.[61]

Philosophical outlook

Rumi was an evolutionary thinker in the sense that he believed that the spirit after devolution from the divine Ego undergoes an evolutionary process by which it comes nearer and nearer to the same divine Ego.

All matter in the universe obeys this law and this movement is due to an inbuilt urge (which Rumi calls “love”) to evolve and seek enjoinment with the divinity from which it has emerged. Evolution into a human being from an animal is only one stage in this process.

The doctrine of the Fall of Adam is reinterpreted as the devolution of the Ego from the universal ground of divinity and is a universal, cosmic phenomenon.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson’s idea of life being creative and evolutionary is similar, though unlike Bergson, Rumi believes that there is a specific goal to the process: the attainment of God. For Rumi, God is the ground as well as the goal of all existence.

However Rumi need not be considered a biological evolutionary creationist. In view of the fact that Rumi lived hundreds of years before Darwin, and was least interested in scientific theories, it is probable to conclude that he does not deal with biological evolution at all. Rather he is concerned with the spiritual evolution of a human being: Man not conscious of God is akin to an animal and true consciousness makes him divine.

Nicholson has seen this as a Neo-Platonic doctrine: the universal soul working through the various spheres of being, a doctrine introduced into Islam by Muslim philosophers like Al Farabi and being related at the same time to Ibn Sina’s idea of love as the magnetically working power by which life is driven into an upward trend.

 

I died as a mineral and became a plant,

I died as plant and rose to animal,

I died as animal and I was Man.

Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar

With angels bless’d; but even from angelhood

I must pass on: all except God doth perish.

When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,

I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.

Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence

Proclaims in organ tones,

To Him we shall return.

 

از جمادی مُردم و نامی شدم —

وز نما مُردم به حیوان سرزدم

مُردم از حیوانی و آدم شدم —

پس چه ترسم؟ کی ز مردن کم شدم؟

حملهٔ دیگر بمیرم از بشر —

تا برآرم از ملائک بال و پر

وز ملک هم بایدم جستن ز جو —

کل شیء هالک الا وجهه

بار دیگر از ملک پران شوم —

آنچه اندر وهم ناید آن شوم

پس عدم گردم عدم چو ارغنون —

گویدم کانا الیه راجعون

 

Universality

It is often said that the teachings of Rumi are ecumenical in nature. For Rumi, religion was mostly a personal experience and not limited to logical arguments or perceptions of the senses. Creative love, or the urge to rejoin the spirit to divinity, was the goal towards which every thing moves. The dignity of life, in particular human life (which is conscious of its divine origin and goal), was important.

 

ملت عشق از همه دین‌ها جداست

عاشقان را ملت و مذهب خداست

The religion of Love is different from all religions

For lovers, religion and denomination is God alone.

Book 2 Section 36: Moses and the Shepherd

 

It is undeniable that Rumi was a Muslim scholar and took Islam seriously. Nonetheless, the depth of his spiritual vision extended beyond narrow sectarian concerns. One rubaiyat reads:

 

در راه طلب عاقل و دیوانه یکی است

در شیوه‌ی عشق خویش و بیگانه یکی است

آن را که شراب وصل جانان دادند

در مذهب او کعبه و بتخانه یکی است

Quatrain 305

On the seeker’s path, wise men and fools are one.

In His love, brothers and strangers are one.

Go on! Drink the wine of the Beloved!

In that faith, Muslims and pagans are one.

 

However, despite the aforementioned ecumenical attitude, and contrary to his contemporary portrayal in the West as a proponent of non-denominational spirituality, a number of Rumi poems suggest the importance of outward religious observance, the primacy of the Qur’an.

 

Flee to God’s Qur’an, take refuge in it

there with the spirits of the prophets merge.

The Book conveys the prophets’ circumstances

those fish of the pure sea of Majesty.

 

Legacy

Rumi’s poetry forms the basis of much classical Iranian and Afghan music (Eastern-Persian, Tajik-Hazara music). Contemporary classical interpretations of his poetry are made by Muhammad Reza Shajarian, Shahram Nazeri, Davood Azad (the three from Iran) and Ustad Mohammad Hashem Cheshti (Afghanistan). To many modern Westerners, his teachings are one of the best introductions to the philosophy and practice of Sufism. In the West Shahram Shiva has been teaching, performing and sharing the translations of the poetry of Rumi for nearly twenty years and has been instrumental in spreading Rumi’s legacy in the English-speaking parts of the world. Pakistan’s National Poet, Muhammad Iqbal, was also inspired by Rumi’s works and considered him to be his spiritual leader, addressing him as “Pir Rumi” in his poems (the honorific Pir literally means “old man”, but in the Sufi/mystic context it means founder, master, or guide).

Shahram Shiva asserts that “Rumi is able to verbalise the highly personal and often confusing world of personal growth and development in a very clear and direct fashion. He does not offend anyone, and he includes everyone…. Today Rumi’s poems can be heard in churches, synagogues, Zen monasteries, as well as in the downtown New York art/performance/music scene.”

According to Professor Majid M. Naini, “Rumi’s life and transformation provide true testimony and proof that people of all religions and backgrounds can live together in peace and harmony. Rumi’s visions, words, and life teach us how to reach inner peace and happiness so we can finally stop the continual stream of hostility and hatred and achieve true global peace and harmony.”

Rumi’s work has been translated into many of the world’s languages, including Russian, German, Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, Bengali, French, Italian, and Spanish, and is being presented in a growing number of formats, including concerts, workshops, readings, dance performances, and other artistic creations.

The English interpretations of Rumi’s poetry by Coleman Barks have sold more than half a million copies worldwide,[76] and Rumi is one of the most widely read poets in the United States.Shahram Shiva book “Rending the Veil: Literal and Poetic Translations of Rumi” (1995, HOHM Press) is the recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award.

 

 

Source: truththeory.com and wikipedia

Category: Deneme, Felsefe, Toplum, Yazın