Rumi's Four Essential Practices Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER IMAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  Introduction

  A RELIGION OF INTOXICATED LOVE AND ECSTASY

  EATING LIGHTLY

  BREATHING DEEPLY

  MOVING FREELY

  GAZING RAPTLY

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATIONS

  FOOTNOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT INNER TRADITIONS • BEAR & COMPANY

  BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST

  COPYRIGHT & PERMISSIONS

  Introduction

  A RELIGION OF INTOXICATED LOVE AND ECSTASY

  Religion is always born out of a moment of radical insight but then all too often devolves into a system of rules and beliefs that turns the original insight into an event to worship rather than an experience to re-create. “Organized religion,” says the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, “is a defense against having the religious experience.” The religious experience is everyone’s birthright, but paradoxically we brace ourselves against having this experience. We hold back on the inner forces and energies that, yielded to, give birth to the soul, and we often tragically refer to religious text and tradition to justify this denial.

  Jalaluddin Rumi—the great thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and originator of the dance of the whirling dervishes—began his life within the folds of orthodox religious tradition, but ultimately he had to go beyond the accepted practices and prescribed forms of prayer in order to have the religious experience for himself. To truly grow in soul, he found that two things were necessary: you have to surrender to love, and you have to dissolve the self that keeps that love contained:

  falling in love

  took me away from academia

  and reading the Koran so much

  just like that

  it made me crazy and insane

  I used to go to the mosque

  to throw myself on the prayer rug

  and cover myself in devotion

  but one day love entered the mosque

  and spoke to me:

  “o wise one,

  why do you stay stuck

  inside this house of worship?

  what you need to do is break free

  from the bondage of self”

  The path of embodied love, which takes you beyond your self, is a far more potent way of inviting the religious experience than is compliant participation in the ritualized behaviors of organized religion alone. Rumi urges us not just to remain sober scholars of God, but to become rowdy lovers of God. He urges us to surrender to the powerful feelings of ecstatic love, which live in the middle of each and every body, just waiting for permission to be expressed. He wants us to know that it’s okay to feel these energies and, even more, to surrender to them and be transformed by them—even if (especially if ) they start making us feel as though we’re getting spinny drunk and are losing our minds. In this state of intoxicated reverie, love takes over and shows us the way beyond our self.

  Rumi’s is a path for anyone who has ever felt the religious impulse but was never able to tame his or her energies to comfortably conform to the traditional religious model of composed tranquility. Rumi doesn’t want you to remain calm and tranquil. He wants you to come alive, explode open, and become over-the-top drunk on the divine energies that live inside you.

  Rumi’s transformation from an orthodox religious teacher into an ecstatic lover of God came about through his chance encounter with a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz. The two men met in the streets of Konya. Something altogether extraordinary must have transpired between them in that moment of meeting, because they immediately went off together into a retreat room from which they didn’t emerge for several months. When they did finally come back out into the world, they were in a highly illuminated state of sheer ecstatic wonderment. How could this have happened?!

  What actually occurred behind the closed door of their retreat room has been the subject of much debate, but a careful reading of the poetry that started pouring from Rumi’s mouth strongly suggests that they were exploring the spiritual exercises and practices presented in this book. It’s not enough simply to sit and talk about wanting to merge with the energies of God; one has to explore techniques and practices that allow this surrendered merging to actually occur.

  After his encounter with Shams, Rumi entered a period during which he began to speak in the language of poetry as he moved and danced through Konya’s streets, conversing with townspeople that he met along the way. He was always accompanied by an inner circle of students and friends who became known as the Secretaries of the Scribe and whose job was to write down the words that kept pouring from their teacher’s mouth. After Rumi’s death, the poems were compiled into twenty-three separate volumes, comprising some forty-four thousand verses and known collectively as the Divan.

  While we owe the compilers a colossal debt of gratitude for preserving Rumi’s words, their decision to group poems together not in chronological order, but according to things like similarities in poetic meter, makes the task of deciphering what Rumi was actually telling us all the more challenging (and causes utter consternation for the art historian, who relies on linear chronology to make sense of an artist’s life work).

  To put it impolitely, the Divan is a sprawling mess, but what a divine mess it is! Sometimes a poem seems to start and trail off, but then, several volumes later, you come across a passage that strikes you as far more thematically linked to the earlier poem than to anything in its near vicinity. Confounding things further, the numbered “poems” in each volume often read more like journal entries than they do discrete poems. An individual entry might include fragments from several conversations that Rumi had as he passed through the streets of Konya on a particular day. Each of the poems is a small puzzle in itself—deceptively simple, yet hinting at meanings that can spark long conversations. Because Rumi was a kind of trickster teacher, preferring to give out instructions through poetic clues that you have to figure out for yourself, the Divan’s jigsaw-puzzle nature is probably entirely appropriate.

  Rumi spoke his poems spontaneously to people he met on his walks through the city; he didn’t write them for readers to ponder over later. As much as possible, I’ve attempted to use wording to sound as though someone is speaking directly to you. On occasion, I’ve linked passages together that seem to complement and even complete each other. And I’ve altered some of the English phrases that are commonly used in translations of Sufi poetry to give readers unfamiliar with Sufi terminology a clearer sense of what I believe Rumi was pointing to. The more common annihilation, for example, becomes melting down or melting away; the land of absence becomes the place where I disappear to.

  Mostly we think of spiritual practices and meditations as something we do with our minds, but all the practices that Rumi mentions—eating lightly, breathing deeply, moving freely, gazing raptly—are remarkably body oriented. His message is clear: if you want to change the psychology, you need to alter the physiology first. As a young man, Rumi had been taught the principle of ma’iyya by his father, who was an accomplished mystic in his own right. Ma’iyya tells us that God (or whatever word works for you) cannot be found in the mind alone (Buddhists, take note), can not be found in the heart alone (a shocking belief for a Sufi to have), but needs to be felt everywhere in the body. Minute tactile sensations can be felt in every part of the body, down to the smallest cell, but ordinarily we don’t let ourselves feel them. All too often, we hold the body still and suppress sensations, but then we’re puzzled as to why we feel so numb and cut off from life. Love is not just an isolated affair of the heart alone, but of the whole body felt and accepted. Every little part of the body that we hold our
selves back from feeling is a part of love that we cut ourselves off from.

  Each of the four practices presented here supports the awakening of soul through the stimulation of feeling, but the practices don’t just affect the body; they also radically affect the mind by softening the hardened sense of self with which, ordinarily, we so completely identify:

  dissolving the self

  is the creed and religion of lovers

  there’s no way to find your essence

  without giving up your self

  so melt yourself down

  go to the place where you disappear completely

  become nothing

  look and see

  I’ve seen everything in nothing

  We all have a sense of individual self, a feeling that I exist as an individual entity, separate from everyone else and from everything else as well. We nurture, defend, and protect this self (and the body it lives and dies in) with every available resource—yet Rumi urges us to let it go, to dissolve it, to find out what lies beyond it.

  The problem with the self is that it inevitably bifurcates the world into me and everything else, and ecstatic love can only be found in moments of merging. The self lives in a world of separation, but the soul thrives on union. The self speaks through the monologue of silent thoughts that pass continuously through your mind, so Rumi speaks of the need for silence and for going to a place beyond words. The self can be felt as a contraction in the middle of your head, and so Rumi speaks of dissolving and softening it. When the self starts melting away, ordinary boundaries start melting along with it. When your self subsides, you feel intimately commingled with your world, no longer separate from it.

  What might possibly lie beyond the self, and what is the state of union about which Rumi speaks so glowingly? No one can answer these questions for you. You have to find out for yourself, and that’s where the practices in this book can help you. Each section begins with an introductory essay about the practice, followed by a selection of Rumi’s poetry that speaks of it. Some of the poems read like literal instructions for the practice, while others allude to it more indirectly through metaphor and story. Many of the poems are funny, if not downright quirky; others go straight to the heart. This is not just another collection of beautiful Rumi poems to ooh and ahh over, however. It’s a call to practice, an invitation to actually do something. As Rumi has said—referring to religious scripture (and, for that matter, to his own poems as well):

  you can’t untie this knot by listening to fairy tales

  you have to do something inside yourself

  So look upon each of these practices as an invitation to ecstasy, and know that your name is on the guest list. To gain entrance into ecstasy’s party, all you need to do is to commit to doing practices that let you open to love’s outrageous presence and pass beyond your self. What might this party be like? (Hint: it’s no ordinary bar scene.) Listen to how Rumi describes what goes on there:

  o hearts gone wild

  overcome by pleasure

  ask for wine from the player

  and surrender to the sound of the ney*1

  o sober ones

  drink this wine from the jar of union,

  then destroy the mind

  that looks so far ahead of itself

  open the ear of your soul,

  listen to the music

  at the tavern of eternity,

  stop repeating the alphabet

  for god’s sake

  fill your skull with that divine wine

  and roll up the covers

  of reason and the mind

  o lovers

  take off the garment of self-consciousness

  and melt yourself away

  while gazing at the face of immortal beauty

  EATING LIGHTLY

  From its range of tastes, smells, and the flavors that ensue, to its ability to transform the discomforting signals of hunger into sensations of satiety, food gives us pleasure. The preparation of food, the sharing of it with others, the sitting down to eat it—all of it gives us pleasure. After all, we don’t eat and drink to be sad; we eat and drink to be merry, and so whenever humans gather together to celebrate, they most often do so around a table of delicious and carefully prepared food and drink.

  Food gives us pleasure, but it also gives us problems. In the cultures of scarcity there’s never enough, and in the cultures of abundance there’s often too much. Too much can be as problematic as too little (although it must sound offensive to people who have too little to hear of the “problems” of having too much). Because our ancestors were never certain that the cache of berries and nuts that they so fortuitously discovered today would be found tomorrow, they would eat as much food as possible whenever they came across it, and all too often, under radically different conditions, we still enjoy doing fundamentally the same thing. Traits that long ago guaranteed our survival now contribute, in the cultures of too much, to an epidemic of overeating and its long list of serious health problems—as well as ensuring a life of despair in the cultures of too little.

  Rumi would never tell us to forgo the pleasure of the food we eat, but he adds another twist to the connection between food and pleasure, one that compels us to reexamine our entire relationship with food and is especially pertinent in a world in which most people have either too little or too much available food. Beyond the pleasure of the chocolate in the mouth (and yes, it is pleasurable), there’s an even greater pleasure to be found, Rumi tells us, and that pleasure arises through fasting.

  For millennia many of our most prominent figures have voluntarily given up eating food for a period ranging from a single day to fifty days and more, and they did so for the spiritual, physical, and mental benefits that fasting in the proper way and under the proper circumstances can uniquely provide. Fasting played an important role in the spiritual journeys of such diverse individuals as Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and Gandhi. Healers of the body—such as Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Paracelsus—embraced it for its ability to cure physical illness. The philosophers Socrates and Plato recommended fasting to their students and to members of the Academy because of its ability to increase mental clarity and to enhance physical functioning.

  Billions of people on the planet today fast as part of religious ritual. Muslims eat no food during the days of Ramadan. Jews refrain from eating over Yom Kippur. Christians observe Lent. Native Americans fast as part of vision quests. Hindus and Buddhists each honor special days in their religious calendars by taking no food. And there are many more who fast on their own—not out of any religious observance, but simply because they enjoy how fasting makes them feel physically, emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually.

  As a Muslim born to a devout family, Rumi grew up within a culture of fasting and would have participated fully in the observances of Islam’s holy days. As he matured, he came to realize that fasting, while often initially entered into as an act of religious penance, was ultimately a practice of healing—not only of the body and mind, but of the soul itself. Eating large amounts of food feeds the you in you, but eating very little food feeds the god in you. Feasting has its place, but continual overeating adds fat to the very self that you hope to melt away. Fasting helps dissolve that self by stimulating the energies of ecstasy. During fasting, the sensations of the body start humming and vibrating again, and the mind eventually slows down and becomes quieter. Rumi always tells us to go inside and experience who we truly are, and periodic fasting was one of the fundamental tools he recommended for shining light onto our interior.

  Fasting can be as simple as drinking water or juice for a day, or it can go on for weeks on end. If you’ve never fasted before, you’ll want to speak to a health professional to make sure that you don’t have any medical conditions or circumstances (diabetes or pregnancy, for example) that would prevent you from fasting. But if you’re a candidate for fasting (and most reasonably healthy people are), let Rumi’s words reassure and support you as you ex
periment with eating so lightly.

  An enormous amount of information about fasting is available over the Internet and at book stores and libraries. You will find a huge variety of different kinds of fasts lasting for different lengths of time. Choose the fast that you intuitively resonate with and follow its instructions. If you’re brand-new to fasting, start slowly with a short fast. And remember: not all of the time spent fasting will be pleasant because, on their journey out of your body, accumulated toxins can be released from deep within your cells. But the release of this ache and pain can help heal your body, settle your mind, and show you the mysteries your soul craves.

  The Zulus have a saying: “The continually stuffed body can’t see the secret things.” Fasting, Rumi tells us, provides the kind of food that helps us see the mysteries and secret things in a way that the food of the table can’t. So, when grappling with the issue of whether or not you should fast periodically, ask yourself the following question: is the pleasure of a well-fed belly enough for me, or do I also want to taste the ecstasy that Rumi speaks of as an even greater pleasure?

  every year they dredge the canal

  and clean the mud

  so that water can flow

  and green crops can grow again

  if you give the bread of fasting

  to the one who cleans and opens the canal

  the fountain of life begins to flow

  and the body’s sensations come alive again

  we’ve cleaned our heart and soul with fasting

  the dirt that’s been with us

  has been washed away now

  fasting causes some inevitable stress

  but the invisible treasure of the heart gets revealed

  fasting is wine for the soul