what was Rumi trying to tell us?

Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering

Of the billions of people who have walked the earth, it’s rather remarkable that only a relative few make a lasting impression in a historical sense. The 13th century poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī is one of these people.

Perhaps Rumi’s works and sentiments live on because they touch the heart. They have traveled from the handwritten word to the earliest letterpress books, across the sands of vast deserts and across oceans into lands that Rumi never dreamed of, settling here in the modern era where they appear all over the internet in manifold languages throughout the east and west. Poets and spiritual teachers have quoted Rumi over and over again, feeling that his words are some of the finest examples of poetry, evoking compassion, feelings of love, a sensitivity for the natural world, and a call to world unity.

Unlike so many others of lasting impact, Rumi’s fame is for his profoundly spiritual nature. He is arguably the greatest Sufi mystic and poet, but his message is beyond religious views and teachings so that he has widely influenced mystical thought and literature, throughout the Muslim world in the Middle Ages and well into India. And now, many centuries later, Rumi is known throughout the west where his poetry is posted as sound bites on the internet and studied at the university level.

One biographer notes that, as a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the Persian poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who presented him with his personal copy of Ilahinama (The Book of God). Attar was a collector of verses and sayings of famous Sufis and it seems that Rumi impressed him the most. If we consider that books were expensive and not mass manufactured, then we can begin to see the value in Attar’s honorarium.

Historians say that Rūmī’s life changed immeasurably on November 30, 1244, when in the streets of Konya he met a wandering dervish — a holy man — named Shams al-Dīn (Sun of Religion) of Tabrīz. From this point on, Rumi became immersed in mysteries of divine majesty and beauty; and his writings were often colored with love for Shams of Tabriz. Perhaps it’ll never be fully known, but through today’s eyes one may speculate that Rumi’s poetry for his teacher bordered on homoeroticism, which may have been the reason that Rumi’s relatives drove Shams out of town on more than one occasion. Eventually Shams of Tabriz was reported murdered and the news crushed Rumi.

the search for the seat of the self
Rumi’s poems reflected the eternal search of those who become mystics, which is the search for the seat of the self — what lies beyond this sense of self that seems to suffer so much over its own existence. Rumi wrote:

Everyday I meditate upon this, and every night I groan
Why is my own existence to myself the least known?

Whence have I come, why this coming here?
Where to must I go, when will my home to me be shown?

I am in desperate awe, why was I ever created?
For this, my creation, whatsoever was the reason?

It seems, according to historians, that much of Rumi’s poetry was composed in a state of ecstasy, induced by the music of the flute or the drum, the hammering of the goldsmiths, or the sound of the water mill in Meram, where he frequented with his disciples to bask in the marvel of nature. It was in nature that he found the reflection of the radiant beauty of the Shams of Tabriz, and where he embraced flowers and birds partaking in his love. Rumi often blended and infused his verses through the now-famous whirling dance of the dervishes, and many of his poems were composed to be sung in Sufi musical gatherings.

what can we learn from Rumi?
Author Coleman Barks wrote that “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up… He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

Rumi’s poems seemed to bridge the divide between the world and the otherworldly, the common and the transcendent. As with all good poetry, his poetry has the power to turn one’s thoughts from the world of phenomena to the source of all things. And his philosophy is one of inclusion, hope, redemption, and salvation, or what may be called unconditional love and compassion.

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.

— Rumi

transcendent words
There have been a number of enlightened teachers down through the ages, but they are rare and few in number. We may never know if Rumi was among this special lot, but his words evoke a truth that transcends the ephemeral world of the body and our so-called existence. Centuries before his birth, the Greeks had proclaimed that there are only two categories of existence: atoms and the void. Existence is of the atomic world that are all the expressions, objects, and beings, and the void remains a mystery out of which all else (the atomic world) emanates. The teachings of the true mystic point to the void, the source, where the suffering and confusion of life does not exist. The void is the silent stillness that is found beyond the sense of self and all expressions of life. It is knowable if we just set the self aside and take a close and undistracted look. Rumi wrote:

I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water-carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!

— Rumi

the emptiness is what we are at our core
Rumi’s words echo the same findings of the most famous enlightened mystics who discovered that this world of form and expression issues forth from an ineffable emptiness. And this emptiness is all of us at our essence. He wrote:

This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.