Johnson - Rumis Four Essential Practices

CONTENTS

Introduction

A RELIGION OF INTOXICATED LOVE AND ECSTASY

R eligion 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 everyones 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 Rumithe great thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and originator of the dance of the whirling dervishesbegan 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 its okay to feel these energies and, even more, to surrender to them and be transformed by themeven if (especially if ) they start making us feel as though were 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.

Rumis 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 doesnt 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.

Rumis 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 didnt 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 Rumis mouth strongly suggests that they were exploring the spiritual exercises and practices presented in this book. Its 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 Konyas 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 teachers mouth. After Rumis 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 Rumis 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 artists 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 itselfdeceptively 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 Divans jigsaw-puzzle nature is probably entirely appropriate.

Rumi spoke his poems spontaneously to people he met on his walks through the city; he didnt write them for readers to ponder over later. As much as possible, Ive attempted to use wording to sound as though someone is speaking directly to you. On occasion, Ive linked passages together that seem to complement and even complete each other. And Ive 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 mentionseating lightly, breathing deeply, moving freely, gazing raptlyare 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 ofmaiyya by his father, who was an accomplished mystic in his own right. Maiyya 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 dont let ourselves feel them. All too often, we hold the body still and suppress sensations, but then were 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 ourselves back from feeling is a part of love that we cut ourselves off from.