Teachings of Rumi Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Jelalludin Rumi (1207–1273) led the quiet life of an Islamic teacher in the central Anatolia (modern Turkey) until the age of thirty–seven, when he met a wandering dervish named Shams Tabriz—through whom he encountered the Divine Presence in a way that utterly transformed him. The result of this epiphany was the greatest body of mystical poetry the world has ever seen, and the establishment of a spiritual movement that would eventually stretch from Africa to China, enduring to our own day.

  This collection of versions of Rumi by Andrew Harvey contains some of the master’s most luminous verse, along with selections from his lesser–read prose works, with the aim of presenting a balanced view of his teaching that includes both the high–flying love of God and the rigorous path of discipline essential for those who seek it.

  ANDREW HARVEY is the author of Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ and more than thirty other books. He has also published several other collections of Rumi, including The Way of Passion.

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  Teachings of

  RUMI

  Re-created and edited by

  ANDREW HARVEY

  SHAMBHALA

  Boston & London

  2012

  SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Horticultural Hall

  300 Massachusetts Avenue

  Boston, Massachusetts 02115

  www.shambhala.com

  © 1999 by Andrew Harvey

  Cover art: Page of manuscript of Quran. Iran, sixteenth century. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Teaching of Rumi/edited by Andrew Harvey.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 978-0-8348-2680-9

  ISBN 978-1-57062-346-2

  1. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Maulana, 1207–1273. 2. Mevleviyeh. I. Harvey, Andrew, 1952–

  BP189.7.M42T43 1999 98-54866

  297.4′092—dc21 CIP

  For

  GLORIA VANDERBILT COOPER

  “Real Lovers serve ardently, hopefully, in an ecstasy of awe.”

  —RUMI

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART I

  The Call

  The Wine and the Cup

  You Are the Macrocosm

  Our Soul Was Like the Universe

  Return at Last

  The Goal Is One

  One Light, Different Windows

  The Authentic Human Being

  Rumi and the Ox

  The Moon Is the Same Moon

  You Yourself Become Illusion

  The Elephant, the Candle, and the Eye of the Sea

  Don’t Listen to the Trickster

  A Quarrel about Grapes

  Lift Now the Lid of the Jar of Heaven

  The Three Pearls

  The Thicker the Veil, the More Valuable the Jewel

  Become the Sun Itself

  The Real Pilgrimage Is Inward

  The Thirsty Man, the Wall, and the Water

  False Thinking

  The Paradox

  The Place of Honor

  Busy Yourself with That Head

  Taste with Discrimination

  You Are Loved by Him

  Leave the Vulture Behind

  Such a Passion and Longing

  The Heart’s the Only Real House of Safety

  Keep Your Heart Awake

  Measuring out the Sugar

  Nearness Is of Many Kinds

  Keep Moving, Keep Growing

  Make Yourself Ready to Do All He Wants

  On the Limits of Fatalism

  Another Alchemy

  On Repentance

  More Than One Stage Has to Be Transcended

  See to It That You Pray Constantly

  The Soul and the Spirit of Prayer

  The Pure Name

  Your Longing for Me Was My Messenger to You

  All through the Night God Is Calling Us

  Moses and the Shepherd

  True Consciousness

  The Sublime Art of Gathering-in

  Draw Strength from Reality through Form

  Find a Home in the Heights

  Be Worthy of My Gifts

  The Man of God

  Become a Fool

  Resurrection

  PART II

  Be a Lover

  A Life without Love Isn’t a Life

  Not the Garden but the Gardener

  See the Friend Directly

  Love Is All That Exists

  The Soul of Reality

  The Root of the Entire Matter

  Through Love

  Only Love Can Explain Love

  The Beloved Is Everything

  Secret Ways

  Astounding Comfort

  Love, the Black Lion

  Let Yourself Be Killed by Him

  My Heart is “Light upon Light”

  Lover and Love Are Only One

  Rose Garden after Rose Garden

  Love’s Intelligences

  Look for Passion, Passion, Passion, Passion

  Love Makes the Seas Boil Like a Pot

  It Itself Becomes Sign

  Joy Will Unveil Itself

  PART III

  Ordeal

  Destruction Precedes Renewal

  Enter the Furnace

  The Mystery of Misery

  Ordeals by Terror

  The Work of Religion Is Astonishment

  The Sign

  Look for the Happiness of a Supreme Lover

  Grief Is Worth More Than the Empire of This World

  Prudence

  Keep Your Dragon in the Snow

  Give the Serpent a Kiss

  For Love, Like for a Furnace

  Offer Your Life to This Work

  A Supreme Grace

  Gaze in Wonder at the Infinite Rose Garden

  The Housewife and the Chickpea

  He Will Not Let You Die

  Satan

  You Have No Idea What You Are Asking For

  Obstacles on the Path

  One Small Hair

  The Tattoo Artist, the Lion, and the Man of Qazwin

  Peace after Long Exile

  Never Turn Away from Me

  Despair Is a Sin

  Praise God and Be Patient

  The Serpent

  Now Die to Yourself

  My Work’s to Risk My Head

  Heaven Is Made of the Smoke of Hearts

  Do Not Despair, My Soul!

  The Desert Where Love Appears

  PART IV

  Union

  Waters Constantly Flowing

  Since You Are I, You Who Are Myself

  The Rose Garden Has Flowered

  O Most Glorified One! O Most Holy One!

  She Was Always Referring to Him

  Why Would I Not Be Honest?

  The Highest Rank

  Paradox on Paradox

  What Is This Sacred Dance?

  The Voluntary Slave

  His Rarer Alchemy

  Divine Pride

  You Will Not Hear One from Me

  God Wears Red

  Go Further Always

  The Direct View

  My Burial Ground Will Invite You to Dance

  Stage After Stage

  Become a Sea
>
  On the First Day of Every Year

  Look for the District of Joy

  United Tenderly

  Reciprocal Loves

  Sources

  Glossary

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my Mother, for the inspiration of her love of truth.

  To Eryk, my husband, bringer of fire and tender heart-companion.

  To Leila and Henry Luce, for their constantly encouraging kindness.

  To Mara and Joey Singer, for the truth of their friendship.

  To Tracy Cochran, for her kind and generous help and witness.

  To Tami Simon, for her clarity and integrity.

  To Eva de Vitray Meyerovitch, for her pioneering work and for many hours of communion in the presence of Our Beloved.

  To my editor, Dave O’Neal, for his support and vision.

  To the blessed memory of Bella von Heinz, who first awoke me to the wonder of Islam.

  INTRODUCTION

  JALAL-UD-DIN RUMI, the greatest mystic of Islam, and, many people believe, of the world, was born in Balkh, Afghanistan on September 30, 1207, and died in Konya, Southern Turkey, on December 17, 1273. He left behind as the record of his extraordinarily intense life, lived on the wildest and grandest heights of the spirit, the Mathnawi, a mystical epic; 3,500 odes; 2,000 quatrains; a book of table talk; and a large volume of letters. The Mevlevi order that he founded and that was continued by his son, Sultan Valad, spread his vision all over Asia and Africa and now has centers all over the world.

  In the last twenty years, through the pioneering translations of Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Kabir Helminski, and Jonathan Star, among others, Rumi has become, as Bill Moyers pointed out in his recent television special on him, “the most popular poet in America,” read and loved by seekers of all persuasions and creeds. For hundreds of thousands of people, Rumi’s work in its passion, honesty, and gorgeous imagery has become a way of connecting directly with the Divine beyond the constrictions of religion or dogma. Rumi now commands in the West what he has long commanded in the East—an unassailable position as the most poignant and vibrant of all celebrators of the Path of Love and as a supreme witness, in a way that transcends all national, cultural, and religious boundaries, to the mysteries of Divine Identity and Presence.

  Rumi combined the intellect of a Plato, the vision and enlightened soul-force of a Buddha or a Christ, and the extravagant literary gifts of a Shakespeare. This unique fusion of the highest philosophical lucidity with the greatest possible spiritual awareness and the most complete artistic gifts give Rumi unique power as what might be called a Sacred Initiator or Initiator into the Sacred. Born out of the fire of a vast Awakening, Rumi’s work has an uncanny direct force of illumination; anyone approaching it with an open heart and mind, at whatever stage of his or her evolution, will derive from it inspiration, excitement, and help of the highest kind. Everything Rumi wrote or transmitted has the unmistakable authority of total inner experience, the authority of a human being who has risked and given everything to the search for divine truth.

  As fears of an environmental apocalypse grow, and the terrible dangers that afflict humanity on every level become more and more inescapably clear, Rumi’s work will become increasingly important for its testimony to the divine origin and purpose of human life, its overwhelmingly beautiful celebration of the truths and mysteries of Divine Glory, and its wise embrace of all paths and approaches to the experience of God. Increasingly, it will become clear that Rumi is not only humanity’s supreme mystical poet but also one of its clearest guides to the mystical renaissance that is trying to be born in the rubble of our suicidal civilization. What might be called the “Return of Rumi” to the consciousness of humanity occurs at a time when the truths of Rumi’s celebration of the Beloved are needed not only as revelations of the real purpose of human life but as essential inspirations and empowerments in the struggle to save the human race and preserve the planet. Unless the vision of Rumi and other great mystics from the major traditions possesses the spirit and hones the motivation of millions of human beings and initiates them into the sacredness of human life and the holiness of Nature, humanity will destroy the world in a bitter frenzy of ignorance, pride, and greed.

  If Rumi is to be given, as I believe, a central role in the awakening of humanity to its own divine truth and possibility, then it has never been more important to see his work and the teaching it enshrines in as lucid and fearless a way as possible. The New Age in its narcissism, its lazy greed of appropriation, its ability to make over all sublime and demanding truth in its own hazy image, and its lack of any real or ennobling concern for political, social, and environmental issues, has created a limited vision of Rumi to serve its own ends; has created, in fact, what I call “Rosebud Rumi,” a Californian hippie-like figure of vague ecstatic sweetness and diffused “warm-hearted” brotherhood, a kind of medieval Jerry Garcia of the Sacred Heart.

  This limp and vulgar vision entirely omits an essential side of Rumi’s spiritual genius—its rigorous, even ferocious, austerity. Rumi is indeed an ecstatic, the greatest of all celebrators of that ecstasy that streams from the Presence of Love. He is also—as I hope this volume will make clear—the canniest, shrewdest, most unsentimental, and sober of teachers, very un-New Age in his refusal to deny the power of evil, his candor about the limits of all worldly and earthly enlightenment, his Jesus-like suspicion of all forms of wealth and power, and his embrace of the sometimes terrible and prolonged suffering that authentic transformation must and does demand. This rigorous, fierce, authoritative Rumi, the veteran of the wars of Love, is what our spiritual renaissance deeply needs to listen to and learn from, if the transformation that is trying to happen in our time is not to be diffused in a cloud of laziness, fantasy, denial, and occult charlatanry.

  Rumi can be a complete guide for seekers now precisely because he combined the most extreme imaginable vision and experience of divine beauty and mystery with a sober and humble teaching of how to sustain, continually deepen, and integrate them with daily life. Unlike many of our contemporary teachers, drunk on partial awakening, Rumi—whose knowledge of the Path of Love was perhaps the most thorough that any human has ever had—never claimed total enlightenment; in fact, one of his most original contributions to the history of mystical thought is his intuition that evolution is an infinite process that never ends on any of the planes of any world, and that the journey into embodying and living Love is as infinite and boundless as Love Itself. Unlike many contemporary seekers, Rumi’s passion was not for sensational experiences, occult powers, or radically enhanced “self-esteem”; he was dragged deep enough into Love to know that divine life could only be found on the other side of an Annihilation of self that demanded and cost everything and that authentic spiritual “Lordship” was not the acquisition of any kind of power but a humble embrace of “Servanthood”—of the life of the servant-slave of Love and so of every human and sentient being in the name, and for the glory of, God. Such a vision is simultaneously far more humble and more exalted than the pseudomysticisms being peddled everywhere in the New Age, and sometimes in Rumi’s name. The laws of such a final vision of human truth and divine possibility are not tailored as are so many of the contemporary mystical “systems,” either to flatter human weakness or to inflate human claims to divinity; complete experience gave Rumi an unfailing sense of balance and a fundamental and astonished humility before the always changing and always deepening experience of the Divine.

  This balance and humility inform Rumi’s teaching at every level and are the source of its extreme clarity about the dangers, temptations, fantasies, and various forms of inflation, hysteria, and pride that threaten the authentic seeker. They are also the source of perhaps its most challenging, even frightening aspect—that of Rumi’s fearless and scathingly truthful embrace of the ordeals that true transformation demand. Rumi’s own awakening was at the price of a vast suffering, or rather, series of sufferings, that le
d to his death and rebirth in the dimension of Resurrection. Rumi knew from bitter and glorious experience, that the life of the real lover of God is often one of frightful ordeal and exposure to bewilderment and grief of every kind. Yet, because Rumi both lived and survived such appalling experience, he is able to speak with ennobling courage and hope about the gnosis that is born from it and about the glory of sustained divine human being that Annihilation opens onto, the inner “Rose garden” that only a pure-souled dying-into-Love can uncover in all its amazing rapture and loveliness.