The Forbidden Rumi by Nevit O. Ergin

Author:Nevit O. Ergin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Poetry
ISBN: 9781594779961
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2009-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Songs of Advice, Songs of Admonition

Imagine the small and winding streets of a thirteenth-century Turkish town. Imagine Rumi as an ecstatic drunkard wandering around town, calling out to everybody he passes as he dances and staggers through the streets. On one corner are the lovers, and he stops and speaks to them softly, encouraging them to keep surrendering to this mystery that has taken hold of them. On the next corner are the people who revere him and his great friend Shams. Rumi acknowledges them for the wisdom of their vision and their continued commitment to enter into the heresy themselves. A few blocks later, he comes across the naysayers, the scowling faces of disapproval, the ones who behind everyone’s backs are plotting for the downfall of both Rumi and Shams. Rumi does not shy away from meeting their disapproval with disapproving words of his own.

Like a physician of the soul who liberally distributes medicines to the ill, Rumi dispenses advice on every street corner. Take this, he says, take it diligently, take it for the rest of your life, and watch what happens to you. Watch your illness drop away, like some concealing curtain, and then see what vistas of your soul are revealed.

We all suffer from the illness of the soul, and our symptoms are remarkably similar. We listen to the chatter in our minds as though it were God himself speaking. We are swept this way and that by our fluctuating emotions, desires, and fancies, as though the tides of the ocean itself were sweeping through our bodies. Everywhere we look, we get confirmation of our separation from the world outside of ourselves. The more we come to know about the vastness of that world, the more we feel small, alone, alienated, fearful of the discrepancy in size between our little body and the very large world.

But, Rumi tells us, there’s a cure to this illness, a solution to this insoluble dilemma. The consciousness of union, in which the soul experiences its inherent connection and oneness with everything that is, is every bit as real and palpable as is the far more common consciousness of separation. The antidote to the fear of separation is to be found through dissolving into union, and guess what? The medicines to effect this cure have already been ingested. In fact, they have been inside you from the moment you were born, waiting patiently on the shelves for you to have the good sense to take them down, swallow them whole, and let the healing begin.

The medicines Rumi dispenses are both sweet and bitter. For those clearly on the path of the heart, the words are a comfort to the soul. But for those who stand in opposition to the ways in which the divine energies want to pass through them, the unminced words may be difficult to hear. Rumi is not afraid to respond to the fiery words of those who doubt him with fire of his own. For him there

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