The Spiritual Practices of Rumi by Will Johnson

Author:Will Johnson [Will Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2011-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Birthing River of Darkness and Light

The practice of gazing at the beloved is like a float trip that takes you down the river of your soul and ends at the ocean of union. Starting off from the familiarity of dry land, you and your friend place your raft in the river, climb aboard together, and then simply surrender to the current, passing through untold adventures along the way until you arrive at your destination where the river empties itself into the ocean. And then you take the trip over and over and over again.

While it’s impossible to predict the specific events and occurrences that await you, there are four main stages that you are likely to encounter on your journey. Some of these stages are filled with light, like the noonday sun on a cloudless day. Others may take you into dark moonless nights where hidden creatures crouch, waiting to jump out and scare you. Each stage is marked by a different condition of the body and the mind. Understanding these stages before you launch your raft can help prepare you for the unusual adventures and transformations that lie ahead.

The first stage is the conventional condition of the body and mind that creates the consciousness that passes as normal in the world at large. This is where we all begin the journey. Even though many good and decent people will spend their entire lives here and never proceed any further, Rumi refers to this stage as the dry and brittle land, the hardened and parched earth that removes us from the life-giving waters for which our hearts so thirst.

The civilized world in which we live, with all its very real joys and fears, is primarily a first-stage world. Whether we are victims or victors, we tend so to identify with the material forms and roles that we have been cast into that we lose touch with the animating spirit, the life force that inhabits these forms. In this first stage, we suppress the naturally expansive energies of the body and mind, as though we were turning down the dimmer switch on a lightbulb, and settle for an existence that is less luminous than it might otherwise be. Like a black hole in space that collapses down on itself and doesn’t let light escape or radiate out from it, we withdraw into ourselves and effectively become separate from everything we perceive to exist outside of our bodies. The first stage enshrines the perspective of separation as the reigning consciousness of choice.

As inhabitants of the first stage, we protect ourselves from feeling the full vibrancy of our bodily life through the creation of a subtle, but pervasive pattern of numbing tension that blankets our body from head to foot. But like deer that somehow manage to get into a fenced garden and nibble away at the vegetables, pockets of pain still manage to poke through this protective barrier and eat away at our peace of mind.

When the vibrant life of the

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