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The
Life and Spiritual Milieu of Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
( Excerpt from Introduction to
"A
Daybook of Spiritual Guidance
--365 Selections from the Mathnawi of Mevlâna
Jalâluddîn Rumi"
by Camille & Kabir Helminsky).
In
the last decades of the Twentieth Century the spiritual
influence of Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi is being strongly
felt by people of diverse beliefs throughout the Western
world. He is being recognized here in the West, as he
has been for seven centuries in the Middle East and
Western Asia, as one of the greatest
literary and spiritual figures of all time.
Different qualities of Rumi have been brought forth by a
variety of new translations that have appeared during
the nineteen-eighties. He has been presented as both
refined and sensual, sober and ecstatic, deeply serious
and extremely funny, rarefied and accessible. It is a
sign of his profound universality that he has been so
many things to so many people.
Rumi's Life......
Jalâluddîn
Rumi was born in 1207 in
Balkh in what is today Afghanistan. At
an early age his family left Balkh
because of the danger of the invading Mongols and
settled in Konya, Turkey, which was then the capital of
the Seljuk Empire. His father Bahauddin was a great
religious teacher who received a position at the
university in Konya.
Mevlâna's
early spiritual education was under the tutelage of his
father Bahauddin and later under his father's close
friend Sayyid Burhaneddin of Balkh. The circumstances
surrounding Sayyid's undertaking of the education of his
friend's son are interesting: Sayyid had been in
Balkh, Afghanistan when he felt the death of his friend
Bahauddin and realized that he must go to Konya to take over Jalâluddîn's spiritual
education. He came to Konya when Mevlâna was about
twenty-four years old, and for nine years instructed him
in "the science of the prophets and states," beginning
with a strict forty day retreat and continuing with
various disciplines of meditation and fasting. During
this time Jalâluddîn also spent more than four years in
Aleppo and Damascus studying with
some of the greatest religious minds of the time.
As the
years passed, Mevlâna grew both in knowledge and
consciousness of God. Eventually Sayyid Burhaneddin felt
that he had fulfilled his responsibility toward
Jalâluddîn, and he wanted to live out the rest of his
years in seclusion. He told Mevlâna, "You are now ready,
my son. You have no equal in any of the branches of
learning. You have become a lion of knowledge. I am such
a lion myself and we are not both needed here and that
is why I want to go. Furthermore, a great friend will
come to you, and you will be each other's mirror. He
will lead you to the innermost parts of the spiritual
world, just as you will lead him. Each of you will
complete the other, and you will be the greatest friends
in the entire world." And so Sayyid intimated the coming
of Shams of Tabriz, the central event of Rumi's life.
At the age
of thirty-seven Mevlâna met the Dervish, Shams. Much has
already been written about their relationship. Prior to
this encounter Rumi had been an eminent professor of
religion and a highly attained mystic; after this he
became an inspired poet and a great lover of humanity.
Rumi's meeting with Shams can be compared to Abraham's
meeting with Melchizedek. I owe to Murat Yagan this
explanation: "A Melchizedek and a Shams are messengers
from the Source. They do nothing themselves but carry
enlightenment to someone who can receive, someone who is
either too full or too empty. Mevlâna was one who was
too full. After receiving it, he could apply this
message for the benefit of humanity." Shams was burning
and Rumi caught fire. Shams' companionship with Rumi was
brief. Despite the fact that each was a perfect mirror
for the other Shams disappeared, not once but twice. The
first time, Rumi's son Sultan Veled searched for and
discovered him in Damascus. The second
disappearance, however, proved to be final, and it is
believed that he may have been murdered by people who
resented his influence over Mevlâna.
Rumi was a
man of knowledge and sanctity before meeting Shams, but
only after the alchemy of this relationship was he able
to fulfill Sayyid Burhaneddin's prediction that he would
"drown men's souls in a fresh life and in the
immeasurable abundance of God... and bring to life the
dead of this false world with... meaning and love."
For more than ten years after meeting Shams, Mevlâna had
been spontaneously composing odes, or ghazals,
and these had been collected in a large volume called
the Divan-i Kabir. Meanwhile Mevlâna had
developed a deep spiritual friendship with Husameddin
Chelebi. The two of them were wandering through the
Meram vineyards outside of Konya one day when Husameddin
described an idea he had to Mevlâna: "If you were to
write a book like the Ilahiname of Sanai or the
Mantik'ut-Tayr'i of Fariduddin Attar it would
become the companion of many troubadours. They would
fill their hearts form you work and compose music to
accompany it."
Mevlâna smiled and took from inside the folds of his
turban a piece of paper on which were written the
opening eighteen lines of his Mathnawi, beginning
with:
Listen to
the reed and the tale it tells,
how it sings of separation...
Husameddin
wept for joy and implored Mevlâna to write volumes more.
Mevlâna replied, "Chelebi, if you consent to write for
me, I will recite." And so it happened that Mevlâna in
his early fifties began the dictation of this monumental
work. As Husameddin described the process: "He never
took a pen in his hand while composing the Mathnawi.
Wherever he happened to be, whether in the school, at
the Ilgin
hot springs, in the Konya baths, or in the
Meram vineyards, I would write down what he recited.
Often I could barely keep up with his pace, sometimes,
night and day for several days. At other times he would
not compose for months, and once for two years there was
nothing. At the completion of each book I would read it
back to him, so that he could correct what had been
written."
The
Mathnawi can justifiably be considered the greatest
spiritual masterpiece ever written by a human being.
It's content includes the full spectrum of life on
earth, every kind of human activity: religious,
cultural, political, sexual, domestic; every kind of
human character form the vulgar to the refined; as well
as copious and specific details of the natural world,
history and geography. It is also a book that presents
the vertical dimension of life -- from this mundane
world of desire, work, and things, to the most sublime
levels of metaphysics and cosmic awareness. It is its
completeness that enchants us.
His Spiritual Milieu.......
What
do we need to know to receive the knowledge that Rumi
offers us?
First of
all, it needs to be understood that Rumi's tradition is
not an "Eastern" tradition. It is neither of the East
nor of the West, but something in between. Rumi's
mother-tongue was Persian, an Indo-European language
strongly influenced by Semitic (Arabic) vocabulary,
something like French with a smattering of Hebrew.
Furthermore, the Islamic tradition, which shaped him,
acknowledges that only one religion has been given to
mankind through countless prophets, or messengers, who
have come to every people on earth bearing this
knowledge of Spirit. God is the subtle source of all
life, Whose essence cannot be described or compared to
anything, but Who can be known through the spiritual
qualities that are manifest in the world and in the
human heart. It is a deeply mystical tradition, on the
one hand, with a strong and clear emphasis on human
dignity and social justice, on the other.
Islam is
understood as a continuation of the Judeo-Christian or
Abrahamic tradition, honoring the Hebrew prophets, as
well as Jesus and Mary. Muslims, however, are very
sensitive to the issue of attributing divinity to a
human being, which they see as the primary error of
Christianity. although Jesus is called the in the
Qur'an "the Spirit of God," it would be thought a
blasphemy to identify any human being exclusively as
God. Muhammad is viewed as the last of those human
prophets who brought the message of God's love.
In Rumi's
world, the Islamic way of life had established a high
level of spiritual awareness among the general
population. The average person would be someone who
performed regular ablutions and prayed five times a day,
fasted from food and drink during the daylight hours for
at least one month a year, and closely followed a code
which emphasized the continual remembrance of God,
intention, integrity, generosity, and respect for all
life. Although the Mathnawi can appeal to us on
many levels, it assumes a rather high level of spiritual
awareness as a starting point and extends to the very
highest levels of spiritual understanding.
The
unenlightened human state is one of "faithlessness" in
which an individual lives in slavery to the false self
and the desires of the materials world. The spiritual
practices which Rumi would have known were aimed at
transforming the compulsiveness of the false self and
attaining Islam or "Submission" to a higher order of
reality. Without this submission the real self is
enslaved to the ego and lives in a state of internal
conflict due to the contradictory impulses of the ego.
The enslaved ego is cut off from the heart, the chief
organ for perceiving reality, and cannot receive the
spiritual guidance and nourishment which the heart
provides.
Overcoming
this enslavement and false separation leads to the
realization and development of our true humanity.
spiritual maturity is the realization that the self is a
reflection of the Divine. God is the Beloved or Friend,
the transpersonal identity. Love of God leads to the
lover forgetting himself in the love of the Beloved.
Note: The
article is slightly edited for this site
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