These three theories of the Sufi sage will blow your mind.
Some time ago, I started reading Rumi.
Yalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī was a celebrated poet and a great Sufi mystic.
And what started as simple curiosity ended up as genuine admiration.
The mystic Rumi can encapsulate the most astonishing theories in three or four stanzas of poems.
These theories are encrypted in his poems, and I play at shaping them in my mind. And recently, I have discovered three little poems that have changed my thoughts about truth, ego, and divinity.
And I want to share my thoughts with you.
Let’s begin.
On the path, truth, and life.
“Of truth the secret will not be revealed by detachment, question, or penance, but when the heart and eye are exhausted: the Way of Union is not in all that chatter.” — Rumi.
Rumi, with this phrase, tries to abolish dogmas,
- Buddhist detachment.
- The questions of the philosophical tradition.
- Christian penance.
“When the heart and the eye are exhausted” means that we must transcend the ego and the world of appearances because the “union” is not there.
“Union” means religion because religion comes from the Latin “Religare,” which means to unite again.
Lesson: do not always believe your thoughts, let go of dogmas, and recognize your cognitive biases to avoid them, do not listen or be influenced by the external, and look for the truth in the silence, in the calm; only there it is.
On the ego
“My headdress, my robe and this head of mine together the three of them are not worth a dirham. Have you never heard of my world famous reputation? I am nobody, nobody, nobody.” — Rumi.
- Headdress: you are not what adorns your head, your titles.
- Robe: you are not what adorns your body, your material properties.
- Head: you are not what you think you are; your thoughts.
- Reputation: you are not what people say you are; your merits.
So what are you?
Nobody: that which always transforms.
Lesson: you cannot be who you were yesterday, nor today are you who you will be tomorrow because the only constant it’s the change; therefore, you cannot be anything you think you are. And that frees you because when you understand that, you realize you can be everything.
The past does not affect you if you do not allow it to affect you.
The future is what you materialize by giving it your attention, and it is potential. It is up to you, your formless nothingness capable of becoming anything, like water that can fill a glass and take its shape or a pool.
On your divine nature
“By day I praised you, but I did not know it. I slept with you, but I did not know it. That I was I thought, albeit amid suspicions, but I was always You, though I did not know it.” — Rumi.
There comes a point when life is filled with such extraordinary coincidental events that you think, “My life seems like a movie.”
And that’s when you realize that chaos doesn’t exist; everything has a why. And that is frightening and encouraging at the same time.
Rumi speaks to us about what we have all suspected at some point, even if we don’t want to admit it.
What if my consciousness is the consciousness of the universe?
What if when my consciousness shuts down, all reality shuts down?
What if I am an avatar (one of many) through which the universe sneaks in so as not to feel alone and interact with itself?
What if you are me and I am you, dear reader?
For something to exist, there must be an observer. And that makes reality inseparable from the consciousness that contemplates it.
And whether we are reality or consciousness, we are part of the same thing in both cases.
In the words of Rumi, “I asked myself if two are Beloved and lover. No: they were always one, and I saw double.
Lesson: experience needs the one who experiences it. Therefore you are the reality you experience and the one who lives it. You cannot dissociate. And thus, your consciousness and what it observes form a unique universe that, without you, would not exist.
You are more important than you think 🙂
A virtual hug,
AG
Leave a Reply