Tasting and Touching Transcendence

The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi
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The 13th-century Muslim mystic and poet Rumi has long shaped Muslims around the world and has now become popular in the West. Rumi created a new language of love within the Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism. We hear his poetry as we delve into his world and listen for its echoes in our own.


Rumi's poems are best-sellers in the West and he has long influenced Islamic thought and spirituality, though his Muslim identity is often lost in translation. With an Iranian-American poet and scholar, we'll explore why that matters in our time. And we'll hear the lyrical words Rumi put to the common human search for meaning. He understood searching and restlessness as a kind of arrival. He saw every form of human love as a mirror of the divine.

In this episode of  Being  (formerly called Speaking of Faith), Krista Tippett speaks with Rumi scholar and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz.  Ms. Keshavarz is chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a poet, and often sets Rumi's words to music. She grew up speaking the Persian in which Rumi wrote, in the Iranian city of Shiraz.  Together they explore the exuberant world of Rumi and reveal the relevance of his 13th-century wisdom to the modern Western world.

I hear Rumi as a perfect voice for the spiritual longing and energy of our time. With his vigorous and challenging language of the heart, he reminds us that we need poetry as much as we need science, alongside our politics and within our diplomacy. We need passionate searching words, not just logical decisive words, to tell the whole truth about what it means to be human, and about the past, present, and future of our world.

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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
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A Story about Heaven and Hell

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A holy man was having a conversation with God one day and wanted to know what Heaven and Hell are like.

So God showed the holy man two doors.  He opened one of the doors and the holy man looked in.

In the middle of the room was a large round table.  In the middle of the table was a huge pot of stew, which smelled delicious and made the holy man's mouth water.

The people sitting around the table were pale, thin and sickly.  They appeared to be famished.  They were holding spoons with very long handles that were strapped to their arms, but it was still possible for each of them to dip the spoons into the pot and get some stew.  But because the handle was longer than their arms, they couldn't get the spoons back into their mouths.

The holy man shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering.

God said, "You have just seen Hell". 

Then they went to the next door and opened it.  The second room was exactly the same as the first one - there was a large round table with a huge pot of stew, the scent of which made the holy man's mouth water.

The people were equipped with the same long-handled spoons strapped to their arms, but here the people were well-nourished and plump, laughing and talking with each other.

The holy man said, "I don't understand".

"It's simple", replied God, "It requires just one skill..."

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Kneel and Kiss the Earth

as we near the end of Coming to our Senses
by Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Today like every other day
we wake up empty and scared.
Don't open the door of your study
and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel
and kiss the earth.
- Rumi
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Across the span of nine hundred years, Rumi is evoking reverence and how easily it can be missed if, in the face of our endemic discomfort, we persist out of habit in opening the door of our study and begin reading when we might, alternatively, "take down a musical instrument," the closest at hand being our own living body, and let the beauty we love, if we can be in touch with it, reveal itself in the many different ways we might carry ourselves in this moment, here and now.  This is nothing less than an exhortation to practice being truly in touch with what is most fundamental, most important, and a nod to there being no singular one right way to go about it.

When we do not limit ourselves to one way of knowing, or one vocabulary, or one set of lenses through which to look, when we purposefully expand our horizon of inquiry and curiosity, we can take delight in all the various ways we have of knowing something.  We also have a chance to recognize the mystery of what is not known conceptually but sensed, felt, intuited, attended to by the confluence of all our senses in direct unfragmented experience, not excluding anything, even our concepts and what they reveal in any moment, all summing to an ongoing exchange with what is larger than we are and that is nothing other than us as well.  Every one of our mysterious and miraculous senses, including mind, is a way of knowing the world and a way of knowing ourselves.

We are larger than any one way of knowing, and can enjoy all of them as different incomplete and complementary modes for appreciating what is, and for participating in what is with gusto and delight for the moments, timeless and yet fleeting, that we are here for.  We can rest in not knowing, as well as in knowing, in the beauty of form and function and in their mystery, on any and every level that the senses and the mind, our instruments and our instincts, and our efforts to understand, deliver to us in any moment.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Sounds of laughter, shades of earth
are ringing through my opened views
inciting and inviting me

From: http://www.musicbabylon.com

- The Beatles
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Arriving At Your Own Door

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from Coming to Our Senses
by Jon Kabat-Zinn
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The time will come
when with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.

- Derek Walcott, "Love after Love"
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Every moment we are arriving at our own door.  Every moment we could open it.  In every moment, we might love again the stranger who was ourself, who knows us, as the poem says, by heart.  We already know ourselves by heart in every sense of the word, but we may have forgotten that we do.  Arriving at our own door is all in the remembering, the re-membering, the reclaiming of that which we already are and have too long ignored, having been carried, seemingly, farther and farther from home, yet at the same time, never farther than this breath and this moment.  Can we wake up?  Can we come to our senses?  Can we be the knowing, and at the same time keep don't know mind and honor the not-knowing?  Are they even different?

The time will come, the poet affirms.  Yes, the time will come, but do we want it to be on our deathbeds when we wake up to who and what we actually are, as Thoreau foresaw could so easily happen?  Or can that time be this time, be right now, where we are, as we are?

The time will come, yes, but only if we give ourselves over to waking up, to coming to our senses, and going beyond our own underdeveloped minds.  Only if we can perceive the chains of our robotic conditioning, especially our emotional conditioning, and our view of who we think we are - peel our own image from the mirror - and in the perceiving, in seeing what is here to be seen, hearing what is here to be heard, watch the chains dissolve in the seeing, in the hearing, so we rotate back into our larger original beauty, as we greet ourselves arriving at our own door, as we love again the stranger who was ourself. We can.  We can.  We will.  We will.  For what else, ultimately, is there for us to do?

How else, ultimately, are we to be free?

How else, ultimately, can we be who we already are?

And when, oh when, oh when is the moment this will happen?  "The time will come..." the poet says.  Perhaps it already has.

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I learned as a child not to trust in my body
I've carried that burden through my life
But there's a day when we all have to be pried loose.
If this were the last night of the world, what would I do?
- Bruce Cockburn
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