The 13th-century Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī also known as Mevlana, or simply as Rumi, observed that all phenomena of nature are bound together by love. Love is what keeps planets orbiting their stars, stars encircling the centers of their galaxies, and electrons revolving around the nucleus of an atom. Love is the force that keeps us together and moving and immerses an otherwise cold world of matter with warmth. Within the Islamic mystic branch that is known as Sufism, love is seen as a divine essence, and only through the path of love, we can see the truth and become one with the whole, like a drop that becomes one with the ocean.
But love is not something to be found outside of us in the material world. The divine essence, something that goes beyond the ego and the senses, lies already inside us at the core of our being. It’s a force that the intellect cannot comprehend and, therefore, our minds cannot search nor perceive it. But we can taste it. And it can only be revealed if we find freedom from what tethers us to the world of matter, and remove the barriers that separate us from a boundless ocean of love.
Divine love, therefore, isn’t a matter of obtainment; it’s a matter of letting go. Through a mystical journey called samā, Rumi ascended from the material world of form to the divine through love, which was assisted by higher forms of communication and ritual. He encouraged his followers to use music to focus on their whole being and the divine, and the Sufi whirling dervishes use their ritual dance as a meditation practice. But Rumi is perhaps most famous for his expressions in poetry, which mainly revolves around opening ourselves up to divine love so we can find union with what we could call God.
To cover Rumi means to cover his mystic teachings, his religious views, the Sufi tradition and its role within Islam, his works of prose and poetry, and more, which is too much information for one piece. So, this article explores Rumi’s outlook on love. It serves as an interpretive work based on a selection of Rumi’s poems.
Our quest for love
Rumi’s poems are still widely read by both religious and non-religious people. It’s not uncommon that when one is touched by the depth of Rumi’s words, one experiences a sense of liberation from the things that usually concern us deeply; things like wealth, physical beauty, power, social status, and even people. Throughout our lives, the love we may experience towards such things doesn’t seem what Rumi points to in his poems, even though it may look like it for someone without any knowledge of mysticism. He describes love as it’s a passionate affection between lovers who are enamored with one another.
Rumi, himself, as the author seems profoundly in love; just not with a physical human being but with something else; something higher; something that the mind cannot comprehend and words cannot describe.
Know that my beloved is hidden from everyone
Rumi, My Beloved (retrieved from ‘The Love Poems of Rumi’)
Know that she is beyond the belief of all beliefs
Know that in my heart she is as clear as the moon
Know that she is the life in my body and my soul
When we think about love, we mostly think about mutual affection between two people. There can be all kinds of variations of this, of course, and plenty of people also experience a strong love towards objects or animals. What characterizes this form of love is that there’s always something outside of us necessary to fulfill it. Therefore, we are often on a quest for love; we search and look, hoping that we’ll find that special person that can make us whole.
But once we think we’ve found it, it slowly becomes clear that this is not it. Nevertheless, strong attachments form. And when we’re separated from what we love, we discover that what we believe is love is very close to dread, sadness, and agony. This is not the love Rumi is talking about. However, when we experience the agony of heartbreak, a door to true divine love opens.
The agony of lovers
Rumi, The Agony of Lovers (retrieved from ‘The Love Poems of Rumi’)
burns with the tire of passion.
Lovers leave traces of where they’ve been.
The walking of broken hearts
is the doorway to God.
When reading Rumi it becomes clear that his intense love leads him into the union with the ultimate reality. This reality cannot be put in words, but humanity has given many words to it: God, Allah, Tao, Emptiness. But these are just words to indicate the same thing. Sufi mystics aim to transcend the mundane to unite with the divine, which can only be done if they give up their quest for love in the world of matter.
An inexhaustible force
When we finally find someone to love after a long search, our next concern becomes this: will it last? Romantic love, even though it can be profound and deep, rarely lasts. The objects of our love (whether they’re people or stuff) come and go. Our affection towards them fades with time, and when that happens we have to find something else to love. When love is based on attachment and possessiveness it becomes a source of anger, disappointment, hate, and sadness. This kind of love is conditional. According to Rumi, love is always unconditional. Anything else that we recognize as love is about control. And the conditions that such love is bound to are fickle. It needs constant nourishment; like a fire that goes out quickly when you don’t pour enough gasoline on it.
In his poems, Rumi points to a form of love that is inexhaustible and burns within every one of us and never ceases, as it’s the essence of our being. Contrary to romantic love, this love is like a fire that doesn’t need gasoline to keep burning. It’s an inexhaustible, eternal force that’s always there. Rumi tells us that not everyone will reach it, and many don’t even know it exists and ridicule those who do. As a mystic, he has tasted it many times, and he kept coming back for more and was willing to give up the worldly life for it. Giving up possessions, the people we’re attached to, our preferences, our social status, to get something better in return seems inconceivable. But this is what a mystic is willing to do, as opposed to those that only concern themselves with worldly pleasures.
When we’re solely concerned with the world of matter, we’re occupied with looking for gasoline to keep the fire burning, and it’s that very search that blinds us from the limitless source that lies hidden inside of us. This inner, ever-burning fire isn’t just our ability to love without conditions; it’s also a path to receiving love. It’s a path to Rumi’s ultimate Beloved, which he refers to as God. The love of God is not possessive and conditional; it’s patient, accepting, equanimous, merciful, constant.
You wait
Rumi, Caught in the Fire of Love (retrieved from ‘The Love Poems of Rumi’)
patiently
looking into my intoxicated eyes
You accept my passion
with the serenity of love
You are the master of existence
One day I shall be
a Lover like you
Wouldn’t it be great to have access to such a boundless source of love that’s always present and that doesn’t discriminate based on preferences? What if we could radiate love without limits, without the need for fuel, and receive it back as well? According to Rumi, this is available if we open ourselves up to it. It’s in everyone and accessible to everyone.
When we stop resisting
I’m your lover
Rumi, The Agony of Lovers (retrieved from ‘The Love Poems of Rumi’)
Come to my side
I will open
the gate to your love
Come settle with me
Let us be neighbors
to the stars
Rumi describes love as intoxicating to the point that he feels drunk and cannot discern between lover, love, and beloved anymore. He describes it as warm, mysterious, profound, and wonderful. This indeed sounds like the passionate love that we experience when we fall head over heels with someone. When two people are in love with each other, everything else seems to fade into the background. It’s like their worries and sorrows are washed away, and nothing exceeds the euphoria that these lovers evoke in one another. Surrender takes place; an act of giving oneself up to that person. And in this surrender, the mystic moves towards the union with the Beloved. In this surrender, the mystic transcends the world of matter and goes into the realm of the divine.
“I am ready to forsake this worldly life and surrender to the magnificence of your Being,” Rumi stated, which implies that taking the path of love is a matter of letting go rather than obtaining something. Our attachments to worldly life cause us to feel anxious, defensive, and separate from others. Thus, we build barriers to protect ourselves, but by doing so we also separate ourselves from the very thing that we yearn for. These barriers are like a jar with some water in it drifting in a vast ocean; it’s surrounded by love, filled with love, but the jar itself is the reason why the ocean and the water imprisoned in the jar cannot merge. The water longs to be part of the ocean and the ocean calmy awaits to receive it with kindliness. But to become one with the ocean, the jar has to go.
Love is all around us and within us. Rumi states that we must die in this love, and if we do, our souls will be renewed. But we unknowingly reject this love because of the barriers we’ve built against it while looking for it in the wrong places. So, we must cut off the chains that hold us prisoner and detach from worldly concerns, so we can become whole. According to the wisdom of Rumi, we don’t need to seek love. We just have to stop resisting it. But looking at the devotion and continual practice of the Sufi mystics, it’s probably not an easy task.
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