Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 42
1. There are many variations of the ninety-nine names for God. These eighteen names are from Bawa Muhaiyaddeen’s Asmul-Husma: The 99 Beautiful Names of Allah (Philadelphia: Fellowship Press, 1984).
Chapter 1
Introductory Note: Great Song, a book of Joe Miller's talks, edited by Richard Power, is available from Maypop Books (800-682-8637).
1. “Entrance Door”: Mahmoud was a king whose name means “Praise to the end!” For his servant and friend Ayaz, just the presence of the king is more important than any form. In the story referred to here, no matter what value the courtiers put on the pearl, Ayaz is willing to crush it to powder when the king asks him to.
2. “A Garden Is Questioning the Dawn”: Khidr, literally, means “the green one.” Khidr is known throughout the Islamic world. He exists on the edge between the seen and the unseen. When Moses vows to find the place “where the two seas meet,” meaning where the spiritual and the this-worldly mix, he meets Khidr. Although not mentioned by name in the Qur’an, Khidr is associated with the person described as “one of our servants whom We [God] had given mercy from Us, and We had taught him knowledge proceeding from Us” (18:64, Arberry translation). In this passage Moses wants to follow Khidr and learn from him, but Khidr says, “If you follow me, you must not question anything I do. You must be patient and wait for my explanations.” Moses agrees, but as Khidr performs apparent outrages (sinking a boat, killing a boy), Moses cannot restrain his alarm, and Khidr leaves him after explaining the hidden reasons for his actions.
Khidr represents the inner dimension, which transcends form. He is the personification of the revealing function of the metaphysical intellect, the “prophetic soul.” He especially appears to solitaries, those who are cut off from normal channels of spiritual instruction. The Sufi mystic Ibrahim, who gave up his external kingdom for the kingdom within, said of Khidr: “I lived four years in the wilderness. Khidr the Green Ancient was my companion. He taught me the Great Name of God.” Khidr is connected philologically with Elijah and with Utnapishtim of the Gilgamesh epic. He may be a partial source, along with Druidic lore, for the enigmatic Green Knight in the magnificent Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Chapter 2
1. “Strange Gathering”: The figures in this poem, from both Christian and Islamic romantic and heroic traditions, are having a very free-form party. It is important that the poem ends with those two figures who are so completely and insistently free of form, Hallaj and Shams Tabriz.
Chapter 3
1. “Green from Inside”: The Sufi mystic, writer, and teacher Al-Hallaj Mansour was martyred in Baghdad in 922 for saying Anal Haqq, or “I am the Truth. I am God.”
2. “Saladin”: See note on “Goldsmithing” below in chap. 12.
3. “To the Extent They Can Die”: There was a Platonic academy in Iconium (Konya), so there was probably a strong tradition of studying Plato’s Dialogues as well as Plotinus’s Enneads, and certainly the Muslim philosophers Ibn Rushd, known as Averroës (1126–98), Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), Suhrawardi (1154–91), and Ibn Arabi (1165–1240).
4. “What the Sun Says Rising”: Zuleikha is the wife of Potiphar the Egyptian. She is so lost in her love for the handsome Joseph that she sees everything that happens as a message from him. For Rumi she is a type of the lover, like Majnun.
Chapter 4
1. “A Bowl”: Shams means “the sun,” and almost every reference to sunlight in Rumi’s poetry is a remembrance of Shams Tabriz. Rumi’s son Sultan Velad writes that Shams passed through all stages of the lovers of God and became qotb-e hama ma shugan, the “pole of the beloved.”
2. “Unfold Your Own Myth”: “Chase a deer and end up everywhere” is a reference to the life of Ibrahim (d. 783). A prince of Balkh, Ibrahim represents to the Sufis someone who in one visionary moment gives up his external kingdom for his inner majesty. There are striking similarities between his life and Gautama the Buddha’s. Balkh seems to have been an area, along the Silk Road, where Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and other faiths met and blended. Lotus motifs, indications of a line of meditation, are on the ruins there of the school of Rumi’s father, Bahauddin Velad. Here is Rumi’s account in Discourse #44 of Ibrahim’s epiphany:
Ibrahim, when he was still king, went out hunting. As he galloped after a deer, he became separated from his retinue. His horse was tired and lathered, but still Ibrahim rode. Deep in the wilderness, the fleeing deer turned its head and spoke. “You were not created for this chase. This deer body did not take shape out of nothingness, so that you might hunt. Supposing that you catch me, will that be enough?” Ibrahim heard these words deeply and cried out. He reined in his horse and dismounted. There was a shepherd nearby. “Take this royal jacket sewn with jewels. Take my horse and my bow. Give me your shepherd’s robe of coarse cloth, and tell no one what has happened.” The exchange was made, and Ibrahim set out on his new life. He made such an extraordinary effort to catch the deer and ended up being caught by God. All plans are subject to revision. God lives between a human being and the object of his or her desire.
There are other implied stories in many of the sentences of “Unfold Your Own Myth.” I recognize the Moses, Jacob, Joseph, and Omar stories, but not the one that refers to Jesus. Does anybody out there know the source of that?
Chapter 6
1. “Glory to Mutabilis”: Glory, Penelope, and Mutabilis are names of current varieties of roses. Mutabilis is Latin for “changeable” or “in the midst of change.” I added them to this poem.
Chapter 8
1. “Rumi’s Deathbed Poem”: Aflaki, a contemporary of Rumi’s grandson, says that this seems to be Rumi’s last poem, spoken to his son, Sultan Velad, comforting him, sending him off to get some rest, and ending with the lighthearted jibe at his son’s intellectual pretensions.
2. “Sanai”: Hakim Sanai (d. 1150) was the first poet to use the masnavi form, rhyming couplets expressing mystical and didactic themes. Rumi loved Sanai and borrowed many images, phrases, and stories from him, particularly from his Hadiqat’ul-Haqiqat (The Walled Garden of Truth). Sanai’s earthy style impressed Rumi. His remark that off-color, bawdy stories can be instructional finds its way into Book V of the Masnavi, where a number of such jokes are told and explicated. Sanai is also the source of the famous story about the blind man and the elephant, which Rumi changed to a number of people in a pitchblack room trying to define an elephant by where they happen to touch it. Sanai got that story from Indian sources. The tricky pun bargi bi bargi (“the leaves of leaflessness”) also comes from Sanai. Rumi uses the image of no-leaves coming out on a winter tree as a beautiful symbol for the state of awareness that has abandoned the world without leaving (pun intended) it.
A story has come down to us, from Sirajuddin Ali’s Memoirs of the Poets, about the central event in Sanai’s transformation from a conventional court poet to the absolutely original mystic who wrote The Walled Garden of Truth. The sultan of Ghazna, Bahramshah, is starting out on a military campaign to India. Sanai is along to record the battles in verse and generally to celebrate Bahramshah’s eminence, as court poets were paid to do. Sanai has just completed such a poem when the expedition passes a walled garden (firdaus in Persian, hence our word “paradise”). They hear beautiful music and singing coming from within the enclosure. They investigate and discover that it is the notorious Sufi mystic, drunkard, and teacher Lai-Khur.
Lai-Khur nods to the sultan and proposes a toast, “To the blindness of Bahramshah.” Some of the officers object, and Lai-Khur explains, “Bahramshah is going on this foolish expedition to India when he is needed at home, and besides, what he is looking for is in himself.”
Bahramshah recognizes the truth of what the Sufi says, but not enough to turn his army around.
Lai-Khur then pours another glass and proposes another toast, “To Hakim Sanai, and his even greater blindness.”
“What do you mean?” asks Sanai.
“You are unaware of the purpose of your life. You will come before the throne of God bringing these silly poems in praise of political stupidity.”
Sanai looks into Lai-Khur’s eyes and suddenly he knows his life’s purpose. He resigns from his court poet’s post, even though the sultan offers him half the wealth of the realm and his daughter in marriage. Bahramshah is desperate, having received the same teaching as Sanai and been unable to respond. Sanai is unshakeable in his new state. To absorb the illumination, he goes on a pilgrimage. During this time he meets his Sufi teacher, Yusuf Hamadani. When he arrives back in Ghazna, he has with him The Walled Garden of Truth. I recommend the translation by David Pendlebury, The Walled Garden of Truth (London: Octagon Press, 1974).
3. “Sanai”: Rum refers to the Roman-influenced part of the Anatolian peninsula, roughly everything east of Iconium (Konya) and sometimes, more specifically, to Byzantium, that ultimate bridge city between East and West. In the early thirteenth century the region around Konya was established as the Sultanate of Rum by a branch of the Seljuks. Rum-i means someone from Konya. In dialectical Arabic the adjective rumi refers to something Western or nonindigenous.
Chapter 9
1. “The Wave of That Agreement”: The agreement referred to here is the covenant of Alast, when God addressed as yet uncreated humanity and asked, Alastu bi-rabbikum? “Am I not your Lord?” The “Yes!” that came instantly keeps propelling humankind forward and into spirit.
2. “Out of the Image-Making Business”: Azar was Abraham’s father and a famous maker of images. In the Qur’an Abraham asks his father, “Do you take idols for gods?”
Chapter 11
1. “The Deepest Rest”: Qutb means “axis” or “pole.” It is the center, which also contains the periphery, like a spiral. The Qutb is a spiritual being, or function, that can reside in a human being, or several beings, or in a moment. It is the elusive mystery of how the divine gets delegated into the manifest world. Very little can be said of it. In this poem Rumi suggests that one can be more open to that divine-human interaction, the Qutb. One can allow oneself to be seen and allow the taste of one’s wanting-oneness stew to live as energy, as the chickpea eventually becomes the cook.
Chapter 12
Introductory Note: Hamza Yusef, The Purification (Louisville, KY: Starlatch, 2004).
1. “Goldsmithing”: Saladin Zarkub, the goldsmith. There are hagiographic miniatures that show Rumi leading Saladin out of his goldsmith’s shop to begin the sema. Rumi heard a transcendent music in the goldsmiths’ hammering. He began to turn in harmony with that, and with the galaxies and the molecules, in the ecstasy of his listening. Saladin had come to Konya in 1235, already a student, like Rumi, of Burhan Mahaqqiq. When Shams arrived in 1244, the two would sometimes meet in Saladin’s shop or in his home. After Shams’s disappearance, Saladin became the friend that Rumi loved as a reminder of the deep presence. In 1248 when Saladin died, Rumi led a mystical dance with flute and drum through the streets of Konya to celebrate Saladin’s urs, the union of a great soul with the divine mystery. The friendship of Rumi and Saladin was further strengthened by the marriage of Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, to Saladin’s daughter, Fateme Khatun.
Chapter 13
Introductory Note: In the May 2, 1977, dream I am sleeping out in a sleeping bag on the bluff above the Tennessee River where I grew up—five miles north of Chattanooga on the Baylor School campus. I wake up inside the dream, though still asleep, in a lucid state. A ball of light rises off of Williams Island and comes over me. It clarifies from the inside out and reveals a man sitting cross-legged with a white shawl over his head, which is bowed. He raises his head and opens his eyes. “I love you,” he says. “I love you too,” I answer. The landscape then, the curve of the river as it holds the island, feels soaked with dew. I feel the process of the dew forming in the night, and it feels like, it feels identical with, how love is mixing in with the world’s matter. That is the dream. It felt initiatory. It is certainly the only credential I have for working on the Rumi poetry. A year and a half later, when I met the man in the dream, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, he told me to continue the work on Rumi: “It has to be done.”
Chapter 14
Fundamentalist orthodoxies have often opposed, and even killed, innovators who break with the past: Hallaj, Jesus, Suhrawardi, Socrates, Sarmad, Shams Tabriz. And now this enlightened master has possibly been murdered, in our time, by us (with our complicity) for his worldview and his mystical freedom. To be more factual, as much as I can be, I say this because I have met and talked to his personal doctor, George Meredith (Amrito), and I believe him. He says that Osho’s health changed radically after the interlude he spent alone in an Oklahoma jail in November 1985, while supposedly being transferred from Charlotte (where he was arrested without a warrant) to Seattle for deportation. A trip that should have taken six hours took twelve days. Dr. Meredith thinks that Osho was poisoned with thallium, a heavy metal untraceable after a year, while he was in the Oklahoma jail. The symptoms of thallium poisoning are clearly set forth in the medical literature. Osho developed most, if not all, of them, and he had exhibited none of them prior to November 1985.
I am no student of the evidence, but by putting this information here, my hope is that someone might be able to trace the matter back to that Oklahoma jail and find out who put the thallium in Osho’s orange juice (just a guess) and who arranged it. There are lots of good reasons for a democratic government to have effective secrecy: secure missions in wartime, terrorist surveillance, drug stings, and so forth. But should the secrets be permanently kept from public scrutiny? In a democracy, I feel, we must eventually (it has been twenty-five years) be able to find out who did what, who gave the order, and why. Otherwise we have government run not by the people or their elected representatives, but by secret agencies and multinational corporations. I am not much for “conspiracy theories,” and mostly those who espouse them give me the willies. I do not know. I admit that. Maybe Dr. Meredith was wrong in his diagnosis. I myself cannot do the considerable research required to get to the bottom of this, but I hope that someone, at some future time, will. I am too lazy. My mind is not focused enough. And I have too many luxurious poems to write about my grandchildren, not to mention Rumi’s Masnavi to joyfully drown in. Let me hear how it goes.
Chapter 15
Introductory Note: H. W. L. Poonja, Wake Up and Roar (Kula Maui, HI: Pacific Center Publishing, 1992), pp. 59–63. See also H. W. L. Poonja, Wake Up and Roar, vol. 2 (1993); The Truth Is (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 2000); and Gangaji, Freedom and Resolve: The Living Edge of Surrender (Ashland, OR: Gangaji Foundation, 1999).
Chapter 16
Introductory Note: The Carl Jung quotation is from a conversation cited in Miguel Serrano, C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, trans. Frank MacShane (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 56. The Heraclitus quotation is from Brooks Haxton, trans., Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 45. The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen quotation is from Questions of Life, Answers of Wisdom, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Fellowship Press, 1987), pp. 31–32.
1. “Drawn by Soup”: There is a legend that when the Mongol armies led by General Bugra Khan got close to Konya, Rumi went out alone to meet them. The general was so impressed that he spared the city: “There may be more beings like this here. We must not harm them.”
Chapter 17
1. “Hometown Streets”: A matzoob is someone so ecstatic with just being conscious and here and in a body that he or she may appear insane to some. To others, matzoobs are the purest sanity.
2. “Border Stations”: Majnun and Layla are types of the star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet. There are thousands of incidents in their story. Rumi likes to tell of the time when Majnun got dizzy and confused just with meeting Layla’s dog on the street.
Chapter 20
1. “Who Is the Friend?”: Mutanabbi (915–965) wrote in Arabic. In his youth he was imprisoned for leading an insurrection in al-Samawa, in which he set himself up as a prophet with a new Qur’an. “Mutanabbi” means “the man who pretended to be a prophet.” I have not been able to locate the riddle that Rumi gives the answer to here. Perhaps it was “Who is the Friend?” or “Who pours this wine?”
Chapter 21
1. “Ramadan Silence”: Ramadan is a time to experiment not only with how fasting deepens the connection to presence, but also with restraining language, not talking and not e-mailing so much, not reading. I once spent some silent days at the Meher Baba Center in Myrtle Beach. I recommend it. Huston Smith has beautifully described the difficulties of his decision to have silent days with his wife at his home in Berkeley.
Chapter 23
1. “Even Better,” “Music Is My Zikr”: [note on Rehavi, Neva, Irak, Ispahan, Zingule, etc.] The Persian musician and artist Reza DeRakshani tells me these are modes and ways of playing music in different parts of the country.
2. “Music Is My Zikr”: Zikr means “remembrance.” In a practical sense it refers to the internal or external repetition of the phrase La’illaha il’Allahu. (“There is no reality but God; there is only God.”) The zikr (or dhikr) is said to have at least three parts. The first part, La’illaha, is the denial, the abandonment of everything, the depths. The second, il’Allah, is the actual intrusion, the explosion into the individual, of divine presence. Hu, the third part, is the out-breathing of that divine presence. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen advised his students to repeat and reflect upon the zikr with every breath. A student asked how that was possible. Bawa responded, “It is like driving a car. At first you think it is difficult, and it is, but you get used to it. It becomes natural. After a while, you can even drive and talk at the same time.”
3. “Not a Food Sack, a Reed Flute”: Averroës, as he is known in the West, is Ibn Rushd, born in Cordova, Spain, in 1126. He is best known for his commentaries on Aristotle and for his combining of medicine and theology into a philosophy of spiritual health. He had a profound influence on Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages, especially Thomas Aquinas.
