Evoking Our Inner Mystic - Part III

Continuing with the class, Practical Mysticism, we focused on the lessons of the Sufi mystic, Rumi, who lived 700 years ago. He is someone who experienced the merging into that bliss of divine love, and wrote some of the world’s most beautiful poetry.

Born in 1207 in Afghanistan, the son of a theologian and mystic, he became a teacher.
In 1244, he met the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz, who he recognized as a kindred spirit.

 They spent months together in what is described as pure ecstatic communion. Shams served as spiritual guru and they shared a pure unselfish love mixed with reverence.

Rumi came to understand that love for the teacher, the Beloved, is simply divine love, love for our own inner self. God is the Beloved Friend, and Shams embodied this Friend.
Shams taught Rumi that God within us is real; we are not separate entities. We are all One.

This intense relationship aroused jealousy  and the story is that Shams disappeared, murdered through a plot involving Rumi’s son.

Rumi’s grief over this loss of his Beloved Friend stimulated his transformation into a mystic artist. Today we celebrate not only his inspired poetry, but his legacy of the Whirling Dervishes.

Rumi poetry is all about love, acknowledging that “God is Love, Lover and Beloved.”
He writes: “Those who don’t feel this Love pulling them like a river, those who don’t drink dawn like a cup of spring water or take in sunset like supper, those who don’t want to change, let them sleep."

He also writes: “There’s no love in me without your being, no breath without that. I once thought I could give up this longing, then thought again. But I couldn’t continue being human."

In his grief and trance-like whirling movement, Rumi disgorged his poetry: “The Lover is ever drunk with love; He is free, he is mad, He dances with ecstasy and delight. Caught by our own thoughts, We worry about every little thing. But once we get drunk on that love, Whatever will be, will be.”

His poetry echoes across the centuries, relevant today. “When your love reaches the core, earth-heavals and bright irruptions spew in the air. the universe becomes one spiritual thing, that simple, love mixing with spirit.”

And so it is.