Beshara School Lectures

Meister Eckhart was a Dominican Friar who was born in the town of Hocheim in the middle of what is now Germany in 1260 AD, about 20 years after Ibn ‘Arabi died and about thirteen years before the death of Jelaluddin Rumi. He died in about 1328, probably on his way home from Avignon, in the South of France, where he had been undergoing investigation by the Papacy for charges of heresy. No one knows where Meister Eckhart was buried or where he died. He returned to his Lord unmarked and without trace. His life was spent in study, prayer and work. He gained his academic degrees from the Studium Generale in Cologne (a university founded by Albertus Magnus) and from Paris. He later taught at both universities at different times. He was a priest and he was the Provincial Head of the Dominican order in two principalities of Germany, which meant he had huge administrative and management responsibility. He would have walked almost everywhere, and his journeys will have taken him all over Germany, to Paris (at least twice) as well as to Avignon. Meister, Master, was his title, applied to him after he took his Masters Degree in Paris. His name no one really knows. But it may have been Johannes Eckhart von Hocheim. He has always been known simply as Meister Eckhart, Master Eckhart. He was a Saint, a mystic, a Gnostic, a Wali. He wrote from one singular point in everything, from the heart of his servanthood, based on knowledge and in the fullest adab (proper response) possible in the face of the opening up of knowledge at any moment. Meister Eckhart’s writings display the most beautiful and limpid logic and clarity. He is thoroughly familiar with the concepts and references of his contemporaries, and of Greek thinking, which had then been recently introduced to the West from the Muslim world. He completely submits to the rigour of inherent intellectual discipline. But this is not what he WAS, it was an adjective of him if you like, or maybe better, a means of expression. His fundamental starting point (and ending point), to repeat, is complete servanthood – and it is important to understand this because otherwise you will think you are looking at a body of ideas, a point of view, one set of ideas among others. Real knowledge can only arise in the pure and empty recess of the totally receptive heart that allows no adjective or presupposition to impose on the purity of revelation, but responds to it completely as it comes and as it is and according to how ITS pleasure and intention intends. In other words, where the heart conforms completely to and is defined by the revelation itself. Eckhart was a friar, not a monk, which is significant. Monks live enclosed lives in seclusion from the world. Their service is through the interior, through prayer and self-abnegation. They know that a movement in the heart of one who faces God has no location and therefore its effects are not limited by time or place, so even though they are cut off and hidden from the world, they work for the world as much as for their own souls – they have no problem with Self Knowledge and Global Responsibility. Friars are different in mode. They also take upon themselves the rigours of abstention – which Mhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi comments on in the Chapter on Jacob in the Fusus al Hikam. But the friars do not live in seclusion; their work is actively in the world. In fact the Dominican order is also known as the Order of Preachers. They are for exposition and for explanation and for the expansion of knowledge of the religion through preaching. They would travel around, subsisting entirely on charity, preaching wherever they could find an audience – in churches, in markets, in the fields, wherever. This is why Eckhart’s core teaching is given in the form of sermons, which are the fundamental form of expression of the friars. Central to all Eckhart says is that only God is. There is nothing else in existence than Him. In fact one of his expressions that the Officials of the Church had a problem with is: “All creatures are pure nothing. I do not say that they are a little something, or anything at all, but they are pure nothing.” In Sermon 19 he comments on the text from the Acts of the Apostles (on when St Paul saw a blinding light outside the walls of Damascus): “Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing”. Meister Eckhart says of this: “I think the text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God he saw all things as nothing.” This is reminiscent of similar expressions in the works of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi. In his Sermons, Eckhart is inviting his audience to the Truth through clarification. But of course in what he says a metaphysic is implied and assumed. This is the metaphysic of Absolute Unity of Being – God is, and there is not with Him a thing. It is also very important for us to understand here the spiritual ground of what Eckhart in so many different ways, is pointing us to, telling us about, cajoling us to see, inviting us to know. The core matter of Eckhart’s exposition is the birth of God in the soul, as he puts it – and it still sounds shocking! But remember that he had to use the language of his culture, and this is Christian language. Naturally ‘birth’, in this sense, is metaphorical. When Eckhart talks of the birth of God in the soul, it is the same as being brought to realisation, to arrival at truth. It is the same as dying before you die. It is the same as Union. Sermon One in the translated collection of his Sermons explains this beautifully. The text he addresses in this sermon (and the sermons are all based on a text or sentence from a holy book or tradition) is: “When all things lay in the midst of silence, then there descended down into me from on high, from the royal throne, a secret Word. This Sermon is about that Word.” He explains that this birth can only take place in the “purest, loftiest, subtlest part that the soul is capable of… Therefore the soul in which this birth (union) is to take place must keep absolutely pure and must live in noble fashion, quite collected and turned entirely inward; not running out through the five senses into the multiplicity of creatures, but all in-turned and collected in the purest part – there is His place, He disdains anything less.” This is when you have attached yourself entirely to Him and died to your imagined self. It is where the Lover knows for certain that Love is returned for Love and for no other consideration… This is no denial of the world because all the universes are contained in this, but as we know, even if the whole of manifestation were in a corner of the heart of the Perfect Saint, he would not be aware of it at this level. As Eckhart says: “…that love with which we love must be so pure, so bare, so detached that it is not inclined towards myself nor towards my friend nor anywhere apart from itself.” It is important to see that this cannot be ‘denial’ of the world because if you deny anything you give it existence by qualifying it with denial. This is complete facing of Him and only Him in His absolute Unity. Turning to Him alone, not turning away from anything, though sometimes the language sounds as if it is saying this. From Sermon 18: “people imagine that they have more if they have things together with God than if they have God without the things. That is wrong for all things with God are no more than God alone.” Then Eckhart goes on to explain the quality or nature of receptivity that the soul must adopt for this birth. “One should shun and free oneself from all thoughts, words and deeds and from all images created by the understanding, maintaining a wholly God-receptive attitude, such that one’s own self is idle, letting God work within one.” And remember this is not denial of anything – it is complete facing the Essential. He says that the silence in which the secret Word is spoken “is in the purest thing that the soul is capable of, in the noblest part, the ground – indeed in the very essence of the soul which is the soul’s most secret part. There is the silent middle, for no creature ever entered there and no image, nor has the soul there any activity or understanding, therefore she is not aware there of any image, whether of herself or of any other creature.” Everything in the life of the lover needs to be directed towards this point. Nothing real happens before this death before dying. After this (as Ibn ‘Arabi explains in the Kernel of the Kernel) real education happens – education in taste. Then he explains how whatever the soul effects she effects through her ‘powers’. She understands through the intellect, remembers through the memory, loves through the will (love is intentional) and so on. Every external act is through some means. The power of sight is through the eyes, without which the soul cannot see, and so on with the other faculties – all of which Eckhart calls the powers of the soul. “But in the soul’s essence there is no activity, for the powers she works with emanate from the ground of being. Yet in that ground is the silent ‘middle’: here nothing but rest and celebration for this birth, this act, that God the Father may speak His word there, for this part is by nature receptive to nothing save only the Divine Essence, without mediation. Here God enters the soul with His all, not merely with a part. God enters here the ground of the soul. None can touch the ground of the soul but God alone.” And what of this soul? What he says here is actually our experience if we can but see it, here and now. He explains how the soul knows other creatures (at whatever level) by receiving an image of that thing and then approaching it, knowing it, through the image that has been “voluntarily taken in” through the faculties. And through this “presented image”, the soul approaches creatures. In other words, we delineate in our interior consciousness (or mind, or sensibility) a ‘model’, an image of whatever we seek to know as mediated to us through our senses, then we work with the image. The image, says Eckhart, can only enter the soul through the powers from ‘outside’. But the soul can neither create nor obtain an image of herself, so there is nothing so unknown to the soul as herself. “And so she knows all other things, but not herself. Of nothing does she know so little as of herself, for want of mediation.” There is no means by which she can know herself. “You must know that too that inwardly the soul is free and void of all means and of all images – which is why God can freely unite with her without form or likeness.” Every instant this is so, and what freedom it offers! This unknowing is the same as infinite receptivity and this is the height of the soul – the predisposition to receive His Fayd al-Aqdas. And then he says that this not-knowing makes her wonder and “leads her to eager pursuit, for she perceives clearly that it is, but does not know how or what it is. This unknown-unknowing keeps the soul constant yet spurs her on to pursuit” of her truth, her reality, her essence, her love. He then explains that good and perfected people (and he says his words are addressed only to these people) “who have so absorbed and assimilated the essence of all virtues that these virtues emanate from them naturally, without their seeking… they must know that the very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within. When the powers have been completely withdrawn from all their works and images, then the Word is spoken.” This next quote may remind you, again, of the Kernel of the Kernel: “If only you could suddenly be unaware of all things, then you could pass into oblivion of your own body as St Paul did, when he said: “Whether in the body I cannot tell, or out of the body I cannot tell; God knows it” (2 Cor. 12:2). In this case the spirit had so entirely absorbed the powers that it had forgotten the body: memory no longer functioned, nor understanding, nor the senses”. In this way a man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward and sink into oblivion of all things and himself.” And so, “if God is to speak His Word in the soul, she must be at rest and at peace, and then He will speak His Word, and Himself, in the soul – no image, but Himself!” “My soul dissolved and melted away when Love spoke his word” (Cant. 5:6). When he entered, I had to fall away.” And: “How should a man be who is to see God? He must be dead. Our Lord says: “No man can see me and live”. He means here death before death. “God alone is free and uncreated, and thus He alone is like the soul in freedom… And when she, the soul, emerges into the unmixed light, she falls into Nothingness so far from the created nothing, that of her own power she cannot return to her created something. God with His uncreatedness upholds her Nothingness and preserves her in His Something. The soul has dared to become nothing and so cannot of herself return to herself, for she has departed so far from herself, before God comes to the rescue.” “If this work is to be done, God alone must do it, and you must suffer it to be. Where you truly go out from your will and your knowledge, God and His knowledge surely and willingly goes in and shines there clearly. Where God will thus know Himself, there your knowledge cannot subsist and is of no avail. Do not imagine that your reason can grow to the knowledge of God. If God is to shine divinely in you, your natural light cannot help towards this end. Instead, it must become pure nothing and go out of itself altogether, and then God can shine in it with His light, and He will bring back in with Him all that you forsook and a thousand times more, together with a new form to contain it all.” (Meister Eckhart Sermons and Treatises, Trans. M. O’C. Walshe, Vol.1, p.40.) “You should know what a man is like who has come to this: we can well say he is God and man. Observe, he has gained by grace all that Christ had by nature, and that his body is so fully suffused with the noble essence of the soul, which she has received from God and the divine light, that we may declare: That is a man divine! Alas, my children, you should pity such people, for they are strangers, unknown to anybody. All who ever hope to come to God may well be mistaken in these folk, for they are hard for strangers to perceive; none can truly recognise them but those in whom the same light shines. This is the light of truth. It may well be that those who are on the way to the same good but have not yet attained it, can recognise these perfected ones of whom we have spoken, at least in part… But note, you must pay good heed, for such people are very hard to recognise. When others fast, they eat, when others watch, they sleep, when others pray, they are silent – in short, all their words and acts are unknown to other people; because whatever good people practise while on the way to eternal bliss, all that is quite foreign to such perfected ones. They need absolutely nothing, for they are in possession of the city of their true birthright… They do more eternal good in an instant than all outward works that were ever performed externally.” (Meister Eckhart Sermons and Treatises, Trans. M. O’C. Walshe Vol.2, p.269.) Finally I am going to read some beautiful passages to you from Sermon 19 – the one where he is talking about St Paul rising up and with open eyes seeing nothing. Much of it refers to the Song of Songs, or as Eckhart calls it, the Song of Love, from which he quotes: “In my bed at night I have sought him whom my soul loves, and not found him.” She sought him in her bed, which means that whoever clings or hangs on to anything less than God, his bed is too narrow. All that God can create is too narrow. She says: “I sought him all through the night”. There is no night that is without light, but it is veiled. The sun shines in the night, but it is hidden from view. By day it shines and eclipses all other lights. So does the light of God, it eclipses all other lights. Whatever we seek in creatures, all that is night (i.e. veiled light, not absence of light!). I mean this: whatever we seek in any creature, is but a shadow and is night. Even the highest angel’s light, exalted though it be, does not illumine the soul. Whatever is not the first light is all darkness and night. Therefore she cannot find God. “I arose and sought him all about, and ran through the broad ways and the narrow. Then the watchmen – they were the angels – found me, and I asked them if they had seen him whom my soul loves. But they were silent.” Perhaps they could not name him. “When I had passed on a little further, I found him that I sought.” The little, the trifle that she missed him by is a thing I have spoken of before. He to whom all transient beings are not trivial and as nothing will not find God. Hence she said: “Having passed on a little further, I found him that I sought.” When God takes form in the soul and infuses it, if you then take Him as a light or a being or as goodness – if you recognise anything of Him – that is not God. See, we have to pass over that little and discard all that is adventitious and know God as One.” She does not name “Him whom her soul loves” – refers to him only like that. “There are four reasons”, says Eckhart, “why she does not name Him. One reason is that God is nameless. Had she given Him a name that would have had to be imagined. God is above all names, none can get so far as to be able to express Him. The second reason is that when the soul swoons away into God with love, she is aware of nothing but love. She thinks that everyone knows Him as she does. She is amazed that anyone should recognise anything but God. The third reason is, she had no time to name Him. She cannot turn away from love for long enough to utter another word but ‘love’. The fourth is, perhaps she thinks He has no other name but ‘love’. With ‘love’ she pronounces all names.” But listen also to what he says about Knowledge and Love: “…knowledge is better than love. But two are better than one, for knowledge includes love. Love infatuates and entangles us in goodness, and in love I remain caught up in the gate, and love would be blind if knowledge were not there. A stone also possesses love, and its love seeks the ground. If I am caught up in goodness, in the first effusion, taking Him where He is good, then I seize the gate, but I shall not seize God. Therefore knowledge is better, for it leads love. But love seeks desire, intention. Knowledge does not add a single thought, but rather detaches and strips off and runs ahead, touches God naked and grasps Him in His essence.” (Meister Eckhart Sermons and Treatises, Trans. M. O’C. Walshe Vol.1, p.258 on knowledge.) And to those of us still mystified, Meister Eckhart adds a little comment at the end of Sermon 56. What he had to say he had to say, willy nilly and regardless of who understood or not. He says: “Whoever has understood this sermon, good luck to him. If no one had been here, I would have had to preach it to this donation-box.” Meister Eckhart by Adam Dupré http://beshara.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/dupre.mp3 ← The Beshara Lecture 2014: Jane Carroll The Modern Mindfulness Movement: a Talk by Alison Yiangou →

I am going to talk about Mindfulness, and specifically what is called the Modern, (secular) Mindfulness Movement, flowing from the seminal work of Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1970s. I am going to say some things about what mindfulness is and isn’t, and then also try to place the arising and development of the Modern Mindfulness Movement in a larger context. Why am I doing this? Because I have been a student of the Beshara School for most of my adult life. This has been a great river in my life, and In the last few years this has been joined by another river, mindfulness. When two rivers join they become one. That is my experience of it and what I hope to convey to you. Actually, you cannot really talk about mindfulness, because the arena of mindfulness is your own direct experience, not in conceptual thinking. So to begin, let’s just dip our toes into the water with a very short mindfulness practice. [ Mindfulness Practice] Mindfulness emerges from the great spiritual tradition of Buddhism and refers to awareness: moment by moment awareness of life unfolding just as it is, right here, right now, as you. Moment by moment awarenss is not specific to Buddhism: it is at the root of all the great spiritual traditions, perhaps known by different names. Here at the School, for example, right in the introductory lecture we encounter Bulent Rauf’s words: ‘The degree of evolution of a person is measurable only by the constancy of their awareness of reality.’ Mindfulness includes both the direct experience of moment by moment awareness, as well as a ‘tool box’ of meditative practices. The practices help us to stabilise and to cultivate the abiliity to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, to whatever focus we are attending to, whether it is what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling or knowing. But from the very beginning, it is important to know that it’s not the things we are attending to that are the most important. What is most important is awareness: the awareness that arises when we pay attention in this way; the awareness that feels and knows, without thinking, what is in our experience now. Just a little exercise… For a couple of breaths, pay attention to breath’s movement in the body. Perhaps feeling the cool intake of air at the nostrils, the rising and falling of the chest with the inbreath and outbreath, the rising and falling to the belly. How did you know you were breathing? Any answers? This knowing, this awareness is direct and non-conceptual. It is not something we do, or can achieve, it is something we already are. It is the domain of Being, not doing. Why? because at its root this awareness is intrinsic to Being Itself, ever awake, ever aware, and present right here, right now, as ourselves. It is what is present, and to be found, ‘at the root of the root of our own selves’ as Rumi says, and this is universally true for all human beings, regardelss of age, race, religion or culture. Any mindfulness practice is simply a door into the same room – the room of what we already are. Before we go on, please check in with your own response to the word ‘mindfulness’, the associations it brings up for you. It is so easy in English to associate ‘mind’ with thinking, but as we have seen, mindfulness is not thought. It’s different in eastern langauges because in most, the word for heart is the same as the word for mind. In Mindfulness, heart and mind are inseparable. Mindfulness is inseparable from Love, because the consciousness that Being has of and for Itself is intrinsically compassionate, intrinsically loving. Please bear this in heart and mind as we go on! Here are a few contemporary ‘definitions’ of Mindfulness Knowing what is happening, while it is happening, without preference. Paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally, to things as they are, and as if our life depended on it. The awareness that arises when we pay attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally, to things as they are, and as if our life depended on it. Inhabiting the present moment with awareness, equanimity, clarity and caring. A radical act of love. In the Modern Mindfulness Movement – or Mindfulness Based Approaches – this invitation to constancy of awareness of reality is presented in completely secular form. Secular doesn’t just mean the opposite of ‘sacred’ or of ‘spiritual’. ‘Secular’ oringinally means ‘of the time’, ‘of its own time’, what is of ‘now’. Mindfulness is not concerned with an imaginary boundary between what is spiritual and what isn’t. I personally like this very much, because if ‘we are committed to seeing God’s vision of Himself’, as stated in the Introudctory lecture to this course, then that vision is unified, all-inclusive and admits no boundaries. Mindfulness courses are open to everyone, whatever their background. They do not require people to have any conscious motivation towards self knowledge, or spiritual seeking. Indeed many come to it in order to relieve unbearable suffering, as we shall see. This was perhaps the key insight given to Jon Kabat-Zinn. He saw the possibility of taking mindfulness practices out of an overtly spiritual context, like a Buddhist centre, and into everyday life. Why not try to make meditation so commonsensical that anyone would be drawn to it? Why not develop an American vocabulary that spoke to the heart of the matter, and didn’t focus on the cultural aspects of the traditions out of which the dharma emerged, however beautiful they might be……. We will return to this later. The approach is much more empirical: just do it, totally, sincerely and with all of yourself, and discover what you discover. Dive into the ocean of awareness, to whatever depth suits you. What is a mindfulness course? A mindfulness course usually extends over 8 weeks. There are times of gathering together in a group, interspersed with daily practice alone. The group gathers one evening a week, or 3 weekends spanning 8 weeks, and introduces you to mindfulness and the pratices, and you inqiure together into what arises whilst doing the practices. The daily practice is a guided meditation – continuing the practices that have been introduced in the group – undertaken every day, with intention, at home, or wherever you happen to be. This dynamic of group work and home practice is very fruitful. It is said that 90% of the effect of a mindfulness course comes from your own daily practice, from your own experience resulting from the practices. The group inquiry then gives the opportunity to reflect upon and deepen your own experience, and also to see and to benefit from other people’s experience. Perhaps the main benefit is in coming to realise that things we thought were our problem, unique to us, turn out to be experienced by many, if not all, others. So you begin to see that mind patterns are part and parcel of the human condition, rather than an affirmation of your own separate existence! This can be life-changing. And why 8 weeks? Because extensive research undertaken by Kabat-Zinn and many others has shown that as little as 8 weeks intentional daily practice results in significant changes: not only experientially, but also in the structure and function of the brain and nervous system. More of this later. What does mindfulness training consist of? It consists of a systematic training in paying attention, on purpose, non-judgementally, in the presnt moment, to things as they are. You are introduced to guided meditations which systematically work with different foci of attention – the breath; the body at rest and in movement, sounds, emotions and thoughts, bringing your full attention to what is actually happening now, and not how we would prefer things to be. [example of toe in body scan] Most importantly of all, you practise bringing mindfulness into everyday life – starting with a routine activity, such teeth brushing or washing up, and gradually expanding into more and more areas. For the real arena of mindfulness is life itself, not formal practice. And you also practice resting in awareness itself: not choosing an object to attend to, but instead allowing everything to be just as it is, right now. To witness, to welcome what is actually happening right now, without distraction, grasping or rejection. Why practice? As we have seen, what is important is the embodied awareness which comes to the surface as a result of this particular way of paying attention. Because most of the time we are doing anything but paying attenton to the present moment, we are anything but truly aware. Our minds are occupied with, and distracted by, the past, the future, daydreams, fantasies, worries, regrets, judgements, emotions, whatever. We have only to sit down to meditate for a few minutes and our minds wander off somewhere, anywhere… That in itself is not a problem, that is what minds do, and do very well. But instead of recognising thoughts – even the most damaging thoughts, – as passing events and letting them go, most of us, most of the time, cling onto them. Without even noticing that we are doing it, we can graft onto a passing thought a whole package of emotions, past associations, and bodily feelings. We relate to them as facts, not passing thoughts, and very often this can set up an almost automatic cascade of reactions. By doing this we give thoughts a degree of existence that does not belong to them, and by clinging to them we continually re-create our sense of ‘I’. The Buddha summarised his whole teaching as, “Nothing is to be clung to as I, me or mine.” In short, the distracted mind is anywhere but here, anywhere but now. How often have we drunk a cup of coffee, for example and not really tasted it? Walked somewhere and not even noticed what we passed? We are rarely fully awake to Life unfolding itself as me, right here, right now, in all its splendour. Whereas mindfulness is about being awake to the present moment, however that moment is unfolding. And given the hadith ‘Every moment He is in a different configuration’, NOW is the only moment we have. If we are not alive to NOW, are we ever truly alive? Let’s now look at the way we pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally, to things as they are. This can sound rather cold. But as I said before, mindfulness is inseparable from heartfulness: from love, kindness and compassion, because awareness belongs to Being itself, ever awake, ever aware, intrinsically loving. Kabat-Zinn speaks of this paying attention as like a mother holding her child – loving, kind and accepting of whatever condition the child is in. Awareness can hold anything: joyful and painful; easy and difficult; the things we would prefer to push away and the things we would prefer to cling onto; trivial and momentous; personal and global. When a mother holds a child in pain, the very act of holding the child with complete kindness is comforting, even healing. So too with mindfulness. Whatever arises, especially the difficult, is welcomed as much as possible; is held close in awareness without probing, rejecting, or wanting it to be different, and when this happens then even the most difficult things can gradually start to soften and dissolve of their own accord in the light of open-hearted awareness. That has to be experienced to be believed, and many thousands of people all over the world, including myself, have experienced it. In mindfulness this way of paying attention is described by 7 ‘attitudinal foundations’. Non-judging Patience Beginners mind Trust Non-striving Acceptance Letting go They look uncannily like the qualities of a spiritual way – perhaps not word for word, but certainly in intent and tone. We may remember the Five Qualities of the Way seen by Ibn ‘Arabi’s saintly wife Maryam in a dream. But in this case it is without any suggestion that a spritual way is what is being undertaken. They describe in some detail the way awareness can hold the present moment. I think many of us find that when we begin to pay attention, our attitudes are actually rather far from those listed. We have judgments about just about everything and everyone; we want things to happen in the time we think is right; we are full of knowing; we don’t actually trust that reality will unfold perfectly well without me trying to make something happen; we strive to do, to achieve; we have very strong views about whether what is happening is good or bad and we usually try to avoid what we think is bad; and we can carry one moment not only to into the next, but sometimes into days, weeks, months, years. These attitudes are foundations because they actually belong to awareness itself, but we can also intentionally cultivate them, be mindful of them, as the way we pay attention. Intention, attitude and awareness go together; deepening in any one, leads to deepening in the others. The more we bring these attitudes intentionally to our experience, the more our intrinsic awareness rises to the suface. The more we sink into the awareness we already are, the more these attitudes rise to the surface. I wish we had time to talk about each of these, in detail, but we don’t. So I’ll just mention one: Beginner’s Mind This is the mind that is willing to encounter everything as if for the first time. Or as Suzuki Roshi says, the mind that is open to thousands of possibilities, whereas in the expert’s mind there are few. In its highest form this is the quality of being ‘ummi’, attributed to the Prophet. Although commonly translated as ‘illiterate’, this word actually derives from the same root as the word for mother (’mm, umm) and comes to mean ‘he who is as when his mother gave birth to him’. In other words, that condition of naked receptivity which receives the moment exactly as it is, uncoloured by our own conditioning, knowledge or preference. I now want to look at the Modern Mindfulness Movement as a phenomenon of this time. It begins, as we said, with the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. A deeply commited practising Buddhist and trained as a molecular biologist, in the mid-1970s he was working at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre and was also profoundly questioning what his ‘karmic assignment’ might be. In other words, ‘what is my real purpose here? ‘How can I best be of service?’ I find his own acount of what happened so fascinating that I have left some copies for you to read if you want. In short, during the course of a long meditation retreat, he experienced ‘‘a ‘vision’ that lasted maybe 10 seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was rich in detail and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought stream, but rather something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully explain and don’t feel the need to.” This is a moment of instantaneous seeing, of kashf, when he saw clearly the possibility of taking the meditative practices out of their ‘spiritual’ context and making them available to anyone and everyone, in a secular vocabulary. He put himself wholeheartedly into what he had been shown, and the extraordinary things is that everything he saw in that 10 seconds has indeed come to pass. He started working in the hospital with people suffering from incurable pain, offering not to cure their pain, but to change their relationship to it by introducing them to mindfulness practices. He knew these practices were drawn from Buddhism; they didn’t know, and didn’t need to. They just had to commit to doing the practices for a period of 8 weeks. The results were spectacular and humbling. Not only did the patients change their relationship to their pain, they found something that changed their lives. His approach, known as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, MBSR, has since ‘gone viral’ and is in use throughout the world. In this country Professor Mark Williams and his colleagues have developed a variant of MBSR known as MBCT, Mindfulness Based Cogntivie Therapy. Now widely available to everyone, this was first developed in a clinical setting as a treatment for recurrent depression. It has proved to be more successful in preventing relapse than drug therapy and so is availbale on the NHS for clinical patients. Even 10 years ago who would have thought that a course based on meditation would be available on the NHS? Mindfulness based approaches have been successfully integrated into medicine, psychology, neuroscience, healthcare, education, parenting, childbirth, business leadership, stress management and many other fields. People everywhere want it – it is meeting a real need and receptivity of our time. Another characteristic of the Modern Mindfulness Movement is that it is bringing together two different ways of knowing: that of western empirical science, and that of the empiricism of the meditative or consciousness disciplines. And it is bringing these together without the thorny, and usually fruitless, arguments about science and religion. A growing body of work within neuroscience, particularly using MRI imaging, is showing how mindfulness training results in changes to the brain, both in its structure and in the way it functions. For example the hippocampus, which plays an important role in learning and memory, gets thicker. The right amygdala, which regulates fear-based reactions, gets thinner. There is a measurable effect on the heart and the digestive system via the vagus nerve which connects the brain to major internal organs. Different brain networks are activated when we continue to tell ourselves the story of our own separate existence – a process known as ‘selfing’ – to when we experience moment-by-moment awareness. We humans put so much time and energy into creating a false sense of selfhood – it turns out we even recruit different brain networks to do it! This coming together of what we might call the inner and the outer sciences has to be one of the hallmarks of our time: a time which begins to recognize the unity of the One, not only interiorly, but also exteriorly. Mark Williams comments: “The world can only benefit from such a convergence and intermixing of streams, as long as the highest standards of rigor and empiricism native to each stream are respected and followed. The promise of deepened insights and novel approaches to theoretical and practical issues is great when different lenses can be held up to old and intractable issues.” And the future? Just as any individual may progress towards greater realization of their original purpose, so the same is true for humankind as a collective. The Fusus, for example, deals with both individual realization and the progress of humankind towards perfectibility, because both an individual human and the collective humanity are images of the One Single Nafs. And the movement of existence is towards ever greater, ever more universal realization of that. Now there is the possibility for any of us, whatever our belief and whether we consider ourselves spiritual or not, to return to awareness of the pure, compassionate being who is present as ourselves, and who loves to be known by and through us. I’d like to end with something Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote recently: “The author sees the current interest in mindfulness and its applications as signaling a multi-dimensional emergence of great transformative and liberative promise, one which, if cared for and tended, may give rise to a flourishing on this planet akin to a second, and this time global, Renaissance, for the benefit of all sentient beings and our world.” May it be so. The Modern Mindfulness Movement by Alison Yiangou http://beshara.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/alisonyiangou-mindfulness.mp3 ← Meister Eckhart: a Talk by Adam Dupré Gregory of Nissa: a Talk by Edward Hallinan →

Sadr al-d?n Qunaw?: His importance to us, and his relationship to R?m? by Jane Clark It is a great pleasure to be asked to talk about Sadr al-d?n Qunaw?, especially here at Chisholme. It is especially appropriate as this is – probably – the 800th year of his birth in 1208, probably in Malatya. Probably because we don’t really know the exact details of his birth. But whatever the real situation, his life and work will be celebrated this May by the first ever conference devoted specifically to him, to be held in Konya where many of you will have visited his modest tomb in the outskirts of the city. Sadr al-d?n Qunaw? lived in an interesting place at an interesting time, and he was surrounded all his life by spiritual giants, with whom he had various types of relationship. Firstly of course, he was a child and a student. His father, Majd al-d?n was a man of standing in both spiritual and worldly matters, an aristocrat who had important roles at the court of the Seljuk Empire in Konya, and in the service of the Caliph of Islam – one of the last to be in residence in Baghdad – as well as being a man of learning and a spiritual teacher. He befriended Ibn ‘Arab? whilst he was staying in Mecca, and invited him to a position in Anatolia, where he came under the patronage of the Sultan and so was able to settle and bring up a family. Majd al-d?n and Ibn ‘Arab? became best friends, and when Majd al-d?n died, Ibn ‘Arab? took on the guardianship of the young Sadr al-d?n, when he was probably about eight years old, and raised him alongside his own son Sa’?d al-d?n. Ibn ‘Arab? also became his teacher, and he showed such aptitude for learning and spiritual intuitions that he eventually made him his spiritual heir, in preference to his sons, and later on we will look in detail at what this entailed. It seems that Sadr al-d?n went to Damascus with the Shaykh when he left Anatolia, in about 1222, at which point he would have been about 14, and so received his general education – in Qur’an, hadith, etc. – in one of the great intellectual centres of the Islamic world. In his teens he also came under the tutelage of Awhad al-Kirm?n?, another important spiritual figure, also an aristocrat – a prince, in fact – and a man of great influence. He was an eminent teacher and poet, an exponent of the path of chivalry (futuwwa), and a close friend of both Ibn ‘Arab? and Jal?l al-d?n R?m?. Then, as a mature man, when he became a Shaykh in his own right, Sadr al-d?n attracted an extraordinary group of people to study under him, many of whom became, over the centuries, as famous – or perhaps more famous – than he was; the Persian poet Fakr al-d?n ‘Ir?q?, the philosopher and encyclopaedist, Qutb al-d?n al Shir?z?, the metaphysician al-Fargh?n?, and his close friend and major pupil, Mu’ayyad al-d?n al-Jand? who wrote the first full commentary on the Fus?s al-Hikam, and in turn educated a line of great Ottoman thinkers and commentators such as al-Kashan? and Daud al-Qayser?. As far as contemporaries were concerned, this was an age when the Islamic world was bristling with great thinkers and mystics, and Sadr al-d?n, who did not live his whole life in Konya, but spent substantial amounts of time in Damascus, Egypt and Persia, is known to have come into contact with many of them, either by personal contact or by relationships with their immediate followers; many of his own students, for instance, were disciples of al-Suhradward? (both al-maqt?l and the founder of the Suhrawardiyya order) or Najm al-Kubra, or Ibn Sa’b?n and Ibn al-F?rid in Egypt. During the last ten years of his life, when he was teaching and writing with the greatest intensity, Sadr al-d?n lived in Konya where Jal?lud?n R?m?, also, was at the height of his powers; the two men were almost exact contemporaries, being born and dying within a year of each other, and they dominated the intellectual scene of the city between about 1250 and their deaths in 1273/1274. In the last part of this talk, we will take a look at this relationship in particular. Sadr al-d?n was a man of stature and influence in both the worldly and spiritual realms. He inherited his father’s position at the Seljuk court, and when he finally returned to Konya around 1250, when he was about 42/3, he was granted a large house by the Protector of the city where he kept a substantial household and taught his students. He was extremely learned in all branches of knowledge; he had studied hadith in Damascus with the very eminent scholar al-Hadhab?n? and became as well known as a master of Islamic law as for his knowledge of the mystical sciences; in Konya, he was given the position of Shaykh al-Islam, meaning, the leading teacher of his time. He also studied philosophy and medicine and was well known for his pleasure and ability in debate. This interest in the sciences, and in fact in every kind of knowledge, is something he had in common with this master, Ibn ‘Arab?, who shows evidence in his work of a great awareness of the leading edge of science, such as in optics. Transmission But despite his obvious individual stature, Sadr al-d?n’s main function was to be a transmitter of a certain kind of knowledge at a time when Islam was undergoing a major ‘sea-change’. Sadr al-d?n was the great establisher of the Akbarian tradition. He preserved it – literally preserving Ibn ‘Arab?’s written works in Konya, as we shall see – and in his own works and teachings he re-expressed the Shaykh’s ideas in a form which was suitable for the times in which he lived, and which, as we have already said, attracted some of the finest minds of the times to their study. His writings and teachings laid the foundations for the great dissemination of this knowledge which took place in the following centuries. When I say that Islam was undergoing a sea-change at this time, I mean that during the 13th century the old Islamic order died in a very real sense. It was a century in which the Franks retook most of Andalusia, which was of course Ibn ‘Arab?’s homeland, whilst in the Levant, the Franks were firmly established once again in Jerusalem, Acre, etc. Most importantly, in the East the Mongols were sweeping through Khurasan and Persia – including Konya – pillaging and burning. They initiated a terror for which we have no equivalent in the present day; there was a massive movement of population going on, and the cities of the middle areas were full of refugees. This was one of the main reasons for the intellectual vitality of the time, as people and cultures intermingled; the presence of Ibn ‘Arab? and R?m? in Anatolia, swept into the city from the far West and the far East by the political and social upheaval, exemplified a situation which was going on everywhere. In 1258, the Mongols reached Baghdad, the very heart of the Islamic Empire – where they destroyed the caliphate and burnt the books in the great library. Sadr al-d?n himself, in Konya, had a dream on the night of this event in which he saw the Prophet lying prostrate on the ground, whilst all around pronounced him dead. He came close to him, and saw that there was still in him just the faintest trace of breath, which Sadr al-d?n announced to all those around him. He was right, and Islam did revive, but the old order had gone; the Baghdad caliphate was never revived. The new shoots that the Dar al-Islam threw up, initiating four hundred years of continuous expansion and virtual global domination, came from the ‘new territories’ such as Anatolia, with the rise of the Ottomans in Turkey and the Balkans, the Safavid Empire in Persia and eventually the Mughal Empire in Northern India. These were Persian-speaking cultures, not Arabic-speaking, and they brought many innovations as they rose to power, including their adoption of Ibn ‘Arab?’s ideas, as formulated by Sadr al-d?n, as the basis of their spirituality or, in fact, their whole intellectual perspective. By the 16th and 17th centuries, the Islamic Empire stretched from Vienna to China, and culturally and spiritually formed a remarkably homogeneous region. Professor Francis Robinson in a recent study of the texts studied in the madrassas – the Islamic universities – in this period[1], notes that the similarities in these three great empires far outweigh the differences, and that both in the official knowledge on the madras curriculum, and in the Sufi orders which taught outside their walls, they drew significantly from the Anatolian/Persian thinkers of the 13th and 14th centuries. This was not only mystical ideas, but in philosophy, law and natural sciences, and also the poetry, hence the work of R?m?, ‘Attar and ‘Ir?q? were equally disseminated throughout this huge region. This is because this cultural milieu within which Konya was seated – it was not only Konya itself, of course – was the ‘seed’ from which the regeneration after the Mongol invasions sprouted. The importance of Sadr al-d?n’s work is that he placed Ibn ‘Arab?’s vision and exposition into the very heart of this seed, in such a way and in such a form that it became the dominant ethos for the Ottomans, the Persians and the Mughals from the 14th to the 18th or even 19th century. This was not only in an intellectually abstract way; Ibn ‘Arab?’s ideas were the explicit foundation upon which the Ottomans successfully managed a vast empire consisting of many different cultures, races and religions; and in the Mughal emperors’ attempt to form an India in which Hindu and Muslim were equal. One of the interesting things about Robinson’s study is that it also documents the moment when things changed; ie when this very expansive, tolerant ethos was seriously challenged and eventually defeated by other forces within society, as it was in all three realms, although at different times. But this is for another time. I mention this only to give some taste of Sadr al-d?n’s achievement and to flesh out this statement that he was above all a transmitter and a successor. Al-Jand? refers to him as “The Perfect Man of his age, the Pole of the poles of his time, and the khalifa of the Seal of Muhammedian Sainthood” [2] We are used to thinking of khalifa as ‘vice-regent’ but it is also ‘successor’, the designated heir, and al-Jand?’s use of the phrase khalifa of the Seal of Muhammedian Sainthood so soon after his death, shows that both Sadr al-d?n and his immediate circle were quite aware of the elevated nature of the knowledge they were dealing with. The eventual great influence of the Shaykh’s work came not so much through original works by either Sadr al-d?n or Ibn ‘Arab?, but through the works of successors, such as al-Fargh?n?, al-Fanar?, Daud al-Qaysar? and the great 15th century poet and metaphysician al-J?m?, who settled at the Timurid court in Herat in present day Afghanistan. But all these people based their work on the formats which Sadr al-d?n established. The ‘White Fus?s’ which we study here, for instance, written in 17th century Ottoman lands, is based upon the format begun by al-Jand? under Sadr al-d?n’s supervision, based upon his notes taken during Sadr al-d?n’s teaching sessions in Konya. The whole manner and tone of the commentary is imbued with Sadr al-d?n’s terminology and his approach, which systematised Ibn ‘Arab?’s ideas in a way that the Shaykh himself did not do. Sadr al-d?n as Successor But to say that he systematised, does not mean that he bookishly studied and collated his master’s works. It is clear that Sadr al-d?n wrote from his own divine inspiration, and followed Ibn ‘Arab?’s exposition because he had come to see the truth of the matter for himself. In fact, he describes how Ibn ‘Arab? himself encouraged him to write down and expose his own insights and intuitions. He wrote a number of very important books – probably around 20 altogether, with around 8-9 really major works which in their day were ranked with Ibn ‘Arab? and R?m? in importance. But none of these has yet come into English, and many are not even available in Arabic editions. The work that Bill Chittick did in the 1980s is still the most important published source for the ideas and metaphysics that we have. There is a very good recent PhD thesis by a man called Richard Todd, done at Oxford, which has just become available for reading, and this contains a lot of new information and insight, of which just a little will appear in this talk. Todd disagrees with some of the emphasis that Chittick gives; particularly, he feels that Sadr al-d?n does not focus especially on philosophical issues, except insofar as these had become an integral part of the discourse of the intellectual elite of the times. Like Ibn ‘Arab?, he was deeply committed to the traditions of the Qur’an and hadith, but Todd feels that he has a more neutral and impersonal tone which was well suited to the function of widespread dissemination. He says: By both distilling and elaborating upon his master’s metaphysical and cosmological doctrines, al-Qunaw? succeeded in providing a mature and complex world view, which was ideally placed to challenge the words of the mutakallim?na (the theologians) and the fal?sifa (philosophers) alike.[3] These later were the main intellectual opponents to the ideas of the mystical writers. For autobiographical information, we have a little information from Sadr al-d?n’s own works, particularly Nafah?t al-il?hiyya (The Breaths of the Divine) in which he records some of the mystical insights and visions which were given to him, and we have some information from the works of his followers, such as al-Jand?’s Nafah?t al-R?h and the introduction to al-Fargh?n?’s commentary upon Ibn al-F?rid’s Poem of the Way. J?m?’s Nafah?t al-Uns (The Breaths of Intimacy) which is a description of all the great Sufi saints up until his day, includes an account of his life and those of his followers, and this has been the main source in the Turkish tradition to date. Today I am also going to use Afl?k?’s Man?qib al-‘?rif?n (The Wonders of the Knowers of God) which is the first major account of R?m?’s life, which has recently been translated into lovely clear prose by John O’Kane. This gives quite a vivid picture of 13th century Konya and the relationship between R?m? and Sadr al-d?n, although it is rather one-sided, in that, as O’Kane says, its main purpose is to show R?m? as the most important spiritual figure after Muhammed in the whole of Islamic history. The only text of Sadr al-d?n’s we have in complete translation is his will, the wasiya which Bill Chittick translated in the early 1980s. This is a good place to start to look at the particular features of the process of Akbarian transmission for which Sadr al-d?n, as in all other things, set the pattern. These are extracts from Chittick’s translation of the wasiya. I enjoin my friends and companions [that] they bury me among the graves of ordinary Muslims. They should wrap me in the clothing of the Shaykh – may God be pleased with him – (meaning Ibn ‘Arab?) and also in a white covering; and they should spread in my grave the prayer rug of Shaykh Awhad al-d?n – may God’s mercy be upon him (meaning al-Kirm?n?). Let none of those who recite the Qur’an over graves accompany my funeral procession. No building should be built over my grave, nor should any roof be erected. Rather, let only the grave itself be built of strong stone, nothing else, lest it fall into oblivion, and so its trace may remain. Let them give alms of 1000 dirhems on the day I am buried to the weak and poor and beggars, both men and women, especially those who are disabled and blind… My books on philosophy should be sold and the proceeds given as alms. The rest of the books – the medical works, works on jurisprudence, Qur’anic commentaries, collections of prophetic traditions, etc. – should be made into an endowment. My own writings should be taken to Af?f al-d?n [al-Tilims?n?] so that they can be a remembrance from me to him, and he should be enjoined not to be niggardly in giving them to those in whom he sees the qualifications to profit from them…”[4] Just a couple of points here. 1) That although Ibn ‘Arab? had died about 30 years before and Sadr al-d?n had become such a great figure; the will makes clear his continuing reverence and affection for his two early teachers. This is the will of a truly modest man. 2) The degree of wealth, which we will mention later; 1000 dirhems is a great deal of money, and it reminds us that Sadr al-d?n in his day was famous for his generosity to the poor. 3) The wealth is coupled to the modesty of the grave. In fact the whole area where the grave still stands was a public grave-yard and the mosque next door was on the site of this house. A mosque – not the one that is there now – was built after his death to house the endowment of his books which he mentions. These included a collection of Ibn ‘Arab?’s original writings, including the autograph Fut?h?t which was dedicated to him, and Sadr al-d?n’s own copy of the Fus?s al-Hikam. These two major works of the Shaykh, in authenticated copies, along with many other wonderful things, were preserved in this building until the 1920s, and the mosque became a centre for the study and propagation of the Shaykh’s works for the next 500 and more years. It is a unique situation, within Islam and without, to have the works of a great thinker preserved in this way; we have from this, and other sources associated with Sadr al-d?n, about 30 major works surviving from the lifetime of Ibn ‘Arab?. One thing which I have not quoted is the middle part of the will where he talks of the Akbarian heritage, and this is because it is not really clear what it means in detail. But what is clear, is that he does not pass on the role of khalifa of the Seal of Muhammedian Sainthood. On the contrary, he says here and in other places, that this ends with him. This is why, as far as I understand it – and please, if anyone has any further insights, let’s hear them – there has never been a formal tar?qa associated with the followers of Ibn ‘Arab?, in the way that there is for say, the Mevlevi order. Here there is a line of transmission which has passed from shaykh to shaykh all the way back to Sultan Veled, and therefore to R?m? himself; the shaykh of the present community is a blood relative of Jal?l al-d?n and Sultan Veled. The same goes for the Qadiri order, or the Shadhili or the Naqshbandi, where a particular order will have a silsila going back to the founder in order to validate the standing of the present teacher; I remember Carl Ernst in Oxford showing us one of these for the Qadiri order on a kind of scroll, which when unfurled went right across the room and way out into the corridor. This has never happened for the Akbarian tradition. My own feeling about this – and again, this is just what I have come to by considering the matter a great deal – is that the matter of the Muhammedian Sainthood is too general, too universal, to be appropriately contained within a specific order. It was and is for the whole of the Islamic tradition, and ultimately, I believe, for the whole of humanity; not just ‘initiates’. And I think that this is what one sees by looking at the extent of the influence over the centuries. But this lack of external form does not mean that there is not transmission of the understanding and the degree of knowledge which Ibn ‘Arab? opened up for humanity. On the contrary. But it comes in a different way. I am going to present this by giving you two descriptions by Sadr al-d?n himself about his own experiences. The first comes from Nafah?t al-il?hiyya and happens about 13 years after the death of the Shaykh: I saw the Shaykh (May God by pleased with him) in the night of the Sabbath on 17th Shaww?l 653 in a long event. There passed between me and him many words and I told him in the course of the conversation that the effects of the Names derive from the predications (ahk?m), and the predications from the states (al-ahw?l), and the states are particularised from the Essence (dh?t) in accordance with the predisposition (isti’d?d), and the predisposition is an order which is not caused by anything else. He (RA) was extremely delighted by this explanation, and his face beamed with joy and he nodded his head. He repeated some of my words and said: “Excellent, excellent.” I said to him: “Master, you are the excellent one as you have the ability to make the human being arrive at the point where he can perceive such things. By my life! If you are a human being, the rest of us are nothing (kal? shay’in).” Then I came close to him and kissed his hand, and said to him: “There remains to me one thing I need.” He said: “Ask.” I said: “I desire realisation (tahaqquq) in the manner of your witnessing (shuh?dika) of the self-revelation of the Essence (dh?t) continually and eternally.” I meant by that the attainment (hus?l) of that which came upon (h?silan) him from the essential self-disclosure, beyond which there is no veil (hij?b) and without which there is no establishment (mustaqarr) for perfection (al-kam?l). He said: “Yes,” then answered by saying: “This is given to you, as long as you know that I have had children and companions, particularly my son Sa’ad al-d?n, and despite that, that which you ask has not been easy for any of them. Many I have killed and brought to life. Of my children and companions, those that died died, and those that were killed were killed. They did not attain that.” I said: “Oh my master, praise be to God.” I meant, because of my being singled out for this excellence. “I know that you bring to life and that you kill.” After that we talked some more, but it is not possible to make what we said public. Then I woke up. The gift belongs to God.[5] Just a couple of comments on this. 1) There is a phrase in the first part where he says: “Master you are the excellent one, as you have the ability to make the human being – al-ins?n – arrive at the point where he can perceive such things.” This has been translated by several people as a very general ‘someone’ or ‘a person’ but Stephen Hirtenstein and I have discussed this, and we think it does mean ‘the man’ – meaning, that Ibn ‘Arab? has the ability to bring the interior reality of each person, the real person, which is perfect human reality in each of us – to the point of realisation. Pointing to Ibn ‘Arab?’s universal function in educating to this degree, and what it is he educates. 2) In the second part, this is very clearly a reference to the degree of Seal of Muhammedian Sainthood, as Sadr al-d?n puts the attainment of the final degree of sainthood, in which the heart of the knower becomes the locus of the Divine self-manifestation at every moment, into Ibn ‘Arab?’s hands. One would assume that this ‘death’ and ‘killing’ is a reference to ‘Die before you die’, and the bringing to life to the revivification in knowledge, as referred to in the chapter of Jesus in the Fus?s al-Hikam. But here again, this is just how I interpret it; I am sure there are many other ways. Also, what Sadr al-d?n describes here is his heirship to Ibn ‘Arab?; in that being an heir, as is noted in other places, involves not just knowing about or seeing the states of the one from whom one inherits; it means tasting and encompassing them in oneself. Thus this matter of the direct connection to the essence – the private face, al-wajh al-kh?ss – and the possibility of receiving the Divine revelation directly in the heart, without intermediary was, as Todd points out, a cornerstone of Sadr al-d?n’s own exposition on the nature of reality, and one of the points on which he argues against the vision of the Islamic philosophers, who saw the Divine revelation descending by way of degrees from the essential Unity through the cosmological degrees of the celestial spheres. In this vein, the other quote I want to bring is one I have brought several times before. It is from the introduction to the Fuk?k, which is Sadr al-d?n’s own commentary upon the Fus?s al-Hikam. Here he describes how he came to agree to write the book because people were asking him to elucidate the meaning in the Fus?s: I [did this] despite the fact that I only asked for an explanation of the preface (khutba) – nothing else – of this book from its author (may God be pleased with him). But it was [directly] from God to me, through His grace, that He granted me the [privilege] of sharing with him (Ibn ‘Arab?) in realising that which was revealed to him, and of raising my glance to that which had been made clear to him, and of taking from God without causal intermediary but rather from the purity of Divine providence and essential binding which protects me from that which appears from the properties (ahk?m) of the intermediaries and the characteristics (khaw?s) of the [secondary] causes, the conditions and the ties. He (God) brings that about in a pure way because of His purpose, drawing [us] close to Him, and bringing benefit to me and to them [both] now and on the day [we] arrive at Him. Amen, [praise be to God] the Lord of the universes. [6] This is repeated by al-Jand?, who writes in the preface to his much more complete commentary upon the Fus?s, the first line by line analysis: While my master and guide Muhammed b. Ish?q b. Y?suf al-Q?naw? was giving me a commentary on the prologue of the book (the Fus?s), the inspiration of the world of the mystery manifested its signs upon him and the Breath of the Merciful (al-nafas al-rahm?n) began to breathe in rhythm with his breathing. The air from his exhalations and the emanations of his precious breaths submerged my inner and outer being. His secret governed my “secret” (b?tin?) in a strange and immediate manner and produced a perfect effect upon my body and my heart. In this way, God gave me to understand in the commentary of the prologue the contents of the entire book, and in this proximity inspired in me the preserved contents of its secrets. When the Shaykh realised what had happened to me… he related to me that he too had asked our master, the author of the Fus?s, to provide him with a commentary on the prologue which had produced in him a strange effect by virtue of which he had understood the contents of the entire work. [7] The obvious thing to mention here, is that this direct mode of transmission carries on to the next generation, and in fact the Akbarian tradition is adorned with similar stories which show that it is to do with taking knowledge directly from God, not from an intermediary. There was a quote which Stephen Hirtenstein once used in a presentation and which we have never been able to find again in order to reference it; but he found it somewhere. It was a saying of Ibn ‘Arab? concerning his teaching of Sadr al-d?n: “Even though he sits and hears it from me, he is taught by God.” This wonderfully sums up this matter of the Akbarian tradition, which establishes the knowledge of the heart, and does not pose intermediaries between the student and God. Relations with R?m? So much for the relationship of Sadr al-d?n to the generation which came before and after him in the Akbarian tradition. His relationship with his contemporary, Jalal al-d?n R?m?, brings up a completely different set of considerations. The two men lived and taught in Konya at the same time; as I have said, they were almost exact contemporaries, and both were highly influential throughout the Islamic lands in the centuries that followed. In fact, Ibn ‘Arab? and Jal?lud?n R?m? could be said to form the twin pillars of spiritual life in the lands of the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals in India, and onward to all areas which have come under the sway of Islam since 1300. It can be no coincidence that they lived in the same town, prayed together in the mosque, taught, in some cases, the same people in the same madrassas, and wrote their many works within half a mile of each other. Even a cursory reading of Afl?k? reveals that they had a strong personal relationship and met together often both in public and in private. But the connection – which we know must be there – is not a direct , or a manifest, one; Sadr al-d?n was not a student of R?m?’s and R?m? was not a student of Sadr al-d?n (at least not in the sense that Sadr al-d?n was a pupil of Ibn ‘Arab?’s or R?m? of Shamsi Tabr?z; they leave no records acknowledging this kind of relationship). In fact, when one looks at the situation, the most striking thing is how different they were, to the degree that one can say that in many ways they were the exact opposite of each other – at least in the way that tradition, which mostly means Afl?k?, portrays them. Sadr al-d?n is rich and has social standing and duties; whilst R?m? is poor and appears almost like a wandering dervish, subject to bursts of ecstasy which manifests as trance-like states and turning. Sadr al-d?n writes metaphysics whilst R?m? writes ecstatic poetry. Sadr al-d?n writes in Arabic and in the Arabic tradition, being the khalifa of Ibn ‘Arab?, who is from the far West. R?m? writes in Persian, in the very different Persian poetical tradition, and was born in the far East. Sadr al-d?n is portrayed, at least in Afl?k?, as a Sufi who teaches in his house which is referred to as a khanaqah, or zawiyya, a Sufi lodge. R?m? lives in the madrassa – because he was of course a university teacher when Shams found him – and is not a Sufi (interesting one that!). In the way that their respective ways develop there is also a great contrast; R?m?, through his son Sultan Veled, became the founder of one of the great Sufi tar?qas which was established in Konya. They have a famous practice, the sam?’, based upon R?m?’s own practice during his lifetime. The Akbarian tradition through Sadr al-d?n did not found a tar?qa, and in fact in his will, Sadr al-d?n orders his family and followers to leave Konya; his family and al-Jand? moved to Damascus within a short time, whilst al-Fargh?n? went East into Iran. There is no fixed practice, except that the way is characterised by investigation of metaphysical questions; and what we might call Akbarians are to be found in every tar?qa. The difference in the development of the traditions creates the great problem in saying anything more about their relationship, because all the material that we have comes from Afl?k?, meaning from the Mevlevi tradition a couple of generations along, taken from accounts of R?m?’s early followers. Afl?k?’s purpose is to elevate R?m?, so many of the stories are designed, I’m afraid, to show his superiority in knowledge and wisdom; there is really no intention to portray Sadr al-d?n in a balanced way. There is nothing that I know from the other side; ie. anything about R?m? from developing Akbarian tradition. So what follows comes from reading between the lines of the very many stories – about 30 – where Afl?k? relates an interaction between the two men. So first of all; I do not believe that Sadr al-d?n and R?m? participated in the rather crude competitiveness which one feels in the pages of Afl?k?. These were two completely realised men, and surely they knew the reality of the situation. One nice story, which to me has the ring of truth, seems to describe the beginning of the relationship: In the beginning, Shaykh Sadr al-d?n was greatly opposed to Mowl?n?. One night in a dream he saw that he was massaging Mowl?n?’s blessed foot. He woke and sought forgiveness from God. A second time he saw the same thing. Three times he woke up and sought forgiveness from God. The last time he woke he ordered the lamp to be set and told an attendant: “Go and fetch me such and such a book from the library.” When the attendant was about to descend from upstairs, he saw Mowl?n? sitting in the middle of the staircase. He turned to the Shaykh and told him this. The Shaykh came and saw Mowl?n? sitting there. When Mowl?n? saw the Shaykh, he stood up and they embraced one another. Mowl?n? said: “Don’t be vexed and don’t ask God for forgiveness. Let it be that sometimes you massage our foot, and sometimes we massage yours. Sometimes you render service to us, and sometimes we render service to you. There is concord between us, not foreignness.” [8] In addition, here is an extract from Sadr al-d?n’s Ij?za al-bay?n, as translated by Richard Todd: It is inconceivable that the friends of God should diverge regarding fundamental divine principles. Any divergence that arises is either to do with secondary applications. Or it is that which arises between middle ranking initiators and followers who are subject to transient spiritual states, or who receive manifest unveilings whereby real essences, spiritual presences and other such realities appear to them clothed in subtle semblances. For the true significance of this kind of intuition, and what the Truth (al-haqq) intends by it, can only be known through knowledge which comes with the non-manifest, purely intellectual kind of unveiling which transcends all the subtle archetypes and material supports of whatever degree, or through that mode of divine communication which occurs through the suppression of all intermediaries and hence transcends all conditioned states and dictates of the conditioned being. [9] Here is another tale from Afl?k?, which I personally love very much: It is transmitted that one day Mowl?n? went to see the Shaykh of the Shaykhs, the prodigy of the age, the King of the Traditionalists, Shaykh Sadr al-d?n (may God have mercy on him). The shaykh came forth to meet him with complete respect, sat down on his prayer rug and positioned himself politely on his two knees opposite Mowl?n?. They then entered contemplation and for some time swam and travelled within the ocean of light-filled contemplation (hod?r).[10] There follows a very interesting story about silence and poverty, which is maybe for another time. Given that R?m? and Sadr al-d?n were in such a state of essential knowledge, and that they did indeed meet at the level of essential presence and silence, then my own feeling is that the differences between the way they manifested has a meaning. The most basic one is simply that perfection is an interior matter that appears in different ways in different people. But more than this, I believe: these two people have universal functions in the spiritual unfolding of this human emergence, therefore there is something here about our own nature. There is a seminal story which has been quoted recently by Stephen Hirtenstein in a paper he gave recently in Istanbul. This is recounted by Ismail Hakki Bursevi, the great 17th century Ottoman saint whose tomb you will have visited in Bursa. He reports that one day R?m? and Qunaw? were sitting together. Qunaw? turned to R?m? and said: “For us it is to live like a king during the day and to sleep at night like a poor man (faqir).” Immediately R?m? retorted: “And for us it is to live like a poor man during the day and to sleep at night like a king.”[11] Ismail Hakki Bursevi then comments that if one wants to understand something of what they were talking about, one should look at their tombs. And indeed, we all have and can see that Sadr al-d?n’s, as he specified, is modest and open to the air, whilst R?m?’s is a grand mausoleum visited by thousands every year. More than this, and probably what Ismail Hakki was referring to, over the door of R?m?’s tomb it says: “This is the ka’ba of lovers; whoever enters lacking will find completion”; so this is to do with the mysteries of the night, when lovers meet. Over Sadr al-d?n’s, it says: “Your morning is coupled to glory and country; your door ever open to the people of need”, pointing to the mystery which Ismail Hakki posed. My suggestion is – and again, this is only what I have come to – that these two together point to the fact that human beings are both rich and poor in relation to God and the world; as vice-regents and the place where all the Divine Names manifest, we are wealthy and have rulership. But from the aspect of being, we are poor, because we have no being; we are utterly dependent both on God and on the world. The Ismail Hakki story is wonderful because it is so Akbarian in its subtlety – showing us that even in our wealthy mode, we are poor interiorly, and when we manifest with poverty, we are rich. Sadr al-d?n’s aspect in this is to show us how to be wealthy in the service of God; not using wealth for our personal ends, but how in our wealth we can manifest with service and humility. Thus, as we have seen, he was famed for his generosity towards the poor and it is clear that his big house in Konya was full of people receiving food and care, and students studying. It was his wealth which also allowed him to preserve Ibn ‘Arab?’s heritage; to have the works copied on good paper and to found the waqf in which they were preserved. It is also clear that he used his position to support R?m?, not financially because R?m? was committed to a life of renunciation and ascetcism, but in terms of supporting his position in the town. After the foot massage incident, Afl?k? has him saying to one of his companions: This man is strengthened by God and is one of those concealed under the domes of the Almighty. Intelligent men’s reason is confounded before the nature of his deeds, words and spiritual states. After today, we must look upon him with a different gaze and show him respect and reverence in a different manner. [12] So in story after story in Afl?k?, at least in the early part of their relationship, we find Sadr al-d?n supporting R?m? in public gatherings, inviting him to speak or to take the lesson; or we find that when R?m? disappears from a gathering and is found turning or meditating, Sadr al-d?n says something which validates his activity. Many stories begin by saying things like: One day Shaykh Sadr al-d?n was engaged in giving a lesson about hadith and all the great men of the world were there Mowl?n? came in and… The next day, R?m? went to the Shaykh’s khanaqah…[13] You never find Sadr al-d?n described as visiting R?m? in his madrassa. However, as I have mentioned, they are often described as meeting in public gatherings. Here is one which shows Sadr al-d?n clearly giving R?m? what we might nowadays call a ‘feeder’ line: It is transmitted that one time the late Sultan Rokn-al-d?n – God show him forgiveness – held a splendid entertainment in his palace, and all the shaykhs and prominent men came. Q?d? Ser?j al-d?n sat in the chair of honour, and Shaykh Sadr al-d?n in another seat of honour. Sayyed Sharaf al-d?n was seated alongside the sultan’s throne. And all the prominent men sat occupying the high and low places. Suddenly Mowl?n? came in with his disciples, and they seated themselves in the middle of the palace around the water basin. As much as the sultan and the Parv?na exerted themselves, Mowl?n? would not sit on a higher seat. Shaykh Sadr al-d?n said: “All living things come from water.” (Q 21:30). Mowl?n? said: “Nay! All living things come from God.” All the prominent men left their seats for the lower level. Right there a great sam?’ took place.[14] Towards the end of his life, it is clear that R?m? had gained such support that he was in many ways an equal; but there is one interesting story at the end which shows that Sadr al-d?n’s function extended beyond R?m?’s own lifetime. R?m? specified by the way that Sadr al-d?n should lead the prayers at his funeral – which indicates something of how he saw his colleague – which Sadr al-d?n managed to do, although he fell ill immediately afterwards and died within nine months. But not before he was able to support R?m? when a group of people went to the ruler and complained about the sam?’ saying: The sam?’ is absolutely forbidden. We accept that R?m? practised the sam?’ during his time, and it was allowed for him. But despite that, his disciples should not insist on practising this reprehensible innovation and display it openly. Prohibiting such unwarranted innovation is one of your duties, and making an effort in this noble regard is required of you. The Parv?na rose and went before Sadr al-d?n. He reported the situation to him and that day all the prominent men of Konya were present in that place. The Shaykh said: “If you accept my words and trust in what the dervishes say and your belief in Mowl?n?’s person is firm, by God, by God, do not interfere in this matter in any way, do not enter into what men of ill-will say, and do not argue, for in a sense that would be to turn away from the Friends of God and that is inauspicious. Indeed the innovations of the Friends of God are like the sunna of the noble prophets.” [15] And so, interestingly given the larger picture, it seems that the practice of the sam?’ was saved through Sadr al-d?n’s intervention. Jane Clark, Chisholme, 2008. Notes [1] See F. Robinson, “Ottomans Safavids Mughals: Shared knowledge and connective systems” in Journal of the Asiatic Society, 8.2, pp.115-184.[2] See Nafah?t al-R?h, translated by William Chittick in “The Last Will and Testament”, p.32.[3] Richard Todd: Writing in the book of the world: man’s existential journey according to Sadr al-d?n al-Q?naw?, Oxford Univerisity, PhD Thesis 2004, p.75[4] William Chittick, “The Last Will and Testament of Ibn ‘Arab?’s Foremost Disciple, and some notes on its author”, Sophia Perennis, Vol 4. No 1, 1978.[5] Nafah?t al-Il?hiyya, ed. M. al-Khawaja, Tehran. pp.165-6[6] al-Fuk?k, ed. M. Khawaja, (Tehran) p.181[7] Translated by Claude Addas in Quest for the Red Sulphur, p.284. From Sharh al-Fus?s[8] Man?qeb al-‘?ref?n, translated by John O’Kane, Brill, p.212.[9] Ij?za al-bay?n, Hyderabad, 1988, pp.43-5. Translated by Todd, p.287.[10] Man?qeb, p.193[11] Ali Namli, Ismail Hakki Bursevi ve Tamamu’l-feyz (M.U. Sosyal Bilimler Enstitusu, Istanbul 1994), vol.2, p.31. My thanks to Stephen Hirtenstein for this quote in his very good paper: “Spiritual Poverty, Heavenly Riches.”[12] Man?qeb, p.212[13] Man?qeb, p.232[14] Man?qeb, p.235[15] Man?qeb, pp.396-7. Sadr al-d?n Qunaw?: His importance to us, and his relationship to R?m? by Jane Clark http://beshara.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/clark_on_konevi.mp3 ← The Beshara Lecture 2010: Jane Clark Peter Coates: Ibn 'Arabi and the Ecological Crisis →

Like Rumi, in explaining the things of which Rumi himself talks, we too must often resort to metaphor. In this lecture I have seized upon the play of words of the already metaphorical description of an emotional condition, ‘open heart’ and a particular surgical operation known as ‘open heart surgery’. If you want to see a video of physical open heart surgery, please go to www.fi.edu/…openheart.html now, and don’t read this lecture. If however you know roughly what I am referring to in the title, the pun is useful, because it describes an operation which saves lives – the coronary bypass. In this operation, when the reader’s heart stops, the Masnavi is his or her very own heart-lung machine for the duration of the operation. This makes sense: as Rumi’s poetry is ‘heart-stoppingly beautiful’, beauty stops the heart so that the mystical surgeon may operate on it. This lecture is about the procedure of that operation to open the eye of the heart which is blinded and obstructed by ‘self’. Quite a lot of the lecture is direct quotation from my translation of Masnavi Book 1, along with a transcription of the Persian text. The subject I want to talk about today, in the year of Rumi’s anniversary, is love in the Masnavi;Rumi is known as the qutb or ‘pole’ of love. Understanding what that means is difficult for us using that English word ‘Love’, simply because, as we all know, it tends to have two associations; one with sentiment and the other with erotic love.[1] Now what Rumi means by love is something that we discover as we read the Masnavi; one of the words he uses is the Arabic/Persian word ‘eshq. This is a mysterious word, not because it is in itself mysterious, but because we misunderstand it. Because we love form. And the whole of the Masnavi is a lesson in the love of what is beyond form. Now ‘Open Heart Surgery’ is not just a clever title – it is a clever title – but I mean exactly by that that I now believe that the Masnavi is what Gurdjieff and J.G. Bennett referred to as a ‘legominism’ (I think that was the word he used). If I remember rightly, what Bennett meant by legominism was a text that must be heard or said and which has the effect of inducing in the reader a change of heart, because of the impact of a form of wisdom in the text. The Masnavi is a teaching in a poem. And that is why I think that the Masnavi is as deliberate as a surgeon’s operation on the heart. So it tells you what the Masnavi is, it is open-heart surgery. It requires an operation on our selves. Rumi has already donned his surgical garments in the first few lines of the Masnavi when he declares, leaning heavily on a medical reference:[2] sh?d b?sh ay ‘eshq-e khwosh sawd?-ye m?  ay tabib-e jomle ‘allath?-ye m? Rejoice, O Love, that is our sweetest passion, physician of our many illnesses! ay dav?-ye nakhvat o n?mus-e m?  ay tu efl?tun o j?linus-e m? Relief from our pomposity and boasting, O You who are our Plato and our Galen! And here he mentions the most famous metaphysician and physician of the ancient world, Plato and Galen.[3] In Rumi’s time, as well as in the ancient world, the philosopher and physician worked in a continuum of reality, and ‘doctor’ was someone learned in both realms. But in this line he addresses no human being at all, but Love itself, ay ‘eshq; ‘o Love’ and he calls upon God – upon Love -– who cures us of our many illnesses. And Rumi immediately illustrates the workings of the divine physician with the very first story of the Masnavi, of the King and the slave-girl, which is familiar to all of you. In this story, four words are used for sickness, which show the range of the term as in English ‘illness’, ‘sickness’, ‘disease’, ‘affliction’; Arabic marz and ‘allat, and Persian ranjuri and bim?ri. He focuses on two separate instances of sickness: the first when the slave-girl, whom the king has just bought, falls sick and frustrates the king’s lascivious intentions, and one which seems brutally to resolve the story, when the king’s divine physician has the slave-girl’s former boyfriend poisoned. The first sickness is immediately diagnosed by the divine physician as ‘an aching heart’ –we could call it spiritual heart disease to follow the metaphor of my title, when Rumi says: did ranj o kashf shod bar vay nehoft  lik panh?n kard o bar solt?n nagoft He saw the pain and opened up the secret but did not tell the king and kept it hidden. ranjash az sawd? o az safr? nabud  buye har hizam padid ?yad ze dud Her pain was not from black or yellow bile: the scent of wood is sent up in its smoke. did az z?rish ku z?r-e del ast  tan khwosh ast o u gereft?r-e del ast He saw in her distress her broken heart: her body healthy but her heart in chains. ‘?sheqi payd?st az z?ri-ye del nist bim?ri chu bim?ri-ye del The sign of being in love’s an aching heart; there is no suffering like the suffering heart. The pain was opened up, just as a secret is revealed. It is not caused by a bodily malfunction, but rather by the sickness of the heart   nist bim?ri chu bim?ri-ye del there is no suffering like the suffering heart. The moment he says this line, Rumi is carried away on a discourse of ecstatic flight, which is perhaps unparallelled in the rest of the Masnavi, as he contemplates the unimaginable power of love, suggested by one word, and that is the word shams, ‘the sun’. He has moved effortlessly from the lovestruck palpitations of an adolescent serving girl to contemplating the glories of divine love which have been shown to him in ecstasies, which he cannot bring himself to reveal here to his listeners, although he struggles to do so. And all because love is one and a reality which is continuous, going between the mundane and the ultimate levels of reality. This is why Rumi says: ‘allat-e ‘?sheq ze ‘allath? jod?st  ‘eshq astrol?b-e asr?r-e khod?st 110 The lover’s suffering’s like no other suffering: Love is the astrolabe of God’s own mysteries. ‘?sheqi gar zin sar o gar z?n sar ast  ‘?qebat m?r? bed?n sar rahbar ast No matter whether love is of this world or of the next, it steals us to that world. har che guyam ‘eshq r? sharh o bay?n  chun be ‘eshq ?yam khejel b?sham az ?n Whatever words I say to explain this love, when I arrive at love I am ashamed. garche tafsir-e zab?n rowshangar ast  lik‘eshqbi zab?n rowshantar ast Though language gives a clear account of love, yet love beyond all language is the clearer. chun qalam andar neveshtan mishet?ft  chun be ‘eshq ?mad qalam bar khwod shek?ft The pen had gone at breakneck speed in writing, but when it came to love it split in two. These lines are very beautiful in Persian, and I would like to play you an extract of them sung by Hossein Omoumi and Parisa. (plays musical example and reads lines in Persian.) Now I want to look at this word love. The word Rumi uses for ‘love’ in this line 111 No matter whether love is of this world or of the next, it steals us to that world. is ‘?sheqi. It’s different from the more abstract word ‘eshq ‘passionate love’, the love of the perfect lover for God and the love of God for the perfect lover. It’s not the philosophical abstraction ‘love’, but rather the agent noun ‘?sheq, like English ‘lover’ so ‘?sheqi is the state of being an ‘?sheq, i.e. a ‘lover’, just as m?dari motherhood is the abstract of the active state of being a mother m?dar. Lover-hood-ness. The abstract of the agent noun. The state of being a lover. He mentions the astrolabe. Love is the astrolabe of God’s own mysteries The astrolabe is a measure and a microcosm of the whole universe by which the medieval astronomer could understand its workings. And so Rumi does not blame the slave-girl for feeling heart-sickness, for he is acknowledging that love has this power over us to make us suffer, whether it is a tender infatuation, or a profound mystical yearning. ‘?sheqi ‘being a lover’ is the human condition, the state of attraction, needing, yearning, and we are torn apart by it. This is the very starting point of the Masnavi, expressed in the familiar lines which begin this great poem: beshno in nay chun shek?yat mi konad  az jod?’ih? hek?yat mi konad – Listen to this reed as it is grieving; it tells the story of our separations, kaz nayest?n t? mar? bobride and  dar na?ram mard o zan n?lide and ‘Since I was severed from the bed of reeds, in my cry men and women have lamented. sine khw?ham sharhe sharhe az far?q  t? beguyam sharh-e dard-e eshtiy?q I need the breast that’s torn to shreds by parting, to give expression to the pain of heartache. Here, the heartache and being torn apart is meant at the highest level of mystical understanding, and that too is part of the human condition. The Masnavi tells that God is known primarily through love, and that God is approached as the divine beloved. Rumi’s principal theme, and his method of working on the transformation of the heart, is announced in this first line, which commands the listener to hear the story of separation. It is in understanding what causes separation, and why, when we feel torn apart by desire, longing, suffering, we may understand its resolution. Separation is the human predicament: love is both the cause of this predicament of separation, and also its solution. Human love forms an attachment to the object of love, which inevitably results in the experience of separation from it. Then, if this transitory love is lost, occasioned by a failing heart or a failing of health, can love be given and felt any more? The cure is divine love, which is not to be found in other, transitory things, not even in the image of a transcendent beloved; for to do so would be to return to things which can be lost and forgotten. Right from the beginning, in the first story of the king and the slave-girl, Rumi leads the reader into the complexities of human love and separation, and discloses the action of divine love when it is earnestly sought and asked for. As the Masnavi progresses, each couplet conveys a nokte, or ‘point of intelligence’, that penetrates and lightens the sense of separation felt by the soul,[4] which is dominated by the nafs, the egoistical and illusory condition of ‘self-regard’. The goal of Sufi teaching is to die to self-regard and live in the consciousness of the divine. The reed becomes the symbol of this paradoxical love, as it complains bitterly of having been torn from its reedbed, and whose cries have always moved men and women to tears, but which is also soothing to us as it reminds us of love’s consolations: nay harif-e har ke az y?ri borid  pardeh?-ash pardeh?-ye m? darid The reed is friend to all who are lovelorn; its melodies have torn our veils apart. hamchu nay zahri o tery?qi ke did  hamchu nay dams?z o masht?qi ke did Who ever saw a poison and a cure, a mate and longing lover like the reed? The operation of the mystical heart surgeon, then, is different from that of the cardiologist of the medical operating theatre. Rumi’s spiritual physician uncovers the veils which obscure the heart. Rumi is not working to unblock ventricles and arteries, but rather to restore the sight of the heart (we would probably prefer to say ‘insight’). In Persian the heart has an eye, chashm-e del. In Masnavi I, when Caesar’s ambassador could not see the Caliph’s palace, he was told: ay bar?dar chun bebini qasr-e u  chun ke dar chashm-e delat rostest mu O brother, how will you perceive his palace, when hair has overgrown your inner eye? chashm-e del az mu o ?ellat p?k ?r  v?n gah ?n did?r-e qasrash chashm d?r 1405 Your heart’s eye must be cleansed of hair and error, then go and have a look and see his palace. What causes this blindness of the heart’s eye is variously described by Rumi. In one passage Solomon is said to have achieved perfect vision by emptying his heart of all that cluttered it, namely ‘the kingdom of this world’: chun ke m?l o molk-r? az del ber?nd  z?n soleym?n khwish joz meskin nakh?nd 990 Since Solomon had cleansed his heart of wealth and power he’d only call himself ‘the poor’. kuze-ye sar baste andar ?b-e zaft  az del-e porr b?d fowq-e ?b raft A stoppered jar, in troubled waters even, can float on water, with its air-filled heart. b?d-e darvishi chu dar b?ten bovad  bar sar-e ?b-e-jeh?n s?ken bovad So when the air of poverty’s within us there’s peace upon the waters of the world. garche jomle in jeh?n molk-e veyast  molk dar chashm-e del-e u l? shay ast Although this whole world is His sovereign kingdom this kingdom is as nothing to his heart’s eye. In the simplest of terms, Rumi diagnoses the defect as selfishness: ?yine ghamm?z nabvad chun bovad …how can a mirror be without reflection? ?yine-t d?ni cher? ghamm?z nist  z?nke zang?r az rokhash momt?z nist Do you know why your mirror tells of nothing? The rust has not been taken from its surface.’ It is one of his favourite images. Rust is ugly on a mirror, as selfishness defaces the heart: bar del-e t?rik-e por zang?rash?n 2575 Or for their rust-encrusted blackened hearts? In a beautiful, lyrical passage in the latter part of the first book, which I quote at greater length, Rumi returns to a definitive expression of this theme: hin makash bahr-e hav? ?n b?r-e ?elm  t? bebini dar darun anb?r ?elm 3465 Don’t bear that weight of knowledge from ambition; make sure you see the fruits of inner knowledge, t? ke bar rahv?r-e ?elm ?yi sav?r  ba?d az ?n oftad tu-r? az dush b?r And ride upon the vehicle of wisdom and then the burden tumbles from your shoulders. az hav?h? kay rahi bi j?m-e hu  ay ze hu q?ne? shode b? n?m-e hu Without His cup will you be free from cravings, O you who are content with just His name? az seffat vaz n?m che z?yad khay?l  v?n khay?lash hast dall?l-e vas?l What comes of qualities and names? Illusion. yet that illusion signifies the union. dide’i dall?l bi madlul hich  t? nab?shad j?de nabvad ghul hich Have you seen signs without a signifier? when there’s no road, there is no ghost to haunt it. hich n?mi bi haqiqat dide’i  y? ze g?f o l?m–e gol gol chide’i 3470 And have you seen a name without its essence? from‘r’, ‘o’, ‘s’, ‘e’, have you picked a rose? esm khw?ndi row mosamm?-r? be j?  mah be b?l? d?n na andar ?b-e ju You’ve named it, now go find the thing you’ve named! The moon is in the sky, not in the river. gar ze n?m o harf khw?hi bogzari  p?k kon khwod-r? ze khwod hin yeksari If you would pass beyond the name and letter, then cleanse yourself of self, once and for all. hamchu ?han z?hani bi rang show  dar riy?zat ?yne’ye bi rang show Be rust-free, like the sheen of polished iron; be rust-free in your practice, like a mirror. khwish-r? s?fi kon az aws?f-e khwod  t? bebini z?t-e p?k-e s?f-e khwod And cleanse yourself of qualities of self so that you see your pure and holy essence. bini andar del ?ulum-e anbiy?  bi ket?b o bi mo?id o bi owst? 3475 You’ll see within your heart the prophets’ science without a book or tutor or a master. There are countless images of the wounded heart in Rumi’s writings. Perhaps the simplest is: chun kasi-r? kh?r dar p?yash jahad  p?ye khwodr? bar sar-e z?nu nehad 150 As when a thorn has stuck in someone’s foot, he takes his foot and puts it on his knee, vaz sar-e suzan hami juyad sarash  var nay?bad mi konad b? lab tarash And with a needle’s point seeks out the tip, and if he does not find it, licks the point. kh?r dar p? shod chonin doshv?ry?b  kh?r dar del chun bovad v? deh jav?b That thorn is so elusive in the foot, tell me, how much more hidden in the heart! kh?r-e del-r? gar bedidi har khasi dast kay budi gham?n-r? bar kasi If any fool could see the thorns in hearts, then when indeed would sorrows overwhelm us? Or as blindness caused by wickedness: khashm o shahvat mard-r? ahval konad  zesteq?mat ruh-r? mobdal konad Desire and anger make men go cross-eyed, for they distort the spirit from uprightness. chun gharaz ?mad honar pushide shod sad hej?b az del besuye dide shod 335 When craving comes, then virtue is concealed; a hundred veils divide the heart and sight. The term ‘heart’ is used in a variety of strengths of sense. Sometimes it is used in a weak sense, as in the English ‘in my heart’, meaning ‘the genuine person’; and sometimes in a stronger sense, as in the central organ of one’s spiritual nature which must be opened and purified. Once strengthened and purified, one is s?heb-del, a difficult Sufi term to translate, literally ‘master/owner of the heart’. I render it as ‘heart-strong’, i.e. the opposite of ‘head-strong’, and someone who is perfected in their spiritual nature. Here in a ‘purple passage’, Rumi opens with the image of a laughing pomegranate: jomle d?niy?n hamin gofte hamin  hast d?n? rahmatan li ’l-??lamin The wise have all agreed on this exactly; the wise one is ‘a mercy to all creatures’. gar an?ri mi khari khand?n bokhar  t? dehad khande ze d?ne u khabar A pomegranate should be bought when laughing so that its laugh will tell you of its seeds. ay mob?rak khande ash ku az dah?n  mi nem?yad del chu dorr az dorj-e j?n How lucky is its laugh, for from its mouth its heart is shown like pearls in soulful caskets. n?mob?rek khande-ye ?n l?le bud  k-az dah?n-e u siy?hi del nemud But inauspicious was the tulip’s laughter whose mouth displayed the blackness of its heart. n?r-e khand?n b?gh-r? khand?n konad  sohbat-e mard?nat az mard?n konad 725 The pomegranate’s laugh delights the garden and human company will make you human. gar tu sang-e sakhre o marmar shavi  chun be s?heb del rasi guhar shavi You may be stone, or you may be of marble but when you meet the heart-strong you’re a jewel. mehr-e p?k?n dar miy?n-e j?n nesh?n  del madah ell? be mehr-e del khwosh?n Implant the pure ones’ love within your soul and keep your heart for love of the sweet-hearted. kuye numidi marow umidh?st  suye t?riki marow khworshidh?st Do not go down the hopeless track – there’s hope. Do not go to the darkness – there are suns. del tu-r? dar kuye ahl-e del keshad  tan tu-r? dar hebs-e ?b o gel keshad The heart will lead you to the heart-strong way, the body to the gaol of earth and water. hayn ghaz?-ye del bedeh az hamdeli  row beju eqb?l-r? az moqbali 730 Go on, and feed your heart from friendly hearts; go find your fortune with the fortunate. Del (‘heart’) is also used in its strongest sense as virtually synonymous with God himself, not in a philosophical sense as an abstraction but as the organ which is directly illuminated by divine light. Rumi explains this very carefully, though it was extremely difficult to translate such a condensed few verses into English metre: in berun az ?ft?b o az soh?  vandarun az?aks-e anv?r-e ?ol? This outward light is from the sun and stars, the inward light’s reflection of sublime light. nur-e nur-e chashm khwod nur-e del ast  nur-e chashm az nur-e del-h? h?sel ast Your own eye’s light’s light is the light of hearts; the eye’s light is the outcome of the heart’s light. b?z nur-e nur-e del nur-e khod?st  ku ze nur-e ?aql o hess p?k o jod?st 1135 Your own heart’s light’s light is the light of God; it’s pure and far from mental, sensual light.   But the light of the heart, and even the heart itself, does not belong to the self, and therefore there must be a sacrifice in order for the heart to return to full strength and capacity. And this is the central conundrum and paradox of the Sufi teaching, expressed in the line: ey hay?t-e ??sheq?n dar mordagi  del nay?bi joz ke dar delbordagi How much of lovers’ lives is spent in dying! You only win the heart by losing it. For Rumi, the pain of human separation was the teacher of this process of letting go attachment to desire and attachment to sensuality and self-regard. This was a man in his 60s, who had lost both parents before he was 40, his first wife, his eldest son, and several beloved spiritual teachers, including losing Shamsoddin of Tabriz twice. In the first story, the king first thought the slave-girl would be a cure for his pain. But his pain had apparently only started when he had felt he was going to lose her through her illness. In other words she had become a cure once she had begun to cause him to suffer. He could only be released from this kind of pain by being released from love of her, when he found a true love in the person of the spiritual physician: goft ma‘shuqam tu budasti na ?n  lik k?r az k?r khizad dar jeh?n He said, ‘In truth you were my love, not she, but in this world one thing becomes another… She is only released from the pain of her own heartache when she falls out of love with him: chun ze ranjuri jam?l-e u nam?nd  j?n-e dokhtar dar vab?l-e u nam?nd In sickness now his beauty was no more the girl’s soul would not see him through his sufferings. chunke zesht o n?khwosh o rokhzard shod  andak andak dar del-e u sard shod 205 As he turned ugly, grim and pale of face, he gradually went cold within her heart. ?eshqh?’i k-az pay-e rangi bovad   ?eshq nabvad ??qebat nangi bovad When love is for the sake of a complexion it is no longer love, it ends in shame. He protests that he has been unfairly treated, but dies in the end: …?n kanizak shod ze ?eshq o ranj p?k …the slave-girl was released from love and pain. z?nke ?eshq-e mordeg?n p?yande nist  z?nke morde suye m? ?yande nist Because the love of dead men does not last because the dead man does not come to us. Rumi concludes this story with a celebration of the true love which does not suffer separation: ?eshq-e ?n zende gozin ku b?qi ast  k-az shar?b-e j?n faz?yat s?qi ast 220 Choose love of that immortal living one the bearer of rejuvenating wine. ?eshq-e ?n bogzin ke jomle anbiy?  y?ftand az ?eshq-e u k?r o kiy? Choose love of Him from Whom the prophets all derived their power and glory from His love. A theme that emerges early on in the Masnavi, is that the ability to feel pain is not only a human universal, but also that it is profoundly necessary as a guide to the truth. Sickness can be beneficial: hasrat o z?ri gah-e bim?ri ast  vaqt-e bim?ri hame bid?ri ast It’s sighs and sorriness when you are sick; the time of sickness is a time to waken. ?n zam?n ke mishavi bim?r tu  mikoni az jarm esteghf?r-e tu Just at the time when you are falling sick, you beg forgiveness for your trespasses. mi nom?yad bar tu zeshti-ye gonah  mikoni niyyat ke b?z ?yam be rah The hatefulness of sin is shown to you, and you resolve ‘I’ll come back to the path.’ ?ahd o paym?n mikoni ke ba?d az in  joz ke t??at nabvadam k?ri gozin 630 You promise and you pledge that ‘After this I’ll only choose obedience for my deeds.’ pas yaqin gasht in ke bim?ri tu r?  mibebakhshad hush o bid?ri tu r? So this becomes a certainty, that sickness will bring good sense to you, and wakefulness. pas bed?n in asl-r? ay asl ju  har ke-r? dard ast u bordest bu So know this for a fact, fact-finding one, whoever is in pain has got the scent. har ke u bid?rtar porr dardtar  har ke u ?g?htar rokh zardtar She who is more awake is in more pain; she who is more aware is paler faced. In the story of the First Jewish King and the Christians, the Christians are separated from their teacher, the Jewish vizier who deceives them all. They also suffer the terrible pain of loss, but this time when they see (in their blind folly) their pain as their cure, it is self-delusion, and this is the point of the story: that you can fool some of the people all of the time. ba?d az ?n chel ruz-e digar dar bebast  khwish kosht o az vojud-e khwod be rast He shut himself away for forty days then killed himself and fled from his existence. chun ke khalq az marg-e u ?g?h shod  bar sar-e gurash qi?matg?h shod When people were informed about his death it was the Day of Judgment round his grave. khalq-e chand?n jam? shod bar gur-e u  mu kan?n j?me darr?n dar shur-e u So many people gathered at his grave all tearing hair and ripping clothes in grief, k?n ?adad-r? ham khod? d?nad shomord  az ?arab vaz tork o az rumi o kord That God alone can estimate their number Of Arabs, and of Turks and Greeks and Kurds. kh?k-e u kardand bar sarh?-ye khwish  dard-e u didand darm?n j?ye khwish 670 They heaped the dust upon their heads for him they saw their pain for him as their own cure. ?n khol?yeq bar sar-e gurash mahi  karde khun-r? az du chashm-e khwod rahi A month long those poor creatures at his grave were streaming paths of blood from both their eyes. In some of the passages of even this early in the Masnavi, Rumi is delivering a message which is profoundly difficult to understand, namely that sometimes suffering can be good for us: ?tesh-e tab?at agar ghamgin konad  suzesh az amr-e malik-e din konad And if your nature’s fire should cause you pain, it burns by order of the Lord of Judgment.* ?tesh-e tab?at agar sh?di dehad  andar u sh?di malik-e din nehad And if your nature’s fire should cause you joy, the Lord of Judgement puts the joy in it. chunke gham bini tu esteghf?r kon  gham be amr-e kh?leq ?mad k?r kon 840 When you are feeling pain, then ask forgiveness: the pain which the Creator wills is useful. chun be khw?had ?ayn-e gham sh?di shavad  ?ayn band-e pay ?z?di shavad He wills, and pain itself is turned to joy, His very manacles will make you free. ‘His very manacles will make you free’ says it all, but it is one of those impenetrable gems of Rumi’s poetry one contemplates, and rarely can see into. Rumi, as one brought up in the lore of Iranian tradition, knows that suffering is inevitable in this mixed world of good and evil: khalq-e panh?n zeshtash?n o khubash?n  mizanad dar del be har dam kubash?n The hidden creatures which are good and evil strike at the heart with blows at every moment. (1039) But he counsels tranquillity to transform our understanding of suffering: kh?r kh?r-e vahyh? o vasuse  az haz?r?n kas bovad na yek kase The wounds ofinspirations and temptations come from a thousand sources, not from one. b?sh t? hess-h?-ye tu mobdal shavad  t? bebinish?n o moshkel hall shavad Be still so that your senses are transformed that you may see them and the pain is cured. (1042-3) The purpose of pain is mysterious, for somehow contentment (khwoshdeli) arises from its opposite, yet God has no opposite: ranj o gham-r? haqq pey ?n ?farid  t? bedin zedd khwoshdeli ?yad padid For God created pain and grief for this, that by these opposites contentment comes. pas neh?ni-h? be zedd peyd? shavad  chun ke haqq-r? nist zedd panh?n bovad So hidden things appear through opposites God has no opposite, He stays concealed. There are said to be some who are exempted from pain and grief, because of their exceptional commitment and spiritual fortitude: pas shahid?n zende zin ruyand o khwash  tu bed?n q?leb bemangar gabrvash And so the martyrs live, they live in joy – do not dwell on the body like the pagans – chun kholaf d?dastash?n j?n-e baq?  j?n-e iman az gham o ranj o shaq? Since He gave them the everlasting life, the life immune from grief and pain and suffering. But the majority, says Rumi, are in love with pain, as the merchant laments for the death of his parrot: ??sheq-e ranjast n?d?n t? abad  khiz l? uqsim bekh?n t? fi kabad ‘…The stupid man’s in love with pain forever, go, read from “I do swear” to “in affliction”. az kabad f?regh bodam b? ruy-e tu  vaz zabad s?fi bodam dar juy-e tu 1720 With your face I was free from all the suffering, untainted in your stream by any froth.. in darigh?-h? khiy?l-e didanast  vaz vojud-e naqd-e khwod bobridanast These groans are mirages of seeing, and the act of severance from my own true being. gheyrat-e haqq bud o b? haqq ch?re nist  ku deli k-az ?eshq-e haqq sad p?re nist It was God’s jealousy, there is no way round God where is the heart not shattered by His love? gheyrat ?n b?shad ke u gheyre hamest  ?nke afzun az bay?n o damdamest It’s jealousy for He’s unlike all others, much more than explanation or report. ey darigh? ashk-e man dary? bodi  t? nas?r-e delbar-e zib? bodi Alas! I wish my tears became an ocean to shower down upon my lovely sweetheart. tuti-ye man morgh-e ziraks?r-e man  tarjom?n-e fekrat o asr?r-e man 1725 My parrot, o my most sagacious bird, interpreter of all my thoughts and secrets! harche ruzi d?d o n?d?d ?yadam  u ze avval gofte t? y?d ?yadam Whatever comes to me that’s just and unjust, she told me from the first so I’d remember.’ And Rumi comments at this point: tuti-i k?yad zevahy ?v?z-e u  pish az ?gh?z-e vojud ?gh?z-e u A parrot with a voice from revelation began her life before the first existence. andarun-e tust ?n tuti neh?n  ?aks-e ur? dide tu bar in o ?n This parrot is concealed inside yourself; you’ve seen her image in phenomena. mi barad sh?diyat-r? tu sh?d az u  mi paziri zolm-r? chun d?d az u She takes your happiness yet you are glad; you take her blows as if she gave you justice. ey ke j?n-r? bahr-e tan mi sukhti  sukhti j?n-r? o tan afrukhti 1730O you who burned your soul all for the body, youburned the soul and you inflamed the body. sukhtam man sukhte khw?had kasi  t? ze man ?tesh zanad andar khasi I’m burnt, and anyone in need of tinder can set alight their rubbish using me. sukhte chun q?bel-e ?tesh bovad  sukhte best?n ke ?tesh kash bovad Since tinder is amenable to fire take tinder which most quickly sets ablaze. ey darigh? ey darigh? ey darigh  k?n chon?n m?hi neh?n shod zir-e migh Alas! and o alas! and o alas! that such a moon as this went into cloud! chun zanam dam k?tesh-e del tiz shod  shir-e hajr ?shofte o khunriz shod How can I breathe with such a flaming heart, the lion of absence wild and shedding blood? It is as if this wisdom dawns on the merchant only as he contemplates his loss, and Rumi himself has taken over the voice and now rises to an ecstatic plane. He ‘takes the cup in hand’ and approaches the poetry of the ineffable, coming closer and closer to the sweetness of silence. I am going to read a fairly extended passage, because I prefer to let Rumi do the talking this afternoon anyway, a couple of passages which are a kind of legominism because they lead the mind from this world to the next. I explained in the introduction to my Penguin translation that academics have in the past looked for a thematic unity in the Masnavi, for a conventional, or even an ‘esoteric’ thematic development of teaching, a didacticism which can be described in outer discourse and they’ve come to blows over it. Some people have even come to see ring composition in the Masnavi. I shan’t say here what I think the theory of ring composition to be. I would argue that the unity of the Masnavi’s structure is in harmony with its meaning, that the structure of his work, like the meaning of the work, is to be found beyond form, and that if you look for a formal structure within the Masnavi you will not find it. My contention is (and I have tried to explain it in simple terms in the introduction to my book), that the poetry starts with story, because story hooks our imagination and takes us somewhere with him. However, as you are so used to when you read Rumi, you very quickly find that he has left the story -– has left the building -– and gone somewhere else. And you follow. You follow. Where does he take you? He takes you into analogy, and you get the analogy, and then he takes you into a moral discourse, which you manfully struggle to keep up with, and it goes on and on, and then suddenly—phshwooih—he’s gone, he’s gone! And where is he? Ah! But this is a vertical take off. I’ll try to explain. He has a vertical trajectory, which is that you’re not expecting that at any moment he just goes phhwihh! And he’s just beamed up. And you can follow him there, which is the lovely thing and it’s why we like Rumi, because we go with him: he takes us to that formless, silent world. Well, at least, he doesn’t take us to the silent world, but to the point where he is actually frustated by his inability to say, and each line then becomes a sort of throwaway – crying out in ecstasy, crying out for help, each line behind him as he goes on, and each one burnt as he goes further on: and what happens is that he comes to a point of hiatus or silence where he leaves you to finish the Masnavi for him in your life. ?n ke u hoshy?r khwod tond ast o mast  chun bovad chun u qadah girad be dast 1735 The one whose sober state is wild and drunk – what happens when he takes the cup in hand? shir-e masti k-az seffat birun bovad  az basit-e marghz?r afzun bovad The drunken lion who goes beyond all telling is too much for the confines of the plain.. q?fiye andisham o deld?r-e man  guyadam mandish joz did?r-e man I’m contemplating rhymes ? my lover tells me, ‘You only contemplate your vision of me!’ khwosh neshin ey q?fiye andish-e man  q?fiye dowlat tu’i dar pish-e man Relax, dear rhyming-couplet-contemplator for in my couplet you are rhymed with triumph. harf che bvad t? tu andishi az ?n  harf che bvad kh?r-e div?r-e raz?n What’s in a word that you should contemplate? What’s in a word? The thorns around the vineyard. harf o sawt o goft-r? bar ham zanam  t? ke bi in har se b? tu dam zanam 1740 I throw the words and strains and speech together so that without them I can sigh with you. ?n dami k-az ?damash kardam neh?n  b? tu guyam ey tu asr?r-e jeh?n That sigh which I did keep concealed from Adam I’ll say to you, O mystery of the world! ?n dami-r? ke nagoftam b? khalil  v?n ghami-r? ke nad?nad jebra’il That sigh I never breathed with Abraham, that sadness Gabriel has never known. ?n dami k-az vey masih? dam nazad  haqq ze gheyrat niz bi m? ham nazad That sigh which the Messiah never breathed, God never mentioned, in His zeal, without us. m? che b?shad dar loghat asb?t o nafy  man na asb?tam manam bi z?t o nafy What’s ‘we’ in words? The ‘yes’ and ‘no’.I’m not affirming. I am essenceless negation. man kasi dar n?kasi dar y?ftam  pas kasi dar n?kasi dar b?ftam 1745 I found identity in the impersonal state I wove it into the impersonal state. jomle sh?h?n bande-ye bande khwodand  jomle khalq?n morde-ye morde khwodand All kings become the servants of their servants and all become deceased in their own dead. jomle sh?h?n past past-e khwish r?  jomle khalq?n mast mast-e khwish r? All kings are humbled by their humble servants and all are drunk on those who swoon for them. mishavad sayy?d morgh?n-r? shek?r  t? konad n?g?h ish?n-r? shek?r The catcher of the birds becomes their prey and suddenly he’ll make them prey to him. bi del?n-r? delbar?n joste be j?n  jomle ma?shuq?n shek?r-e ??sheq?n With all their souls the amorous seek the lovelorn and all beloveds are their lovers’ prey. harke ??sheq didiyash ma?shuq d?n  ku benesbat hast ham in o ham ?n 1750 The one you saw as lover is beloved,: he’s both of these in terms of the relation. teshneg?n gar ?b juyand az jeh?n  ?b juyad ham be ??lam teshneg?n The thirsty may seek water in the world, and in the world the water seeks the thirsty. chunke ??sheq ust tu kh?mush b?sh  u chu gushat mi keshad tu gush b?sh So since He is the Lover, you be silent! Be ear, since He is tugging at your ear! band kon chun sayl sayl?ni konad  varna rosv?’i o veir?ni konad Restrain the torrent when it starts to flood, or it will cause disgrace and desolation. man che gham d?ram ke veyr?ni bovad  zir-e veyr?n ganj-e solt?ni bovad Why should I care if there be desolation? For underneath there lies a princely treasure. gherq-e haqq khw?had ke b?shad gherqtar  hamchu mowj-e bahr j?n zir o zebar 1755 The one who drowns in God desires more drowning, his soul tossed up and down like ocean waves. zir-e dary? khwoshtar ?yad y? zebar  tir-e u delkashtar ?yad y? separ It’s better under or above the sea? His shaft’s more captivating or His shield? p?re karde vasvase b?shi del?  gar tarab-r? b?z d?ni az bal? You will be split apart by whisperings, dear heart, if you distinguish joys and trials. gar mor?dat-r? maz?q-e shakkarast  bi mor?di ni mor?d-e delbarast Though your desire is for the taste of sugar the lover’s true desire’s desirelessness? har set?rash khunbah?-ye sad hal?l  khun-e ??lam rikhtan ur? hal?l His stars atone a hundred crescent moons He is allowed to shed the world’s life-blood. m? bah? o khunbah?-r? y?ftim  j?neb-e j?n b?khtan besht?ftim 1760 And we obtained our price and the atonement and quick we were to play our souls away. ey hay?t-e ??sheq?n dar mordagi  del nay?bi joz ke dar delbordagi How much of lovers’ lives is spent in dying! You only win the heart by losing it. man delash joste be sad n?z o dal?l  u bah?ne karde b? man az mal?l With a hundred loving looks I sought His heart He wearily excused Himself from me. goftam ?kher gharq-e tust in ?aql o j?n  goft row row bar man in afsun makh?n I said, ‘My mind and soul are drowned in You.’ He said, ‘Be off, don’t chant such spells at me. man nad?nam ?nche andishide’i  ey du dide dust-r? chun dide’i Do I not know what you have contemplated? Ah, how could your two eyes behold the Friend?’ ey gar?n j?n khv?r didasti var?  z?n ke bas arz?n kharidasti var? 1765 O leaden soul, how you looked down on Him because you bought Him at so cheap a price. harke u arz?n kharad arz?n dehad  guhari tefli be qorsi n?n dehad Whoever buys for nothing sells for nothing; A child will sell a jewel to buy a loaf. gharq-e ?eshqi am ke gharq ast andar in  ?eshqh?ye avvalin o ?kherin For I am drowned in love which does contain the loves of former times and future times.’ majmalash goftam nakardam z?n bay?n  varna ham afh?m suzad ham zab?n I spoke in brief, I gave no full account, lest it consume your tongue and understanding. man chu lab guyam lab-e dary? bovad  man chu l? guyam mor?d ell? bovad When I say ‘lip’, I mean the ocean’s shore; when I say ‘no’ the intention is ‘except’.* man ze shirini neshastam ru turush  man ze besy?ri-ye goft?ram khamosh 1770 I’m sitting down and grimacing from sweetness; I’m silent from a surfeit of my speech. t? ke shirini-ye m? az du jeh?n  dar hej?b-e ru turush b?shad neh?n So that our sweetness may be kept disguised from both worlds in the veil of grimacing. t? ke dar har gush n?yad in sakhon  yek hami guyam ze sad serr-e ladon This discourse does not fall on every ear I tell one in a hundred heavenly secrets. And so Rumi brings to a close one of his most celebrated stories, The Merchant and the Parrot, with a sublime discourse on the love of God, and why it appears both awesome and terrible in its jealousy at the same time as being the cure and resolution of all our separation. The love of God is the manifest form which is only apparent to the human heart, not to the nafs. Rumi takes great pains, literally, to intimate to his listeners the nature of this divine love, which is like no other form of love, yet from which all loves are ultimately derived. We have to remember, of course, that the whole conception of this takes place in a frame dominated by the image, the hadith, the context, the story of the divine unity loving in order to be known. We are caught half way in this circle of revelation on the way back to the Beloved, so the jealousy of God, the love of God for us is the attraction which draws us back to him. gheyrat-e haqq bar masal gandom bovad  k?h-e khorman gheyrat-e mardom bovad The jealousy of God would be like wheat, and human jealousy like straw in haystacks. asl-e gheyrat-h? bed?nid az el?h  ?n-e khalq?n far?-e haqq bi eshteb?h The root of all our jealousies is come from God Who is beyond comparison. sharh-e in bogz?ram o giram geleh  az jof?ye ?n neg?r-e dahdeleh I leave this explanation to bewail the cruelty of that ten-hearted sweetheart. n?lam ir? n?le-h? khwosh ?yadash  az du ??lam n?le o gham b?yadash And I lament ? laments are sweet to Him ? He needs laments and sadness from both worlds. chun nan?lam talkh az dast?n-e u  chun niyam dar khalqe-ye mast?n-e u 1785 I must lament His fraud with bitterness since I’m not in the circle of His revellers chun nab?sham hamchu shab bi ruz-e u  bi ves?l-e ruye ruz?fruz-e u Why should I not be night without His day without the union of His day-igniting face? n?khwosh-e u khwosh bovad dar j?n-e man  j?n fed?ye y?r-e delranj?n-e man His nastiness is sweet within my soul ? soul, victim to the Friend who tortures me. ??sheqam bar ranj-e khwish o dard-e khwish  bahr-e khoshnudi-ye sh?h-e fard-e khwish I am in love with both my grief and pain, all for the pleasing of my Matchless King. kh?k-e gham-r? sorme s?zam bahr-e chashm  t? ze guhar porr shavad du bahr-e chashm I make an eye-balm from the earth of sorrow; both oceans of my eyes are filled with pearls. ashk k?n az bahr-e u b?rand khalq  guhar ast o ashk pand?rand khalq 1790 The tears which people shed on His behalf are pearls, yet the people think them tears. man ze j?n-e j?n shek?yat mikonam  man niyam sh?ki rev?yat mikonam I am lamenting for the Soul of souls; I don’t complain, I tell it as it is. del hami guyad kazu ranjide am  vaz naf?q-e sost mikhandide am My heart says how I am tormented by Him, I’ve ridiculed its low hypocrisy. r?sti kon ey tufakhr-e r?st?n  ey tu sadr o man darat-r? ?set?n Be just, o Glory of the righteous ones, O You who are the throne and I your shoe-rack. ?set?ne o sadr dar ma?ni koj?st  m? o man ku ?n taraf k?n y?r-e m?st Shoe rack and throne? –what do they mean in spirit? both ‘we’ and ‘I’ are where our Lover is. ey rahide j?n-e tu az m? o man  ey latife-ye ruh andar mard o zan 1795 O you whose soul is freed from ‘we’ and ‘I’, O spiritual grace in women and in men. mard o zan chun yek shavad ?n yek tu’i  chun ke yek-h? mahv shod ?nke tu’i When lovers become one You are that one; when difference is effaced then there You are. in man o m? bahr-e ?n bar s?khti  t? tu b? khwod nard-e khedmat b?khti You made this ‘I’ and ‘we’ with this intent, That You should play the game of Nard with You. t? man o tu-h? hame yek j?n shavand  ??qebat mostaghreq-e j?n?n shavand That all the I’s and You’s become one soul and finally absorbed in the Beloved. in hame hast o biy? ey amr-e kon  ey monazze az biy? o az sakhon All this exists, and ‘Come!’, o word of Being,* You who transcend this ‘Come!’ and all such words. jesm jesm?ne tav?nad didanat  dar khiy?l ?rad gham o khandidanat 1800 Flesh sees you only in the fleshly form, imagining Your sorrow and Your laughing. del ke u baste gham o khandidanast  tu magu ku l?yeq-e ?n didan ast With heart tied down to sorrow and to laughing, do not protest that it deserves to see Him. ?n ke u baste gham okhande bovad  u bedin du ??riyat zende bovad He who is tied to sorrow and to laughing he lives on these two things which have been borrowed. b?gh-e sabz-e ?eshq ku bi montah?st  joz gham o sh?di daru bas miveh?st In love’s fresh garden ?which is infinite ? are many fruits apart from joy and grief. ??sheqi zin har du h?lat bartar ast  bi bah?r o bi khaz?n sabz o tar ast To love is higher than these two conditions and green and tender without spring or autumn. dah zakk?t-e ruye khub ey khub ruy  sharh-e j?n-e sharhe sharhe b?z gu 1805 So pay your lovely face’s tax, my beauty, and tell the tale of how my soul is torn, k-az kereshm-e ghamze’i ghamm?ze’i  bar delam benh?d d?gh-e t?ze’i The charms of glances of seductive eyes have lately stamped a brand upon my heart. man hal?lash kardam ar khunam berikht  man hami goftam hal?l u migerikht And I did sanction Him to shed my blood. I kept on saying ‘sanctioned’ and He’d flee. chun geriz?ni ze n?le kh?kiy?n  gham che rizi bar del-e ghamn?kiy?n You flee the cries of scrabblers in the dust. Why heap more sorrow on the hearts of grievers? ey ke har sobhi ke az mashreq bet?ft  hamchu cheshme moshreqat dar jushy?ft Each dawn which shone its rays up from the East found You erupting like the solar fountain. chun bah?ne d?di in shayd?t r?  ey bah? na shakkar-e labh?t r? 1810 Why did You spurn this madly love-sick one O You, whose lips of sugar have no price. ey jeh?n-e kohne-r? tu j?n-e now  az tan-e bi j?n o del afgh?n shenow O You, the new soul for the ancient world now hear the soulless, heartless body’s cry sharh-e gol bogz?r az bahr-e khod?  sharh-e bolbol gow ke shod az gol jod? Leave off your talk of roses, for God’s sake; tell how the nightingale was parted from it. az gham o sh?di nab?shad jush-e m?  b? khiy?l o vahm nabvad hush-e m? Our fervour does not come from grief and joy, nor is our mind in fancies and conjectures. h?lati digar bovad k?n n?der ast  tu mashow monkar ke haqq bas q?der ast There is another state which is most rare. Do not deny this; God is full of power. tu qiy?s az h?lat-e ens?n makon  manzel andar jaur o dar ehs?n makon 1815 Do not compare this with the human state; don’t set up house in wickedness and virtue. jaur o ehs?n ranj o sh?di h?des ast h?des?n mirand o haqqsh?n v?res ast For wickedness and virtue, pain and joy, are things which pass away and God inherits. sobh shod ey sobh-r? sobh o pan?h  ?ozr-e makhdumi hos?moddin bekhw?h It’s dawn, o dawn and refuge of the dawn; ask pardon of Hosamoddin my lord. ?ozr khw?h-e ?aql-e koll o j?n tu’i  j?n-e j?n o t?besh-e marj?n tu’i Excuser of the universal mind and soul, You’re Soul of souls and coral’s brilliance. t?ft nur-e sobh o m? az nur-e tu  dar sabuhi b? mey-e mansur-e tu The light of morning shone, and in Your light our morning draft of Your Hallaj’s wine. d?de-ye tu chun chonin d?rad mar?  b?de ke bvad ku tarab ?rad mar? 1820 And as Your gift takes hold of me like this, what other wine could bring me such delight? b?de dar jushesh gad?-ye jush-e m?st  charkh dar gardash gad?-ye hush-e m?st And wine fermenting craves our fermentation, and heaven turning craves our understanding. b?de az m? mast shod nah m? az u  q?leb az m? hast shod nah m? az u The wine got drunk on us, not we on it; the body came from us, not we from it. m? chu zamburim o q?leb-h? chu mum  kh?ne kh?ne karde q?leb-r? chu mum We’re like the bee, the body’s like the hive, each body cell’s constructed like the hive. One of the first lines that I quoted is the one I’d like to finish on which is when he says in I.112 Whatever words I say to explain this love, when I arrive at love I am ashamed. So this is why it’s not a particularly suitable task for an academic to discourse on, because when I come to love, I am ashamed. [5] © Alan Williams 2007 Alan Williams Notes [1] Not in the Socratic sense of ho er?s as explained by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium nor in the sense of Christian love, agap?. [2] I give a simplified romanized transcription of the Persian couplets in order that the reader may get an idea of the sound and shape of Rumi’s language.? is long a as in f?ther.[3] As R.A. Nicholson said of this line, ‘Arabian and Persian medicine is permeated by Greek philosophy, so that the standard Moslem biographical dictionary of famous physicians naturally includes, by way of introduction, articles on Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and other philosophers as well as on Hippocrates and Galen. Plato’s own theory of love makes the mention of him here specially appropriate; if further authority for linking him with Galen were needed, we might quote Ibn Abi Usaybi‘ah, I 49 penult., where it is stated that he wrote “a book on medicine, which he sent to his disciple Timaeus”.[4] One cannot but help notice Rumi’s gentle wit and humour throughout the Masnavi that are a source of constant consolation to his readers – to continue the metaphor of surgery – of oxygen to the troubled heart.[5] For an introductory essay on the voices and levels of discourse which Rumi uses in the Masnavi,see my Introduction to my translation Rumi Spiritual Verses The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma‘navi, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books 2006, pp. xx-xxxv. Dr Alan Williams is Reader in Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, England. He studied Classics, then Persian and Arabic for his first degree at The Queen’s College, Oxford, having begun to read Rumi while still at school in London and having met Beshara in its early incarnation at Swyre Farm. He did his PhD at SOAS, University of London on the Zoroastrian tradition in Old and Middle Persian literature. He has written several books and many articles on Zoroastrian and Iranian studies, and on comparative literature, religion and translation studies, most recently Rumi Spiritual Verses The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma‘navi, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books 2006, and Parsis in India and the Diaspora, ed. with John R. Hinnells, London: Routledge, 2007. He lives in Buxton, in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Listen to the talk: Open Heart Surgery: the Operation of Love in Rumi's Masnavi by Professor Alan Williams http://beshara.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/williams-open-heart-surgery.mp3 The Beshara Lecture 2010: Jane Clark →

Ibn 'Arabi and the Ecological Crisis: a Merciful Nemesis? by Peter Coates http://beshara.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/coates.mp3 Peter Coates graduated from Lancaster and researched at Keble College, Oxford. He was senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lincoln. He has studied, lectured and written extensively about mysticism, with particular reference to Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, the eminent Arab mystic of the 12th century. Peter is the author of Ibn ‘Arabi and Modern Thought.

Educating the Heart: Establishing a Spiritual Perspective in the Modern World First, let me say what an honour it is to be asked to give this first Beshara Lecture. I first came across Beshara in 1974, which is an astonishing 36 years ago, and I regard my subsequent decision to do an intensive six month course at the Beshara School, which I embarked upon in 1977, as the pivotal decision of my life which opened up for me entirely different possibilities from those which had been presented to me during my upbringing and previous education. Being asked to speak today has demanded looking back over the intervening period – now more than half a life-time – and trying to say something coherent about what difference it makes to be a long term student of Beshara; not merely to do a course or two, or study a text or two, or do a retreat or two, but to live ones life with the kind of orientation which one is introduced to when one comes under its umbrella. God willing, something of interest has transpired, and if not, I beg your indulgence. There were many themes which came to mind – and I think is in indicative of the nature of this orientation that almost anything could be the subject of a Beshara lecture – and in the end I decided on the ‘Educating the Heart’ because it seems to me to encapsulate something quite essential about what Beshara is. Also, in my present work as a support tutor for students with specific learning difficulties, I do a lot of work with young people who are studying within what we might call ‘the ordinary education system’. Living in Oxford, I am privileged to do much of my work with students at the university of Oxford, where this ‘ordinary’ type of study happens at the very highest level. So I am brought in close proximity every working day with the issue of education; what it is, what it is for, what it can do for us as human beings, and so feel that I have some real basis for talking about it. Our ordinary education system concentrates almost exclusively upon development of our intellects – of our rational faculty – and this is something which was established on fairly sound foundations from medieval times, based upon the philosophy and ethos of the ancient Greeks, who emphasised the supremacy of the rational faculty in human beings. There are other aspects of education recognised by our contemporary system – physical educational, for instance, expressed by the emphasis on sports in schools, or social education, or musical education – but these have a much lower status; you won’t get into Oxford just because you are a good athlete or a good violinist. The kinds of skills that are developed are the ability to think clearly, apply universal principles to particular situations, analyse, make judgements and evaluate outcomes. There can be no intrinsic argument with all this; on the contrary, these are valuable skills which we need as human beings, and as a human race in a scientific age we very much need people who have developed these skills to a high degree. However, it is quite a specific kind of knowledge which intrinsically involves breaking the world into parts in order to understand it – whether this is by physically identifying the different parts of say, the human body or the solar system, in order to describe the way in which they work together; breaking down thought into components so that we can develop an argument or a proof which proceeds step by step, or whether in our post-Descartian era, it is more essentially a matter of making a division between ourselves and the external world in order to come to an ‘objective’ view. By contrast, all the great traditions of wisdom and spirituality have maintained that we have another cognitive faculty which is capable of seeing things as a whole – of seeing the underlying truth of things directly – not just by inference. We used on the blurb advertising this talk a saying attributed to Plato: There is an eye of the soul which is more precious far than 10,000 bodily eyes, for by it alone truth is seen. But there are equally people from all the traditions who would seem to be referring to this possibility of direct insight into realities which elude the intellect. Richard of St Victor, the 12th century Christian theologian, said: The outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible. Whilst the great leader of the native Indian tradition, Black Elk, who lived into the 20th century, said: The heart is a sanctuary at the Centre of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye. This is the Eye of Wakantanka by which He sees all things, and through which we see Him. Of course, although the words ‘heart’ and ‘eye’ recur in all these quotes, it does not follow that all these people understand this faculty in exactly the same way, and inter-religious studies is a field fraught with difficulty once one starts getting down to detail. Therefore in this talk I am going to stick with what I know and discuss this faculty according to the mystical tradition of Islam, and particularly as it is expounded in the works of the person who is the subject of my special knowledge, whose works form the core curriculum at the Beshara School, the 12th century philosopher and mystic Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi. He refers to it just as ‘the heart’. Hence my title ‘Educating the Heart’ has this specific reference; ‘heart’ is not used in the sense of the physical organ, or even as being the seat of emotion, or of romantic love, but refers to this other faculty by which we directly perceive the underlying unity of all things. Henry Corbin refers to it as a subtle organ, similar to the chakras of the Hindu tradition, of which the heart is the central and most important, saying that is that organ which: … produces true knowledge, comprehensive intuition, the gnosis of God and the divine mysteries… an organ of perception which is both experience and intimate taste. Despite it being so well known in traditional systems of knowledge, this faculty of ‘the heart’ is not widely recognised in our society today – or at least where it has been recognised, because I will show towards the end of the talk that we do have cultural precedents, it is not acknowledged as being really important at the level of policy-making, in the way that we set up our educational systems or conduct our businesses, etc. Therefore we are not generally educated either about its nature or the ways in which we can cultivate it. But in this lecture I am going to argue that it is important for several reasons. One is that it is clear from all the traditions that this is the highest form of knowledge – higher than our rational faculty – and therefore in neglecting it, we are failing to realise our full humanity – to achieve our true potential. Another is that in our present age, we are very much in need of a unified perspective as we begin to realise just how interconnected everything is, whether this be the financial markets or the world’s ecosystems. Our very survival as the human race depends upon us developing much more global, joined up modes of thinking and the intellect alone cannot deliver this because, as we have already pointed out, the intellect is intrinsically divisive in its mode of operation. In fact, it is quite possible to argue that we are in the mess we are in the first place because we have relied upon it – particularly on sciences based upon rational thinking alone – too much, but this is not something I want to go into today. The operation of the ‘heart’ is very different in some ways from the operation of the intellect, and in what follows, I am going to sometimes contrast these two modes in order to illustrate my points. This has validity, in that in some ways the heart and the intellect are at odds with each other, or demand different things from us. But I do not intend to imply, by making this contrast, that we have to choose one or the other absolutely. On the contrary, the best situation is where both faculties operate fully and in harmony, in recognition that they are in reality complementary. This can be very clear when one considers really great intellectual achievements such as the inception of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, where intuition and reason went hand in hand. In fact it was Einstein who remarked that: Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind. Therefore, in asserting the need to educate our heart with the same energy and intensity that we devote to educating our minds, the idea is not that we should abandon rationality, but rather that we are correcting a present imbalance in which we give theories and procedures based upon rational thinking alone an inappropriate level of control over our selves, our lives and our societies. What therefore are the differences between the knowledge of the heart and the knowledge of the intellect? One is that the heart sees spiritual realities directly, as self-evident truths which do not require the kind of logical support that intellectual arguments do. This has been so well put by Jalal al-din Rumi that I thought that rather than entering into a lengthy exposition, I would just read you this short extract from the Mathnawi in Nicholson’s slightly oldfashioned but still very beautiful translation: Since wisdom is the faithful believers stray camel, he knows it with certainty from whomsoever he has heard it. When you say to a thirsty man, “Make haste, there is water in the cup; take it at once” Will the thirsty man say: “This is mere assertion; go from my side, oh pretender…Or else produce some testimony and proof that this is of aqueous kind and consists of the water that runs from a spring.” Or suppose a mother cries to her suckling babe: “Come I am mother, listen, my child” Will the babe say: “O mother, bring some proof, so that I may take comfort in your milk.” When in the heart of the community there is spiritual perception from God, the face and the voice of the prophet are as an evidentiary miracle. When the prophet utters a cry from without, the soul of the community falls to worship within, Because never in the world will the soul’s ear have heard from anyone a cry of the same kind. That soul in exile by immediate perception of the wondrous voice has heard from God’s tongue: “Truly I am near”. And when he finds himself absolutely in front of it, how should there be doubt? How should he mistake himself? So just to comment upon this; firstly, I don’t believe that these lines need to be interpreted within a context of formal religion. Rumi was writing within a very well-established mystical tradition in which the prophets were not just regarded as bringers of particular religions and external religious laws, but were also – in fact, predominantly – understood to be messengers sent to call people back to remembrance of their origin, which they, like people in exile, have forgotten. i.e. they are sent to address people’s interior reality – their heart and soul – and to call them back to the truth which, if they have hearts open to hearing it, they recognise instantly as being their own reality. In this sense, we do not have to interpret what Rumi says within a theistic context, but take what he is saying as a general statement about anything which speaks to our hearts and which we recognise directly as being true. Indeed it is a very important principle within even the Islamic mystical tradition, where the revelation given through prophecy is central, that anyone or anything in the world can be a messenger or agent for this kind of awakening. In our contemporary context, we are fortunate that we have available to us the wisdom from many different traditions – it seems to be a characteristic of our particular era – and I am sure that everyone here will have some taste of finding this kind of resonance – with texts or music or whatever – from a variety of cultural sources. It is also possible that the things of the natural world can be messagers to us, as we shall see later. Secondly, the poem makes it clear is that the knowledge of the heart is like remembrance of something already known, not of something acquired, and the taste and quality of it, which Rumi expresses so beautifully, is this awakening to something which we already love and long for, like a parent who reappears after many years of separation and who invokes in us all those feelings of intimacy and familiarity which we had forgotten. This idea also goes back to Plato, who developed it in the Meno dialogue – and I have discovered that it has a name – anamnesis. This motif of remembrance and return is a central one, as I am sure that many of you will know, in all the spiritual traditions. In this quality of direct vision, there are clearly in some ways radical disagreements between what we see, perceive, understand through the faculty of the heart and what we perceive through the intellect. This can even manifest in seemingly quite rational fields like mathematics, where there are some people – and I have taught some children like this – who can just ‘see’ the solutions to mathematical problems, and can write down the answer immediately. And this is because there is a reality to numbers – they are not just mental constructs that we make up for convenience. You might think these children show a certain kind of natural brilliance which we would want to encourage, but in fact it is not acceptable in our present educational system to do this; you have to show the steps which you took to reach your answer. So these children have to put this ability aside and learn to do it in the other, more usual way, and after a while they tend to lose the ability to see directly. At the higher levels of operation in mathematics in particular but also in the other sciences, this ability can be more appreciated, and there are many cases where this ‘immediate’ vision has given us some of our most comprehensive and most abstract theories. I think of the case in particular of Einstein, whom we have already mentioned, and the extraordinary mathematician Ramanajan, who had a very high level of this kind of direct perception of numbers and the relationship between them. Some of his theories, set down in the early part of the twentieth century and which all good mathematicians acknowledge as self-evidently true, have not yet been proved in the normal way. But usually what happens in really well established scientific theories is a combination of the two approaches, where the results of a great flash of insight is then backed up or developed by the application of reason, and the result is ‘proved’ according to logic, etc. In these cases, one can see that the unitive approach of the heart and the discriminative approach of the intellect are two routes to the same end. But mathematics is a very specific and relatively trivial example of the situation; when it comes to approaching great existential questions such as; does God exist? Who are we? What is our purpose on earth? there is no set answer. Ibn ‘Arabi, who was of course a great exponent of the vision of heart, describes a conversation on this subject which had he had soon after coming out of a very eventful retreat when he was still in his teens with the great Andalusian philosopher, Ibn Rush, or Averroes as he is known in the west. Averroes asked him whether he thought that the truths perceived through mystical intuition and those deduced by the speculative intellect were the same, and Ibn ‘Arabi replied: ‘Yes’. And then he said ‘No’, expressing very succinctly the notion we shall come to later, which is that the ability to sustain paradox is a characteristic of the knowledge of the heart. By the ‘No’ he indicated that there are truths and realities which can be perceived by the heart which are inaccessible to the intellect when it operates by itself. And as such, he, along with all great spiritual writers, regards the heart as the higher faculty which can penetrate further, deeper and more comprehensively into reality. In other words, any truth perceived by the intellect can also be perceived by the heart, but not necessarily vice versa; there are truths which the intellect cannot grasp but the heart can. Averroes and Ibn ‘Arabi had their conversation in a context of a fundamentally shared world view; in his time, there was no real disagreement between the philosophers/scientists and the mystics about the existence of a divinity, or of the reality of the spiritual realms, or even about the basic form and constitution of the cosmos. The conversation was about the means by which knowledge is acquired and the level and degree of it. In our times, the situation is very different and there is radical difference between the understanding given by our science and the spiritual traditions in almost every respect; about the origin of the universe, about our own origin and constitution, about the very purpose of human life. And many scientists are very definite in their rejection of a spiritual perspective, and maintain that a belief in the existence of a God or of a spiritual dimension is just a childish, dogmatic, irrational nonsense. But in doing this, they assume that the views of people who adhere to a faith or a spiritual perspective are commensurate with their own intellectually based worldviews. But in fact it is much better looked at as difference between people who adhere to the truths of the heart and those who operate only with reason, and for whom, for reasons it is not for me to fathom, the truths given through the heart just do not seem to be visible. Therefore the predominance in our culture of scientifically-based world views presents quite a challenge to those whose heart has been opened up and who wish to develop this way of seeing and being further. There are not many obvious ways of doing this – it is not our social norm – and there are many discouraging influences. So it is really necessary to point out that there is an alternative way of understanding the world, and to demonstrate that it is equally valid. In this respect, the work of people like Ibn ‘Arabi who express a profound spiritual knowledge in ways which are compatible with rational principles are extremely important, because they show that this alternative view can be coherent and intelligible, and not just a subjective aberration. I am presently studying Ibn ‘Arabi’s autobiographical work with a group of students in Oxford – a book called “The Holy Spirit in the Counselling of the Soul” – and one of the things which has struck me on this read-through is the great emphasis he places upon the ability to argue the case for mystical intuition against doubters within his contemporary community, using the tools of analysis and argument. In this, I think that he is very much in tune with the Buddhist tradition, whose spiritual training also develops skills in argument and debate alongside contemplation and the practice of compassion. But perhaps more important, is that the work of Ibn ‘Arabi – and again, I want to repeat that I am speaking of him because I have studied his work to some extent, not because I think that such things do not this exist within other traditions – presents us with a whole world-view based upon the unitive vision of the heart – a view which encompasses all aspects of ourselves and human life, and all aspects of the world. And he shows that such a perspective is more comprehensive in its scope and more beneficent in its effect that the knowledge gained only through intellectual analysis. Such an exposition is very helpful to us, because the spiritual path can be considered in one way as a process of opening up of the heart, but in another way it can be seen as the establishing an already existing contact with reality so that it becomes the constant and irrefutable fact of our existence. This is because there must have been some impulse which drew us to undertake this path in the first place; it does not of course have to be a grand vision like St Paul on the road to Damascus but there does have to have been some initial intimation or indication of truth, some hearing of a call to return. But at the beginning this intimation may not be fully seen or understood, and it is probably not continuously present in terms of experience. Therefore, in looking back over my thirty-odd years with Beshara, it seems to me that the real process which goes on in spiritual education could be best described as a re-orientating of the person, so that what was initially a mere hint or glimpse becomes the central motivating force and focal point of ones life. This process has a different trajectory for each person, but there are clearly, in terms of what one can draw from the vast experience of human history, certain required elements. One of these is the need to make sense of the process one is undergoing and to put it into a proper context; and another is the practice of orientating oneself around this knowledge, so that all the faculties and myriad different elements of ones constitution cohere around it, such that over time they become unified and consistently orientated towards the truth. Bulent Rauf, who was so important in establishing Beshara, used to say that the measure of a person’s spiritual development is the constancy of their awareness. And the older I grow, the more I understand what a profound insight this is. So I am going to talk about each of these essential elements in turn; first a bit of theory, then a bit of practice. So first theory; for Ibn ‘Arabi, the major characteristic of the heart is that it is intrinsically and indefatigably, incorrigibly, unifying in its action. This is not only a matter of the kind of direct vision we have just spoken about, which is intrinsically holistic, and dense, such that just a moment of such insight can take a lifetime to understand or express, and even then perhaps it is done imperfectly. For Ibn ‘Arabi, the heart is also a place where things which are considered by the intellect to be opposite and mutually exclusive are witnessed as being simultaneously true. Therefore, as I have already intimated, it is a place where the answer to a question can be simultaneously ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, not just in the sense that is meant in the academic world, the stuff of a million essays, where the answer ‘Yes and No’ means that in some respects it is true, and in some respects not. Ibn ‘Arabi’s answer to Averroes was more complex; he said: “Yes-No. Between the yes and the no, spirits take wing from their matter and necks are separated from their bodies” – indicating that the resolution of the matter requires one to move beyond the standpoint of the speculative intellect as it appears in a particular material context – i.e. in our own body – into another, more mysterious realm accessible only to the spirit. For Ibn ‘Arabi, the unity of all such sets of opposites can perceived – so there can be perception of the identity of the states of both high and low, here and there, inside and outside, me and you. This he explains – ‘explains’ in inverted commas – as an indication of the fact that there is in reality only one being, one existence, which is the essence of all the separate things and states of being which we perceive in ourselves and in the world. Therefore, we can say that this single reality is the essence of something which is here, and at the same time, it is the essence of another thing which is ‘there’; therefore in a one sense there is unity or identity between the two things, in another there is a difference. This may seem perplexing, but in fact it is not so unfamiliar to us in the present day, because we have been given a very clear example of such a phenomenon from quantum mechanics, where an electron or photon can appear either as a discrete solid particle-like thing, or as a wave. This has long been postulated – Einstein again! – but since the 1990’s this has been witnessable phenomena as scientists, notably John Bell, have succeeded in setting up a real experiment based on the Einstein, Podalsky, Rosen thought experiment – which they call a ‘metaphysical experiment’ – where this phenomenon can be physically witnessed. In this, they can demonstrate that it is really true that when you put up a particle counter, the photon manifests as a particle, and if you put up a set of slits, it manifests as a wave. I was privileged to know, in my science journalist days, one of the scientists involved in these experiments. He was a follower of Rudolph Steiner, and he was very clear that this phenomenon is a kind of modern day icon – meaning that it is something we should contemplate. If we really take it on board and focus on what is before our eyes, rather than just getting on with solving the equations in the rather mechanical way that people do, then we begin to see that what is being demanded, is that we develop this different faculty of perception which can accommodate paradox and mystery, and does not demand that something should be either this or that, but can be simultaneously in both states. This understanding of the dual nature of matter, and many other phenomena in quantum mechanics, radically undermines the classical Descartian view which is still the foundation of scientific enterprise even 100 years after quantum mechanics came onto the scene. In this, there is a very sharp division between our interior – our intellect – which observes and understands, and the exterior world which is ‘other’. This assumes that these two realms have independent existences; the world ‘out there’ is not dependant in any way upon us, and when we are not observing it, it has its own independent life – well, life not perhaps not quite the right word given the Descartian perspective; we could say ‘carries on by itself’ and we can just drop in now and again and have a look at what is happening. But quantum mechanics demonstrates that things are much more complex and interwoven; we cannot in reality separate ourselves from the world. The subject which constitutes the ‘observer’ and the object which constitutes the ‘observed’ are deeply connected at the level of identity, and locked into a relationship of mutual cause and effect, witnessing and response, in ever-changing configurations. And this brings me to the third major characteristic of the heart I want bring out today: that its function is to perceive meaning. The intellect, in making a primary division between the observer and the world – self and other – objectifies the external world and sees a multiplicity of separate things. It is not devoid of unifying action, as it too wishes to understand the cosmos as whole, but its tendency is to create unity by looking at the external connections, so that they are tied together in a mechanistic way, as a great structure, even when considering living things such as plants and animals, or the human body. Whereas the heart, whose fundamental knowledge is that of a single identity, sees samenesses, correspondences, and relationships. It is concerned with the interior connectivity of things. Ibn ‘Arabi’s world is one in which it is not just a matter of one ‘thing’ like the electron appearing in two different ways depending on how we approach it; it is a matter of one global, encompassing being who appears in a multiplicity of ways as every ‘thing’ that we see. It is a cosmic view in which the observer and the observed – the self and the other – are locked in a relationship of mutual dependence and reflection; where everything that we think of as being ‘outside’ of ourselves has a connection, or a correspondence to something ‘inside’ of us, and is therefore meaningful to us; i.e. it shows us something about ourselves, or reveals some aspect of beauty or order which reminds us of our reality and our origin. This is a world which is very far from inanimate and self-subsistent, but alive, ever-changing, always engaged in the task of communicating truth to us. One of my favourite lines from Ibn ‘Arabi’s great opus magnus “The Meccan Revelations” says that: Nothing walks in the cosmos without walking as a messenger with a message… Even the worms, in their movements, are rushing with a message to those who can understand it. (Futuhat 2, 372/10). Ibn ‘Arabi calls this ‘a high knowledge’, and one see that it illustrates well what I said earlier about the process of spiritual education, or education of the heart. In this aspect, it can be described as being one through which a person moves from the state of receiving a call to return through a glimpse or intimation in one particular form, to a state in which they are able to perceive everything, both inside and outside of themselves, as a messenger from their beloved, reminding them of who they really are. A central Quranic verse for the Islamic mystical tradition – not only Ibn ‘Arabi – through which the knowers of God describe this very highest state of realisation is Surat al-Buqara: 115: “Wherever may you turn, there is the face of God”. Seen like this, it is clear that the heart is essentially a passive and receptive faculty; its function is to receive impressions, whether from the deep mysterious realms of interior being or from the external world, and unify them by recognising them as meanings which point to a single reality. This is a process in which there is, intrinsically, by definition, no expected outcome – no end-result. It is an open-ended process done entirely for its own sake. By contrast the intellect is a very active faculty which, as I said above, observes things, and is actively engaged in categorising them, sorting them, manipulating and reorganising. And in its modus operandi it is fundamentally quantitative, i.e. concerned with measurement, relative value, etc. I am always being told, by books which come out and conferences I attend, that we as a human civilisation are now moving beyond a Descartian perspective, and that new ideas from quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and from ecology, are leading us to a more holistic paradigm, which would embody, one hopes, a more heart-centred perspective. But on-the-ground experience, the evidence of daily life, would tend to indicate the contrary; that we are continuing to move further and further in the direction of unmitigated rationality in the form of quantification in areas such as education, health and government; everything now has to be weighed and measured and given a value, usually in terms of money. In my own field of education, in the last twenty years, this aspect of measurement and evaluation has come more and more to the fore, so there is no longer any question of open-ended investigation; every teaching session has to have an expected outcome and must be evaluated against that. And everything is seen in utilitarian terms; i.e. according to how useful it will be to us. And this has significant consequences, even for basic skills like literacy and numeracy, as I know from my own work. Despite vast resources being devoted to teaching these skills, there are still a significant number of people who just cannot learn them, and this number seems to be growing rather than diminishing. At the same time, reading and maths are understood more and more to be mere mechanistic operations, or they are placed in a utilitarian context with no intrinsic meaning attached to them. But this is a very narrow approach which can be positively counter-productive for many people, who need to be able to make some connection to their inner world in order to learn. For Ibn ‘Arabi, by contrast, the very letters the alphabet were spiritual realities pregnant with meaning and symbolism; he had a great vision once whilst travelling in Algeria in which he saw all the letters of the Arabic alphabet as celestial intelligences, and experienced mystical union with each one of them, witnessing the particularity of its ‘messagership’. And he saw the vast potential of symbolism and beauty which their combination into words, letters, sentences, could express. From this moment, he describes, poetry just flowed out of him without any effort. Similarly, numbers have been seen by all the wisdom traditions as containing the very secrets of the universe; the Greeks were not exploring the properties of irrational numbers or geometric shapes in order to compute their cash flows. They were trying to uncover sacred realities. And the builders of the great cathedrals, of Chartres, the Aga Sofia, the Taj Mahal, who designed according to the principles of sacred geometry, were expressing a profound understanding of the meaning of two-ness, threeness, etc.. And they did not do this because it was a cost effective mode of construction but because of their desire to praise and glorify God. The results are some of the greatest and most enduring achievements of humankind, and the creation of spaces which in their very structure act as reminders to the soul; to enter them is have an experience of order, beauty and infinity which awakens in us a memory of another, more essential place to which we belong. And we all acknowledge their power and grandeur; when I visited the Taj Mahal a couple of years ago, the thing which really struck me – apart from its really incredible beauty, which is quite overwhelming – was its obvious ability to speak to every human being, evidenced by the fact that the visitors came from every human race and culture, every religion, and were of all ages and types. These things have a universal appeal because they speak to that which is universal within us; i.e. our capacity to perceive and respond to the unity which is the underlying reality of the world. So this leads to the fourth and final point I want to make today; that the knowledge of the heart is undertaken for its own sake, not for any limited end; for praise and for the expression of beauty, not for achieving any measurable target. And this means that it is undertaken for love. I have said that for the Islamic tradition the heart is not the seat of love, because for them the emotions and the passions are located in the liver, not the heart. But as the place which receives and comprehends the myriad of meanings which are constantly manifest in both the interior and exterior, it is the locus within which the Divine love is enacted. Ibn ‘Arabi explains that this process, which we have already outlined, whereby the one reality manifests in all the different forms in the universe, is motivated in the first place by the Divine love. It is a very important, and perhaps unique, feature of his exposition that the notions of love and knowledge are indissolubly linked for him in a single movement; in this he relies upon a Divine saying, uttered by God through the mouth of the prophet Muhammad: I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, therefore I created the world that I might be known. So this process whereby the one reality manifests in a multiplicity of forms which impress themselves upon the heart and are seen there for what they are, i.e., the beautiful revelations of the One, is the enactment of the process of manifestation and witnessing which is the origin of the whole cosmos. And as this has no other end from the Divine side than the desire to be known and loved back, so the response, from our side, has to be equally unconditioned. Therefore the education of the heart consists, in a very essential way, of coming to a point where a truly free, unconditioned response is possible for us – i.e. without the interference of our ego, our desires, or our wish for power and control. As Bulent Rauf said in his very lovely short paper on The Essential: The lover has to know for certain that love is returned for love, and not for any other consideration – riches, help, comfort or bargain… So finally, then, in our last few minutes; how do we cultivate these qualities of the heart? Much has already been said, fortunately, else we would be here all night. But two things that it would be good to mention for completion. One is, that the heart is essentially a receptive faculty, and it appears, or flourishes, or however you want to put it, in stillness and silence. It action is contemplation, as opposed to activity, and in this it is pragmatically in very sharp contrast to the way that we operate when we are dominated by our intellectual mode. Therefore the fundamental practice needed for its development is withdrawal from our usual modes of operation – from actively seeking, actively organising, actively understanding – and the creation of a contemplative space where we can learn to be receptive to, to witness the ‘messages’ we are constantly receiving. We have spoken a lot in this talk about the ‘eye’ of the heart, but it equally possible, and perhaps more appropriate when talking about this aspect of ‘withdrawal’, to talk about ‘hearing’, as Rumi did in the very first passage which I quoted; what is ‘heard’ is the call, as he puts it, of God saying: I am near. For Ibn ‘Arabi, it is not the outer form of the practice which matters, so I am not going to go into this at all, but the inner orientation; so this withdrawal could be physical, in terms of periods of actual retreat from the world. Or it can be shorter periods of time set aside each day or week for meditation or contemplation; or it can be a completely interior practice, of being able to withdraw into an interior space even though outwardly in the midst of life, and within the Islam tradition this last was considered to be the highest level of achievement, being the state of those who the Quran mentions for whom “buying and selling does not distract from the remembrance of God”. Secondly, alongside this setting up of a contemplative space, is the practice of learning to tolerate uncertainty and lack of definition; to be able stand in front of, and stay with, that which we do not know, as my friend advocating ‘staying’ in contemplation in front of the mysteries of observation with quantum mechanical particles. It seems to me that we do have some precedent for this practice in modern European thought, in that this is very much what Keats refers to when he talks about ‘Negative capability’. This he defined as the state of: …being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason This attitude which was later expressed very well by another poet, Rilke (1875-1926), in his Letters to a Young Poet, as follows: I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as you can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. And as we have found ourselves in the European tradition, I thought it would be nice to end with another quote from the Romantic poets which seems to me to be very much in tune with what has been said in this lecture. These are Wordsworth’s famous lines from Tintern Abbey which describe his understanding of poetic sensibility as: That serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. LISTEN TO THE TALK: Educating the Heart: Establishing a Spiritual Perspective in the Modern World by Jane Clark http://beshara.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/besharalecture_jane-clark.mp3 ← Alan Williams: Open Heart Surgery

Bulent was instrumental in establishing the Beshara School, and served as its consultant from 1975 until his death in 1987.

Edward has been studying the writings of the Cappadocian fathers, as well as classical and Sumerian mythology, for the past 20 years. He embarked on these studies following the courses he took at the Beshara School, which have been guiding his search ever since. He gave this talk as part of the 6-month-course lectures at Chisholme, in March 2011.

Elizabeth studied English at Oxford and Philosophical Inquiry at Glasgow University. For most of her life she has worked in education, from teaching English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia with V.S.O. to secondary school teaching, community education, and lecturing at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities. She is now a yoga teacher and practitioner of ayurveda.

Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at Manchester University and is working on a translation of Rumi's Masnavi, the first volume of which has been published by Penguin. This talk was given on March 3rd 2013.

Stephen is editor of the Journal of the Muhyddin Ibn 'Arabi Society and co-founder of Anqa publishing. He has been a student of Beshara for forty years. This talk was given on March 2nd 2013.

Colin Tudge was born in London in 1943; educated at Dulwich College, 1954-61; and read zoology at Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1962-65. Ever since then he has earned a living by spasmodic broadcasting and a lot of writing – mainly books these days, but with occasional articles. He has a special interest in natural history in general, evolution and genetics, food and agriculture, and spends a great deal of time on philosophy (especially moral philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the relationship between science and religion).

Alison Yiangou has been a student of the Beshara School for most of her adult life, and has facilitated courses worldwide. She is now studying for a Masters Degree and a Teaching Diploma in Mindfulness at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice of Bangor University, and also undergoing some teacher training at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre.