About Rumi
Barely known in the West as recently as 15 years ago, Rumi is now one of the most widely read poets in America. His is an exciting new literary and philosophical force. One reason for Rumi's popularity is that "Rumi is able to verbalize the highly personal and often confusing world of personal/spiritual growth and mysticism in a very forward and direct fashion. He does not offend anyone, and he includes everyone. The world of Rumi is neither exclusively the world of a Sufi, nor the world of a Hindu, nor a Jew, nor a Christian; it is the highest state of a human being--a fully evolved human. A complete human is not bound by cultural limitations; he touches every one of us. Today Rumi's poems can be heard in churches, synagogues, Zen monasteries, as well as in the downtown New York art/performance/music scene." says Shahram Shiva, a noted Iranian translator of Rumi.
Rumi's work has been translated into many of the world's languages including Russian, German, French, Italian and Spanish, and is appearing in a growing number of formats including concerts, workshops, readings, dance performances and other artistic creations – and now this CD.
RUMI'S LIFE
Jelaluddin Rumi was born in Balkh, Afghanistan, a part of the Persian Empire, on September 30, 1207.
Rumi’s father, Bahauddin Walad, besides being a theologian and jurist, was a mystic. After the family fled the Mongol invasion of Afghanistan – to Konya in Turkey – he became the sheik of the dervish learning community there until his death.
At his father’s death, the title of Sheik passed to his son, and Rumi, already renowned as a scholar, artist, and theologian while still in his twenties, assumed his father’s duties and responsibilities to the community. This was a period of maturing and growing when many questions were asked by the young seeker as he yearned to understand the deeper meaning of his life.
Besides studying with his father’s students, who taught him about his father’s inner life, Rumi also studied the mystics Sanai and Attar.
Until 1244, Rumi led a typically normal life for a religious scholar of that era. It was in the late Fall of that year that he met the man who was to change his life forever. This was a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz. Shams had traveled throughout the Middle East looking for someone who could “endure his company”.
In one version of the meeting, Rumi was riding his donkey through the marketplace, when a man stepped in front of him and shouted, “Who is greater – Muhammad or Bestami?” In the exchange that followed Rumi became so overwhelmed by the presence before him that he fainted and fell from his donkey.
As the relationship matured between Shams and Rumi, they became inseparable, spending months together beyond human needs, relating together in mystical conversation – called “sobhet”. During this period Rumi’s disciples were all but forgotten by their teacher. They became deeply displeased and extremely jealous. Shams sensed trouble from this quarter, and felt that he needed to disappear from time to time – for his own safety and Rumi’s too. It is reported that during one of these disappearances, Rumi’s poetry writing and mystic whirling began.
After things would cool down, Shams would reappear and the episodes of being lost in each other’s company would resume. On one of these reappearances, Shams and Rumi fell at each other’s feet upon seeing each other. This was a telling moment in their relationship – remembering that the first time they met; Rumi fell in a faint at Shams feet. This time they bowed down to each other. What had begun as a master/disciple relationship had dissolved into pure loving friendship.
One winter night Shams, who was living with Rumi and his household, answered a knock at the back door. Shams disappeared, never to be seen again.
This disappearance caused in Rumi what may be called a spiritual implosion, an event in which, in the absence of the beloved, the lover falls “into himself” and disappears into his own emptiness. It is from this oceanic emptiness that the drop that was Rumi became the ocean – and his poetry a reflection within it.
An excerpt from one of his poems perfectly expresses this state:
“Why should I seek? I am the same as he.
His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself.”
The union became complete. Rumi fell into the ocean that was Shams. Out of that experience came a huge wave of poetry that Rumi called, The Works of Shams of Tabriz.
Rumi and Shams had merged, and in time Rumi found another companion. The story goes like this…
One day in Konya, after Sham's had disappeared, Rumi was walking down a merchant street through a market. Suddenly he heard a goldsmith tapping his jeweler's hammer upon an small anvil.
The rhythmic sound of that tapping sent Rumi into an ecstasy, where he spontaneously began to whirl – the ecstatic whirling of the Sufi dervish. Legend says that he continued to whirl for forty-eight hours without stopping. From then onwards the goldsmith named Saladin Zarkub became Rumi's companion and the “Friend” to whom Rumi addressed his poems during that period. After Saladin’s death, Husan Chelebi, Rumi's longtime scribe, became the “Friend” and the one who wrote down The Mathnawi, Rumi's vast and mysterious masterwork. In the 12 years before his death, Rumi dictated the six volumes to Husam. He died on December 17, 1273.
It is said that the leaders of all the religious groups attended and perticipated in Rumi's funeral. The Christians of the time compared Rumi Jesus. The Jews, to Moses. And to the followers of Islam, Rumi was revered almost as was Mohammed.
The Poems
These are the poems which have been set to music for the CD, “Secret Language”. As you read, you might begin to wonder how much of Rumi’s life experience can be discovered within these lines…
Who makes these changes?
Who makes these changes?
I shoot to the right the arrow lands left
ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog
I plot to get what I want and end up in jail
dig pits to trap others and I fall in
I should be suspicious of what I want
Secret language
Every part of you has a secret language
your hands and your feet
say what you’ve done
and every need brings in what’s needed
pain bears its cure like a child
Whoever finds love
Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises
What is the soul
What is the soul I cannot stop asking
if I could taste one sip of an answer
I could break out of this prison for drunks
I didn’t come here of my own accord
and I can’t leave that way
whoever brought me here
will have to take me home
No end to the journey
No end, no end to the journey
no end, no end never
how can the heart in love ever stop opening
if you love me, you won’t just die once
in every moment you will die into me
to be reborn
Into this new love die
your way begins on the other side
become the sky
take an axe to the prison wall,
escape
walk out like someone
suddenly born into color
do it now
Drop being sad
Don’t ask questions about longing
look in my face
soul drunk, body ruined
these two sit helpless in a wrecked wagon
neither knows how to fix it
and my heart, I’d say it was more like a donkey
sunk in a mud hole struggling and miring deeper
But, listen to me for one moment
drop being sad hear
blessings dropping their blossoms
around you
Keep on knocking
Keep on knocking
‘til the joy inside
opens a window
look to see who’s there
Inner wakefulness
This place is a dream
only a sleeper considers it real
then death comes like dawn
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief
A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived
and he dreams he’s living in another town
in the dream he doesn’t remember
the town he’s sleeping in his bed in
he believes the reality of the dream town
the world is that kind of sleep
Humankind is being led along an evolving course,
through this migration of intelligences
and though we seem to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness,
that directs the dream
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are
Rumi Resources & Links
www.colemanbarks.com
Jelaluddin Rumi’s preeminent translator is Coleman Barks. The message Barks conveys is of Rumi’s ecstatic poetry, which, as Barks said to Bill Moyers, PBS journalist, is "trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity ... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral ... what Jesus referred to when he said, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’
Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, said, "If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is truly remarkable." What qualifies Barks to translate Rumi? Barks observes, "I’ve always had this contact with the ecstatic part of myself. I’ve always felt lucky, like this life is really fortunate for me. It seems a lot of grace has come to me.
www.rumi.net
This is the site of Shahram Shiva, the noted Iranian Rumi scholar and translator
www.andrewharvey.net
Andrew Harvey was born in South India in 1952 and lived there until he was nine years old, a period he credits with shaping his vision of the inner unity of all religions. He left India to attend private school in England, and entered Oxford University in 1970 to study history on a scholarship. At the age of 21, he became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Fellow of All Souls College, England's highest academic honor.
Andrew Harvey is the author of The Way of Passion : A Celebration of Rumi and The Teachings of Rumi, among others.
www.deepakchopra.com
Deepak Chopra is director of educational programs at The Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, California. He is the best-selling author of nineteen books, including the slender, beautiful volume entitled The Love Poems Of Rumi
In it he writes, “Born Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Balkhi in Persia early in the thirteenth century, the poet known as Rumi (named after the city where he lived) composed works of mysticism and desire that inspired countless people in his own time and throughout the centuries. His poems expressed the deepest longings of the human heart for its beloved, for that transcendent intimacy which is the source of the divine.”
www.greenartprints.com
Michael Green
The work that graces the cover of the CD, and the home page of this web site, is from The Illustrated Rumi, a marvelous collaboration of Coleman Bark’s Rumi translations and Michael Green’s artwork.