ONE OF MY FAVORITE RUMI QUOTES

I live in the true believer’s heart, O how wonderful! Seek me there. RUMI

WHY I AM READING MOBY DICK

Because ultimately all our classics take us through the physical into the spiritual. These two, physical and spiritual, are not separate. Captain Ahab, a proud, imposing, deeply troubled thinking man ignores the messages sent to him over and over not to fight against that which is so much more powerful than man -- what is this but what people called God?

Melville does not shy away from this word -- and pursues Moby Dick, the white whale no one has overcome. Like the old woman who swallowed a fly, and then a bird, a cat, a dog, a horse -- Ahab died, of course.

WHAT I AM READING THESE DAYS

I always return to the classics when I am in the reading mood. I don't read many contemporary authors, mainly dead ones because they have survived for centuries and I don't know, and don't want to bother spending time with live ones to find out if they are worthy of survival. So, I am reading one of my all time favorites, Herman Melville's Moby Dick. It is like sipping 200 year old vintage wine. Yes, I often skip chapters, for Melville took the freedom, as every writer wants to take the freedom, to ramble on and on about a subject that is dear to her: whales. One can't do it these days because Time in our times is so horribly squeezed.

STORIES, RUMI'S STORIES, SHOUTING OUT THE TRUTH

Stories repeat themselves in constant permutations to shout out the truths over and over and over again. Stories are reminders, little stick-its on the mirror, to-do lists we would do well to reread, remember, and heed. Rumi’s stories brings us back on track when we are lost.

DO NOT TRAVEL ALONE ON A WAY YOU HAVE NOT SEEN

If the Guide’s hand is not in yours, the ghouls will keep you wandering,  your head in a whirl. RUMI

IN PRAISE OF PRAYER: about a story from RUMI: TALES TO LIVE BY, WALKING THE WAY

Jalammudin, a character in one of Rumi’s stories, lives in a prison of doubt, depression, and despair. His Mullah advises him to pray. When he does, his depression and despair is lessened, but then Iblis, the devil, says to him: “Stop this noisy babbling like the braying of an ass. Do you hear anyone responding to you when you say “Allah! Allah! Allah? Does your Allah ever say ‘here I am?”

Jalammudin admits Allah doesn’t reply, and falls into a deep funk again.

Prayer, whatever the reason for it, is a hot line to the Being, Guide of guides, our own Highest Self that comes whenever we call, though it doesn’t always seem so. Sometime when we pray our suffering miraculously ends and sometimes we continue to suffer because we have not arrived at the softness and pliability needed for learning the lessons all suffering teaches us. If we understand this, and pledge to suffer consciously, humbly, trusting that our suffering is in fact a healing, we are given the courage to endure. For on the Way, endurance is everything.

Endurance is one of my favorite words. Its many Indo-European roots from the taproot, deru, from which comes deodar, tree of the gods, spread deep into the soil of our souls. Many of my other favorite words bloom from the same root: wisdom, trust, firm, steadfast, true, Truth, pledge. I especially like one European root from Old French, triste, waiting place: a “place where one waits trustingly,” even as one suffers.

To be utterly honest, left to myself, I am unable to endure. I falter, despair, panic. Though I speak about suffering as the guides

speak of it, I must admit I do not like to suffer. My not liking it does not keep it away from me, however. If anything, resisting it prolongs it. When I am suffering I am helpless to do anything but suffer. No prayer comes to my rescue. Though I often do not know the cause of my suffering, my most recent experience of it was due to too much busy-ness, too much being in the world. But a lifetime of observing my limits is teaching me to stop, pull back, say ‘no’ to my many tasks and obligations, to make space and time in which I can perform the most important of functions – turning my gaze inward, turning towards the divine in me, and sing songs, however well or badly, of humble prayer and praise.

Prayer and praise, through music and song especially, connects one to the Being in an immediate way. The Sufis delight in it as being the fastest shortcut on the Way. Singing is at the very heart of Sikhism. “No one and nothing stands between You and me,” Kabir sings. When we sing we tap into this connectedness, without any intermediaries, directly, heart to precious heart. When we pray through song we address the Godhood in the second person pronoun – not ‘he’ or ‘she,’ but You. Thou. In Sikh sacred songs this pronoun appears in the familiar ‘tu’ or ‘tum,’ not an excessively polite word, but with the intimacy one reserves for the closest of relationships.

When we sing, listen to, or recite prayers with an open heart, with faith and love, we turn to the very source, the giver and fulfiller of our desires, the inflictor and soother of our agitation and anxieties. Rumi knows that prayer moves and stirs, like a vivifying force, the stagnant waters of our souls.

How often, like Jalammudin, the character from Rumi’s tale, The Cup of Praise, who is imprisoned in his own doubt, I feel the shackles of a lock through my own lips! How often as I navigate my own depressions I am unable to pray! Even the mouth of my heart that so often communes silently, speaks to its Self, is sewn shut! Then I am reminded of something the Christian saint, Theresa of Avila said – prayers are like money in the bank; we pray when we can so that when we can’t, we have something to draw from. Sooner or later help is sent to remind us of what we must do, how we must think, as Al Khadir, guide to lost souls, the spirit of water, is sent to Jalammudin in his dream, materializing out of unseen air, to rescue him.

Al Khadir comes to make Jalmmudin a free man by the non-dual message that the two, our remembering and calling out God’s name and God’s response are instantaneous, simultaneous, one. That is why God’s name is so central to all the Eastern and Western religions.  It is at the very heart of Sikhism. Name is remembrance; Name is connection; Name is evocation, bringing into presence the absent and forgotten; Name is help when we need it the most; Name, calling out to our Beloved, is prayer; Name itself is aid, food, sustenance in the highest. “Do not put musk on your body; rub it on your heart,” says Rumi. “What is musk? The holy name of the Glorious God.”

Prayer is the key to resurrection. As soon as Jalammudin whispers the name of his Beloved, the chains, shackle, lock fall away from him. He awakes. It is morning and the world is transformed. His senses, instruments and handmaidens of his soul, see beauty, color, feel and hear the breeze that, like water, flows everywhere.  “Wings are restored to the bird whose plumes were torn away,” and Jalammudin is free.  

                                                      ~

By

Kamla K. Kapur

Author of

Rumi: Tales to Live By.

                                                                    Walking the Way 

THE PRISON OF DOUBT

By Kamla K Kapur, Author of Rumi: Tales to Live By. Walking the Way

                                                           

In one of Rumi’s stories, Mark, whose friend Joseph has been ‘killed” by his brothers, wanders aimlessly over the face of the earth, doubting, despairing about a world in which the best of human nature is butchered by greed and jealousy. And indeed, this makes all of us doubt and question the world we live in. It is food for sorrow. But move beyond this we must. Joseph miraculously survives, becomes a governor through a series of tragedies, meets Mark again, and says to him, ‘if you do not have the faith (in the promise of being God’s guest some day and dining with Him in His bounty) then you will get only dust and ashes from his kitchen.’

How many of us eat dust and ashes from lack of faith and trust! The only one we harm is ourselves. We cling to our doubts and sorrows as if they could comfort us when they only vitiate and embitter us. Joseph is the archetype in Rumi’s stories of the person of faith who uses all his troubles as grist for his transformation.

We need to trust the workings of the universe, to develop what Joseph calls “the senses that behold the light of the Unseen world;” the world that works its magic from within us, through our highest, most hopeful thoughts, feelings, and intuitions.

Being steadfast in our faith involves conscious striving, a constant remembering to remember the Mystery that has bestowed upon us the bounty of breath that sustains us; that can teach us, if we open ourselves to it, to look past the apparent truth of our senses and circumstances to that which lies beneath and beyond. Remembering the Mystery, connecting with it in tiny ways, for just a few seconds before we go to sleep and upon waking, deepens our connection with it. Islam has institutionalized this remembering to five times a day. Doing it just once or twice, not mindlessly, but with total presence, suffices to confirm and increase faith.   

Doubt cannot be extirpated once and for all. It will and does return. Doubt is an in-house phenomenon, inevitable and necessary. It is born from our God-given gift of reasoning. If we didn’t have it, all the tyrannical forces both within and without that try to control and subjugate us would lead us terribly astray. Without doubt, without a healthy exercise of our reasoning, without wrestling with this demon, we would never achieve the power, strength, confidence and trust to continue on the Way.  Doubt tests us, gives us blessed choice, and each time we choose the Way again, our path becomes easier.

Remembering doubt’s inevitable return prepares us for it. If we have been steadfast when we could, our faith will return stronger when we realize that without it we become like Mark without Joseph. Joseph lets nothing interfere with his faith: not his brothers’ betrayals and cruelty, not his sojourn in a deep, dark well, not his subsequent imprisonment in a dark dungeon. Joseph can do this because he lives the examined life; because he examines and interprets dreams, harbingers and reflections of the state of our souls. It is his faith in the basic all rightness of existence, his trust in Being that helps him get out of the prison and become Pharaoh’s governor. All his suffering only becomes fuel for greater faith.

We have to drink the dregs of doubt before we can arrive at the crossroads that force us to make a conscious choice to either stay with doubt and paralysis, or take the ‘leap’ of faith. And it is a leap, a mighty, muscular leap from the sunless to the sunny side of experience, from our small egos that isolate and alienate us to something more transcendent of which we are an indissoluble part.

                                                                        ~