Guru speak
Anandmurti Gurumaa
One summer night in Turkey, Jalaluddin Rumi and Shams Tebriz, his teacher, were out admiring the moon. The whole of Konya village was asleep. Shams remarked, "Behold the beauty of the moon, and look at the people sleeping in a state of unconsciousness!" Rumi responded, "They are sleeping. We should not wake them up." This prompted a reprimand from Shams, "Rumi, you are a sea of benevolence! Your job is to awaken people, whether they are of Konya, Istanbul or Damascus."
Later, when Shams went into hibernation, Rumi wrote a poem: "I remember the moon that had paled in front of my moon (Shams) because my moon is not a moon; it is a sun. O Shams! Now I suffer remembering those moments when we used to go round and round in that moonlit night and do Zikr… Let me describe that night, when the earth and sun danced and gazed at the stars in the sky. I revolved around my sun and my sun revolved around its own self."
Rumi's advice is, "Just like the Prophet kept his lips on one end of the Ney (Persian flute) and the Almighty's songs began coming out from the other end, when you empty your spirit of vanity, His songs begin echoing." There is pain and imploration in this emptiness, like in a 'sigh'. In this space, love takes birth, true love gets nurtured and blossoms.
Love, pain and devotion are central to Sufism. The pain should arise in the heart and the heart needs to implore. Then the heart lotus opens and divine love fills you, making life a celebration. We all long for love, but we look at the wrong places. Love based on mental compatibility will die soon. We delude ourselves repeatedly that we are in love, but we falter and get hurt. Love between Shams and Rumi was of the soul, therefore fulfilling. It is a blessing to fall, nay, rise in love.
The writer is a Sonepat-based mystic and singer.
