It is not meant to be explicated, but felt as music, as presence.
The real story comes from a love-source that cannot be understood with intellect, but known only as a person is known. But the stories that speak of this are at a distance from the center. The universe is the book.Īll of this poetry can be heard as Rumi’s continuing conversation with Shams of Tabriz, an exploration of what it is to be together in God. Sufis are loved the world over for reminding us that the glory is our inner reality, the outer being a kind of language that explains THAT. His vision was a whole-world work and the poetry was part of the soul-unfolding done in a learning community. While he did his spiritual spadework within the patterns of Islamic Sufism, his whole life was a witness to the boundless universality of the Heart. When Rumi died, he was mourned by Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims and Buddhists.
Who was Shams? The name, which actually translates as the Sun, becomes a charged hieroglyph constantly reappearing in Rumi’s poetry. With this final illumination, he began singing the spontaneous poetry of such beauty and perfection that is now loved and revered across the world as revelation. One day in Damascus, he realized there was no longer a need to search. Rumi wandered for months – desolate in disbelief that his companion was really gone. Finally on December 5, 1247, fanatics in the community took Shams’ life. Shams was forced into exile several times, but he always returned at Rumi’s request. “No,” said Shams, “take it to our friends in the West.” When the entourage treated Shams like an emperor of the spirit, Francis confessed and attempted to give Shams the money back. He found him in Damascus, playing cards in a tavern with a young man from the West, the wastrel later to become Francis of Assisi. After a time Rumi sent his son, Sultan Veled, to bring Shams back. Who can say what transpired there? We can only guess that Rumi endured the refining fires of a deep spiritual purification.īut some of Rumi’s students saw their beloved teacher being spirited away by a madman, and their intrigues forced Shams to leave Konya.
#When did rumi met shams tabrizi series#
The two began a series of months-long retreats into solitude where they entered into a deep communion of words and silences called sohbet. When Rumi revived, lying on the ground, he answered, “Bestami took one swallow of knowledge and thought that that was all, but for Muhammad the majesty was continually unfolding.” To the outside world, it is only recorded that, at Shams’ question, Rumi “tumbled from his saddle to the ground, unconscious.” Later, he would say, “What I once thought of as God I met today as a human being.”
In an instant of mystical annihilation, fire met fire, ocean ocean, and Rumi fell into pure being. and in one pure outrageous act of faith, Rumi dove through. He had come face to face with the Mystery.Ī doorway to eternity flickered open. In a dusty marketplace in south central Anatolia. “But Bestami said, ‘I am the Glory!’ Muhammad said, ‘I cannot praise you enough!’”Īs Rumi was about to reply, he realized that this was no seminary debate about the mysteries. Rumi gave the approved answer, “Muhammad.” The stranger challenged him:īestami was a legendary Sufi master given to ecstatic merging with God, then crying out with mystical candor that he and the Godhead were one! Muhammad was the founder of their tradition, the anointed one, but his greatness resided in his stature as messenger of God. He did not want followers or fame he only wanted to find one person vast enough in spirit to be his companion.Īs Rumi was riding a donkey through the marketplace, surrounded by a knot of disciples, a stranger with piercing eyes stepped from a doorway and seized his bridle. People spontaneously gathered around him, though he was given to slipping out the side doors and leaving town when it happened. A street bodhisattva who mingled with laborers and camel drivers, he had no school.
Shams was a wandering dervish monk, rough-hewn and sinewy. He was a venusian lover of the beautiful and the good, a scholar, and artist. Rumi, at the age of thirty-seven, had become an accomplished doctor of theology, the center of his own divinity school. With their friendship, categories of teacher and student, lover and beloved, master and disciple, dissolved. The meeting of Rumi and Shams was a grand event in the mystical evolution of the planet.