When you
don’t lose yourself, the beloved
is like a thorn
When you lose
yourself, the beloved is the
purest gold
When you
don’t lose yourself, a fly can
fell you
When you lose
yourself, elephants fall before
you
When you
don’t lose yourself, you’re a
cloud of grief
When you lose
yourself, mist and fog parts for
you
When you
don’t lose yourself, the beloved
turns away
When you lose
yourself, the sweetest wine
comes your way
When you
don’t lose yourself, you’re as
dispirited as autumn
When you lose
yourself, your January is like
spring
All your
restlessness is out of your
desire for stillness
Just desire
restlessly, then, love will fill
and still you
All your
unhealthiness is out of your
desire for health,
Just abandon
health, then, even poison will
heal you…
This ode/ghazal
in which Mowlana Jalaleddin Rumi
speaks of the differences
between life when “you lose
yourself” and life when “you
don’t lose yourself” is one of
the jewels of the Divān-e
Shams, and you would be hard
pressed to find another
ghazal that compares to it
in terms of revelations about
the secrets of wisdom and the
riches of vision.
It is as if, here, all in
one place, Rumi has bequeathed
to us the quintessence of his
mystical and transcendental
experiences; divulged his
inmost, spiritual discoveries;
and laid bare the fruits
of his ardent, mystical journey.
It is
generally assumed that in the
Masnavi, Rumi is a teacher
and that in the Divān-e Kabir,
he is a besotted lover. There,
he complies with the code of
conduct of the classroom and,
here, he abandons himself to the
“misconduct” of love; for, “the
conduct of love is misconduct
through and through”. This is a
correct assessment and anyone
who has had the good fortune to
read these spiritual and
inspirational works will know
that, in these two tomes, he is
faced with two Rumi’s: the sage
and the lover. It is not for
nothing that the Masnavi
has been called Hesāmi-Nāmeh
(The Book of Hesameddin), whilst
the Divān-e Kabir is
known as the Divān-e Shams
or Shams-Nāmeh. In
the nightly sessions in which
the Masnavi was born,
Hesameddin would sit like a
pupil. Pen in hand and eyes
glued to the teacher’s lips, he
would listen to the master’s
teachings and put them to paper.
In Rumi’s own words, in
the Masnavi, he behaved
like an astute ruler, who
thought about combining form and
meaning. And, notwithstanding
his inebriation, he minded his
conduct and imparted the fine
points of morality and religion
like a dignified teacher. And
if, now and then, in
mid-sentence, his thoughts
strayed to Shams—robbing his
mind of concentration, his heart
of serenity, his words of
composure and his soul of
tranquillity—he would hastily
give himself a shake, bite his
tongue, swallow the impassioned
words and bellow to himself to
stop thinking and speaking of
Shams-e Tabrizi, “Else, there’ll
be ruin and disgrace”.
But, in the
Divān-e Kabir, this same
Rumi becomes a great madman, who
is robbed by love of the
serenity to teach like a sage;
who looks down on the ladder of
“the way” because he has reached
the rooftop of “the truth”; who,
like a piece of gold, has become
unneedful of the science and
practice of alchemy; who reveals
secrets so frenziedly as to
force Hallaj to call for him to
be hanged:
“The people hanged Hallaj
for his insinuations / Hallaj
will have me hanged for my
frenzied revelations”.
Rumi,
who—judging by his works—was
very fond of stories involving
animals, was well-versed in the
story of the lion and the deer;
a lion that was so awe-inspiring
and terrifying as to make the
deer faint and fade away, so
that nothing remained of it but
a pale shape. The deer forgets
its own being and is lost in the
lion’s being.
It is as if the deer is
so brimming with the lion as to
be empty of itself, and the lion
fills the deer’s emptied mould.
From then on, the deer
that has “lost itself” becomes a
lion that has “not lost itself”
and behaves in a lion-like way.
In fact, the
lion was no one other than
Shams-e Tabrizi and the deer was
no one other than Jalaleddin
Rumi. The story of the deer and
the lion was the tale of Rumi’s
own encounter with Shams, who
made him lose his senses and
“lose himself”. And it was in
this “losing himself” and losing
his senses that he crazily
composed the ghazals,
which told the story of his
madness and his love.
He was transformed into
another lion and another Shams;
nay, a thousand Shams-e Tabrizis
dangled from each hair on his
head. (Aflaki’s Munaqib)
The
Divān-e Kabir is the product
of those rare moments when you
lose yourself. And although
respect for a teacher’s code of
conduct is not to be found
there, the secrets of love are
hidden therein. The lion that
the deer of Rumi’s soul saw was
not a life- devouring lion, but
a life-giving one. And it was
this new life that poured new
meanings into old words and
built the world anew.
From this
prelude, I want to make my way
to explaining the ghazal
that I mentioned at the
beginning—which is a most
thorough elucidation of “losing
yourself”. But, first, I can’t
resist citing the following two
verses from Divān-e Shams,
which is a soulful description
of a brave soul who saw a
life-giving lion and gained new
life from it: “Our lion is a
rare specimen and far from
devouring a deer / It breathes
into a roe’s shape and makes it
bound and leap / It’s out of my
love for it that I took up the
lute / It cries out my feelings
for me, as I sit stunned and
mute”.
*
*
*
Why does Rumi
say, in his ghazal, that
when you “lose yourself”, you
find contentment, sturdiness,
joy, the vitality of spring and
companionship with the beloved;
whereas when you “don’t lose
yourself”, you feel sadness,
weakness, wretchedness, autumnal
lassitude and separation from
the beloved?
What about all the other
paradoxes that he describes: The
tranquillity that you find when
abandon tranquillity; the
purposelessness that you feel
when you pursue an aim; the
unpleasantness that stems from
seeking pleasant things; and the
beloved’s coldness when you long
for its warmth?
If, in the
realm of theory, we define
“losing yourself” as
“heedlessness and fearlessness”,
this might answer some of our
questions, but what virtue is
there in ignorant, idle
heedlessness?
Perhaps sagacious
unconcern/not caring may be
nearer the mark: someone who
cares about happiness is afraid
of being unhappy and is saddened
by any decrease in happiness;
someone who longs for spring
dreads autumn; someone who
values disciples’ praise is hurt
by their derision; and anyone
who is trapped by these likes
and dislikes is open to weakness
and wretchedness, loses all
courage, is ensnared by anguish,
grows sad for fear of sorrow,
and flees from one trap into
another.
Although the
idea of being contented,
unconcerned, untroubled and
unencumbered is very sweet and
comforting, it raises two
questions: First, how can gain
and loss, joy and sorrow, life
and death, purposefulness and
purposelessness become equal so
that neither side of the
equation is preferable to the
other?
What would motivate
desiring and movement then?
And is the comfort of
contentment not pleasurable in
itself and is it possible to
forego this pleasure? Secondly,
why should such a moral
demeanour and such a noble
person be described as someone
who has “lost himself”. And is
“losing yourself” the same thing
as being an unconcerned
nonconformist or is it its
begetter, and if it is its
begetter, what is it composed
of? Setting all these
considerations aside, in the
ghazal in question, although
Rumi seems to turn his back on
all the things that people
desire, he lauds desiring. In
other words, he doesn’t equate
desiring and indifference. On
the contrary, he asks us to
desire restlessly and to adore
the beloved’s cruelty, and this
is desiring and caring,
and it is incompatible with an
absolute absence of desire.
In the
Golestān, Sa’di, Rumi’s
contemporary, tells the tale of
a dervish who is asked, “What do
you want?” “Not to want
anything,” he replies. But this
is clearly not what Rumi is
talking about. Perhaps, what
Rumi is saying is closer to
Attār’s words when he said:
“Poverty’s cap is adorned with
three abandonments / Abandoning
this world, abandoning the next
world, and abandoning
abandoning”.
Being a
dervish rests on three pillars:
Turning away from this world,
turning away from the next world
and turning away from turning
away.
In other words, not
fighting desires, but
transcending desires and finding
another way of being. Isn’t this
what a dervish’s “nonbeing”
means? As Rumi put it, “There’s
no dervish anywhere, the speaker
said / and if there is a
dervish, he isn’t”.
This idea was also
expressed by Sheikh Abolhassan
Kharaqani when he said: “A Sufi
is someone who isn’t.” In other
words, a dervish is someone who
is neither in this world, nor in
the next world, nor concerned
about abandoning this world or
the next. It is a kind of
lover’s freedom that Hāfez, too,
discovered: “I’m the servant of
love; free of both worlds”.
Be that as it may, even
if we equate “losing yourself”
with abandoning abandoning, we
must still take on board the
idea of desiring, which Rumi
hailed and acclaimed.
We must also
not equate “losing yourself”
with alienation, which means
mistaking an other for yourself.
Alienation is “not losing
yourself” combined with not
knowing yourself. And it goes
without saying that this is
furlongs away from “losing
yourself”.
And we must
not equate “forgetting your
soul” with “losing yourself”
either. “Forgetting your soul”
is a reprehensible condition
which, according to the Qur’an’s
teaching, results from
forgetting God: “Be not as those
who forgot God, and so, He
caused them to forget their
souls.” (Hashr, 19)
The same can
be said of the term diminution
or “loss”, which is the opposite
of robustness and heftiness and
conveys a sense of being
insubstantial and being “at a
loss”. This is a long way away
from “losing yourself” in the
laudable sense. According to the
Qur’an’s teachings, a human
being (who is by nature pure and
good) loses something of himself
and becomes thinner when he
sins, and he weighs less when
measured on the scale of justice
and truth, unless he compensates
for the lack and the thinness by
having faith and doing good
deeds. (“Surely Man is in the
way of loss, save those who
believe and do righteous deeds.”
Al-Asr)
Now, let us
see whether “self-regard” is
akin to “not losing yourself”
and “disregard for yourself” is
related to “losing yourself”.
Rumi extracted this relationship
in the most eloquent way in the
tale of the grammarian and the
sea captain in Book I of the
Masnavi. After the
grammarian had irritated the sea
captain by telling him that he’d
wasted his life since he’d never
studied grammar, the sea captain
warned the grammarian that the
ship was approaching a whirlpool
and that, in such circumstances,
only people who had studied the
“grammar” or the method of
self-effacement could proceed
with confidence.
It would seem
that “the method of
self-effacement” is, in effect,
a lesson in “losing yourself”,
abandoning haughtiness and
self-esteem, and practising
death. Of course, not focusing
on yourself has a moral sense,
which is humility and modesty,
and it has a mystical sense,
which is to see one’s self as a
veil and to strive to step out
of the way.
It may be
fairly straightforward to see
how arrogance and conceit—also
sometimes known as “me-ness”—are
akin to “not losing yourself”.
Someone who has “not lost
himself” is preoccupied with
“me”. He sees others as
“nobodies” and sees himself as
“everybody”. And this bloated
kind of “me” is effectively an
illness and it is also a source
of illness.
In the Masnavi,
Rumi tells the tale of a lover
who knocks on the door of the
beloved. When the beloved asks,
“Who is it?”, the lover replies:
“Me.” This “me” is enough to
make him deserving of being
rejected and sent away.
The story continues until
all his many “me’s” burn away.
Then, he returns to the
beloved’s house. This time, when
the beloved asks, “Who is it?”,
he replies, “Here, too, it is
you, my darling heart.” And, so,
he is allowed into the house by
the beloved, who says: “Since
you’re me, come in; otherwise,
two me’s don’t fit in one
house.”
In Rumi’s
view, anyone who has a “me” and
a “self”, in truth, has not one
“me” but a different “me” and a
different “self” at each moment.
In Rumi’s words, such a person
has “a thousands me’s and we’s”.
And it is in the chaos of all
these “me’s” that he forgets who
he is.
For Rumi, at
least one meaning of “losing
yourself” is casting away these
“multiple-selves” and arriving
at “a single self”. And although
this contains a cure to
haughtiness and self-esteem and
the method of self-effacement
within it, it is not identical
to this kind of moral
improvement. It is a movement in
your being, not in your
morality; it is a vertical leap,
not a horizontal one; and it is
deliverance from polytheism, not
from grime.
Killing your
appetites or combating your
appetites may seem close to the
idea of “losing yourself”, but
it is, of course, not identical
to it, and far from being a
purging of the self, it is a
preening of the self. And
although this cleaning and
preening of the self is morally
laudable, it is far away indeed
from “losing yourself”, which
amounts to transcending beauty
and ugliness. Of course, Rumi
believes that understanding
God’s unity requires that you
part with your appetites; that a
mind that is sullied by bodily
desires is incapable of
understanding the Transcendent.
So, he is of the view that
commanding people to combat
their appetites on the path to
understanding unity does not
contravene God’s compassion.
But all these battles
fall within the realm of
learning and morality, which
concern the good and bad effects
of “the self"; they do not cut
down to the bone to remove “the
self”.
*
*
*
We said that,
on the way to “losing yourself”
and arriving at the fruits of
this condition—i.e.,
contentment, sturdiness, joy and
beauty—the least that you must
do is to strive for “a single
self”, escape division and
dispersal, become “whole”, drive
away the devil and greet the
angel of glad tidings. Now,
assuming that “multiple selves”
have been cast away and the
“single self” has been achieved
(which is possible by turning
away from bodily appetites,
reducing desires, shunning
vices, acquiring virtues,
talking less, eating less,
sleeping less, etc.), what steed
will allow you to make the
journey from “a single self” to
“losing yourself”? How, in the
realm of theory and practice, is
it possible to achieve the
contradictory concoction of “a
self that has lost itself”?
Logically, there are three
possible ways:
1. You must
cease to exist—in a totally
non-metaphorical sense—and
succumb to death. This is not at
all a seemly course and it is
not an acceptable answer,
because the purpose of “losing
yourself” is for you to remain
who you are while achieving the
state of “losing yourself”. And
by destroying yourself you
destroy your capital and make it
impossible for you to strive
towards perfection.
2. You must
become bewitched by and
disappear into another and put
him in your place. This amounts
to losing yourself, but it is a
loathsome kind of losing
yourself. This is the alienation
that we spoke of earlier and it
involves giving yourself up and
receiving an “alien self” and
mistaking the alien for
yourself.
This is a combination of
surrendering yourself and not
knowing yourself; it means
spending a lifetime in
estrangement, entrusting the
house of your being to a
stranger,
working under the yoke of
another and playing the role of
someone else. “Love of
faces/forms” is, in Rumi’s view,
this kind of estrangement and
alienation. You’ve lost yourself
but you’ve failed to remain who
you are.
3. You have
to become empty of yourself and
put someone in your place who is
“more you than you” and “more
yourself than yourself”. In this
way, you both “lose yourself”
and remain who you are.
Rumi’s works
testify in a hundred different
ways that he travelled this
third course and that what he
meant by “losing yourself” was
not drunkenness and
heedlessness, or alienation and
estrangement, or self-denial and
self-flagellation, or humility
and meekness; although humility,
selflessness, courage, decency,
even-temperedness and sagacious
unconcern are some of the sweet
fruits of “losing yourself” in
the mystical sense.
Rumi recommended loving
someone who is “more yourself
than yourself” so that when it
fills your being, it both
uproots your “self” and replaces
it with someone richer and more
fitting.
Rumi did not recommend or
aspire to an absolute emptying
of the self. He also wanted to
be filled; being filled by
someone who also carries along
the “self”, but at a higher and
richer level.
Rumi believed
that a lover should be empty of
himself, but filled with the
beloved; a beloved who bears,
contains and completes love. A
beloved who both kills the lover
and brings him to life. Both
destroys him and perfects him.
And this was why he associated
“losing yourself” with “love”.
He considered this to be the
reward of a lover who has lost
his heart to a superior beloved
who is “more me than me” and
“more myself than myself”.
Quite simply put: “The
life of lovers lies in death /
you’ll only find your heart when
you lose it”. In other words, it
is only when you lose your heart
that you become aware of it; it
is only when you fall in love
that you become aware that you
had a heart.
And this happens when the
heart joins “a heart that is
more of a heart”, and the self
combines with “a self that is
more of a self” and the soul
surrenders to “a soul that is
more of a soul”.
So, the
reason why love is the cure for
haughtiness and conceit, and the
reason why it is our Plato and
our Galen is because, first, it
turns dispersal into wholeness
and multiple-selves into a
single self, and, then, it
entrusts this self to “more of a
self”, the greatest blessing of
which is “losing yourself”.
In the tale
of the lover from Bukhara and
Sadr-e Jahān, after the lover
has been able to negotiate all
the impediments, obstacles and
rebukes and, finally, reaches
the beloved, the first thing
that he hears from the beloved
is that he should not fear that
“losing himself” means being
emptied; quite the reverse, it
means being filled with “more of
a self”. Hence, it is not a
losing but a winning; it is to
give copper and receive gold.
In the tale
of Bāyazid, what Rumi tells us
is that the gracious pauper had
been so filled with God that, in
that state of losing himself, he
made claims to godliness: “When
the phoenix of ‘losing himself’
soared high / Bayazid began to
speak and said: / There’s no one
in my cloak but God / Why do you
keep looking for Him in the
sky?”
And most
beautiful of all is the allegory
of the hen who invited a camel
to her house: “When the camel
the hen’s house entered /
the roof fell in and the
house crumpled”. Thus, the house
is emptied of the hen and filled
with the camel.
In a sense,
“losing yourself” is a
misleading term because it seems
to convey a sense of emptiness
and vacuity. This misleading
appearance is deliberate. It
ensures that the angel of glad
tidings’ message does not fall
into the wrong ears. It is: “So
that Our sweetens in this world
and the next / is hidden in a
veil of sourness”.
But it is clear to the
worthy recipients of the angel’s
message that that perdition is a
veil for being, that that
vacuity is a veil for the
sublime and that that “losing
yourself” is, in fact, “becoming
yourself”; nay, “becoming even
more yourself”. The secret of
this transformation is expressed
by the philosopher’s stone of
love, which turns knowledge into
the evident.
It was not for nothing
that Rumi was hostile to his
“self” and found death as sweet
as honey and sugar: “We’re the
foes of our selves and the
beloved is the one who kills us
/ Drowning in the ocean, the
waves come and kills us / It is
with the sweetest pleasure that
we relinquish our lives / For it
is with halva and sugar that the
king kills us…”.
It would seem
that “losing yourself” must be
understood in two ways:
impoverishment and empowerment.
“Losing yourself” as
impoverishment means being
emptied or becoming an “other”;
whereas “losing yourself” as
empowerment means becoming “more
yourself”.
*
*
*
So far, we
have explained the meaning of
“losing yourself” as
empowerment, as well as the
liberating role of love. We also
explained why this “losing
yourself” makes you strong as an
elephant and a lion, and as
well-tempered as the spring and
the beloved’s sweet wine.
Heedlessness brings delusory
strength, but being filled with
the grand love of a grand
beloved creates grandeur. Rumi
viewed prophets’ stern
countenance in this same light:
“Anyone who has the sun behind
him / Will have a stern
countenance without shame or
fear”.
But a few
points still remain to be said,
with which it may be useful to
adorn and conclude this article:
First, there is the notion of
bewilderment. When a grander
self replaces “the self” so that
“you lose yourself”, this
“losing yourself” goes
hand-in-hand with bewilderment.
Bewilderment is neither stupour
nor fretfulness; it happens when
a camel steps into the house of
a hen. It is the outcome of the
crumbling of the house of “the
self”, because a guest who is
more hefty and “more of a self”
has entered it. All mystical,
faith-related experiences are
intertwined with bewilderment.
And this bewilderment makes not
only your being but also your
speech tremble and quake.
On the noble
Prophet’s Ascension, too, Rumi
spoke about the bewilderment
that strikes the chosen few.
When Gabriel is unable to
accompany the Prophet any
further, the Prophet, alone,
drives his steed towards God
(and all of this has a mythical
and metaphorical aspect). And
bewilderment upon bewilderment
follows.
Even more
than this, Rumi considered it
religion’s task to evoke
bewilderment and he believed
that anyone who has not arrived
at a bewildering experience
(which is the product of losing
yourself) is not a true
believer.
Secondly, there is the notion of
formlessness and definition-lessness.
Bewilderment results from
encountering that which has no
definition, form or name. What
we can describe and name is
within the grasp of our reason,
but that which escapes
definition bewilders reason. As
long as an individual has “not
lost himself”, he is in the
realm of definition. But when
you “lose yourself”, you arrive
at the formless and the
definition-less. And it is the
realm of “the definition-less
life-land” that gives rise to
bewilderment.
It is as if, before the
definition-less, there was death
and, after it, there is life.
And this definition-less, “lost
self”, who sits beyond all
definitions, cannot define and
describe itself either. It does
not fit in any mould and does
not match any name or
designation. This nameless,
definition-less, “lost self” is,
in fact, the nonconformist, whom
Hāfez
spoke of—who has abandoned all
comforts and attachments. And
although he mingles with all
“faces” or “forms”, he does not
stop at or fit in any face or
form. He is “the servant of
love” and “free of both worlds”.
Because he is free of his
“self”. This is a desirable
love. And, so, “From desiring, I
shall never desist, until I
arrive at my quest”. And
although love has been described
as a blessing, the saying also
goes that you must “Seek love!”
It is when you stay still within
“the self” that you become
restless. So, be restless for
love so that you can “lose
yourself”, for this is the font
of every stillness and every
quest.
Translated
from the Persian by Nilou
Mobasser
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