“The rose’s rarest essence lives in the thorns” - Rumi

During my time when travelling with my father to one of our nursing homes last year I was reading some of Rumi’s poetry…

Once upon a time there was a brilliant and learned scholar. A genius of his times, who knew hundreds of thousands of lines of orthodox Islamic laws, rhetoric, treatises and nuances of every interpretation. All that fundamentalist knowledge, prestige and religious jurist ultimately taught him one thing: He was unhappy. His life was a success, but his soul was empty. He knew every ritual on worship of the orthodox Islamic idea of God, yet he never felt God's love.

And then, he got enlightenment after a chance meeting with a dervish. He felt the love of the real God, than an orthodox idea of God. And his heart knew love. His soul awoke from the dead carcass of orthodox thought and brushed off the cobwebs of fundamentalist impositions that create heavy anchors of fear on the mind of any sentient being.

Al-Rumi, the Masnavi became his Magnum Opus and encouraged the seeking of the real God through contemplation, sacred dance, music and poetry. His poems on love particularly have an intoxicating quality. Rumi was recognised as a great professor and preacher as well. He combined studies of the legal and theological sciences with the more inward and spiritual orientation of Sufism, but he was not yet known as an authority in the Sufi sciences, nor did he compose poetry. The great transformation in Rumi's life began when he was forty years old. In this year an enigmatic figure called Shams al-Din of Tabriz, or Shams-i Tabrizi, appeared in Konya (Afghanistan now). He and Rumi quickly became inseparable. Shams seems to have opened Rumi up to certain dimensions of the mysteries of divine love that he had not yet experienced. I highly recommend reading “Secrets of Divine Love” to gain a better understanding. For Rumi, Shams became the embodiment of God's beauty and gentleness, the outward mark of His guiding mercy. Their closeness led some of Rumi's students and disciples to become jealous, and eventually Shams disappeared. Some whispered that he had been murdered, but Rumi himself does not seem to have believed the rumors. What is clear is that Shams's disappearance was the catalyst for Rumi's extraordinary outpouring of poetry. Rumi makes this point explicit in many passages. He alludes to it in the first line of his great Mathnawi, where he says,

"Listen to this reed as it tells its tale, complaining of separations"

Rumi wrote about three thousand love poems, signing many of them with Shams's name. Now, if Shams is not Rumi's soulmate/twin Soul, I don't know what he is. Their love contributed to a greater purpose, enlightenment, it included pain and separation but it was very spiritual and had a purpose. When Shams left, Rumi was found in the mosque whirling around a column in pain and grief, his students watched him do that, and ever since this became the famous Whirling Dervish Sufi dance.

It is said that each and every soul has a spiritual counterpart or a twin that is their exact polar opposite. When the soul was created it was manifested in God’s image from the infinite source. One twin polarised to the yin or female side and one twin polarised to the male or yang side. Each of the twins retained a seed of their counterpart. These spiritual counterparts are linked together throughout eternity. Twin souls or flames embody a deep unconditional love that is eternal, pure and of the highest form. The love is "divine" in nature and is representative of the love that the universe evokes. Plato discussed twin souls in the Symposium, his philosophical writings on the nature of love, around 385 BC. The concept of twin flames should not be romanticised with the “eleven eleven” numerology, as the union exists solely to attain servitude to the planetary, cosmic and universal consciousness. Love that is apparent in the third dimension has traditionally focused on the attention and emotions towards another person and originates on a sexual or personality level only, often demanding persistent compromises to make the partnership work. The twin flame union would become a continual unified field with a gateway to the higher dimensional frequencies of oneness, inherently functioning as a single consciousness. It will not be dependent on the talents or vocations of either partner; it is the unit that is commissioned for service, not the individual expression of the unit. Ultimately, it becomes transparent that what you see in others is what you see in yourself.

However, before an individual can meet and unite with their twin flame there is a myriad of work to enhance the consciousness; such as releasing, healing and becoming an integrated whole. The heart must be strong and resilient through suffering grief, pain and loss as well as experiencing many unified and loving soul mate relationships; which would contribute to the intensity of being finally united with the twin flame.

To this day there is disagreement whether Rumi’s poems were his own or written for Shams. During his time the belief of having awakening of these spiritual centres of perception that lie dormant in an individual was the norm. It is believed that each centre is associated with a particular colour and general area of the body and varies from order to order. This overlaps with the idea of the seven chakras and wonder if there are any similarities to both concepts. The energies of the chakras (energetic wheels) are the basic raw energies of emotional states. When a chakra is active, or “open”, we directly experience the basic subtle energies that go into the makeup of the various emotions, instead of the emotions themselves. That is why we experience emotional freedom when the heart opens: the energy frees us, for the moment, from the conflicting emotions that usually fill our hearts. The basic energy of the heart chakra is experienced as love, joy, and bliss.

The help of a guide was used during Rumi’s time and was considered necessary to help activate these centres. After undergoing this process, it is said to reach a certain type of "completion”. The individual gets acquainted with the lataif one by one by Muraqaba (meditation), Dhikr (Remembrance of God) and purification of one's psyche of negative thoughts, emotions, and actions. Loving God and one's fellow, irrespective of his or her race,religion or nationality, and without consideration for any possible reward, is the key to ascension according to the teaching.

These six "organs" or faculties: Nafs, Qalb, Ruh, Sirr, Khafi & Akhfa, and the purificative activities applied to them, contain the basic orthodox philosophy. The purification of the elementary passionate nature (Tazkiya-I-Nafs), followed by cleansing of the spiritual heart so that it may acquire a mirror-like purity of reflection (Tazkiya-I-Qalb) and become the receptacle of God's love (Ishq) and illumination of the spirit (Tajjali-I-Ruh). This process is fortified by emptying of egoic drives (Taqliyya-I-Sirr) and remembrance of God's attributes (Dhikr) and completion of journey by purification of the last two faculties, Khafi and Akhfa.

The heart (qalb), is the organ which produces true knowledge, comprehensive intuition, the gnosis (ma’rifa) of God and the divine mysteries, in short, the organ of everything denoted by the term “esoteric science”. In short, this “mystic physiology” operates with a “subtle body” composed of psycho-spiritual organ. The word heart is sometimes used to denote the heart chakra and sometimes “the most hidden.” When Rumi was creating I believe that word “heart” was used to denote essence itself, the presence of true nature, in all of its facets well most likely with my favourite quote “the only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart”…