In certain places and times, the current of mystical awareness runs deep and strong. In the Persian empire from the 11th to the 14th centuries, a brilliant flowering of awareness came among the Sufis, and especially the poets. Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) was one of those conductors of knowing and being. Sufis call Rumi the "qutb," the pole, of love. Through Rumi comes a transmission of the divine to this planet in the regions of love. His poetry is a record of his enduring the experience of living at the core. In each human being there is a meeting with the divine. That intersection is the heart.Sufis say that the heart is "the comprehensive human reality," and that the way of love is a path of annihilation, of the beatitude of "as though it had never been." Our original state is nonbeing, nonexistence, and we spend much of our lives trying to break free of matter, free of mind and desire, back into the deep region of being and nonbeing we are at the core. The refreshment of dreamless sleep when we are, but are not, conscious is a taste of it. We are here then, but with no awareness of being here.
That region of being is described in the Heart Sutra, the central text of Zen, as having "no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, and no consciousness." To get there you must die before you die. Buddha's Heart Sutra draws one along to the understanding that in that dissolving nothing exists by itself. Everything interpenetrates in the ecstatic core where heart-vision begins.
When Rainer Maria Rilke, the great mystical poet of the twentieth century, saw the Mevlevi (whirling) dervishes in Cairo in 1910, he said, "With Rumi the scale is shifted, for this is the mystery of the deeply kneeling man. In following the peculiar weight and strength in his knees, he belongs to that world in which height is depth. This is the night of radiant depth unfolded." He was referring to the night of December 17, when Rumi died in 1273. It is celebrated as his union with the divine.
