“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ― Rumi
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.” ― Rumi
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ― Rumi
“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” ― Rumi
“What you seek is seeking you.” ― Rumi
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, or more popularly in the English-speaking world simply as Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Iranians, Turks, Afghans, Tajiks, and other Central Asian Muslims as well as the Muslims of South Asia have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy in the past seven centuries. Rumi’s importance is considered to transcend national and ethnic borders. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world’s languages and transposed into various formats. In 2007, he was described as the “most popular poet in America.”
Rumi’s son and followers founded the Mevlevi branch of the Sufi Islamic tradition, spinning around and around and around and looking totally at peace while doing so. This ritual meditation is called sema, and here’s what it’s about, according to this website:
It is scientifically recognized that the fundamental condition of our existence is to revolve. There is no being or object which does not revolve, because all beings are comprised of revolving electrons, protons, and neutrons in atoms. Everything revolves, and the human being lives by means of the revolution of these particles, by the revolution of the blood in his body, and by the revolution of the stages of his life, by his coming from the earth and his returning to it.
However, all of these revolutions are natural and unconscious. But the human being possesses a mind and an intelligence which distinguishes him from other beings. Thus the whirling dervish or semazen, intentionally and consciously participates in the shared revolution of other beings.