Jewel Lights in His Eyes

Sufi Saying:
“Why wait for a train if the train
isn’t coming”

“All I know about Sufis is that my teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, was one. He was in a universal place beyond the categories of religion, and even beyond the categories we have for love…

When somebody asked Bawa what reality was like, he said it’s like you’re driving a car, and you’re inside driving, but you’re also the landscape you’re going through. Evidently that makes sense when you’re enlightened. [Laughter.] At one point Rumi was out walking in Damascus, looking for Shams, and then he realized that he didn’t need to look; he was the friendship…

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, once asked me, “Will you meet me on the inside or on the outside?” With my typical English-teacher evasiveness, I said, “Isn’t it always both?” I should have looked in those eyes and said, “Inside.”

When I was twelve years old, I kept a little notebook of words that I loved: azalea, halcyon, jejune. I just liked the taste of them… We ate every meal, three meals a day, with four hundred people in a big dining hall. I ate with my father and mother and brother and sister and five other people at the table. Among the tables around us were several magnificent English and Latin teachers who were storytellers and writers. There was also a group at the school called the “Round Table” that met every two or three months and discussed a book. It was a very literary place.

We were Presbyterian, but I was sort of a river mystic. There was a curve of the Tennessee River near the school, right across from Williams Island. It was a very beautiful spot. People have been living in that place for fifteen thousand years. That’s where I learned about beauty, just watching that river… It was perfectly all right at any time just to wander off from the family and sit by the river. My sister had her own spot out on the bluff where she went. We would see her out there, and we realized that you shouldn’t go and talk to her when she was out there. She was doing what I did — just looking at the river.

I grew up in an ecstatic family. Anybody at any time could burst into song for any reason. My mother would just dance around the house, singing. I recall those two minutes at the end of the day when a golden light would fall across the floor, especially in April. I would lie down in it and hug myself. One time when I was doing that, I told my mother, “Mama, I’ve got that full feeling again.” She said, “I know you do, honey.”…

Both of my parents died in 1971, within six weeks of each other, of unrelated causes. I went into a period of grieving in which I felt as if I had blinders on. It also opened me out into a new freedom with bursts of creativity. My dreams became lucent and spectacular. Grief and joy very much did feel like two wings on the bird of my consciousness during that time.

Some members of the gay community like to claim that Rumi and Shams were lovers in the physical sense. I don’t believe they were. Rumi’s poetry teaches us about a friendship, a love in a place that is beyond sex. Rumi’s so honest, I feel he would have mentioned it. I think we would have descriptions of sexual acts. When I claim that his friendship with Shams was beyond touch and time, beyond teacher and disciple, beyond lover and beloved, beyond longing, I’m not being afraid of the erotic. They met in the heart…

Rumi once mentioned a teenager who had done something naughty that teenagers do; we don’t know what — masturbation, being a peeping Tom. Rumi said, “No, don’t scold him for that. He’s getting his wings, his feelings.” Life has to be lived. You have to live your sexuality. Of course Rumi felt and followed his sexuality, just as he knew the taste of wine and how wine affects the company at a table. Jesus knew about wine too. That was the good stuff he was making at the wedding in Cana.

I feel that one of the great failures of Christianity, of the organized-religion part, is that so little — nothing, really — is said about Jesus’s sexuality. The Mary Magdalene passages are expunged. We have nothing about Jesus’s life from when he was twelve until he was twenty-nine. That is a powerfully sexual time for most men. What we are given instead is monastic celibacy and a heightened sense of sexual guilt.

I don’t mean to offend anyone; this is a sensitive subject, the meeting of faith and sexuality. Just bringing it up is considered provocative, even offensive… it is not very well-known in the West how Mohammed’s sexual energy is celebrated in Islam. He had several wives, and he is said to have visited each wife every day. That part of the Islamic world is not well recognized here. You could call it the “positive masculine,” that which loves women and enjoys sex. And there are other parts of Islam that we are blind to: the courtesy and peacefulness; the attention to craftsmanship and the simple worker’s daily practice. There is also a respect for the feminine in Islam that we don’t see. We see the sexually repressed, fundamentalist elements, which are present in nearly every religion…

Wine is one of Rumi’s metaphors for our desire for transcendence, for finding some kind of friendship with the divine. But so are fasting and walking a mountain road and diving into the ocean to look for a pearl. The mystery of dissolving the ego is what Rumi continually finds new terms for, although, as he says, “Love cannot be said.” He sometimes invents physically impossible images for the process, like the individual worm eating grape leaves who suddenly becomes the entire vineyard and the orchard too, with no more need to devour, no desire, no more grape-leaf thirsting. The longing of a wine drinker is notoriously not satisfied by wine. Drunkenness gives one an uncentered, artificial kind of selflessness.

Robert Bly and I recently went to Iran. The University of Tehran flew us over there because they wanted to give me an honorary degree, which was good, because the one I’d gotten from the University of North Carolina had worn off. [Laughter.] We went to Tehran and Isfahan and Shiraz. While we were there, I fell in love with the Khajou Bridge, which was built by Sufi architects in the seventeenth century. They say the Sufis mixed the concrete of this bridge with egg white to create some kind of chemical reaction, or perhaps to foster a connection with mother consciousness. People don’t use the bridge only to cross the river. There are two levels to it: The upper level is a road. The lower, pedestrian level is a destination in itself. People are sitting there, meditating on the steps, singing, or reciting poetry in the alcoves. There is a beautiful atmosphere. Nobody is selling anything, and there are no guardrails on the bridge. It’s slippery. It’s wonderful.

When we were sitting at the tomb (of the Sufi poet Hafiz), busloads of kids came in, first- and second-graders, and they all stood around the tomb and sang Hafiz songs. They serve great sherbet at Hafiz’s tomb, and music is going all the time. The Iranians know how to enjoy their poets…

The U.S. State Department sent me to Afghanistan in March 2005. There hadn’t been an American speaker sent to Afghanistan in twenty-five years. They decided that because Rumi was both the most-read poet in the United States and the national poet of Afghanistan — his work is on the radio all the time there — the two cultures should acknowledge that they love the same man…

I told the man taking me around Herat that I wanted to meet a real Sufi. He thought a bit and said there was a man named Omani, from the Chishti line of Sufis. He was ninety-five years old, and he had been teaching Rumi’s Masnavi for seventy-five years in this little back alley. I got my guard, this six-foot-eight Minnesota-farm-boy soldier, to escort me across town to meet him. I asked a lot of questions, and we got to talking about Rumi’s friend Shams. Finally I said, “Who is Shams?” And he said, “Shams is the doctor who comes when you hurt enough.” I replied that I’d come to Afghanistan to hear him say that. He said that in this era, the longing is not deep enough, not intense enough, but in the thirteenth century it was deep and intense enough, so Shams came to Rumi. This man was so deeply gentle that I could have just drowned in his eyes…

I went up to the front in a Billy Graham crusade. It felt good, like surrender. But I know I’m not enlightened. I’m not there. People who are enlightened say once you get enlightened, it becomes so funny because obviously everybody’s enlightened, but they don’t know it! It becomes a huge joke… I felt something similar to it in the presence of Bawa. I felt real friendship, a connection, as well as a feeling of being out of time or place, a melting of the world. Bawa would say that this world is like snow: made of beautiful shapes, but it melts. Bawa’s teaching is slowly working on me.

Islam means “submission.” Yes, we want things to be democratic, with everybody equal. It turns out they’re not. Maybe people are equal in terms of value, but in terms of soul growth, some people are farther along. This man, this being, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen came to get me in a dream. He could visit me in dreams and be conscious of having done that. I would go to see him and start telling him my dreams, and he would say, “You don’t need to tell me that dream. I was there.” If somebody told me that this had happened to them, I might not believe it was real, but it happened to me.

We have such lack of trust with spiritual teachers — the Jim Jones–guru syndrome. But with this man, trust was no problem. Surely people felt this around Jesus or the Buddha: the knowing that he is the real thing. Bawa never asked for money. He said you don’t charge for wisdom. And if he was giving a talk and he found that they were taking money at the door, he would say, “Go find the people and give it back!”

My teacher used to say that other people were the jewel lights in his eyes. And then there’s Joe Miller, the homegrown mystic who is dead now. He used to teach by walking; he’d get fifteen hundred people walking with him through Golden Gate Park. He’d get to the end of the park, and he’d buy a bunch of us ice cream. He called it “headquarters”: this shared inwardness, the friend, the beloved. “Coleman, now get back to headquarters,” he’d say — get back to your center.

That’s the place Rumi calls “majesty.” “The Kingdom of God is within you,” it says in the Gospel of Thomas: “Lift up a stone and I am there. Break a stick and I am there.” Whoever’s saying that is the headquarters, the friend, the beloved, the sun. The sun that melts the snow.”

~ Coleman Barks, interviewed by Andrew Lawler in Sun Magazine