living in a hole you have dug.
So, at night,
I set fruit and grains,
and little pots of wine and milk
beside your soft earthen mounds
and I often sing.
But still, my dear,
you do not come out.
We should talk about this problem,
otherwise,
I will never leave you alone.
This is a poem by Hafiz, a Sufi mystic who lived in Persia in the 14th century. The first time I read it, I laughed out loud. I turned to a friend who was standing beside me and read it to her, and we were both strangely touched, standing there in the middle of a busy bookshop in the Amsterdam Red Light District, somehow awed by what the poem implies. What struck us both was how, in a place where life can be harsh, this voice seemed to suddenly speak to us in such an intimate way, as if Hafiz knew and loved us. If one lets the poetry “sink in”, one cannot help but take it personally, as it is obviously meant: not just directed at us, me, but at the one who hides inside me, a secret self I sometimes sense but rarely allow to be seen by another.
The other thing that struck me is something I had heard talked about, but never spoken from, as if it were already a fact for the poet. It is the notion of intimacy with the Divine, the notion that the Divine has a close, personal relationship to us, whether we know or acknowledge this or not. Hafiz is a Sufi mystic, Sufism being the mystical “wing” of Islam. The word mysticism is often associated with dreaminess, something vague and unreal bearing little relevance to either our daily lives or the world we read about in newspapers. To me, a mystic is someone whose central concern in life is the desire to know oneself as the Truth, as that which Is. In Sufi poetry, Truth in its personalized form is often referred to as the Beloved, or the Friend. To know – I had always associated knowing with information, with data stored in the memory. Hafiz – and other poets too, but Hafiz foremost among them – brought home to me that there is a different kind of knowing, much more direct and intimate, not unlike the way we know we are tired, or sad, or that we have a headache. We might ask: how can we know that we have a headache? And the answer would be that we know it directly, in our being, in our bodies.
Here’s a poem by Rumi, another Sufi poet who lived a century or so before Hafiz:
This we have now
Is not imagination.
this is not
grief or joy.
Not a judging state
Or elation.
These come
And go
This is the Presence
That doesn’t.
Both the knowledge that Rumi and Hafiz speak from, and knowing that you have a headache, or being tired or joyful, can be sensed directly, in one’s present experience, now. The difference is that those passing body sensations and feeling states can be experienced at a certain distance, as if they were somehow separate from us. They can then be stored in the memory, as something that once happened and is now gone. But this Presence, this there-ness, I can in no way experience and separate myself from at the same time. Rumi calls it the Presence that does not come and go because, even if we lose touch with it, it is always already here. It’s almost impossible to speak of because the word “it” already turns it into an object outside this direct, present-time knowing which is at the same time being. It is that which Hafiz addresses in us, across six centuries, and there is an immediate response. Something real is being acknowledged, it is like meeting myself face to face without a mirror, and I suddenly know without a doubt that it is good and right that I am here.
To me, personally, this is not only a new experience but one that is always new. It is not even a precious experience but a taste of the preciousness that I am. The closest my conditioned brain can get to understanding it in terms of my Judaeo-Christian upbringing is through a phrase from the Old Testament, where it is said when two people have made love with one another that “she knew him”, or “he knew her”. It is knowledge as intimacy, knowledge as, eros. It does not go down very well with any institutionalized religion that sees God as Out There, as not just the Eternal One but as the Eternal Other.
Some weeks ago, I had a brief conversation with a friend of a friend, almost in passing. The subject of mystical poetry flashed by, and did it bear any relevance to the way we live our lives, or, say, the events of the eleventh of September 2001? Before I knew it, I jokingly remarked that someone should write an article “on the political relevance of mystical poetry”. Then of course, this very idea started to haunt me. Poetry, mystical poetry, has political significance for me if I dare to live the truth that it conveys. But to write about it… who am I to presume to write about such potent and far-reaching ideas? At random, I open a book of Hafiz poetry, in a modern translation by Daniel Ladinsky. This is what I read:
Do you know
how beautiful you are?
I think not, my dear.
Again, reading this, the one who hides inside me responds, and there are tears in my eyes.
Let me explore this with you, reader, and let’s dare to take this as personally as Hafiz is obviously inviting all of us to do. Imagine for a moment that everything about you, just as you are, were already perfect, or if the word perfect has confusing connotations for you, just as you need to be; that nothing about you needs changing, correcting, or getting on top of.
Yet when I let myself touch down into what I believe to be my sense of self, now, this trying to hold something together that is doomed to fail goes deeper than merely the writing of this article. It is something I am always doing; inside that restlessness there is a sense of holding together a self that is like a castle built on thin ice. The more solid I try to make this castle, the more anxiously I try to hold together this sense of self, and the more likely it is to disappear with a splash through a crack in the ice. I am asking you, reader, to sense within your body-awareness for that feeling of holding on, of tension, of effort to maintain who you are, or who you take yourself to be. I am suggesting that what we hold on to, or what we hide behind, is a many-layered constructed self that we are almost constantly, in all our day-to-day, moment-to-moment relating, trying to defend. A mental construct, a self-image that is based on our confusing and contradictory life-experience. It’s an idea in the mind that we experience as a contraction, on the physical level as a tension in the body. This idea has become linked to other ideas, such as nation, religion, race, that likewise exist in the mind. It is in defending this identity-idea that we are sometimes willing to commit atrocious acts of violence.
It is this, I believe, which both Rumi and Hafiz and other mystical poets are referring to where they speak of hiding, holding on, and falling. What they are implicitly suggesting is that the sense of self we not only have created but are also constantly in the process of re-creating, is something we hold on to for dear life because we’ve lost contact with the direct experience of Being, not of being something or somebody, but of being as a palpable presence – a presence that is alive and real. We have all come to depend on an image, a concept, as a substitute for that direct knowing, we should talk about this problem!
Says Hafiz:
God was so full of Wine last night,
So full of Wine,
That He let a great secret slip.
He said:
There is no man or woman on this earth
Who needs a pardon from Me –
For there is really no such thing,
No such thing,
As Sin!
The good news, so to speak, is that we are always already this Presence, that which does not come and go. We were never anything but that – the beautiful Creature who hides inside us. Then, again, how do we “get there”? How can we know this, and really know it? This we might call the bad news. As Rumi says in the poem about sky-circles and falling: the road there is devastation.
We fall. I would call it the Fall into Grace. In a society where the dominant religion is Christianity, we’ve all been brought up to believe that we have fallen from a state of Grace into a state of sin. And, all of our spiritual efforts are directed towards a climb upward, up out of that state of sin towards a self that is worthy of the ascent into Heaven. The illusory, mental-construct self we so anxiously maintain to get us through the days and years we cling to as the vehicle that will get us “there”. Along comes a forgotten poet-mystic who tells us tells us that we can fall into Grace, instead of straining towards a peak we all secretly believe to be unattainable but for a very few. And would it be any fun to be one of them?
Pulling out the chair
from under your mind,
and watching you fall upon God,
what else is there
for Hafiz to do
that is any fun in this world?
Hafiz, Rumi, and a handful of others have already fallen. He himself has walked the road that is devastation, the devastation of what was never anything but an image, a mirage, a substitute. With the voice of the Beloved, or as he is sometimes called, the Tongue of the Invisible, he cajoles us with fruit and grain, he sings to us, to get us to come out of our hidey-hole. But still, we will not come out. We will not fall; we have already invested too much in the upward ascent, in the job of perfecting the ramshackle vehicle that is supposed to transport us to the dizzying heights where we imagine the Divine doth dwell. Why should we? What reasons do we have to trust that there is a God to fall upon? Isn’t it all just words? Isn’t all this mystical poetry just totally irrelevant to the business of keeping ourselves from drowning?
Our religion, and in their different ways all of the religions that have degenerated into institutes, is a religion of disempowerment. We are sinners, fallen from Grace, and therefore we must submit to authorities – parents, teachers, priests and politicians – that give us all these conflicting messages as to how we must change in order to stand the remotest chance of climbing back into Grace. Aren’t all those authorities, whoever they are, ultimately representatives of an imaginary Authority that exist outside us, a God we can never know directly? Perhaps, against this fundamentally disempowering view of ourselves as condemned to a life of strife to gain this Divine Approval, there is a gentle antidote.
What these poets are telling us is not meant to sound beautiful. It is the most radically empowering message. No wonder the Church has always persecuted “mystics”- those who put their trust in the Presence within. No wonder Sufis are considered a danger to Islam.
There is a contemporary American poet, Mary Oliver, who says it like this:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
It is the gentlest, tenderest of messages. You, as you already are, in this body, as this body, are already the Divine Presence. You are already flawless. As you are - not as you think you are, not as what you are trying so hard to be. A gentle and radical message of empowerment. Our hiding in a hole we have dug ourselves takes many forms. But fundamentally, basically, we have learned that we should hide – because we are unworthy, flawed, not deserving of respect. This message, this assumption, has broken, disempowered, oppressed, disenfranchised the spirit of millions, for centuries, and is continuing to do so. Through economic oppression, physical and verbal cruelty, war, manipulation, you name it. Our bodies are not ok, our sexuality is not ok. Our anger is not ok, our courage to be uncertain, our spontaneity and unpredictable creative spirit are not ok, our being what we are is not ok. And so, all we have is this sense of an identity that has, at least, a semblance of control, some semblance of solidity even if it has a tense anxiety at its core. Along comes this gentle message of the mystical poets. Gentle, radical, and devastating. Devastating, because it says, you are not what you are striving so hard to be, and because it asks us to be seemingly honest about our most treasured illusions. Gentle, because it says, you are already something infinitely, almost unimaginably more beautiful and profound. And radical, because it says, there is no longer any need to try and change. There is no longer any need to do violence to yourself. There never was.
When Rumi was asked what a Sufi is, he answered: a man or a woman with a broken heart. Every time I allow this poetry to touch my heart, as it gently calls me back to this immediate aliveness, it also never fails to bring me to an awareness of something in me that I call brokenness. Not only is there the pain in the heart that we all share, the pain of not being seen or supported, or even of the various ways in which we have all been violated, traumatized or had our spirit crushed, but also of defeat. My attempts at rising above, escaping from, or becoming immune to human suffering have failed. In that sense, I am broken. And even though I can sometimes still be fooled into believing that others have succeeded where my own personal identity-project has crashed, I believe that this brokenness, this defeat, is also something we all share, though most of us haven’t admitted it yet. Once again, Hafiz winks at us in humorous complicity when he says, O my sweet, crushed angel – you have not danced so badly after all.
There is no call, in this poetry, to turn away from or deny this brokenness. In fact, to the degree that we fail to acknowledge or embrace the acutely sensed experience of it as part of what it means to be here, we will be unable to acknowledge this brokenness in others, unable to fully relate to the world around us, and we will, I believe, continue to cause harm.
Says Rumi:
Those tender words we said to one another
are stored in the secret heart of heaven:
one day like rain, they will fall and spread
and our mystery will grow green over the world.
The tender words, which are spoken in this poetry, invite us to stop trying to turn our isolated identity-project into a success at the expense of others or the environment. They are spoken from the radical tenderness of knowing ourselves, our broken selves, intimately, honestly. We only need to look around to see that mankind is hugely traumatized and that the degree of trauma is mounting, not diminishing. We need to embrace ourselves in this brokenness, as this brokenness to allow ourselves to become permeated with the Presence that we are. Then, we will be able to relate again, intimately, with ourselves and with others, and with the world around us.
To fall into the unknown like that brings fear. It certainly does for me. This poetry, to me, is like gentle rain that waters the seeds of what is real in us. The world desperately needs these seeds to grow and bear fruit – to grow green. It is this living presence in us which connects us to a living reality that we all share. It is that seed we need to nurture. I, for one, am unable to imagine anything that is more fundamentally relevant – politically relevant – than this. In this way, how we nurture that in us which is most deeply personal and intimate – the One who hides inside us – is hopefully on its way to becoming profoundly political.
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