Rumi's Language of Silence and Love

Moosa Raza http://spirituality.indiatimes.com
The mystic, Jalalludin Rumi, saw the world both in its material and spiritual aspects, as a multipolar world — full of opposites that sometimes complemented each other and at other times, clashed. What Rumi taught us was to understand these inherent contradictions and harmonise them. "The life of this world is nothing but the harmony of opposites", he said.
The way to find harmony is not to get bogged down in the chicanery of words or in the hair-splitting of philosophies. The way to achieve it is through the language of silence. "When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues", says Rumi: "Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend".
Through silence, Rumi reaches a level of consciousness where he loses all his mundane identities. This is not an easy or pleasant experience. When an individual loses his historical identity, the loss is keenly felt at first. That is why Rumi cries plaintively "What shall i do, O Muslims, i do not know who i am?
I am neither Christian, Jew, Infidel, nor Muslim! I am from neither the East, nor West. I hail not from the land or from the sea. I am not from the land of India or China, Bulgaria or Saqsin, nor Iraq or Khorasan". Having lost his mundane identity, Rumi has attained a higher supra-existence, for he says "I have shed duality, and see the two worlds as one.
I seek One, i know One, i see One, i read One". It is in this shedding of duality that one is able to reconcile the opposites — sulh-e-azdad — and find the harmonious music of the spheres: "To look at the ocean, beyond the spray, to look at the essence, beyond the words".
Rumi wrote his Mathnawi, his poems, in memory of his master Shams Tabriz. The Mathnawi is nothing but a paraphrase of the Qur'an, and equally a paraphrase of the Gita and the Gospels.
In one of his ecstatic moments, he said: "I have sucked the marrow from the Qur'an, and the bones i have thrown..." Rumi had no respect for squabbling scholastics who lost sight of the spirituality of the Qur'an, and indulged themselves in splitting hairs about the words of the scriptures.
Nor did he have any patience with philosophers. "Paradise is populated by a majority of simple folk those who kept them-selves away from the mischief of philosophy".
Rumi's message is to rise above mundane identities, go beyond ritualism and scholasticism, beyond hypocrisy and the mischief of philosophy, and breaking the shackles of words to reach a state where we can say with him, "Beyond belief and unbelief lies a vast ocean. I wander carefree in that clime".
The path to reach that clime is through Love. And what is Love? Rumi despairs of defining Love. "However much i might try to expound or explain Love, when i come to Love itself, i am ashamed of my explanations... Love alone can explain the mysteries of Love".