Coleman Barks: The Soul of Rumi – Part 3
Living Dialogues
Duncan Campbell
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Episode 54 - Coleman Barks: The Soul of Rumi – Part 3

"Duncan you are a real national treasure, you make me smile, and I love that you ask me to be on your program...I just love how you come up with ways to tie these insights we discover together.  I don't know how you do it.  It's inspired..." – Coleman Barks

I described Part 1 (See Program 3 on this site below) of this three-part dialogue with Coleman as follows:

This three-part dialogue on The Soul of Rumi is a great embodiment of the experience and value of dialogue, showcasing Rumi's life and poetry as a perspective of timeless wisdom and inspiration.   For those unfamiliar with Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in Turkey, this first program will be a great introduction, and a "feast" for the great many around the world already deeply appreciative of his work.  In recognition of the worldwide inspiration for communication created by Rumi in evoking the spirit and experience of unity beyond religious, cultural and ideological boundaries, UNESCO proclaimed 2007 as “The Year of Rumi”.  As noted in my prior dialogue with Larry Dossey, M.D. (See Program 2 below), Rumi has remarkably become today -- 800 years after his birth on September 30, 1207 -- simultaneously the most-listened to and revered poet in Afghanistan and the most-published poet in America.  His continually growing popularity in the U.S. is due in large part to the incomparable translations by the great American translator and poet, Coleman Barks.

This then is a link to the co-creation of a "dialogue consciousness worldview" that Living Dialogues is promoting and holding space for. 

Part 2 was described in these words:

Rumi’s poetry inspires in these dark times when we are trying to create a civilization without elders – that is to say, we are in the process of becoming elders ourselves in times of uncertainty, encountering unprecedented global conflicts and climate change. As I say in the dialogue, Rumi functions as an elder in our human journey as a species, whose words resonate down over eight centuries, across national, ethnic, religious, and language barriers, expressing the unifying essence we all share.  In the words of another eloquent member of the species, John F. Kenndy, 45 years ago this month in his historic American University speech proclaiming the world’s first nuclear disarmament initiative, in the name of creating together a planetary peace that would be beneficial for all mankind:  “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children’s future; and we are all mortal.”

To go forward on this great journey together, we need to develop the paradoxical consciousness which can hold our universal moral values and experience together inclusively and beyond ideology with our human diversity.  In that vein, this poem of Rumi serves as an inspiration and touchstone for the spontaneous investigations and ruminations evoked in this dialogue:

Today, like very other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.  Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

In Part 3, Coleman and I explore a number of different aspects of the need to balance both the modern mind’s excessive emphasis on the mental, the sky (which can leave us feeling “empty and frightened” in our fragmented, specialized culture), with our indigenous heritage of appreciating the embrace of the earth -- as expressed in the open-ended conciseness of the Rumi poem quoted in the paragraph just above (ending the summary of Part 2 of this ongoing Dialogue).  We need to develop this dynamic equipoise of spirit and soul in order to develop our own elderhood, as Rumi did in his time, in order meet the challenges of the 21st century, to create not just a localized sanity, but a planetary civilization which can communicate with and within all of its component parts so we don’t self-destruct.  Here are some excerpts:

Duncan Campbell: Well it’s wonderful you know to, end, as it were, on this note of openness, that, this acceptance of the uncertainty and bewilderment again is that kind of razor’s edge of going beyond any kind of duality, you know, between confusion on the one hand and apparent but evanescent clarity on the other. That you’re somehow magically holding both poles together and honoring both and in so doing reaching a higher state of, as you put it, balance, of compassion, or love.

Coleman Barks: Hmm, right, yeah. I think that’s true, it’s a, it’s a shaky walk –laughs- that we do here with our left foot and then our right foot. We explore things in the world and then we meditate on those, and then we, as we walk, the path unfolds. Yeah.

Duncan Campbell: In a sense, you know, some have called it the wisdom of uncertainty of actually embracing the uncertainty as the deepest wisdom and walking forward confidently but not because you know where the next step is going to land.

Coleman Barks: Right. He says there is an excess in spiritual searching that is profound ignorance. And he says, “Let that ignorance be our teacher.” –laughs- you know, so it’s good to have a mystic who says let ignorance be our teacher. Yeah, he also, in terms of this balance thing, he also honors; a lot of mystics praise the sky, the openness of that. He praises the ground, as well. He says, you got to have somewhere to plant your grief seeds, you got to hoe. And he says, try to be more like the ground. The ground has a great generosity and it takes our compost and makes beauty. It takes in the rough clod, he says, and gives back an ear of corn. So try to be more like that, give back better, like the ground does.

Duncan Campbell: I remember that, yes. It was just really so striking when I read it, try to be like the ground is. Give back better than you receive, in other words, whatever seeds fall into your life of experience that you enrich and nurture them and give back beauty rather than bitter fruit or some dried husk.

And I think that’s part of the theme of the masculine and the feminine in a way, that there is traditionally that association of the masculine with the spirit or the sky and the association of the feminine with the soul or the soil. Soul and soil. Soil is mater, matrix, mother, material. Some honoring of form, honoring of incarnation, honoring of things as they are without thinking they need to be somehow transcended. Already there’s divinity in body if we could but release ourselves into it. For me that’s a constant theme with Rumi, this open ended-ness of his. I’m very moved by this. Calling us back into honoring the earth itself and honoring the ground, and to emulate it, to be like it, to have dignity and generosity and courage of receiving toxicity, and finding a way to dissolve it and giving back better than you’ve received.

. . . . . . .

Duncan Campbell: Well one of the things that Joseph Campbell said that really struck me was in one of his conversations with Fraser Boa was that when a culture arrives at the point where it emphasizes the economic and the military to the relative exclusion of other values, it’s always the sign of a late stage culture. (CB: Wow.) And when asked about this by Paul Ray (see Program 37 on this site) and Sherry Anderson, who wrote the book, The Cultural Creatives, when they talked with him oh, maybe 1982, they said: “’Well, what can we do about this Joe?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I can just tell you what’s happening. I can’t fix it’ and then he laughed.”  And in another, separate conversation, that Duane Elgin recounted to me that he had had with Joe Campbell in that same time period (see Programs 40, 41, and 42 on this site), Joe responded to a similar question by saying:  “Not my job.  Your job in this next generation.”  And then he laughed as well.

So, you know, Coleman,  we’re just in a stage now, where like Rome, I would say the modernist culture centered in America, the global corporatist culture has lost touch, relatively speaking, with that deep source of generativity and I think there’s no mystery in that sense why Rumi, has ironically, become the most popular published poet in America today, because there is that sort of void that’s calling to us. There’s that desire to reestablish a sense of generative balance that you talked about right at the beginning. The need is to “find the Grail” in a new contemporary co-creative and cooperative way, to once again “green the kingdom (the Planet)” from “ the wasteland” (in T.S. Eliot’s poem describing the modern world) that it is becoming.  And Rumi in his timeless poetry is calling forth this sense of generative balance from us and we’re collaborating actually with Rumi as an elder spirit of the species from hundreds of years ago. He is perhaps as present or more present today in those of us that hear his call than he was in his own community, in his own time, in the 13th century.

Coleman Barks:  Yes, and I think it’s important to take up on a point Joe Campbell was making in that quotation you cited, that we talk about poetry and even ecstatic poetry in this time, when it might seem so extraneous, because it’s important to the inner ecology. It gives the soul a place that it can enjoy living. You know, and it nourishes it. I find as I read these Rumi poems to people in these terrible times, after the 9/11 terrorist attack and before whatever the next one is, that they feel fed somehow by these poems in a way that’s important.

Duncan Campbell: I think that’s the balance that has to be struck if we’re going to go forward, it’s something that I think we can look to the experience of Rome and what happened when that balance was not struck. We may repeat that history or we may be able to go beyond it. But I think that’s what’s up, it seems to be at this point, and I think Joe Campbell really put his finger on it when he said if we lens it exclusively or preponderantly through the economic and military viewpoint – the merely measurable and mental viewpoint -- we’ve lost touch with some crucial and essential part of ourselves. So that when we talk about ecstatic poetry, the word ecstasy itself means “to stand outside of”.  To stand outside of is the literal translation of ex-stasis, so we need to train ourselves to “stand outside of” the existing either-or, polarizing paradigm and reclaim some more fundamental aspect of our universal and shared humanity which can be the bridge building that will lead beyond the impasse.

And in the end, we need to remember that Rumi exhorts us not to go to meet on a morally relativistic “field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing”, but to meet in a “field beyond ideas [exclusivistic and polarizing, ideological and rigid] of wrongdoing and rightdoing”, a very different place of open-hearted, open-minded cross-cultural common communication, no longer clinging to our narrow idea of being the only one who is or ones who are “right”, but to learn from one another and to be in dialogue and work together.

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Transcript

Transcript

Female voice: This program is brought to you by PersonalLifeMedia.com.

Coleman Barks: Thank you Duncan. You are a real…national treasure. (chuckle) You make me smile. I really appreciate you and I love it that you asked me to come on your program.

Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous counsels and ancient wisdom traditions, through the work of Western visionaries, such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning, a “dia” –flow- of “logos” –meaning- beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now, as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

Duncan Campbell: Welcome once again to Living Dialogues. I’m your host Duncan Campbell and again I’m delighted to have with me Coleman Barks, uh, the great American poet, and translator of Rumi, 13th century Persian poet, who has now become in our new millennium, the most popular published poet in America. Coleman Barks in addition to being a poet in his own right, uh has taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia for many years and has appeared on Bill Moyers, two PBS poetry specials, which has brought him wide attention and acclaim.

And so Coleman, once again, uh, real delight to have you here participating with me in Living Dialogues.

Coleman Barks: Thank you, glad to be here.

Duncan Campbell: And as observed in our prior dialogues, there is some spirit of Rumi or whatever coming through in these dialogues, not only (CB: ha, ha) when we read his poems but in the kind of delightful play and some surprise of things that occur in the dialogues. And so one thing I thought we might talk about um, to begin this, uh, is the spirit of Rumi. Uh, how would you describe having lived with it now for 25 years, uh, the spirit of Rumi? And, and I mention this uh, because in your most recent book, The Soul of Rumi, you indicate that at this moment you’ve come to the end of a particular cycle. That having lived and worked with the spirit of Rumi for 25 years, you are going to, for the nuts, put it aside and work with your own poetry, but keeping the early morning exercise of (CB: yeah, yeah) of visiting with Rumi (CB: right). Uh, but, you know, since you’re at a cusp and a cycle here with Rumi would it be just a way to ruminate (CB: ha, ha, ah) if you will, on what this has meant to you?

Coleman Barks: Well, I, I hope it, um, gives me balance, uh…he is, he is himself, um a poise between many different things that, uh, that, that, the balance of surrender and discipline, being a beautiful one. And uh, a balance of the masculine and the feminine, I think. Uh, what they call the jalal and the jamal, uh, he deeply honors the, the gentleness, the intuition, and the sweetness of the feminine. Um, you mind if I read a little section of the Masnavi here about that?

Duncan Campbell: Tell us uh, for our listeners, what is the Masnavi,this last written poem?

Coleman Barks: Masnavi is 64,000 lines of poetry, uh, 6 books uh, of a single poem that wanders uh, through many different uh, of, of landscapes. Uh, it’s kind of, it’s kind of sublime jazz. That he (chuckle) dictated to his uh, his uh, scribe Hussam-e-Chelebi, uh the last twelve years of his life, as, as they walked around uh, Konya, and the vineyards, and the baths, and streets, and also as part of uh, his teaching in the, in the madresa, uh the learning community. And here is a little section of that, he says,

There is a tradition that Muhammad said “A wise man will listen and be led by a woman, while an ignorant man will not.” Someone too fiercely drawn by animal urges lacks kindness and the gentle affections that keep men human (chuckle) anger and sharp desiring are animal qualities but loving tenderness toward women shows someone no longer pulled along by wanting. The core of the feminine comes directly as the ray of the sun. Not the earthy figure you hear about in love songs, there’s more to her mystery than that, you might say, she’s not from the manifest world at all, but the creator of it.

You can’t honor the feminine any more than that, yeah, he says, she’s, maybe she’s not from the manifest world at all but the source of it.

Duncan Campbell: The great mother.

Coleman Barks: The great mother, yeah, Anatolia you know, Ana-tolia, this is the, this is the region of the mothers. Uh, that great Hittite mother that they dup up in Catal Huyuk, the oldest town and the, and the Diana of Ephesus, you know, he’s surrounded by, by that mother energy there on that peninsula. The peninsula that is Turkey. He’s buried in uh, he lived most of his adult life in uh, Konya, Turkey. Yeah.

Duncan Campbell: Didn’t you and Robert Bly, the poet, go back (CB: We did) at the invitation of the Turkish government in December of 2000 (CB: Right) to honor the, uh, it was the anniversary of Rumi’s death but is also known as his wedding night (CB: Yeah) the night he merged with the divine (CB: Uh, huh, right) is the way they describe his death.

Coleman Barks: Uh, the 727th anniversary of that. Uh, the Turkish government flew us over and gave us plaques, uh, we’re not sure what those plaques say (chuckle) but we think it might have to do with tourism. (laughs) We are, uh, Rumi brings a lot of Western Europeans and Americans into Turkey. Yeah, I, I love that country. Beautiful and uh, yeah.

Duncan Campbell: Well I, I, uh, I think this notion of balance and poise that you’ve been talking about really is uh, a wonderful way of looking at the essence of Rumi because we’ve talked about the necessity of grief as an inherent component of joy. In a sense you can’t have one without the other and I’m reminded of an old Russian proverb, uh, that says, we know in Russia, that you cannot have great joy without having experience deep grief. (CB: Hmm) That there’s some kind of symmetry there, that when we try to edit out our experience and uh, only, uh, put on the smiling face or only have the sense of order and control or only anything without uh, having both poles in this complex dance and relationship, it doesn’t work. It’s manageable to a point but it doesn’t go to the depths of the mystery and in moments of great challenge, than we find ourselves bewildered and in fact, bewildered by our own bewilderment. (CB: Muh) In fact, I just say that because a great Tibetan teacher one time was asked, “What is the nature of enlightenment? Are people that are enlightened also confused?” And he said, “Everyone is bewildered, the only difference is that if you are enlightened, you are not bewildered by your own bewilderment.”

Coleman Barks: Ha, ha, ha, I like that.

Duncan Campbell: And I think there’s a line somewhere in one of these poems, I don’t have it right ready at hand, where Rumi talks about bewilderment or you perhaps in of your introductions talk about uh, dancing with the bewilderment and perhaps as we speak, I can find that particular line.

Coleman Barks: It’s uh, it’s very important uh, station that Rumi explores, that one of bewilderment. Uh, some of the poems are so wild, that they almost turn into gibberish. Um, he has one, this is not from the new book, from uh, The Essential Rumi, he says, he says,

I have five things to say, um, five fingers to give into your grace. First, when I was apart from you, this world did not exist nor any other. Second, whatever I was looking for was always you. Third, why did I (laughs) ever learn to count to three. Fourth, my cornfield is burning. Fifth, this finger stands for reveal, and this is for something else, is there a difference? Are these words or tears, is weeping speech, what shall I do my love?

(laughs) You think he’s going to be so organized, like a professor and he has five things to say, you know, and then he just disintegrates in the middle of the whole thing.

Duncan Campbell: Well it’s wonderful you know to, end, as it were, on this note of uh, openness, that uh, this acceptance of the bewilderment, again is that kind of razor’s edge of going beyond any kind of duality, you know, between confusion on the one hand and clarity on the other. That you’re somehow magically holding both poles together and honoring both and in doing so, uh, you know, reaching a higher state of, as you put it, balance, or uh, compassion, or love.

Coleman Barks: Hmm, right, yeah. I think that’s true, it’s a, it’s a shaky walk –laughs- that we do here with our left foot and then our right foot. We explore things in the world and then we meditate on those, and then we, as we walk, the path unfolds. Yeah.

Duncan Campbell: In a sense, you know, some have called it the wisdom of uncertainty of actually embracing the uncertainty as the deepest wisdom and walking forward confidently but not because you know where the next step is going to land.

Coleman Barks: Right. He says there is an excess in spiritual searching that is profound ignorance. And he says, “Let that ignorance be our teacher.” –laughs- you know, so it’s good to have a mystic who says let ignorance be our teacher. Yeah, um, he also, in terms of this balance thing, he also honors; a lot of mystics praise the sky, the openness of that. He praises the ground, as well. He says, you got to have somewhere to plant your grief seeds, you got to hoe. And he says, try to be more like the ground. The ground has a great generosity and it takes our compost and makes beauty. It takes in the rough clod, he says, and gives back an ear of corn. So try to be more like that, give back better, like the ground does.

Duncan Campbell: I remember that, yes. It was just really so striking when I read it, try to be like the ground is. Give back better than you receive, in other words, whatever seeds fall into your life of experience that you enrich and nurture them and give back beauty rather than bitter fruit or some dried husk.

Coleman Barks: Right, yeah.

Duncan Campbell: And I think that’s part of the theme of the masculine and the feminine in a way, that there is uh, traditionally that association of the masculine with the spirit or the sky and the association of the feminine with the soul or the soil. Soul and soil. Yeah, mater, matrix, mother, material. Some honoring of form, honoring of incarnation, honoring of things as they are without thinking they need to be somehow transcendent. Already there’s divinity in body if we could but release ourselves into it. For me that’s a constant theme with Rumi, this open ended-ness of his, but this very point that you’re making, I’m very moved by this. Calling us back into honoring the earth itself and honoring the ground, and uh, to emulate it, to be like it, to have dignity and generosity and courage of receiving, uh, toxicity, and somehow dissolving it and uh, giving back better than you’ve received.

Coleman Barks: Yeah, um. And related to this, he also honors uh, animals. Dogs especially (laughs) are beloved of the Sufi’s because they’re so faithful and they’re so excited of when we come back home. And uh, and they uh, (DC: there’s nothing like it) there’s nothing like a dog, is there. And so he calls, he says, “Try to be like a loved dog,” he says, “There are loved dogs who don’t, no one knows the name of, give your life to be one of them.” There’s story about Rumi who was teaching one day in the square and he was talking. He kept on talking uh, like we’re doing here (chuckles) on it and people just left and had to go home and uh, it got dark and there was just a line of 5 or 6 or 7 dogs there, listening to him. And he says, those are, you are my real students. There are a lot of stories about Rumi and animals.

Duncan Campbell: Oh, I’m reminded, as you’re speaking, of a statement I heard somewhere, where someone was saying that all dogs are bodhisattvas. You know and I guess, some dogs have may have uh, have too much pain in their life. Usually by an association of a distressed human but uh, you know in general, you’re quite right about uh, the beauty of animals and particularly dogs in that respect. And you have a section of your new book called, A Small Dog Trying to Get You to Play: The Lighthearted Path. Perhaps you could talk about that and about Rumi’s relationship with and appreciation of the animal spirit.

Coleman Barks: Well, that, he, he, one of his images of what the, how the soul is with the personality, is that the soul is the human being and the personality is the small dog that’s just trying to get you to play with it. Trying to get you to loosen up a little bit, the way puppies do, uh. And um, that interchange seems so endearing to me (DC: To come into the moment) Right.

Duncan Campbell: Inviting you to just be here with all of your high-falutin’ thoughts and you know, preoccupations, worries, and aspirations, and just be here.

Coleman Barks: Yeah, he says, “I want to dance here in this time, not in the spirit where eternity is.” He says, I want to dance now, in this time, um. So yeah, it’s important that Sufi’s are called “Children of the Moment” and uh, everything is in that.

Duncan Campbell: In that same little chapter you talk about, we all need a ball to throw and a shawl to pray. You know, a way of being in the moment and also being connected (CB: Wear a big wrap) to be wrapped, pun intended here, rapt and wrapped. You mention that also in your book. You then talk about this distinction and coming together of the fana and the baqa, another polarity, perhaps you could talk about that a bit.

Coleman Barks: Well, it’s an idea I had about these two Arabic words for ways of experiencing the divine. The one is fana or the streaming of the human out into the divine and images occur around that of drunkenness and of dazzlement and of being turned into particles somehow. Uh, baqa, means the other, the streaming of the divine into the human so it’s a walk back down the visionary mountain into the ordinary daylight of the town and the, doing the particular work with a particular person and the absorption in that. Both of them are streaming across the dorsal of consciousness and some of his poems flow one way and some of them flow the other way and sometimes, in one poem, you have them flowing both ways simultaneously. So, I thought it was going to be a way of clarifying something that is poetry but it sort of got way out of hand for me and uh, I hope that section is not too confusing but uh, it was helpful to me at the time.  

Duncan Campbell: Well again, it’s this notion of the dance and play of the uh, of the opposites and how Rumi never seems able to be captured like a single point of view. He alights here, he alights there, and in the end the poem is always opening, and opening, and opening, as well as grounding at the same time. So that there’s a sense in a way of the open-heartedness, we might say, as the, as one of the themes of Rumi’s poetry. That it’s transformative, it’s not something that one encounters and stays the same.

Coleman Barks: That’s right. His image, for what poem, one of his images for what a poem, poems are, his poetry is, is an ocean. And so it’s continuously in motion and continuously the layers of awareness are mixing and the drop is becoming the whole and also, weirdly, the whole has come to court the drop. That is weird.

Duncan Campbell: That’s a beautiful image.

Coleman Barks: Yeah, he says sometimes the ocean comes to court the drop. That’s a baqa. Coming back down, into limitations, the gorgeous container of some small action, you know, he calls it sewing, you’re in your tailor shop sewing the robe of absence.

Duncan Campbell: Oh, beautiful. You know these images are literally sort of soul enriching and mind stopping at the same time. You hear one and immediately you go into a kind of silence.

Coleman Barks: Right, I don’t think you’re supposed to take a lot of them at once. Uh, you’re supposed to find something that strikes you and then, my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen used to say, “Take small steps.” He told me, he says, “You want to be wise too quickly.” He says, “Just take tiny little sips and then assimilate that and then take another one.” It was one of his teachings for me.

Duncan Campbell: It’s a wonderful teaching. And as we’re talking here, I was looking for a small sip. There was one particular couplet that I have not yet found, um, in I believe in your new book, but it has something to do with going to the other shore, as you say, the fana. Touching that sort of divine transcendence and then coming back across the threshold. And it has to do with a sense of bewilderment, that you accept and surrender to the bewilderment of the mystery and you come back and you’re inspired to act with kindness and generosity. That’s the essence of it and it’s said of course, quite beautifully.

Coleman Barks: Yeah, I remember that too (DC: Perhaps we can find it) but I can’t remember where it is (laughs) anyhow. Yeah. Here’s one.

Longing is the core of mystery. Longing itself brings the cure. The only rule is suffer the pain. Your desire must be disciplined and what you want to happen in time sacrificed.

Duncan Campbell: Again and again we have that sense of surrender. Surrendering any attempt to hold on. I’m reminded actually of a phrase from Ram Dass’ teacher Neem Karoli Baba that comes to my mind for some reason now where he said, “It is better to honor all things as divine rather than to try to figure it out.” And in a sense this so called mystical celebration of Rumi, it’s mystical, in the sense not that it can’t be understood or not that it doesn’t penetrate your heart but in that it can’t be pinned down into a doctrine or a belief system. It can’t be held within the smaller confines of the mind alone. It has to move into that oceanic feeling of the heart.

Coleman Barks: Um, that’s certainly very clear to me. I could not figure this thing out.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell