Rumi on Language

Rumi's radical insight to break free from our prison of knowledge

Be silent now. Let silence speak.

Surrender the syllables you count on your fingers.

The river of countless messages is here.

Ghazal - 696

Prelude

Pink Floyd mashed up with Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham - sourced from here

A few weeks back, I delved into the dark side of knowledge - how it can leave us "feeling empty, scared, stupid, confused, lonely, persecuted, paralyzed and possibly mad."

The great sages, writers, thinkers and philosophers throughout history all seem to caution us about the curse that accompanies the pursuit of knowledge.

As we embark on this path, the sheer vastness of all there is to know can leave us feeling insignificant and empty.

The uncharted frontiers, cloaked in darkness, fill us with fear of the unknown. Knowledge's inability to fully grasp and make sense of the world's complexity breeds confusion in our minds.

Moreover, as knowledge pierces through the comforting illusions that lubricate the gears of society, it isolates us and potentially marks us as targets for persecution.

This damning awareness breeds inaction, and that inaction festers into "self-hatred, self-contempt and self-disgust" - a toxic cocktail that can ultimately lead to self-destruction.

In conclusion: how “Truth is possibly not a door to an open field where freedom awaits us but 'possibly' a narrowing corridor to a prison where self-destruction lies in store”

How do we break free from this cycle? How do we break free of the prison of truth?

Introduction

Last week I published a post about Rumi’s life and how it presented a possible example for us to break free of this prison.

How in his transformation from a religious scholar trapped in his prison of knowledge to a Sufi Poet who roamed the fields of love after he burned his books, there were lessons which we can apply in our quest to break free as well.

Lessons which he distilled in his poetry the Collection of Shams' (Divan-e-Shams) and the Masnavi.

If your exposure to Rumi has been through the countless love poems that fill collections which line bookshops and populate social media, it's probable that these verses come from the Divan-e-Shams.

The Masnavi is perhaps lesser known given its length, structure and form. With six books, ~26,000 verses, a non-linear narrative, and seemingly unconnected stories, parables, metaphors, allegories and analogies, woven together more by theme than chronology, means that you have to spend time with it to uncover its secrets.

Today we will try to unpack the first of its most radical and paradoxical secrets which can help us break free from our prison.

That secret is to give up language. Give it up completely!

According to Rumi, once we have used the tool of language to navigate the desert of knowledge, gotten tired of the traveling, broken free of the illusions which form the foundations of our society and faced the darkness — we have to stop using it.

The tool that got us to where we are cannot take us any further. It needs to be given up. Using it any further will only confuse us, leading us astray and forever lost in the labyrinth of knowledge. Talking about the intellect, the progenitor of language, he says:

Sacrifice reasoning out of love today. 

Real intellects are with God anyway: 

The wise have sent their intellects up there; 

Just idiots stayed away from Him. Beware! 

- Masnavi IV, 1425-1428

So why does Rumi want us to give up language so badly in our quest to unearth ourselves?

Why does he think that language, which allowed us to arrive at the truth, cannot help us break free from it?

Let us explore!

Words generalize. And divorce us from reality

From the illustrated copies of the Masnavi translation held by New York’s Morgan Library - sourced from here

Do names not tell of a reality?; Can roses grow from R, O, S, and E?

You’ve said the name, to find the named now try—

The moon’s not on the lake but in the sky!

Mere names and words if you wish to transcend

Then purify yourself of self, my friend!

- Masnavi I, 3470-3474

Rumi's fundamental issue with language lies in its very building blocks: words. He sees words as mere symbols, fingers pointing at the moon, always gesturing towards a deeper reality that they can never fully capture.

Just because you have learned the word "rose" doesn't mean you truly understand the essence of a rose. The word is not the thing itself.

For the more social media inclined amongst us, you can head over to YouTube to hear Feynman explain the same problem here.

This is a problem, not least because it creates an illusion of understanding but because it divorces us from reality.

Nietzsche’s Essay on “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" probably contains the best exposition of the problem which both Rumi and Feynman are trying to warn us about.

In it he explores how a word becomes a concept, how that concept generalizes unequal, individual things, and how that generalization can leads us astray:

“In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. A word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal.

Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.

This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted — but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model […]

We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us […]

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche - On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

This is why for Rumi we cannot begin to break free from the prison we find ourselves without the annihilation of language.

How can we begin to find ourselves amongst the words that are built to generalize us with everyone else?

How can we trust these words to describe our feelings, our sensations, and our thoughts, all the things that make us an individual when their meaning is in the very act of generalizing?

In my post earlier on Building an Emotional Vocabulary I talked about how, possibly, building a more refined vocabulary can help us in our journey of self-knowledge.

For example, realizing that labeling your anxiety as nervousness, unease, worry, apprehension, distress, fear, concern, stress has a big difference on how you see it, how you feel about it, how it impacts your worldview and how you deal with it.

But looks like according to Rumi and Nietzsche, this is a futile exercise. It will never lead us to our ‘true’ selves and allow us to break free of our prison.

Language deceives us. And makes us run in circles

Mystic in Abstract by Khusro Subzwari - sourced from here

All feeble-minded princes feel despair 

When they can’t see what’s happening out there: 

The road looks smooth, but traps are set below, 

When they lack meaning, names are just for show, 

Both words and names are hidden pitfalls too: 

Flattery is sand which saps all life from you.

The sand which gushes water is so rare, 

You’ll have to search for that kind everywhere!

- Masnavi I, 1063-1067

If words cannot grasp reality, leave an illusion of understanding and take away from us our ability to understand ourselves then where does that leave language?

Language, the collection of words through which we try to craft, chisel and give shape to more complex ideas and concepts.

Concepts which Socrates tries to grasp endlessly in Plato’s dialogues but never quite succeeds in ever defining conclusively. Concepts and ideas such as virtue, beauty, temperance, justice, courage, friendship, and ambition.

Reality seems ever elusive. The kernel which contains the truth is never reached.

This is perhaps why Socrates and Plato end up running in circles and not really arrive anywhere. That is the charge Emerson lays at the door of Plato:

“In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter […]

He argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson - PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER

To make his point, he castigates Plato for his ambition in thinking he could systematize the whole world in his philosophy and conjures up the ghoulish image of a Boa Constrictor eating up itself to make his point about how tied up in knots Plato actually finds himself:

“This is the ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He argues on this side and on that.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson - PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER

Ouroboros drawing from a late medieval Byzantine Greek alchemical manuscript depicting a serpent eating its own tail - sourced from here

Nietzsche, decades later, cuts to the heart of the matter with his incisive critique:

“We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called "honesty"; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as "honest" actions […]”

- Friedrich Nietzsche - On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

Nietzsche goes further, to nail the point home, finally explaining why Socrates can’t seem to make up his mind:

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. 

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche - On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

Wittgenstein suggests as much:

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations

In summary: Socrates and Plato try to “Know Thyself” using the dialectic of language; Emerson accuses them of running in circles; Nietzsche steps forward and explains that they are running in circles because there is no truth; and Wittgenstein later declares that there is no truth because language bewitches and misleads our understanding of the world.

That is the gist of it.

Rumi asks — if language cannot describe truth, reality, or the essence of things, then how can we begin to use it as a tool to unearth, reach and understand our true selves?

Rumi has no room for words, language and speech in his self-discovery. Referring to the divine, the beloved, the true self that resides within him, he says:

Words aren't for lovers to reflect upon: What then are words? Around vines, they're a thorn,

Word, sound, and speech I strike relentlessly; So I can talk to you without these three.

- Masnavi I, 1739-1740

Conclusion

Chapters of Masnavi I from my copy of Jawid Mojaddedi’s translation of Masnavi I

So where does this leave us then? Is the message to give up language completely?

Yes and No. Yes if we want to discover our true selves and No if we want to live in this world.

Rumi, after all, wrote the Masnavi using words. There was no other way he could communicate to a wider audience. Although it must be noted that, in his attempt to communicate, he chose poetry and not prose in order to circumvent some of the limitations inherent in words and language we discussed above. (a topic for another day!)

His message is not to give up words, language and their manifestations thought, speech and writing completely.

It is to understand that once we have broken free of the illusions of society to find ourselves facing the truth — the truth that imprisons us — we cannot break free of it using the same tool that helped us break free of the illusions.

The Socratic exhortation to “Know Thyself,” through the dialectic of language, as understood by many, will not get us out of it. If anything, it will lead us down the path of Dostoevsky’s anti-heroes.

Instead of trying to break through the walls with the same tools that built it, Rumi suggests, we should give up these tools entirely. Silence will then prevail.

This is how it always is when I finish a poem.

A great silence overcomes me, and I wonder why I ever thought

to use language.

Ghazal #1823

And in that silence, a voice will appear. A voice that will say to us:

Be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.

Live in silence. Flow down and down in always

widening rings of being.

Ghazal #2577

Not the voice that speaks in words but something that comes just before that:

“Don't speak so you can hear those voices.

Not yet turned into words or sounds”

- Masnavi, III, 1305

A voice that is heard by everyone:

That voice is the sole source of every sound, All noise is just its echo going round,

Each Nubian, Persian, Arab, Turk, and Kurd; Without their ears this wondrous voice has heard —

So what if Turks and Tajiks understood —That voice is heard as well by stone and wood!

- Masnavi I, 2128-2130

A voice made out of silence that will require patience from us:

I sit in front of him in silence, and set up a ladder made of patience,

and if in his presence a language from beyond joy; and beyond grief begins to pour from my chest,

I know that his soul is as deep and bright; as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.

- Masnavi VI 4911-49

A voice that should not be ignored:

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the center of your chest,

and let the spirits fly in and out.

- Ghazal #110

A voice of love which will guide us out of our prison…

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky.

Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.

Do it now.

You’re covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side. Die,

and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign

that you’ve died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now.

Ghazal #636

…and to our beloved. Our true selves. To whom we’ll sing about how they have have helped free us from our prison:

You wake the dead to life, you fountain of grace,

you fire in thickets of tangled thought.

Today you arrived beaming with laughter-that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.

You are hope's beating heart.

You are a doorway to the sun.

You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me.

Beginning and end.

Ghazal #1

Once we have access to this joy, we are out of the prison according to Rumi.

Further Explorations

Painting from the postmodernist painter Jackson Pollock - sourced from here

I find it interesting that beginning with Nietzsche’s distrust of language, Western Philosophy through Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard and others has found itself standing in the same corner in its understanding of language as Rumi. Albeit through a much more circuitous manner and expressed in a much more convoluted form.

While Rumi used his insight into language to navigate his journey inwards and communicate a uniting message of love outwards, the Western Philosophical tradition’s same insight resounds inwards and outwards, rippling through us and our society dividing and fragmenting our ‘self’s’ and our societies endlessly. But this is perhaps a much more nuanced topic for another day!

If you enjoyed this post, I would love if you would consider sharing the post to help me continue writing

You might also want to consider picking up some of the works below which explore Rumi’s life and his work more:

• Jawid Mojaddedi: Masnavi I-VI

• Allan Williams: Spiritual Verses: The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi

• Coleman Barks: The Essential Rumi

• Haley Liza Gafori: Gold; Rumi

• Brad Gooch: Rumi's Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love

• Peter Frankopan: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

I would love to hear what you thought about the topics discussed here.

Would you want me to continue this thread of Rumi? Or would you much prefer I write about something else?

In the meantime, I’d like to leave you with this lovely poem from Rumi about how he has stopped being a poet!

I used to want buyers for my words.

Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

—

I've made a lot of charmingly profound images,

scenes with Abraham, and Abraham's father, Azar,

who was also famous for icons.

I'm so tired of what I've been doing.

—

Then one image without form came,

and I quit.

—

Look for someone else to tend the shop.

I'm out of the image-making business.

—

Finally I know the freedom

of madness.

—

A random image arrives. I scream,

"Get out!" It disintegrates.

—

Only love.

Only the holder the flag fits into, and wind. No flag.

- Ghazal #2449