Hazrat Maulana Room[ Rumi] The emptiness felt by Maulana Rumi [ Rahmatul-Laahi ‘Alaieh] before his encounter with his Beloved Teacher Shams Tabriz
[Rahmatul-Laahi ‘Alaieh], and the love personified by his master created in him a certain belief that it is only through love for the divine that man is propelled towards self fulfillment and achieving a heart free from deceptions and idols. His depression was so much before his spiritual transformation that the sense of love which he perhaps had not considered before meeting his master, causing the concept of love to bear huge significance in his mind. His concept of love usually addresses a sufi seeker before the stage of tranquility and rida, love is considered by him to be the fuel by which an individual is propelled to complete the path of wayfaring, Sulook, in the same way that Imaam Rabbani [Rahmatul-Laahi ‘Alaieh] sees nisbat,or love with the elders of the Sufi path. He describes the state before divine love as one of depression, or better, ‘separation’ from the Divine, which he diagnoses as the original basis of human emptiness and depression, like the reed flute which has been separated from the river bed. After this is realized, a seeker uses divine love for a strategic purpose, to transform their attachment to transient things into attachment only for Allaah Almighty, because only then, will they be free of the emptiness that is so characteristic of a human soul which has desire for transient pleasures. At that stage a person would have their attachments realigned on a healthier basis, with their first priority being the divine will, which is the ultimate refuge for those who seek eternal pleasures as opposed to temporary ones. Realizing the impoverished states of human beings obsessed with their own physical existence to the exclusion of all others, who are constantly trampled by spiritual demons, Maulana Rumi [Rahmatul-Laahi ‘Alaieh] emphasizes the transformative power of divine love as an all-consuming force referring to the Mount Sinai which was crushed by the power of divine love before Prophet Moosa [Alaiehis Salaam] who fell in a swoon. For people obsessed with physical existence, he brings forth an understanding of Tauheed that teaches that all human beings are in fact non existent in reality and the only real existence belongs to Allaah Almighty, therefore, only that persons life is true who lives through Allaah Taa’laa’s existence as opposed to that of the self-obsessed ego which calls constantly to evil. He instructs the seeker to become effaced in Almighty Allaah [God], so that none of the base characteristics of the ego remain, in a story in Book One, a lover knocks on the door of the beloved’s house, and when he calls “it is I”, he is turned away, but when he says “It is you”, he is admitted into a place where two ‘I’s cannot be accommodated. This story is part of a cluster of verses in which divine effacement is discussed. In a preceding story, when a fox goes hunting with the lion, he learns not to think of himself when dividing up what they had gathered while hunting, and in a subsequent story Prophet Yousuf [Alaiehis Salaam] is given a gift of a mirror for him to admire his own beauty in.. The mirror is one of Maulana Roomi’s [Rahmatul-Laahi ‘Alaieh] favorite images for the soul, tarnished by the rust of phenomenal existence which must be purified by discipline in order to reflect Divine light and wisdom. Hazrat Maulana Rumi [Rahmatul-Laahi ‘Alaieh] differentiates between divine love and profane love in one of his opening poems, describing the story a sick slave girl of a pious king, who requests a divine healer to fix her. The healer finds out that she is lovesick, and therefore heals her sickness by detaching her heart from attachment to that prince by poisoning him, and gradually replacing her temporal love with divine love. This is what it means that divine love annihilates, this is what is seems to someone who witnesses such a transformation, but in reality when the false attachments of a person disappear, it is stated by many of the Sufi s that divine love enters automatically, so it seems that it has annihilated all that existed there previously.
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