Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. We will meet there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about language, ideas, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.
از کفر و ز اسلام برون صحرائی است ما را به میان آن فضا سودائی است عارف چو بدان رسید سر را بنهد نه کفر و نه اسلام و نه آنجا جائی است
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, born on 30 September 1207, Sun in Libra, Moon in Capricorn, Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.
The Sufi saint Jelaluddin Rumi is one of the most read and popular poets in the world. He was born in the Eastern part of the Ancient Persian Empire, which is currently Afghanistan, on 30 September 1207. Rumi underwent a spiritual transformation after meeting Shams, his spiritual friend and teacher. A legend narrates that Shams destroyed all previous Rumi’s books, emphasizing direct experience rather than knowledge. After meeting Shams, Rumi danced all day and sang all night. “He had been a scholar, he became a poet. He had been an ascetic, he became drunk with love.” Two years later his teacher suddenly disappeared, and was never seen again. This left Rumi with a terrible emptiness, and a sorrow that he tried to fill with songs and dances. During this time of grief he composed over 30,000 verses of poetry aimed at calling his lost Beloved. Finally, Rumi found that he was calling to himself, that the Beloved he longed for had been with him all the time. “All my talk was madness, filled with dos and don’ts. For ages I knocked on a door; when it opened I found that I was knocking from the inside!”