Rumi and the role of stories

in our twenty-first century

by Muriel Maufroy

I have chosen to talk today about stories and the telling of stories because stories have a unique way of speaking to us.  Apart from being wonderfully entertaining, stories speak to our unconscious and as such, much more than all the best sermons or intellectual analysis, they are, I believe, powerful instruments of change, which by the way means that they are also dangerous tools. 

Our modern societies tend to despise stories, even though the sales of fiction books, the cinemas, the television and our newspapers are proof that people still love them.  Unfortunately, they often do not realise how much those stories affect them, sometimes poisoning their minds, sometimes nourishing them. 

It is no accident that all the great spiritual traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Sufism use stories to a great extent to teach, and that all great cultures have been, and still are, shaped by mythical stories such as the Mahabaratha in India, the Greek mythology in the West, or the story of the hero Rostam in Iran. 

In fact, stories are vital to our spiritual survival.  And as the French writer and politician André Malraux said, "The twenty first century will be spiritual or it will not be."  So perhaps, we should pay more attention to stories.

The great Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi knew about stories. And it is significant and reassuring that Rumi's work and particularly his Masnavi, (which is filled with stories) has been best-seller in the United States for almost two decades. 

One may wonder why the most technologically-oriented country in the world, a country where television and computers have almost taken over people's lives, there is such a hunger for Rumi's work.  One is entitled to think that this success corresponds to a need, that the attraction to his work comes somehow as an answer to the excesses of materialism.

First, let's examine how stories affect those who read or hear them. 

I intentionally dismiss the telling of stories through television or the cinema for a precise reason.  We all know that when we are told a story or when we read one in a book, our imagination fills the gap, adding colours, smells, sounds, etc... In short, the story unfolds and takes life in front of our inner eyes, something the radio still does, but that the television or a film does not allow since they give us, so to speak, a pre-digested image.  The American scientist and lecturer Joseph Chilton Pearce stresses how important this faculty to create mental images is for the development of the human brain.  This is what he says:

"Having no inner imagining capacity leaves most of the brain unemployed, and a child who can't imagine not only can't learn but has no hope in general: he or she can't imagine an inner scenario to replace the outer one, so feels victimised by the environment."

Even more importantly, the same scientist explains that the capacity to create mental images is essential for the brain to develop the ability to abstract and, consequently, to use concepts.  So that a world without story-telling is an impoverished world, in short, a world devoid of true intelligence and, in the long term, a self-destructive world, as we can already observe.

Contrary to preaching in all its forms or to intellectual analysis, stories are entertaining; they take us out or our reality.  This is certainly essential if you want to attract and affect people.  Moreover the entertaining character of stories makes them easy to remember and, by the same token, easy to be passed on from people to people, from generation to generation, as it has always been the case in societies with an oral tradition.  Rumi has certainly succeeded since, after eight centuries, his stories are reaching an ever increasing number of people. 

But, apart from being entertaining, Rumi's stories, like all Sufi stories, are vehicles of higher knowledge, a knowledge which reaches beyond the intellect and beyond the emotions.  Such stories aim, first of all, at transmitting wisdom.

Sometimes Sufi stories are compared to parables or expected to have moral endings.  But their function is more subtle.  Those stories are generally not moralistic; instead, they surprise us or even shock us.  And they are meant to.

The shock to the mind is meant to expose our assumptions and as a result, to allow us to question them.  It is as if the carpet had been pulled from under our feet, and in the gap suddenly opened, a touch of real knowledge can enter, often without us being even aware of it.  Sometimes the shock also comes as laughter.  For teaching and humour are not mutually exclusive; stories can be fun and teach, all at the same time, and humour is another important aspect of Sufi stories.  (The whole lore of the Nasruddin stories is a good example of this).

And this brings us to the real object of this talk, that is, the need for wisdom and the various ways to bring it in our world. 

We all agree that the world is lacking in wisdom or spiritual knowledge, or to put it another way, that our technological advances do not go hand in hand with the spiritual development of humanity.  I tend to be optimistic, however, at least in the long term.  As more of us are becoming aware of the calamities we have unleashed, more of us too are becoming aware that the world is in desperate need of wisdom.  Doesn't the fact that we are gathered here for this Conference prove it? 

So, how can stories re-instil wisdom in the world? 

Those who pride themselves on their intellect may dismiss Sufi stories as being too simple.  They may even enjoy them while missing their real value, for such stories, as I have already indicated, are not addressed to the intellect nor are they addressed to the emotions.  But the fact that some people are not aware of the value of stories does not mean stories do not affect them. 

It is often believed that understanding is knowledge, though true knowledge only comes with integration, that is, assimilation of the nourishment a story offers.  Understanding is not enough and it is not even necessary at the time of hearing the story. 

The individual intellect (is not the intellect capable of production; it) is only the receiver of science, and is in need of teaching.

An American psychiatrist gives a very good definition of the moment of integration; she calls those moments "moments of Aha."  We all know those insightful seconds when, all of a sudden, everything is clear.  We don't think, we know!  It is not an opinion; it is not even something we can entirely put in words.  It is deeper; it is more complete, closer to intuition than understanding.  And this is very much how Sufi stories work and why they need to be read and read again, so that when a situation occurs, they jump to mind and then, the "Aha" moment happens.  This is the opposite of indoctrination. 

The knowledge that is not direct from Him

Does not remain; it's like a woman's make up.

M 1 (3463)

The knowledge that comes from integration is ours.  No one can take it away from us.  Conversely, indoctrination is only a set of opinions replacing another set of beliefs, which, in turn, can be eradicated in favour of yet another set. 

Sufi stories, on the contrary, impact on us because they are constructed as imprints of the various situations life takes us in. They are scientific tools, carefully crafted by masters such as Rumi.

With Rumi, there is another important factor to take into account, it is the very structure of his poems, which produces an inner effect on the reader and forces the logical mind to take a pause. 

Rumi's first translators in the west seem to have missed that point.  They complained that his work was lacking in structure, that it was disorganised and chaotic; they tended to select only what, from their point of view, made sense.  But nothing is accidental in Rumi's work or, as it was then said, particularly "oriental."  The Masnavi is structured, and structured in a way that aims at having a specific effect.

In short, the Masnavi is not only to be read or listened to, it is to be experienced. 

Professor Alan Williams of Manchester University, who is in the process of translating the whole Masnavi (he has already published the first book) says of Rumi's writing that it is "dynamic and polyphonic".  He shows that in one story, several voices appear, sometimes in succession, sometimes overlapping.  There is the narrator who speaks in the past tense, there are the dialogues in the present tense, there is the voice of moral reflection, and the voice that interrupts the story to offer an analogy or another story within the story, there is the spiritual voice, most of the time following the moral reflection.  And when Rumi himself talks, he sometimes addresses an ambiguous you - is it the reader or the listener, or is it God Himself?  (in Persian there are no capital letters) and Rumi plays on the ambiguity).  The logical, rational mind is frustrated, but the result is often dazzling.  In short, content and technique converge to affect the reader and make him permeable to the knowledge Rumi intends to transmit. 

Let me illustrate what I just said with one of the many stories told by Rumi,

The story of the Greeks and the Chinese painters.  (The story was told here.)

At this point, right in the middle of the story, Rumi interrupts it with a key statement:

From the multiplicity of colours, he says, there is a way to the colourless.

Then he adds an allegory to his statement:

 Colour is like the clouds, colourless is like the moon.

And he explains:

All the light and splendour you see in the clouds, know that it comes from the stars, the moon and the sun.

Once he has finished telling the story, Rumi explains that the Greeks are the Sufis who, free of books and artifice, have made themselves pure of lust, greed, hate and avarice;

Then another key: that purity of the mirror is the heart, he says. At this point, we lose the solid ground of our mental constructions.  The purified heart, Rumi continues, reflects innumerable images, and - a new idea - the heart of a Saint reflects the Unseen, that is, the colourless or what is beyond form, the very sight of God.  Then Rumi expands again:

From the heart-mirror the reflection shines back.

The heart is with God or rather the heart is God

We are faced here with a series of paradoxes and contradictions, and the effect is bewildering.  It reminds us of the facets of a diamond reflecting the light from several angles, or of the many fragments of a mirror, the very fragments of that heart-mirror Rumi has just been telling us.  There is no place to stand any more, and yet Rumi has given us all the elements in order to, as he says,

escape from mere scent and colour.  The polished heart transforms everything,

and Rumi asserts that this polished heart even transforms what man fears most:

Those who have polished their heart do not fear death; they receive the very vision of God.

To add to all this, there is an added wonder I have not touched upon: the rhythm and music of the original language in which Rumi composed his work, the Persian language. 

Now, Rumi's mastery must not deter us from telling or writing stories.  On the contrary, I believe that the power of Rumi's stories can be an incentive for us to write and tell stories.  This is what has happened with me.  In the process, I have discovered that stories sometimes travel in a surprising way, and reach people in places I hadn't expected.  Yes, this is a time to tell stories again: to our children, to our friends, to anyone willing to listen.