The dun-colored plains of Anatolia were broken only by the sky and the hills to the north. I could just make out the city of Konya from the air. Known in biblical times as the ancient Iconium, Konya had been a center of trade and learning for nearly a millennium. It was also the home of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, who was one of the greatest Sufi poets and mystics who ever lived. He is often called the Pole of Love since his knowledge of Universal Love, like the philosophers touchstone, brought the possibility for the knowledge of completion beyond form. It was and is all embracing to anyone and to any religious background. Thus, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi was held in equal esteem by those from many diverse spiritual and philosophical traditions during his lifetime over 700 years ago, and I speculated that, since this is a time for the understanding of the unity of religious ideals, perhaps Konya would become a place of pilgrimage for all those seeking to understand the basic truth underlying all religions and all human aspiration.
It was a twenty-minute bus ride from the airstrip, and I looked forward to the first houses and minarets that would signal the outskirts of Konya. Later would come the pedicabs, horse carts, taxis, buses, handcarts, and pedestrians. I could almost memorize the route through the modern section of the city to the ruins of the Seljuk medreses, or libraries, and finally the major street, the Mevlana Caddesi, which led to the tomb and museum of Mevlana.
It is very hard to put into words the deep sense of awe that Konya inspires in me and still harder to talk about the feelings I experienced sitting in my hotel room as I prepared to greet my friend and teacher once again. It was hard not to be in a state of expectation. I had been taught that nothing can ever be as we anticipate. There is always something greater than we have imagined, and things do not always work out as we would wish them.
I had risen while it was still dark. After bathing, I sat by the window, where I could just see the square by the museum and the mosque opposite. The dawn was touching the sky behind. “Allabu Akbar, Allabu Akbar. God is Great, God is Great.” The call to prayer had begun. Each mosque burst forth its cry to the faithful to come to prayer. I watched as the last person hurried into the mosque. Only the street sounds outside remained. As I prepared to leave the room, the telephone rang. “Your friend is here,” the concierge said. “He says to come down and join him for coffee.”
My teacher hadn’t changed at all during those years, and I experienced the same love and warmth as the first day I met him in the store in London. We embraced somewhat formally, and he motioned me to join him at a table. Two cups of Turkish coffee were already there.
“Well, Reshad,” he began, smiling. “It has been a long time. Tell me, how are you? All I know is second-hand, and that it has not been easy for you.”
I remembered how he had put me through test after test, presumably, to see whether I was capable and persevering enough to continue. I thought of the endless and apparently pointless experien
“Did you go to Mexico as you were instructed?” he asked. “You did not write, and I was worried, although I knew that you probably did not know how to get in touch with me. What happened there?”
I had to relate every detail: what I had done, whom I had met, and so on. I had seen him do this before, but this time there was a greater intensity in his questioning. When I told him about the egg story, he laughed. “But I said that the answer lies in the egg, did I not? I wonder if you have understood?” We were silent for a while. A waiter came and brought us more coffee.
“Now,” he continued, “let’s speak directly. You wrote to me and asked that you might come to see me again, but you did not say in your letter exactly why. I’m sure you must have some idea why you have come.”
I did my best to phrase an answer. Finally, I explained that I did not have a specific reason that I could put into words. Somehow, I had assumed that everything would be made clear just by meeting him again.
We spent a long time talking, over breakfast. It was typical of the Middle East: fresh bread, white goat cheese, black olives, and honey. My teacher asked me, again and again, for any details that he felt that I had not told him about my experiences in the last two years. Finally he said, “I do understand, and even perhaps sense some of the pain that you have been through, but I am sure you realize that without a real question in our hearts we cannot expect to receive a clear answer. So often in the past you just went along with whatever was going on, never daring to challenge events. What you learned was thus limited by this lack of clarity. But that was all right, since you lacked the experience to ask a real question. You simply tried to reinforce your own theories. It was really for this reason that I sent you back to your normal life in England, so that you could perhaps assimilate something of what you were shown while we were together and thus be able to ask a question of real value. Does that make sense?
“I think so,” I answered. I was beginning to realize that the fulfillment of our new meeting would be in the quality of my own internal questioning and in the distillation of all that I had experienced since we had last met.
“Things have changed now,” he went on. “You do have a little more experience, and I sense that there is a good reason why you are here.” He touched my shoulder for a moment and smiled.
“Honestly,” I said, “it seems impossible for me to phrase, in one sentence, all the questions I have had. There are so many, and so much doubt. To be straight with you, there is much that I am sick of — at least things that I have seen. So what about the egg? What if someone can produce from the inside of a chicken’s egg the materialization of an event already past? What if an egg is broken on someone’s head and the person does get better? Does all that really have anything to do with what I am pursuing? So much of what I thought I knew has turned out to be unreal. Now it is a question of not knowing which way to turn. That is why I have come to see you.”
“You thought you knew . . . Ah! Almost always, if we think we know anything absolutely, we know nothing. We can know only minute portions of the true reality. We make mental concepts of the truth in its bare essence. There is a wonderful saying in the tradition of the Sufis, ‘If you see yourself in the mirror, then all you worship are your own thoughts; but if you see God in the mirror, then God is seeing Himself in you’.”
We drank the rest of our coffee in silence, and then he turned the cups upside down on the saucer as I had seen him do many times before. It is a popular pastime in the Middle East as it is said that it is possible to read the potentiality of what lies in the moment in the pattern of the coffee grounds left in the cup. “It’s like the egg, isn’t it Reshad?” he said smiling.
Finally, I asked him what he saw in the coffee grounds. “Oh, it’s not so bad, actually, if you can find the question.”
He stood up then, suggesting that we visit the tombs of the great Sufi saints, which are in Konya. This was not a new experience for me; I knew when we turned up the main street from the hotel that we were going first to visit the tomb Shems i Tabriz, the wandering dervish and gnostic who had been agent to the transformation of love within Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi 700 years before. Shems was reputedly the greatest alchemist of his time, and his passionate desire was for friendship with one of those close to God. In Jalaluddin Rumi, he found the manifestation of his longing. Teachers, mentors and pupils to each other, each mirrored the love and knowledge of the Truth in the other. When Shems was finally killed by jealous disciples of Mevlana, the shock of separation caused such longing and refinement in the soul of Jalaluddin that on his death bed he was granted Union with God; at that moment there was no God but God.
We took our shoes off and washed at the fountain outside the mosque. We entered and walked quietly across the simple white-washed room to the grill facing the entrance. Behind it was the tomb of Shems i Tabriz. Our prayers were silent, and we opened ourselves to the moment.
Lines of pilgrims were waiting in the garden when we came out into the chill dawn. Some were in tears, all were in prayer. We walked slowly toward the tomb of Mevlana. Neither of us spoke. My thoughts ran on; it was difficult not to recall all the times that I had visited Konya before and walked the same route. As always, my heart burned in the knowledge of the great love that had been expressed here. This burning led me to the conviction that the saints whose tombs we visited were not merely historical figures. Rather, through their sacrifice and surrender, they had come to exist in a world beyond time and space, and therefore beyond the divisive walls of religious form and belief.
I spoke of this to my teacher as we walked. ‘‘Let me put it to you this way,” he answered. “When we have the courage to realize that life itself is the teacher, the timeless truth lying within the moment can come forth from the knowledge written in the great books and preserved at sacred places. The difficulty is that, traveling or studying books, including the sacred scriptures, is useless without your own inner experience.
“The major problem for Westerners,” he went on, “is that they are always trying to copy the experiences of others. This is ridiculous. No one has ever experienced what another has felt. No one can ever feel another’s joy or another’s pain. People can think that they know, but thinking is a poor and perhaps unintelligent limitation of what lies within each of us. This probably sounds discouraging, particularly if you cannot face your own inner reality and must chase after another’s, but it is true. It would be useful for you to understand this. Your experience is your own, and mine is my own.”
“Then why is it,” I asked him, “that so many people come back to Konya and to other places of pilgrimage, year after year? Does it mean that they have not learned the lesson?”
“Not quite,” he replied. “It is rather like the ocean. You may learn to swim, but the ocean is continuously changing, and so, in a sense, the swimming is different. It adapts itself to the mood of the water. The ocean is the same, but its surface is always changing. Thus, when you visit someone like Mevlana, or Shems i Tabriz, or the city of Jerusalem, or Chartres Cathedral in France, for example, you are encountering something of such depth that, no matter how many times you go and however much you have understood, further realizations and deeper understandings are always possible.
“It is a question of unfolding. It will be necessary for you to meditate on this, for I am attempting to speak of things that really cannot be talked about. After all, there is only one God, but He is continuously manifesting Himself in different forms, in different religions and through different masters, saints, and prophets. We cannot say that first there was no God and then, suddenly, there was God.”
We rounded the corner and entered the long street that runs straight to the tomb of Mevlana. Long lines of people waited outside the museum in front of the mosque and vendors plied a busy trade selling curios, plastic prayer beads, scarfs, prayer hats, and small phials of perfume. Flocks of pigeons wheeled and circled overhead.
In the courtyard of the tomb, a rose garden filled the air with scent and the continuous sound of running water could be heard from a large fountain built for people to wash before entering the building to pray. I walked behind him through the museum until we came to the place where the body of Mevlana lies under a heavy cloth of green and gold embroidery that covers the raised bier. We stayed for a long time, and I recall asking not only to be healed of my ignorance but also to know the question arising at the moment — which, if answered, might bring us all closer to the truth.
We walked quietly through the different rooms, looking at the illuminated manuscripts and paying our respects to those men of God who rested there.
I sensed a change in myself since my last visit. Then, I had felt an unlimited time for things to work out in whatever way that they should, but now I had the very distinct sensation that time was short. Whether this feeling arose from my own projections, or whether there were other forces at work, I could not tell.
We sat in the courtyard after we came out of the museum, and when the time seemed right I spoke about my feelings.
“Do you find this a problem?” he asked. “Do you remember how many times I have told you that really there are no problems. You get so caught up in the world of time that you cannot begin to come to understand the real world. Of course, things change and, indeed, are changing. But how should that be a problem? The only problem that exists is our own ignorance, for it is we who make life so difficult. I dislike this word problem in the English language. It is just a concept of the mind that is limiting, and I am sure you did not come back to meet us only to recreate illusion.
‘‘What you call a ‘problem’ is merely an unattended situation. It is quite clear. You have come all the way from England, but you do not know what to ask. Thus, all we can do together is to talk and enjoy being with each other, for destiny can only work to the extent that we put ourselves in its stream, and that, again, has to do with the quality of our intention.
“The most important thing to understand at this juncture is that it is we who have to change. We cannot expect change of others without making efforts of our own. If we do not work on ourselves, we will only see more and more so-called problems in the outer world. When we cannot solve these problems, we may feel impotent and frustrated, and that will most likely lead us to grief and fear. Before we know where we are, we have either become fanatics, or else we have retired further and further into ourselves and our relationships to escape the pain. Do you see what I am getting at? It is only by changing ourselves that we can see through what we call a ‘problem’ into what underlies it. The unattended situation is within ourselves.
“We have to look at what motivates us, at our repeated habit patterns, and at why we react as we do. If we are honest with ourselves, a change can occur, and we can hopefully see through the illusion of the problem.
“So,” he said, “is your mind still full of confusion? What keeps you from asking a real question? Really, all you have to do is to ask for what it is that you lack in your understanding, for what would enable you to serve better. Or should I break an egg on your head?” He laughed.
I was finding myself more and more agitated. Of course I wanted to know the question, but it had never occurred to me that the majority of the so-called questions I had asked before were merely spontaneous pleadings. They were not really based on experience and study. Now, after years of training, I could, as it were, feel the question within me, but for the life of me I could not get it into the right words. The frustration was intense. It was a sense of pain, a yearning to know something that could change my life and perhaps the lives of those around me. I felt irritated with myself. Why couldn’t I find the words to express the longing?
We sat out in the courtyard. A steady stream of people was entering the museum. The call to prayer had just begun from the mosque in the square.
I found myself getting muddled, but my teacher read my thoughts. “Finding the answer is not so complicated Reshad; but finding the exact question can be a subtle and difficult process. One word placed in one part of a sentence may produce an answer that in another part of the sentence will produce something entirely different. We have to learn to be so accurate with our questions that the answer is as clear and simple as possible. Just try to remember that thought, like life, is not linear but cyclical. Everything is turning back to its source. After all, is not Sufism called ‘the Path of Return’?”
“What is it that you truly need just now, Reshad? What would you most like to know?” There was silence for a while.
It came to me quite clearly, as though a window had been opened in front of me. I could see that there was something badly missing in my life. I had noticed it before, but the pain of seeing it had always meant that I would put the question to the back of my mind. I also found that I was in the grips of a very deep fear; the fear of saying the wrong thing, of making a mistake, of failing some cause that lies way beyond the run of normal, everyday life.
I felt like a child. The sweat ran down my face. I could not look up. I could only trust, with all of my being, that very shortly something would happen to break the intensity as I simply could not go on like this. It was perfectly obvious that my teacher was just going to sit there smoking cigarette after cigarette.
What is it that a child needs? What is it that brings security to the child?
As the realization dawned on me that I could actually see, I found myself struggling for air. He noticed it. “Keep going,” he said. “You are close to the answer. Remember, I asked what it was you needed most. I know that you are ready to receive the answer within and thus be able to ask the question. Just let it come.”
It was so clear. “I need to know I am loved.”
“Good,” he said gently. “Now we can proceed.”
This is an excerpt from The Invisible Way by Reshad Feild. ©Copyright 1979 by Reshad Feild. Reprinted by permission of Harper and Row Publishers, Inc.
