The beloved who is near and hidden

It’s been far too long since I translated any Persian, so here’s a poem by the master of masters, Mawlana Rumi, in the simple but beautiful rajaz muthamman meter:

ay bā man-o penhān cho del, az del salām-at mīkonam.

ای با من و پنهان چو دل از دل سلامت می کنم
تو کعبه‌ای هر جا روم قصد مقامت می کنم

Hey you, who’re with me and are yet hidden, like my heart—
my heartfelt greetings to you!
You’re the Ka‘bah: wherever I go, I head straight for your place.

هر جا که هستی حاضری از دور در ما ناظری
شب خانه روشن می شود چون یاد نامت می کنم

Wherever you are, you’re present, as the supervisor within us from afar;
The bed-chamber is flooded with light when I remember your name.

گه همچو باز آشنا بر دست تو پر می زنم
گه چون کبوتر پرزنان آهنگ بامت می کنم

Sometimes I briefly alight, like a friendly falcon, upon your arm;
Sometimes I head for your roof, like a pigeon fluttering its wings.

گر غایبی هر دم چرا آسیب بر دل می‌زنی
ور حاضری پس من چرا در سینه دامت می کنم

If you’re absent at every moment, then why do you injure my heart?
And if you’re present, then why do I try to ensnare you in my bosom?

دوری به تن لیک از دلم اندر دل تو روزنیست
زان روزن دزدیده من چون مه پیامت می کنم

You’re far from me physically, but there’s a window from my heart onto yours;
From that stolen window, I send you a message, like the moon.

ای آفتاب از دور تو بر ما فرستی نور تو
ای جان هر مهجور تو جان را غلامت می کنم

O sun, from afar do you shine your light upon me;
O you, who are life to all abandoned by you, I serve you as a slave.

من آینه دل را ز تو این جا صقالی می دهم
من گوش خود را دفتر لطف کلامت می کنم

I give to the mirror of my heart your lustre;
I make my ears a record for your delicate words!

در گوش تو در هوش تو و اندر دل پرجوش تو
این‌ها چه باشد تو منی وین وصف عامت می کنم

In your ear, in your mind, in your exuberant heart
Whatever may be, you’re mine—
thus do I generally describe you.

On imagination, meditation, and bringing-into-being

In this fascinating interview, Tanya Luhrmann addresses the tremendous importance of imagination in religious traditions such as American evangelism. The idea that religion is “belief”, the affirmation of the truth-value of some proposition, is a particularly Western, Protestant, understanding of religion, and is profoundly different from the religious experiences of people from, say, the dharmic traditions. (Or for that matter, from the experiences of Orthodox Christians.) Luhrmann says about kataphatic prayer:

It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good.

The obvious response of the outsider to something like this is to describe it as clearly false, or “merely” imagined. And in a certain sense, the outsider is right: it is the believer who has imagined a particular religious experience into being, for which there is most likely no objective correlate. But Luhrmann argues that this attitude misses the heart of the experience as the insider experiences it: as something real, indeed as something more than real—because they create a new reality for the insider. It makes the insider more likely to feel loved, and thus to become more loving. Luhrmann thinks that something like this may even help reverse the erosion of social ties that people complain about today.

A number of Luhrmann's ideas squarely fit in with late medieval South Indian Hindu thought as is described in More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India by David D. Shulman.

Shulman focuses on the importance given in medieval South India to the force of imagination: to the fact that human being are at their core imaginative creatures, who shape reality by imagining it together. 

• Sometimes this imagination is internal to the person: Shulman tells the story of an impoverished devotee of Śiva who constructs in his mind a temple so beautiful that Śiva prefers to dwell there instead of in the vast granite temple that a king has built for him (said to be the Kailāsanātha temple of Kanchipuram). 
• At other times, this imagination is intersubjective: Shulman describes in great detail a performance from the Kūḍiyāṭṭam dance-drama tradition of Kerala, in which a solitary skilled dancer transforms an empty, prop-less stage into a story-universe through the combination of his gestures and through the shared imaginations of the entire audience. 

Worship is imagined in the same way—by imagining our iṣṭa-devatās in our minds and by that very act bringing them into being. The word used for bringing-into-being is bhāvanā, a word borrowed from Mīmāṃsā ritual hermeneutics that refers to the power of a sacrifice to bring into being its fruit.[*]

Shulman points out that the philosophical and theological systems in which these systems developed in South India were staunch defenders of ontological realism, but of course not of physicalist, materialist reductionism. (Paradoxically, it was Advaita Vedānta that was fairly skeptical of the positive power of imagination.) He writes, comparing 16th-century India and Europe:

In Europe, the ancient dichotomy of mind and matter hardened into a fully desubjectified theory, or evolving set of theories, about the status of objects within an external, natural world. In India, the dichotomy is itself questionable, and the metaphysics of inner and outer took another course. Broadly speaking, in one conceptual system the imagination became increasingly associated with pathology, while in the other it tended to be understood as therapeutic. (p. 278)

Suspension of disbelief is the wrong way to think about what's going on here (at least in the Indian context; it may well hold for Luhrmann's evangelicals). We don’t lie to ourselves about something being there when it isn’t; we construct it with our mental acts—and by doing so, we make it real.

And towards the end of the book, Shulman also touches very briefly upon Ibn ‘Arabī, in whose vast work khayāl, “imagination”, is profoundly related to the structure of the universe and to the relationship between man and God.


[*] This explains the use of words like bhāvayāmi in much devotional Carnatic music. The singer-devotee is trying to actualize the deity in the minds of all those present at the performance.