Experiencing Melancholy

After almost three months spent away from my home town, recovering, and soul searching, I felt an urge to come back, to be with my family again, and to catch up with my friends, everything was normal, after 4 days only, I started experiencing melancholy, a feeling of emptiness, a void in my heart with an under tone of sadness & grief, that I had since childhood, something I was never able to articulate properly, as a child I felt misunderstood, because I could not convey this emotion to those around me.

The emotion seems like my soul grappling with a pervasive emptiness that lurks in its dark and unexplored corners. It was a paradoxical yearning for some inexplicable “more,” a continuous yearning for fulfilment, while being purely satisfied with the moment. it reaches its peak, when I am involved emotionally with a partner, when I am grieving after breakups…etc, and I used to interpret it as an emotional attachment.

When this relished sombreness kicks in, my heart becomes extremly heavy, that it can’t be contained in my chest anymore, the intensity of grief, send me into the depth of the most turbulent ocean, the pain is so powerful, that even a mountain would break from its burden. So this time, I was blessed to sit in this emotion gracefully and question it, to dive deep in it, allow it to show itself. I burnt and burnt and burnt…

What do we long for ?

Listen to the story of the reed
As it laments the pain of separation:
Since they have cut me from my reed bed
My wails bring tears to both woman and man
Those ripped away from their beloved
know my song
Having been cut from the source,
they long to return

 Rumi

In the Sufi tradition, longing (shawq in arabic) is a state experienced along the mystic path . The mystic path is the inner journey in search of God. In Sufism, the mystical journey starts with the awakening in the seeker’s heart (qalb in arabic) of a perturbing need to find the divine as a living reality and to attain His nearness at all cost. In the light of this awakening, the seeker senses God as beloved (habib In arabic), and as the sole object and purpose of his/her existence. Love for this remote, glorious, and supreme Being draws the seeker farther on his/her arduous journey. Love is the energy that fuels the mystical journey, and without love the seeker cannot sustain the demands and hardships of his journey.

God the Beloved appears at times close and intimate—as indicated by the Qur’anic verse, “We are nearer to him than his jugular vein” . This state on the Sufi path is named proximity (qurb) and intimacy (uns in arabic, which is similar to “un” in French which means one). Often, however, God is felt as inaccessible and absent. Sufi vocabulary calls the polar state of proximity-remoteness (bu’d) – the separation. There are Sufis who by temperament and disposition are prone to the rapturous feelings that arise from states of nearness. But to many the love of God often seems unrequited. In the search of Him whom the heart desires, a lover wander in pain and desolation “in the wilderness of loneliness,”

The Love Affair

Rumi & Shams

Rumi, a thirteenth century Sufi teacher, and one of the world’s greatest poets of mystical love, knew of these mysteries of the heart. His verses tell the stories of the soul’s love affair with God, whom the Sufis call the Beloved, the love affair that leads from the pain and anguish of longing until we are reunited with our divine nature. This is the great mystical journey that draws us from ourself back to our Beloved.

Rumi was a learned scholar until one day in the marketplace of Konya he met a wandering dervish, Shams-i Tabriz, and fell at his feet after the ragged dervish recited these verses,

If knowledge does not liberate the self from the self Then ignornace is better than such knowledge.

ShAMs

Shams was the spark that ignited the fire of divine longing within Rumi, awakening the passion of the soul, such that Rumi said of his life “I burnt, and burnt and burnt.” His time with Shams transformed him, and the love that was awakened still speaks to us now, so many centuries later:

The tender words we said to one another Are stored in the secret heart of heaven: One day like rain they will fall and spread, And our mystery will grow green over the world 

rumi

Through this painful intimacy of love our heart is changed. No longer caught in ourself we are open to the Beloved. Ruined in the tavern of love we can taste the intoxicating wine of His presence. This is when the bliss begins. At the beginning it may come as a gentle lover’s foreplay, like butterfly wings at the edge of the heart, but in this gentle touch the whole of oneself is saturated with love, a love that runs through the body and soul, in which nothing is excluded. Then one is really reborn, reborn in love, in the deep knowing of one’s true nature and the love that is present in oneself and in everything.

Later the states of bliss deepen and intensify, become almost painful and one wonders how the body can bear it, and yet it continues, sometimes for hours. Sweetness, intoxication, drunkenness.

When one returns from the blinding light, when one’s mind is given back and a sense of self returns, then and only then can there be an inquiry into the nature of this bliss. It belongs to the nature of the soul. In Sanskrit it is known as anandamaya kosha, the sheath of the soul. For most people the only experience they have of this bliss is in the brief moment of sexual orgasm, which in reality is not a physical experience but a momentary immersion in the bliss of the soul. It is given to humanity for the sake of procreation. But for the mystic the real love affair is never a physical encounter, even though they may use the metaphors of sexual love to describe it.

If physical union is sweet, the real union of the soul, of lover and Beloved, is far sweeter:

“The clothes of the body were sweet silk,
but this nakedness is sweeter.”

It is easy to speak of divine love, to read poems about its ecstatic nature, to dream of being taken in rapture by a divine lover. But to live this passion is different. It is heartbreak and devastation, despair and burning. One thinks of Rumi and his relationship with Shams, who for Rumi embodied the divine light. Rumi’s disciples became so jealous of their close and intoxicating relationship that Shams had to leave Konya and go to Damascus; then Rumi became so desperate that finally his son Sultan Walad went and begged Shams to return. Shams returned, but then one night Shams went out never to return, murdered it is said. It is even suggested that another of Rumi’s sons was among the murderers. Rumi did not know he had died and twice went to Damascus to find him. He could not be consoled and was thrown into the despair known only to lovers:

“You are the sugar and you are the poison, do not torture me furthermore.”

Only when Rumi had traversed this spiritual darkness of complete despair and abandonment did the light of Shams once again reappear, this time within his own heart and he knew there could never again be any separation. It was from this inner union that the poems started to pour from Rumi: the story of the heart’s mystery that is experienced by every lover, the love affair that draws us to union.

This Sufi myth echoes the notion, prevalent in many ancient systems—as in Platonism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism—of the soul’s exile from its heavenly abode and its descent into this lower world. Consequently, it echoes also the desire of a few awakened souls to take the upward journey back and to ascend, via states and stages, to the primordial home in the vicinity of God. This has been expressed in many stories or myths like Layla and Maajnoon.

To summarise, it is apparent that we are all longing for a divine union, and it is expressed through the cry of the heart to experience oneness, what does it mean, feel and taste to be one with God. As social beings, we have a constant desire to have a partner, a lover, a companion, to experience true love, the kind of love that ignites the passion of the soul, it stripes you from your armours, and makes you surrender and give yourself to the beloved, it bypasses the mind, terrifies the ego, even the body feels intimidated from it. A love that keeps you awake all night, and make you wish you never experience it, it burns you alive…until you loose yourself, let go of the self, and you renounce your ego.

The experience of true love, can be manifested in a strong soul connection, romantic or not, human or not, soul mates can be friends, companions, lovers, Mother/child, father/child, plants or animals. while some can have their soul spark ignited by soul mates, others can get activated while visiting a place or a site. Once ignited, your life will never be the same again, your heart gets broken again and again in longing, until it opens up to unconditional love, until it perceives nothing but love, until there is a knowingness that separation is an illusion, and that we are always in union, in oneness, oneness with love, oneness with the beloved and oneness with god, this union is eternal, and it is immersed in an infinite love, A love like no other, A love that is beyond time and space.

Be The Light!