His poetry is a gift for anyone who wants to explore the depths of this feeling we call true love.

Perhaps this is why, after centuries, Rumi is still being read, understood and loved by so many of us.

Rumi’s ideas of love are universal.

His poetry and its themes of spirituality, love, mysticism, God and humanity has inspired poets across Persia, Greece, South-Asia, Turkey, Tajiks and other regions where Persian and Arabic languages have influence.

But his words have reached people from all over the world, who relate to the passion and truth in them.

What I have found in Rumi’s peotry is an understanding of the essence of life.

In our modern era, love is often a confused state of mind that overlaps with desire, ego, greed and pride. But I believe Rumi’s poetry can connect us to our inner loving and lovable conscious self.

So let’s revitalize our understanding of love and get ready to be loved, truly:

“The temple of love is not love itself;
True love is the treasure,
Not the walls about it.
Do not admire the decoration,
But involve yourself in the essence,
The perfume that invades and touches you-
The beginning and the end.
Discovered, this replace all else,
The apparent and the unknowable.
Time and space are slaves to this presence.”

The “temple of love” is a metaphor for the worldly expression of affection or lust, which is often mistaken for love.

True love, in contrast, is a genuine feeling which sets us free.

The walls of our material existence are mere illusion. If we love genuinely, these walls are meaningless. Ideas about who we should love and what our what love should be have no place in genuine love. Moreover, our souls must feel the intense vibration of this feeling, because there is no connection as meaningful as true love.

So, true love is something that allows us to transcend the chains of material existence to something more spiritual.

Money, time, distance and social conformity become irrelevant. The essence of love is the feeling of love, so Rumi takes us so deep into the feeling of true love with his words that all known and unknown aspects of passion are revealed. Our minds and souls can trespass the chains of time and space.

Only the depths of love opens the ends of all known and unknown.

All beginnings and all ends are in it.

True love can be felt in many ways, but Rumi has tried to give us a picture of what true love really is: immeasurable passion for anything.

It is a constructive force that binds the universe and flows inside its veins.

So, take whatever you want to love and love it so deeply that it becomes a part of you, an extension of you.

What matters most is that if love is true, it is reciprocated too. One-sided love is admiration, fantasy or self-destruction. But in order to find true love, we must remove all barriers within ourselves that don’t allow us to love deeply and truly, according to Rumi.

While tantra and spiritual sex may be gaining popularity, love is about more than sex. Human connection and human feelings are a strong and strange thing. The problem is, we find it hard to let our stereotypes go completely in favour of true connection. Sex should deepen connection, not tear it apart. If sex connects souls, it’s even more satisfying.

Enjoy the connection, enjoy its depth, let your fears go and embrace the feelings inside you.

This is what I learned from Rumi.

But this is just one poem, and of course there are many others. They can change the way you see a lot of things if you study and connect to them.

Rumi poetry excerpted from Poem Hunter.

Relephant: 

I Fell Hard for Hafiz.

Author: Anam Tanvir

Editor: Khara-Jade Warren

Image: Mario Mancuso/ Flickr