Easter Sunday

I swear on the heart that is humbled before her;

I swear on the soul that is drunk on her wine;

I swear on that moment when they saw me,

A cup in one hand, and her hand in mine.

#1042: From Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi

It is Easter Sunday morning and I've been surfing about a bit. I ran into a reference to the following book:

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Catching the Thread @ goldensufi.org

This book explores the relationships between "Sufism, Dreamwork, & Jungian Psychology" and the author is himself a "sheikh in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Order of Sufism". He is well appreciated by the now elderly Jungian analyst, Robert A. Johnson, author of HE: Understanding Masculine Psychology and SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology. So he stands firmly as an authority in both the Sufi and the Jungian camps. I'm impressed that this book is both available for sale and for free download as a pdf file. Vaughan-Lee has authored over a dozen books, a handful of which are similarly available through this page.

I've read excerpts and chapter headings and I can sense that this author does have a good grasp of the material and communicates it well. However, I've not read deeply enough into the material to see whether he has much to say about Islam itself. This remains an issue with me.

Certainly, on his website WorkingWithOneness.org, under the "About Oneness" page, he provides a lengthy quote from Cecil Collins: The Vision of the Fool and Other Writings (a Tate Gallery publication), which includes the following key paragraph:

All real creation is personal, in art as in life. The mystery of personality is the basis of romantic art, as it is the basis of democracy. They are one. Democracy is the most difficult and most creative form of society known so far to man, difficult because creative, and romantic art is its natural expression. The creative chaos of democracy with all its weaknesses, hypocricy and injustice, is much closer to the human way of making a society then the iron prison of dictatorship states, Communist or Facist. So, the flowing empirical expression of romantic art is much nearer the actual life of the human psyche.

I have studied, deliberated and debated enough about Islam now to know that it is deeply and essentially opposed to democracy and to the creativity described by Collins. I'm not sure whether Muslims swear on the Quran in the same way that Christians swear on the Bible but if they do, then it is clear in today's quatrain where Rumi's allegiance lies. Or rather, where it fails to lie.

And yet, there is also a danger that "democracy" can become as much a catchword for imperialism, dogmatism, and even a kind of fascism (especially of the "politically correct" variety) as has "Allah". It is the "creative chaos" of democracy that needs to be defended and I really don't think that was adequately done in the case of the Danish cartoons. Like the individuals standing together behind the Guy Fawkes masks in the film "V", we all need to stand together as a solid mass defending our rights to the kind of love that Sufism speaks of. We all need to stand together and swear, like Rumi, with a cup of wine in one hand and a lover's hand in the other. And let it be real wine, literal and not allegorical, so that our intention is quite clear. And let the lover's hand include a paw or even a claw so that our humanity is wed to all life on earth.