Rule 26: The Universe is a Web of Stories

 Das Universum ist ein Wesen. Alles und jedes ist durch ein unsichtbares Gewebe von Geschichten miteinander verbunden. Ob wir uns dessen bewusst sind oder nicht, wir befinden uns alle in einer stillen Konversation. Füge kein Leid zu. Übe das Mitgefühl. Und schwätze nicht hinterrücks über jemanden – nicht einmal eine scheinbar unschuldige Bemerkung! Die Worte, die aus unserem Mund kommen, verschwinden nicht, sondern sind dauerhaft im unendlichen Raum gespeichert, und sie werden in der richtigen Zeit zu uns zurück kommen. Der Schmerz eines Menschen wird uns allen weh tun. Die Freude eines Menschen wird alle zum Lächeln bringen.

The connection of everything with everything was out of question for the early homines sapientes. This knowledge is part of the tribal consciousness. Due to the breaking out of man from the close interconnectedness with nature, this insight vanished and was replaced by the relationship of subject and object. The environment became an opponent, an object.  Hence it can be occupied and exploited. This is one of the main achievements of the materialistic consciousness.

The governance of the world works only when the respect of the governed disappears. This lack of respect is the other side of the coin of the world of consumption and welfare, which tends to spread out more and more. Sadly, it is not limited to the relationship to nature in its alive and not alive parts, but permeates also human relationships. We can read the development of history also in the way, that the reification of nature could only be installed as a consequence of the erection of hierarchical systems of power and exploitation, in which persons had been turned into things.

Whatsoever, the result is a relationship between man and human as well as non-human environment, which is based on power and subjugation. The consciousness of a universal connectedness got totally lost, so it is of no certainty today but a possibility we can solely experience in meditation. To a contemporarian who sticks to the prevailing concept of reality, such experiences might be nothing more that esoteric follies.

As Rumi put it: “The Hand of Moses is a hand and a source of light. These things are so real as the infinity is real but for some they just seem to be religious fantasies, for those who just believe in the reality of the sexual organs and the intestinal tract.”  (The Essential Rumi. Translation by Coleman Barks. Harper Collins 2004)

We are only sure about separation: I am I and nothing else, all non-I is different and alien. This attitude we have been training for centuries and centuries to engrave it in our brains. It gives us certainty. But the other knowledge is fuelled by the millions of years, which were before our modern times. Seen in this perspective, the idea of relating to the outside as objects (me here, everything else there) has been around in human history for just a tiny moment.

So we cannot forget about this ancient knowledge despite all materialistic illusions. It turns up here and there silently and timidly, mainly when we are in nature. We notice it especially strong, when our lives encounter severe difficulties. Crisis are often signified by a strong feeling of separation – we have to cope with a loss or digest a misfortune or overcome an illness or confront a deep inner desperation. Such experiences contain a state of separation, which can be equaled with hell, as pointed out in rule 25.

For separation reminds us of the idea of death. Death separates us from life, and any separation of an aspect of life is similar to the experience of death. A part in us, namely a part of our loving power dies in that experience. Love is the power of connection, which grows in a magical way by the exchange of energies between beings. Love knows about the connection of everything with everything. When it is interrupted, we react with fear.

As soon as we understand this all-permeating interdependency as a net of stories, the whole universe turns into a symphony of love stories. Every entanglement of one event with another is part of an endless tale from the book of life. Every particle, which is aware or itself in open connection with something different, adds to the great love. In it, there is exchange and exchange, on and on and up to the point, at which it has become meaningless who is giving and who is receiving.

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the author's imagination. www.elifshafak.com

Rule 25: Heaven and Hell

Hell is the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present in this very moment. Every time we fall in Love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell. Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his conscience that he has done something awfully wrong? Ask that man. He will tell you what hell is. Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments in life, when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and united with God? Ask that man. He will tell you what heaven is.

Whatever we experience is in the present moment. Heaven and hell are metaphors for the experience of opposite states in a given moment. Subjectively, the feeling gives us the measuring stick – do we feel well or not. We can name a state of severe suffering hell, and a great feeling of bliss heaven. Inbetween these states we know a lot of variations and graduations of our moods.

The quote mainly relates to the level of morality: “As in heaven” we are when we communicate in a loving way to others (e.g. when we sing together in a choir), and in hell, when we cut ourselves off from someone. An old story fits into that which says that there is no difference between heaven and hell. In both, people are sitting opposite to each other with a table in the middle full of delicious food. All just have chopsticks, which are too long to feed oneself. In hell, people desperately try to manoeuvre the nutrients to their mouth and fail over and over again, cursing and screaming in anger and frustration. In heaven, people serve the person opposite, and all are happy. Hell is self relating, heaven is being there with others in a loving way, this is what this parable says.

For a long time, humanity was kept in ban by the help of the belief about physical places for heaven and hell. Hell was meant to be somewhere in the blue of our atmosphere, and that is where we all want to go; hell is somewhere underneath, and this is what we have to avoid by any means. These directions serve as instruments for social control and hierarchical power administration and people are meant to subordinate. The fear of hellish punishment and the hope for heavenly pleasures was used for steering people’s behaviour. In the beginning, these images were indoctrinated by preaching and altar paintings. Later, the institutionalised religions cared about internalising the control of behaviour in the inside with the help of conscience. With each act, one should be aware whether it is booked to the heavenly or the hellish account.

The hierarchical installation of this order of society was safeguarding itself with the help of heaven and hell against the upper sphere and against the lower sphere – on the upper side there is glory which gave justification to the prevailing governance, on the low side the most terrible things were waiting for those who would not adjust to the rigid rules. So everyone had to stick to the narrow roles which had been prescribed, and the risk of downfall was lingering everywhere while the hopes for rise were postponed towards the end of life.

It was the materialistic consciousness, which turned its back on these mechanisms of social steering by subtly and cynically undermining it with its orientation towards winning happiness on earth by heaping up material goods. Take care of enjoying your mundane life up to a maximum and do not give a dime for the fate of others.

Then came the age of enlightenment and with it personalistic consciousness. It proclaimed the end of fairy tales about places of anguish somewhere below ground. The earth contains fiery lava but no devils, which enjoy living there. And the sky was scoured by the telescopes of astronomers without finding any paradisiacal realms there.

So the view was redirected into the experiencing subject, the person who takes world of her feelings and emotions and their dynamics seriously and importantly. Good phases change with bad ones, it is a restless life dependent of moods. The personalistic consciousness looks for the heaven inside, but all promises for happiness are just fruitless and temporary consolations. At first, all the depths and in-depths of the life of the soul have to be explored and encountered. This search easily arrives at places similar to hell. Then, at some place, it becomes clear that one’s own inside world well never grant ultimate certainty about the destination of human life.

The consciousness grows further and opens on the systemic level for the relationships with others. They become more meaningful than one’s own search of the truth. How can I be content, when the world is in jeopardy? How can I enjoy my steak when I know that the rain forests of the Amazon region were cut down for it? How can I buy a cheap T-shirt when I can be sure that it was sewed by children? A lot of questions, which disturb our self certainty and self relatedness.

When we approach holistic consciousness, we realize that we can find heaven inside of us but not in our personal inside but in an inner realm which does not belong to us but which is fuelled by a power of love which is far bigger than we are. Then it becomes easier for us to place all our actions into the service of this power of love and by this we enlarge the areas in our life in which heaven shines through.

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com

Rule 24: We are Human and Divine

The human being has a unique place amongst God’s creation. “I breathed into him of My Spirit,” God says. Each and every one of us without exception is designed to be God’s delegate on earth. Ask yourself, just how often do you behave like a delegate, if you ever do so? Remember, it falls upon each of us to discover the divine spirit inside and live by it.   

We know the text from the bible where God inhales life to Adam. So the breath serves as transmitter of life force on the beginning of creation. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Gen2) The mystery of life is the same as the mystery of breath. As every human being starts its own life just after birth with a breath, breathing stands in the beginning of the whole of human life.

The bible makes a difference between the beginning of humans and all other acts of creation, by this signifying the uniqueness of humans; he must be respired to be able to live, meaning that he has to take in what has been inhaled into him, must make it his own and let it out after that. This is how the process of human life starts as a process of exchange and metabolism, as communicative process.

In the tradition of the Islam it says even more that at the initial creation of man God had breathed of his spirit into man. This underlines an even more intimate connection between God and humans: God gives to man not just life but also spirit. So we are creation not only in the sense of a sentient being which tries to secure its survival and promotes reproduction, but is additionally impregnated by the spirit of God. Being human means equally being divine, as the divine spirit works inside of us as His breath. So we cannot other than being spiritual, even in the most primitive acts of survival.

Being spiritual means further that man represents divinity in physical form. He walks on earth as body-spirit-unity, as someone who has received the breath and lives by it as he lives by bread and wine. Furthermore, this implies that he did not receive this spirit to only use it for himself but also to pass it on to others, by respiring and inspiring his fellow men. Then he is a messenger of the inspiration of the divine, which is communication, exchange, love.

This is why teachers of wisdom are so sure that they speak to every human being when they proclaim the divinity of man. They want to call upon the memory of this intimate respiration, this initial inspiration. The rediscovery of respiration awakens immediately and inevitably the wish to pass on the power of breath which means the power of the divine spirit, to breath into others and by this to strengthen and increase their divinity.

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com

Rule 23: Your Life is a Loan

Life is a temporary loan, and this world is nothing but a sketchy imitation of Reality. Only children would mistake a toy for the real thing. And yet human beings either become infatuated with the toy or disrespectfully break it and throw it aside. In this life stay away from all kinds of extremities, for they will destroy your inner balance. Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.

My life is not mine. (Rumi)* 

The first half sentence of this quote questions a lot of what we are used to: We have received this life, we take it and make out of it what we want. What could it mean that our life is just a loan?

First of all, a loan is something, which the loaner can claim to be returned whenever he wants. The end of the loan is not in our hands. We forget about this easily. Further more, this means that we have to take care of the loan, that we have to treat it carefully to able to return it in good shape. Finally we owe gratitude to the loaner as long as he allows us to use what he owns.

Part of the careful treatment of this life, which was entrusted to us, is that we actively foster the growth of our consciousness. We can do this mainly by facing our inner reality to find out who we truly are. We encounter new aspects of this which was loaned to us and can increasingly make more use of it. We honor this life best when we allow it to become a piece of art by letting our talents which are part of the loan, evolve in a creative way. Finally we can return the loan, whenever the time has come, enriched with all the blossoms we have added.

When we see the enfolding of our life mainly as heaping up goods and other things we cannot come closer to reality. We are driven by the fear that things can offer us safety. By this, we give ourselves over to the sphere of objects. Secretly we know that things cannot liberate us from fears or make us happy. On the contrary, the more we have, the more we notice what we are lacking. The spiral of greed goes on by itself, almost without our activity. So we have entrusted the power of things and its immanent logic to run our life, a logic which is fuelled by our wanting to have more and more.

This is the scenario of an alienated experience of reality. This is a caricature of reality which is mirrored by opulent shopping centers and palaces of consumption. This is also the selling of our soul to the world of objects which throws us out of our inner balance. Our inner reality more and more moves away from ourselves while we run after success and self approval. Fascinated by the abundance of offers for happiness in the toy shops of the consuming society we forget about the meaning of our loan.

This way, we are lived by a life programmed by the mechanisms of the market, instead of directing our life ourselves. Life sometimes goes up, and sometimes throws us right down, like a merry go round. As we think, that the circumstances run our life, we make them responsible when it goes down.

The wise teachers, mystics and prophets are talking themselves hoarse since ages to free people from these meanders. In a contrary trend, the economic apparatus is growing immensely which has these abductions as center of its endeavors. Yet we can trust that in this field of tension a growth in individual and collective consciousness happens which strives to overcome these oppressions and compulsions. In as much as we look through the promises of the world of products as make-belief we allow a change in our needs and slowly change the system which is based on the old needs. We no longer allow prescribed desires to control our actions and motivations but follow the calls which come from deeper inside and around us and which want to express our true being.

On this way, we are looking for an alignment in our being and with the world in which we live. This way we tune in to a civilization and its growth and co create by this the development of the world as a whole, with each tiny step of our growth.

The feeling we find when we immerge in the sphere of alignment is the equanimity and balanced of a wise man. In this mood, we do not need any extremes, but we stay in connection with our inner center.

*  The Essential Rumi. Translation by Coleman Barks. New York Harper 2004, p. 41.

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com

Rule 22: Meditation in Daily Life

When a true lover of God goes into a tavern, the tavern becomes his chamber of prayer, but when a wine bibber goes into the same chamber, it becomes his tavern. In everything we do, it is our hearts that make the difference not our outer appearances. Sufis do not judge other people on how they look or who they are. When a Sufi stares at someone, he keeps both his eyes closed and instead opens a third eye – the eye that sees the inner realm.

Meditation in daily life is one of the issues in this rule. And this is an issue for every meditator who does not live in a closed monastery, an ashram or a retreat centre but moves around in daily life between office and tavern. How can I stay connected to inner silence when I walk through the “world” which is full of distractions, enticements and influences? How can I keep my equanimity and loving kindness when people around me are hectic and hostile?

So how can we turn the world into a church, temple or chamber of prayer? By not clinging to the outside of the world, to the glittering or disgusting occurrences which try to put a spell on us and want to draw us away from ourselves. Among these, the products of the advertising industry work most effectively as they are designed for this very reason to attract our attention with any means so that our brains cannot not be captured by them.  The least strongest impulses come from the charms of nature which is soft and mirrors the tenderness of our inside world.

So we have to become resistant towards the overflood of stimuli which bombard us as soon as we move through the normal craziness of city life. We can manage this by over and over again consciously getting in contact with ourselves, and the easiest way to do this is by observing our breathing. Then we realize: It is us who get engaged by the attractions and obstacles of the world outside. We are still more, behind all the goals we have, all the expectations, wishes and needs which keep our minds busy.

So we can create a distance to the actions around us and inside ourselves which makes us aware that there is even more to discover, something bigger and more significant. For in the inner chamber of prayer of silence, truth can appear, and also, what our true destination is. Then all our worries, fears and miseries get lighter.

When we meet other people, coming from this inner space which we carry with us all the time (but visit all too seldom), we do not need to gaze at their outer appearance, we do not need to judge and analyze the upmost layers of their insides, where their failures, weaknesses and shadow sides are stored. Instead, we can get into contact with the prayer room of our partner. This is a challenging and rewarding exercise which could add so much to the peace in this world. Inner peace which recognizes the peace in our fellow men strengthens the peace in them.


The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com