Rule 31: Live with Softness

If you want to strengthen your faith, you will need to soften inside. For your faith to be rock solid, your heart needs to be as soft as a feather. Through an illness, accident, loss or fright, one way or another, we are all faced with incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgemental and more compassionate and generous. Yet some of us learn the lessons and manage to become milder, while some others end up becoming even harsher than before. The only way to get closer to the Truth is to expand your heart so that it will encompass all humanity and still have room for more Love.

Having a strong faith means having a deep trust in life. Life offers us a lot of challenges, so things sometimes run smoothly and sometimes roughly. Yet it moves on, steadily, as the flow of our breath. Our breath reflects this life whether it just runs in a quiet and harmonious area or the waters are turbulent and agitated. When we get aware of our breathing, we can feel that it flows and flows even if this flow is sometimes excited or hectic. To trust our breath means to trust our lives, this is the foundation of faith.

Via breathing we can learn to make this flow not only quieter but also softer. By doing so, we imagine that the breath flows around our heart very gently, enfolding it softly. Then we enlarge the space which the heart fills and expand it beyond our personality, mainly towards people, who are in special need of softness. They are not like that because of bad intention, silliness or laziness but because life has formed them to be like that, like a stone on the riverbed gets its form by the power of the water and has never been asked whether he would like to be formed this way or another.

By expanding our hearts, we feel that there is no boundary but that our heart wants to reach all the other hearts and wants to connect to them. It is as if the whole creation would wait for this moment in which all hearts connect and find a common rhythm.

What hardens us is especially our tendency to exercise power, to be righteous and to follow only our own interests. There is always fear behind these motivations. We assume that we have to fight for our survival, up to the smallest conflict like how the cleaning the soup dish should be done or where the soap should be placed.

Anxiety makes us tense because we think that we can protect ourselves by hardness. Yet there is almost never a real threat which we should be aware of. We are in the movies all the time with a horror film on the screen, and we take the events on the screen for reality as if King Kong would come down to the audience any moment and get us at the throat. By doing so, we tense up without necessity – we go to the real cinema to get excited - , and this is not good for our well-being and health. When we do not conquer our hardness, we damage ourselves on the long run.

The Tao Te King says:

The living person is soft and pliant, and is hard and rigid in death.
All creatures and plants,
Are soft and vulnerable in life,
And dry and brittle in death.
Therefore it is said:
The hard and the rigid are part of death,
The soft and gentle are part of life.
This is the reason why soldiers who are too rigid
Do not triumph.
When the tree is too rigid, it will break.
The stance of the strong and the great is stooped,
The stance of the weak and the small is erect.
(Lao Tse: Tao Te King, 76)

We commit to life when we work on becoming soft. The Tao Te King reminds us that we should not mix up softness and weakness. Rigidity controlled by fear does not represent real power but is a cover of weakness. In this position we cannot recognize clear goals and meet sounding decisions. We get fixed to narrowed views and wrong interpretations.

The position of softness is the position of equanimity, of freedom of pressure and the need to fight. In the Eastern martial arts, the teaching is to gain maximum success by coming from placidity, which allows precise perception and fast reaction. When transferred to other areas of life, it means that the clearest power arises from relaxation, which connects us to reality in a way that we can choose the right thing in the right moment without effort.

But these are only skills for mastering our lives. The way to truth does not stop there, and even someone who is gifted with splendid success in life does not necessarily come closer to truth by this. Especially being fixated to success and becoming dependent on it, often goes with avoiding the look into the depths of one’s heart. People who are in love with their successes often tend to close their hearts instead of being grateful for the gifts they get, as they fear to diminish their accomplishments by softness and compassion, which would arise from gratitude.

So it is meaningless for the way to truth whether a life is successful or full of failure. For the wise person, gain means the same as loss. When he or she is able to open the heart so wide that it can include everything in this world, it contains everything without difference: the billionaire and the beggar, the film diva and the taxi driver.



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 30: Noone to Blame

The true Sufi is such that even when he is unjustly accused, attacked and condemned from all sides, he patiently endures, uttering not a single bad word about any of his critics. She/he never apportions blame. How can there be opponents or rivals or even “others” when there is no “self” in the first place? How can there be anyone to blame when there is only One?

A wise person shows people the way to holistic consciousness. In this realm, there are no judgements or blamings any more. To reach this state, we do not only need patience, a thick skin, a special ability to bear suffering or withholding aggression. Rather it is about a change in consciousness which does not have anything to do with discipline but with an enlargement beyond the confinements of one’s own personality.

So such extraordinary persons do not need any admiration. They deserve to be imitated, but not in the sense of holding on to a task or standing up to challenges, but more in the sense of inner growth. This cannot be attained by training and consistent practice alone. It is the by product of leading a life consciously and carefully. The enlargement of humans happens to the degree they succeed in including more and more aspects, details and habits of the world, in embracing all of this as one’s own which does not belong to one but which one is part of.

We realize that we are members in a great whole called the world. All the funny creatures which play their roles there, all the absurdities and oddities, all the evil and bad, the nice and good events are the other members of this cabinet of curiosities. We are all connected with one another, we take part in the same game. The others play those roles for which we are not so good at.

As an example: the other person plays the role of a rascal, and by this he represents our own evil parts which are hidden in the shadow of our personality. So we meet an aspect of ourselves when we encounter someone who is acting in an evil way towards us or towards others. When we condemn him for being like this, we do the same to ourselves. Someone could treat us disrespectingly. The behaviour of this person points at our own tendencies of respectfulness. By condemning the other person for it, we condemn ourselves for our acts of disrespect.

Of course, this does not mean that we are not allowed to name evil actions for what they are. It does also not mean that we should not be committed to impeding and stopping such behaviour. We have to do this in order to bring our environment back to balance when a derailment has happened. But we should be aware that what we accuse has something to do with ourselves. So there is no place for rising up above the other person in the sense that we are better because we have not committed this error. There is noone without an area of shadow, this is a structural attitude of our complex human nature.

We easily tend to assume that there is nothing evil about ourselves, when we see it on the outside. But in reality we strengthen our evil parts as soon as we react evil against evil. If we want to weaken this side in ourselves, it is necessary to accept it as our shadow, to look at it and thus bring it into light. As soon as we can embrace it from our inside, because it is a part of ourselves, chances will grow that one day we can embrace it when it comes to us from the outside. Then we just see a part of ourselves which has been neglected and unloved for a long time.

Someone might say: But I am not bad. – You are human, and it would be a miracle when nothing evil ever came to your mind. And even if it were so, there is something else in you which is incomplete and worthy of improvement. Being human means being imperfect by knowing about perfection at the same time. We will never reach it, though we know about it. Each new experience offered by life to us can be again something we grow with.

Perfection would be the end of growing and learning, and would be the end of the process of life.


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 29: How to Handle Destiny

Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore to leave everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance.  “The music of the universe is all pervading and it is composed on forty different levels. Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands. ”

We use the word destiny for everything, which happens as unpleasant surprise in our lives, which we cannot foresee and take into account and which we cannot influence. It happens, when life in its self mightiness and stubbornness enters our web of connections, plans and expectations and whirls them apart. We cannot control or tame destiny, it is mightier than our wishing and wanting.

Every blow of fate is an important task for learning acceptance because we define destiny right so as this, which we cannot handle and accept. Yet fighting what has already happened anyway is no gain but is just a waste of our resources. When we learn to accept that, which is most difficult to accept we have done an important step in overcoming our own stubbornness.

By acknowledging destiny we acknowledge that there is a higher power controlling our lives and that we only can act within a framework provided by this power. We can move freely as long as the health necessary for it is granted to us. But we cannot run as fast as an Olympic winner or perform all Yoga exercises like a contorsionist. And when we fall ill, we even don’t manage to get out of bed. We can do a lot to prevent falling ill, but when it has gotten us, we only can surrender to our destiny and act accordingly to the narrowed framework, which our fate has provided for us.

We cannot choose the „instrument“, as we cannot choose the length of our bodies or the colour of our eyes and the set-up of our brain. Still we can train our skills within this framework, we can live up to our inner grandeur, can sharpen our senses and increase our talents. There are limitations due to the capacity of our brain, so that most of us cannot enfold musical skills like Mozart or Schubert. Yet it is up to us to develop our modest talents within this limitation, whether we let them grow or lay barren.

We will not be able to move on, when we envy others about the instruments they have received to play with. I have a clarinet, and you a violin. Instead of producing beautiful sounds with my clarinet, I stare at the violin and think that I am only able to play music when I have it. It is better to trust our own abilities and make the best out of them by learning to develop and enjoy them.

When we fail to do so we disregard our gifts, which life has given to us. We have these possibilities within the context of our free will.  And we have our inner reasons for doing so, if, as mentioned before, we had other reasons we would also lead our lives differently. So it does not make sense to blame ourselves or others for mistreating or spoiling their talents.

Rather we should pay our attention to the reasons which keep us from living creatively and productively, to ornate our lives instead of letting the days pass by. When we explore these areas we might encounter fears and other unpleasant feelings, which want to be taken serious. When we succeed in this, it will become easier for us to take up our own instrument and to share our unique voice with the universal symphony.

On the idea of predetermination

There is a common premature understanding of this idea, which could mislead us to indulge in our passive and depressive parts. Everything is kismet anyway, inevitable fate, what should I do against it, best is to tuck in my head and wait until it is over. By this, we follow our personality imprinting and take the idea of predetermination as an excuse for our laziness or convenience.

Yet the concept of predetermination is not about strengthening a limited personality structure. Understood correctly, it serves as an explanation of wider contexts and is only intelligible when we transcend our egoistic parts and reach the view of holistic consciousness. From there we understand what it means that everything which happens is meant to happen exactly like this, wanted so or predetermined by a higher power or intelligence.

We should not get irritated by the „pre“, for this is not about a time line – as if this huge intelligence would have been sitting somewhere up there a long, long time ago and thought about a gigantic story, which then starts to enfold exactly in the way it was projected into future. The linear structure of time comes from our own motivation for achievement in a materialistic consciousness, as explained in rule 28. We cannot presume that the divine existence works just and only like that. Rather it is more plausible, that this intelligence has access to all modalities of time while having its own centre in a form of timelessness, which is open to our experience only in extra normal states of consciousness.

Thus we can comprehend predetermination in the following sense: devine wisdom works in everything which happens, whether this is pleasant or unpleasant to us. And even that, our judgement about the respective situation is still carried and supported by this wisdom.

Furthermore, predetermination means that there is no difference between the events in this world – moments of despair and bliss and everything in between – and the meaning and evaluation of these events by us. Everything is as it is, and is also meant to be as it is. By accepting it like that, we abstain from moving away from reality and disappear into a dream world: Well, it is as it is, but I just paint it in a different way in my fantasy. We also abstain from blaming reality: What an idiot had the idea for this lousy experience I just had? So we do not lose any energy by rejecting that which is. The energy, which is set free starts looking for a more productive way to add to the process of life.

So we can confide in the idea that everything should be the way it is, and then we notice that it is this very life which wants to move us on: By its urge to enlarge and grow. Let us be entrained by it! And let us have the trust that the speed of this development is exactly the one which is good for us and which is appropriate for our abilities.

Then we stop to criticise ourselves permanently, as we should have to be better, faster, more efficient … as we are. We do exactly what we are able to do in any moment; when we know better and are in the position to do so, we do it like this. And something even better might be available for us in the next or over next moment, and then, and only then we act like this.

This insight also helps us to become more tolerant for our fellow men. We stop to permanently demand from them to be better as they are. They also give their best all the time, which is possible for them in the given moment.

An important question to the idea that everything that happens is also meant to happen like that is the justification of evil deeds or of undeserved blows of fate. Does this mean that it is okay to commit mass murder as this is meant to happen this way? We have to make a distinction between two levels. On the human plane, there is no discussion that such a behavior has to be rejected and prohibited and that the predators of evil acts have to be called on their responsibility and brought to justice. Any society cannot exist when behavior which damages its functioning is tolerated.

On the spiritual plane, this perspective is supported, and it gets an addition by another insight, which says that those evil actions have happened the way they have happened and that nothing of them can be reversed. Death people cannot be brought back to life. Yet it inhibits our connection to the flow of life when we judge or deplore what has happened. Ultimately we do not know why what has happened, has happened in the way it did. We do not know how something, which according to human standards should not have happened, is measured by divine standards.

So when we want to experience the power of the spiritual plane, we have to sustain the tension between these two levels and we are not to neglect one of them. Further more, both levels are not in a hierarchy, like the spiritual being superior to the mundane and diminishing its importance by this – both stand as equal side by side.

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 28: The Illusionary Power of Time

The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through us and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment. The present moment is all there is and all that there will ever be.   

Whatever we experience, we experience in this moment, in the now. The now is defined by this experience. It is nothing but the experience of what is right now. The past is that which we cannot experience any more because it is not in the now. The same is true for the future.

We like to take the past into the presence by remembering. Our remembrance creates an image of the past, which is coloured and photoshopped by all possible influences. Sometimes we even “remember” events, which have never happened. As an impressive example we can see reports from survivors of the bombing attack on Dresden in 1945, which has caused the death of some ten thousands of people. Many survivors describe hedgehopper attacks, which they say to have seen, including the type of aircraft. Yet the historical research has proven without doubt that such attacks have never happened around that event and that such airplanes appeared in Dresden.

So we always should keep in mind that the past is only accessible for us as construction. It is a product of our memory and does not have any reality apart from that. We need our past to ensure our identity and to be able to rely on our surroundings. We do not have to invent or discover everything in each moment anew. But we miss the magic of the moment when we hold on to the past.

The future has to bow to the primacy of the presence as well. We create our future out of our fantasy, which is fuelled by our expectations, hopes and fears. Without future we could neither plan nor organize. Yet our future is never subject to our control, at anytime an unexpected event can destroy all our plans.  So we need to keep up a good balance between the dreams of our future and the real experiences in the presence.

The time line itself is a construction or better, a principle of construction, a raster according to which we can structure our experience of time. Of course time does not have a spatial form. The time line allows us to plan efficiently like when building a house and every craftsman has a place in a plan so he knows exactly when his work is going to happen, or al least is meant to happen.

Being able to measure time gives us the illusion of governing it, of overpowering it. In reality, it is clear that we have no power over time, but that it has power over us. It is running on and on, whether we like it or not. Sometimes we would like to stop time (according to the aged Faust: “Stay, moment, you are so beautiful”), sometimes we want to push time so that an unpleasant experience is over quickly or a desired event comes sooner. But usually time plays a trick on us: When we want it to stay it moves the quicker, when we wait for Santa Claus it drags on endlessly slow. So we are often angry at time: it is too little of it or too much, but never right.

The only possibility to escape the control of time is by staying in the moment that is to be present moment by moment. This is a skill which only a few people have mastered, but we can come closer to it by meditating, e.g. by mindfully watching the inbreath and outbreath. By this, time loses its importance and we come to terms with it. We acknowledge a dimension which is not subjected to our grasp and hand ourselves over to its flow without the illusion of control.

When we imagine time as a spiral, we are in a spatial imagination as well. But it renders us an image, which is related to ourselves – as we move on as conscious beings, experiencing every moment consciously without linking it to anything in the past or in the future. We are not fixed between the old and the new to come but remain in what is real. The movement of time does us not lead away from us but closer to what we really are.

We acknowledge a dimension which is not subjected to our grasp and hand ourselves over to time without an illusion of being able to grasp and control it.

Eternity is this moment in which I can drop into.

And if I had more time, I could write even more about time ....

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 27: Everything is Connected to Everything

The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practise compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone’s back – not even a seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish, but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One man’s joy will make everyone smile.

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