ASK IH: What is your favorite poetry verse? What did it teach you?

ASK IH: What is your favorite poetry verse? What did it teach you?

TLDR: Right and Wrong does not exist. It is a man-made creation.

I feel I have learned much from art. I love poem is called “A Great Wagon,” by Rumi and the middle verse—my favorite—is below:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep."

Some people underestimate spirituality or see it as a trend, but as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Rumi explored that truth in his poems. We don’t just live in the spiritual realm, but we are the spiritual realm. To see beyond our physical bodies and realize our true essence has been our purpose since the beginning of time. Rumi wrote about it eight centuries before the extensive spread of spirituality.

Additionally, Rumi establishes a firm reality: black and white are man-made. We are familiar with the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the true and the false. However, below the surface of black and white, there is a gray space we fail to see—a space void of conflicts.

We tend to judge the situations that occur in our life. We label the things we don’t like as “bad” and label the ones we like “good.” Our dualistic mind sections off emotions, thoughts, and events—and we automatically follow it. This mental division is often the main reason for our inner and outer conflicts.

I suffered a lot in the past for failing to let go of labels. Rumi writes that beyond these labels, these distinctions, lies a serene place—this is where we should all meet each other. I get flustered still when I encounter people that want to discuss right and wrong. Duality is so boring.

In our own minds, we think we are separate from others, from animals, from nature. The truth is, we all stem from one source of energy.

But we can never truly realize this oneness without letting go of judgments first. Seeing every living being as part of us is a step toward gaining a higher realization that doesn’t know the opposition.

I love, and connect with, this poem because of how Rumi weaves these ideas together. We must first let go of judgments before we can enter the spiritual realm and realize our “oneness.”