AN INTERVIEW with Paula Marvelly,
How Rumi’s spontaneous turning led to a centuries-old tradition
“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
―Rumi
―Rumi
PM: In your [unpublished] autobiography, The Pathless Path, in
the part where you describe when you were a child, I was struck by your
response to nature, aesthetics, and the visual world; above all, how
sensitive you were.
Philip Jacobs: At school, I never knew what was
really going on most of the time because I am not an academic. But I
have always been intensely visual, as you say, so I just responded very
intensely to any visual stimulus.
In terms of finding a career, the only thing I was really good at was
painting so it meant my career direction just had one path to go down,
which was an art career. There’s a Joseph Campbell quote, “Follow your
bliss.” If you follow your bliss, doors open for you where you didn’t
know doors were going to be.
And that’s just so totally been my experience. The more life goes on,
the more I am just amazed at the precision of it. What an absolutely
precise drama it is. Even down to when I lost my farmhouse recently,
already this place I am now living in had just become empty, so you
learn to trust life’s process.
Looking back on life, it has been like that all the way along; the
next stepping stone appears just before the last one falls away.
PM: What is it about painting that so liberates you?
Philip Jacobs: When I am painting, I just get so
happy. It’s like when I learnt to meditate. Why I can relate painting to
meditating so well is that I become quiet and a great happiness emerges
from inside.
So having painting as the way I earn my living is a bit like
meditating or playing all day for the past thirty-six years. I do
textile designs mostly; I used to be design director of a big furnishing
fabric company and then in the early 1990s, minimalism came in, so no
one really wanted nice chintzy fabrics anymore, so that gradually fell
away.
I have a friend called Kaffe Fassett; he was a fellow whirling
dervish and at the moment, he and I work for Westminster Fibers and we
design fabrics, mainly for the patchwork quilting market, chiefly in
America but also around the world. I really love that. With furnishings,
I was a little limited to what was going to work on a sofa or as a pair
of curtains; with this, I can completely let go and have a lovely time.
PM: I was recently reading David Lynch’s book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity.
He started life off as a painter and then moved into film. Just like
what you are saying, Lynch realized that initially, all he wanted to
devote his life to was painting; that’s all that mattered to him, and
everything else was secondary. Painting was the raison d’être of his
life. Lynch also said if you love something, everything will naturally
fall into place. But he also said that you have to really love it; you
can’t be half-hearted about it.
Philip Jacobs: That’s very true. You have to love it and then totally devote yourself to it. Then, as a by-product, the money will follow.
PM: That’s also what Lynch said, that you don’t have
to worry about the money. But it’s a hell of a leap to trust that the
money will follow because so often it doesn’t, which then raises the
question, is one devoted enough?
Philip Jacobs: The way I see it is that life is an
already-constructed movie, so in your movie, it has to be constructed
that you will be an artist from the outset. Then you have the love and
devotion, and then you work very hard. But when you are working hard at
something you love, it doesn’t feel like working, it just feels like
playing. So you are having a great time trying to develop lots of
different ideas, and in a strange way, you get looked after one way or
another.
The Study Society
PM: What is your role at The Study Society?
Philip Jacobs: My role is to be in charge of the whirling dervishes and the main ceremony, called the mukabele.
We also have other activities like drumming groups, music groups and
poetry groups, which are under the umbrella of the dervishes. Lots of
young people are starting to come into the classes and be a part of the
group, and as a by-product they start to access their true Being.
PM: In Sufism, is the turning a very specific aspect of the teaching?
Philip Jacobs: Sufism is the mystical branch of
Islam, within which there are lots of different dervish orders. The
particular one we are connected with is called the Mevlevi Order of
Dervishes, founded by the great Persian poet and mystic, Jalallu’ddin
Rumi, in the thirteenth century. He spontaneously went into a whirling
dance; his immediate family then formalized it into the ceremony, the mukabele, which means “coming face to face” and which has been preserved right down to the present day.
In 1925, the then ruler of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, wanted to modernize
Turkey and thus he wanted to ban all dervish orders, all fortune
tellers, anything which he felt was holding Turkey back from being a
modern Western nation. So all the poor dervishes had suddenly to go
underground because they could be imprisoned if they turned in public.
In the late 50s, turning was starting to be allowed again, but only
as a government-run tourist attraction. Some of our older Colet House
members were invited out to one of the ceremonies in Konya, Turkey, and
they caught the eye of a Sheikh, Resuhi Baykara, who was presiding over
the ceremony. They invited him back to come and teach the turning in
London; he went and asked the head of his tradition, who said to him,
yes, you must go.
So in 1963, he came over and taught the ceremony; he wanted us to
keep it exactly as it had always been taught and practised in Turkey.
What was happening with the tourist-attraction dervishes was that they
were changing it and doing different music, using strange-coloured
robes, and cutting bits out to make it more appealing.
So our job is to preserve the original method and the tradition as it
had always been taught. Then he made Dr Roles, the then head of The
Study Society, a Sheikh. He did this, he said, “because of the light in
his eyes.”
PM: What is the point of the turning?
Philip Jacobs: The technique for the Mevlevi turning
we teach is very precise. The learning of it is probably the most
physically demanding thing anyone ever does in their lifetime; they say
it is comparable to childbirth, so I am told. It is very difficult. It
is very demanding physically and very demanding emotionally. When people
come along to do it, we interview them first and see if they are
suitable; we also do a medical questionnaire.
It’s amazing to watch people in the process. The whole technique is
about opening the heart but before that happens something must take
place; there is a dervish phrase, bash kasmak, which means
“chopping off the head”. During the process of training and the
ceremony, the rational discursive mind gradually starts to fall off and
you can actually see this happening to people.
Some people struggle against it but when it happens, they start to
look physically younger, and in particular, ladies become more
beautiful. It’s like a falling in love process that happens. It doesn’t
happen to everyone in the training; for some, it takes a long time and
they have to do it for several years before it happens. But for many
people, you see it happen during the process of the training. That’s why
people do it; it’s such a direct route for accessing the great
stillness that is your true nature.
With the turning, there is so much to attend to within the movement,
there’s no room for any sort of random thoughts; you can’t turn and
think random thoughts. When you bow into the turning room, the bowing is
called bash kasmak; that’s when your head is chopped off.
Because it is so difficult to get through the whole ceremony, you have
to completely surrender and let go of the sense of your separate self
being the doer.
The journey of the ceremony is like life; to get through it, you have
to hand over to something much larger than yourself. Because of the
one-pointed attention, all your daily life completely falls away. I have
turned for thirty-six years. I have been through a number of major
romantic traumas during that time! I remember on one of the worst days
of my life after a romantic trauma, I went and turned and at the end of
the ceremony, I was just so happy. I knew I was having a terrible time
but I could see it was down there somewhere, and that’s why I love it.
PM: Is the turning like meditation in that it builds up a residue of stillness?
Philip Jacobs: Yes, it builds up an accumulative energy. In Sanskrit, it’s called sattva, the energy of being, which gradually permeates you. With the dervishes, after a good mukabele, you have a beingness that is palpable afterwards for many days.
If you do it on a regular basis, it’s almost like the beingness
becomes your background. It’s not really giving you anything new;
rather, it is showing you what was there already but you were looking
for something else.
Rumi and Shams of Tabriz
PM: Could you speak about the relationship between
Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, the maverick and mystical dervish. There’s
that wonderful story about when they first met, Rumi was reading some
books and Shams asked Rumi what he was doing, to which Rumi replied,
“Nothing you would understand.” Then Shams threw all his books into a
well, then retrieved them and they were all dry. Rumi asked him what he
was doing, to which Shams replied, “Nothing you would understand.”
Philip Jacobs: Rumi had been an academic philosopher
and was ripe for meeting the great mystic, Shams of Tabriz. When they
met, it was described as the meeting of two oceans, which is a metaphor I
rather like. That’s when Rumi’s heart opened and he “found” himself.
Shams was supposedly murdered by Rumi’s followers; Rumi became
totally distraught and this is when all the poetry flowed out of him, in
the Mathnavi and the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi.
The actual teaching contained within them is identical to Advaita; it’s a nondual teaching with a very strong heart emphasis.
PM: So essentially, there is no difference between Advaita and Sufism.
Philip Jacobs: There is no difference.
PM: Traditional Advaita people would say they are not the same!
Philip Jacobs: They are the same. They are “not
two”. When I give talks, I slip in and out of Advaita metaphors and Rumi
metaphors; they fit together so well and they are both saying exactly
the same thing.
PM: Rumi has become over glamorized, I feel.
Apparently, he is the most published poet in the West, outstripping any
other poet, even Shakespeare. But his poetry is often used in a romantic
context, when it’s not really talking about that at all.
Philip Jacobs: That’s right, it’s not. Coleman
Barks, the American poet, does his own renditions of Rumi, which are
absolutely beautiful but they are often little cross sections of Rumi’s
work. He often absorbs a poem and then retells it in his own way. It’s
his translations that have led to Rumi becoming the most popular poet.
In Persia, they absolutely adore Rumi. In the last couple of years,
we have been attracting lots of Persians from the London Persian
community; we have our own Farsi version of the Mathnavi group that
meets at Colet House on Tuesdays. We also had a big Rumi celebration
festival recently; we had poetry in the morning and then all afternoon,
we had Persian musicians playing their music to drumming and turning.
Essentially, the teaching is that you have a temporal identity in
time and then there is your inner identity, which is often referred to
as the heart. At first, it appears that our heart is the still centre
inside of us; in the training, at first, what normally happens is that
the pain body, as Eckhart Tolle refers to it, comes to the surface. You
can see that; people start crying, get angry, and so on. That’s all
fine, you just have to let that pass.
The pain body then starts to dissolve away, rather like sediment
rising, and people start to access what they call the heart, the
stillness, which lies behind the psyche and the thoughts and feelings.
When that happens, people start to look visibly younger, they soften,
and the falling in love process happens. That’s stage one.
Stage two is when you discover that the heart isn’t just inside you.
Everything you perceive is in the heart and you start noticing that
everything you are experiencing and everything you are perceiving is
actually taking place within this still centre.
PM: I guess that’s why people love to go dancing in
whatever form it may take because that kind of movement means you are
effectively renouncing your mind.
Philip Jacobs: Yes. There are so many things that
people do, like extreme sports, where you get taken to the edge of
yourself, like mountaineering, for example, which is all about
re-accessing this underlying stillness.
With the dervish ceremony, the whole of the teaching is symbolically
embedded in the ceremony, so it’s like a metaphor. It’s very lovely.
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