"There have been very few people who have moved and transformed as many hearts as Jalaluddin Rumi.
In the world of the Sufis, Mevlana Rumi is the emperor. His words have to be understood not as mere words, but sources of deep silences, echoes of inner and the innermost songs. He is the greatest dancer the world has known.
His dance is a special kind of dance. It is a kind of whirling, just the way small children whirl; standing on one spot they go on round and round. And perhaps everywhere in the world small children do that and their elders stop them saying, 'You will become dizzy, you will fall, you will hurt yourself,' and, 'What is the point of doing it?'
Jalaluddin Rumi made a meditation of whirling. The meditator goes on whirling for hours -- as long as the body allows him; he does not stop on his own. When whirling a moment comes that he sees himself utterly still and silent, a center of the cyclone. Around the center the body is moving, but there is a space which remains unmoved; that is his Being.
Rumi himself whirled for thirty-six hours continuously and fell, because the body could not whirl anymore. But when he opened
his eyes he was another man. Hundreds of people had gathered to see. Many thought he was mad: "What is the point of whirling?"
... Nobody can say this is a prayer; nobody can say this is great dance; nobody can say in any way that this has something
to do with religion, spirituality....
But after thirty-six hours when they saw Rumi so luminous, so radiant, so new, so fresh -- reborn, in a new consciousness, they
could not believe their eyes. Hundreds wept in repentance, because they had thought that he was mad. In fact he was sane
and they were mad.
And down these twelve centuries the stream has continued to be alive. There are very few movements of spiritual growth
which have lived so long continuously. There are still hundreds of dervishes. 'Dervish' is the Sufi word for sannyas. You cannot
believe it unless you experience, that just by whirling you can know yourself. No austerity is needed, no self-torture is needed,
but just an experience of your innermost being and you are transported into another plane of existence from the mortal to
the immortal. The darkness disappears and there is just eternal light.
maysun sesto on rumi