Like a river in spate

There’s a field beyond all notions of right and wrong. Come, meet me there, wrote poet-mystic Rumi, alluding to a kind of “event horizon” in our consciousness where all subjective perceptions evaporate. Is this where intense, universal love is experienced?

Bhakti poets’ lyrical outpourings were usually directed at a divine image: for Tyagaraja was Rama, for Purandara Dasa, Meera, and others, it was Krishna, and the Nayanars bared their souls to Shiva, as did the Alvars to Vishnu. Are mystics believers in the conventional sense?

Although their lyrics do indeed pointedly refer to their ishta devta or favourite deity, you could just as easily imagine an amorphous but ideal lover, unconditionally receptive to all the love-soaked outpourings gushing forth from the lovelorn poets.

To them, ultimately, names and forms didn’t matter as much as the need to channel and express what every cell of their being was experiencing, a symphony of sorts.

Intense love is like a river in spate — impossible to contain. Rumi’s poetry could well be taken to be expression of his deep yearning as intense lover —the yearning to love as well as the yearning to express and share that love with the universe.

If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there, would it make a sound? Could an unperceived existence exist? Would a lover feel as intensely if there was no one to perceive that love? Perhaps Rumi had the answer in his glimpse of that transcendental field, “beyond all notions of right and wrong…”.