Transformational Arts College of Spiritual and Holistic Training

"Behold the Beloved" - Part 2

By Kathy Ryndak and Gord Riddell

No one understood the concept of the Beloved better than Rumi, the ecstatic Sufi mystic and poet. Embracing the Beloved is not just following the spiritual path of love but also the path of higher truth. To start, here are some excerpts from Rumi's poetry that convey the seed of this concept.

"If you are unwilling to undress, don't enter into the stream of Truth.

Do you want to enter Paradise? To walk the path of Truth you need the grace of God.

We all face death in the end. But on the way be careful to never hurt a human heart.

To be unaware of the wonders that exist in me, that is real madness!

Behind the veils I will find such Splendor, such Beauty that I will fall in love with Myself."

Glamour and Illusion

There is much glamour, illusion and myth that is associated with this archetype. Most of us think the Beloved is someone outside of ourselves that would fall madly in love with us forever bringing us eternal bliss and ecstasy. We fantasize that we will actually meet our Divine Lover just as Krishna, the Hindu God, came to the women of the villages intoxicating them with his presence, lovemaking and passion. However, he would quickly move on to the next and their waves of orgasm soon turned into a longing for his embrace. Since he would never return their longing turned into an excruciating torment that they thought could only be filled by him. Little did they know that a Divine Lover, like Krishna, can never really exist but rather we must find our own Sacred Lover within or our Beloved.

Rumi and the Beloved

Rumi of 13th Century Persia (now Afghanistan) met his internal Beloved through his encounters with Shams of Tabriz, a whirling Sufi dervish who walked the path of love. Shams had been searching all his life for someone who could truly understand him and found that in Rumi. Shams rattled Rumi's psyche greatly and encouraged him to walk away from his spiritual intellectual teachings. Instead he would meet God through experience, insight, music, dance and poetry. Shams and Rumi spent two years in seclusion meditating and having great spiritual discussions. Shams then mysteriously disappears from Rumi's life after the death of Shams' newly wedded wife Kimia. Rumi experiences great agonizing loss of his most beloved friend Shams and expresses his grief through his mystical poetry. Eventually, he realizes that Shams was only a projection of the longing for his true self, or inner Beloved that Shams so clearly mirrored.

We will never meet our Beloved in the deluded lover's game that it exists in another, outside of ourselves. Jacquelyn Small, says that "all the glamorous notions of how 'Divine Love' works need to be cleansed from our emotional life to actually meet our Inner Beloved. We'll project God-like images onto one another, but we'll find that there is no human being that can make Divine Love to us." When we realize this, and usually it's painful, we are well on our way to meeting our Inner Beloved. However, it will require us to become deeply aware and conscious of our internal landscape through the process of purification and transformation.

Divine Feminine and Sacred Masculine

One of the most crucial steps in meeting our Beloved is becoming aware of our contrasexual other half within our psyche which completes our souls. This is the marriage of the male or female within, also know as the animus/anima in Jungian terms, to balance our polarities. The Beloved is the soul's desire for union with its highest expression.

Your archetypal feminine side is intuitive, receptive, reflective, emotional, nurturing, caring, creative, spontaneous, relational and leads with the heart. Your archetypal masculine side takes action, is logical, rational, strategic, discriminates and differentiates, focuses, defines and is orderly. Your feminine side lures your masculine side onto the spiritual path. She is more inspired and magical. He is more pragmatic and providing you with assertion and power.

When our male and female merge we have a sacred marriage within and we become our own Sacred Lover. Archetypically, this is an ecstatic, blissful and rapturous reunion. Since we have found our own inner lover we become reengaged in life in a passionate way with all of our senses on fire. Life once again becomes enchanting, full of awe and wonderment. Trebe Johnson has written a book about this appropriately called "The World is a Waiting Lover."

Beauty and Pleasure

We are in awe of all beauty on our planet and can see the beauty within darkness that is waiting to be transformed. We relish the pleasures in our life, but unlike Dionysus, we indulge in moderation. We can see the sacredness in everyday life and even doing something simple like walking your dog becomes an experience where we can connect to the divinity in nature around us.

We acknowledge that sexuality, creativity and spirituality are all part of the same continuum - just different octaves of the same energy. The passion of the Beloved regenerates our life. We literally fall in love with ourselves and as Rumi says we find the wonders and splendors within. No one can ever take your Beloved away from you and it will never abandon you. It is the perfect way to heal abandonment, separation and loneliness.

Sacred Human

Through the journey to meet our Beloved we become the Sacred Human along the way where heaven and earth meet inside us. It is such a delicious way of being since we honour that we are both human and spiritual at the same time with one not being better than the other. We can delight in being ordinarily human. Life on other days can be mundane, painful or very challenging and we accept this as the spectrum of existence on earth.

Up until now we have just been discussing these concepts on a personal level. Just imagine if we apply these principles globally. Certainly, we would see the beauty of all races and creeds, ethnic groups, species and would care deeply for Gaia, our Beloved Planet that has been going through so much environmental duress with such calamities as Global Warming.

We are optimistic and hopeful that the emergence of the Beloved within will only help to heal our planet. It will only be the union of the proaction of the Sacred Masculine with the compassion and nurturing of the Divine Feminine that will evolve, transform and save our world. We leave you with these last words from Rumi.

The time has come to turn your heart

into a temple of fire.

Your essence is gold hidden in dust.

To reveal its splendor

you need to burn in the fire of love.