Rumi’s Case Against Dualistic Thinking and His Wisdom About the World

Abstract

Before expanding his discourse of non-dualism, Rumi had to use dualist concepts to bring to light and eventually reject the inner mechanism of the dual-thinking mind. By doing this, he demonstrated that the dualistic perception of the world—dividing aspects of the world into two opposite categories—is the natural product of the biological and physical world as well as the impulse of the mind. But this was only a step along the way: Rumi’s goal still remained to point people to a non-dual state, the ultimate reality, a time before all became differentiated, dual, and plural. He was trying to describe something similar to the division of yin and yang and their non-dual state of Tao. In Rumi’s writings, the major dualist divisions, apart from young-old, man-woman, day-night, and so on, are mainly between belief and disbelief, worshipper and worshipped, time and space, separation and unity. Rumi provides a framework for numerous examples; this chapter covers a few symbolic ones.