"Duncan you are a real national treasure, you make me smile, and I love that you ask me to be on your program...I just love how you come up with ways to tie these insights we discover together. I don't know how you do it. It's inspired..." – Coleman Barks

I described Part 1 (See Program 3 on this site below) of this three-part dialogue with Coleman as follows:

This three-part dialogue on The Soul of Rumi is a great embodiment of the experience and value of dialogue, showcasing Rumi's life and poetry as a perspective of timeless wisdom and inspiration. For those unfamiliar with Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in Turkey, this first program will be a great introduction, and a "feast" for the great many around the world already deeply appreciative of his work. In recognition of the worldwide inspiration for communication created by Rumi in evoking the spirit and experience of unity beyond religious, cultural and ideological boundaries, UNESCO proclaimed 2007 as “The Year of Rumi”. As noted in my prior dialogue with Larry Dossey, M.D. (See Program 2 below), Rumi has remarkably become today -- 800 years after his birth on September 30, 1207 -- simultaneously the most-listened to and revered poet in Afghanistan and the most-published poet in America. His continually growing popularity in the U.S. is due in large part to the incomparable translations by the great American translator and poet, Coleman Barks.

This then is a link to the co-creation of a "dialogue consciousness worldview" that Living Dialogues is promoting and holding space for.

Part 2 was described in these words:

Rumi’s poetry inspires in these dark times when we are trying to create a civilization without elders – that is to say, we are in the process of becoming elders ourselves in times of uncertainty, encountering unprecedented global conflicts and climate change. As I say in the dialogue, Rumi functions as an elder in our human journey as a species, whose words resonate down over eight centuries, across national, ethnic, religious, and language barriers, expressing the unifying essence we all share. In the words of another eloquent member of the species, John F. Kenndy, 45 years ago this month in his historic American University speech proclaiming the world’s first nuclear disarmament initiative, in the name of creating together a planetary peace that would be beneficial for all mankind: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children’s future; and we are all mortal.”

To go forward on this great journey together, we need to develop the paradoxical consciousness which can hold our universal moral values and experience together inclusively and beyond ideology with our human diversity. In that vein, this poem of Rumi serves as an inspiration and touchstone for the spontaneous investigations and ruminations evoked in this dialogue:

Today, like very other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

In Part 3, Coleman and I explore a number of different aspects of the need to balance both the modern mind’s excessive emphasis on the mental, the sky (which can leave us feeling “empty and frightened” in our fragmented, specialized culture), with our indigenous heritage of appreciating the embrace of the earth -- as expressed in the open-ended conciseness of the Rumi poem quoted in the paragraph just above (ending the summary of Part 2 of this ongoing Dialogue). We need to develop this dynamic equipoise of spirit and soul in order to develop our own elderhood, as Rumi did in his time, in order meet the challenges of the 21st century, to create not just a localized sanity, but a planetary civilization which can communicate with and within all of its component parts so we don’t self-destruct. Here are some excerpts:

Duncan Campbell: Well it’s wonderful you know to, end, as it were, on this note of openness, that, this acceptance of the uncertainty and bewilderment again is that kind of razor’s edge of going beyond any kind of duality, you know, between confusion on the one hand and apparent but evanescent clarity on the other. That you’re somehow magically holding both poles together and honoring both and in so doing reaching a higher state of, as you put it, balance, of compassion, or love.

Coleman Barks: Hmm, right, yeah. I think that’s true, it’s a, it’s a shaky walk –laughs- that we do here with our left foot and then our right foot. We explore things in the world and then we meditate on those, and then we, as we walk, the path unfolds. Yeah.

Duncan Campbell: In a sense, you know, some have called it the wisdom of uncertainty of actually embracing the uncertainty as the deepest wisdom and walking forward confidently but not because you know where the next step is going to land.

Coleman Barks: Right. He says there is an excess in spiritual searching that is profound ignorance. And he says, “Let that ignorance be our teacher.” –laughs- you know, so it’s good to have a mystic who says let ignorance be our teacher. Yeah, he also, in terms of this balance thing, he also honors; a lot of mystics praise the sky, the openness of that. He praises the ground, as well. He says, you got to have somewhere to plant your grief seeds, you got to hoe. And he says, try to be more like the ground. The ground has a great generosity and it takes our compost and makes beauty. It takes in the rough clod, he says, and gives back an ear of corn. So try to be more like that, give back better, like the ground does.

Duncan Campbell: I remember that, yes. It was just really so striking when I read it, try to be like the ground is. Give back better than you receive, in other words, whatever seeds fall into your life of experience that you enrich and nurture them and give back beauty rather than bitter fruit or some dried husk.

And I think that’s part of the theme of the masculine and the feminine in a way, that there is traditionally that association of the masculine with the spirit or the sky and the association of the feminine with the soul or the soil. Soul and soil. Soil is mater, matrix, mother, material. Some honoring of form, honoring of incarnation, honoring of things as they are without thinking they need to be somehow transcended. Already there’s divinity in body if we could but release ourselves into it. For me that’s a constant theme with Rumi, this open ended-ness of his. I’m very moved by this. Calling us back into honoring the earth itself and honoring the ground, and to emulate it, to be like it, to have dignity and generosity and courage of receiving toxicity, and finding a way to dissolve it and giving back better than you’ve received.

. . . . . . .

Duncan Campbell: Well one of the things that Joseph Campbell said that really struck me was in one of his conversations with Fraser Boa was that when a culture arrives at the point where it emphasizes the economic and the military to the relative exclusion of other values, it’s always the sign of a late stage culture. (CB: Wow.) And when asked about this by Paul Ray (see Program 37 on this site) and Sherry Anderson, who wrote the book, The Cultural Creatives, when they talked with him oh, maybe 1982, they said: “’Well, what can we do about this Joe?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I can just tell you what’s happening. I can’t fix it’ and then he laughed.” And in another, separate conversation, that Duane Elgin recounted to me that he had had with Joe Campbell in that same time period (see Programs 40, 41, and 42 on this site), Joe responded to a similar question by saying: “Not my job. Your job in this next generation.” And then he laughed as well.

So, you know, Coleman, we’re just in a stage now, where like Rome, I would say the modernist culture centered in America, the global corporatist culture has lost touch, relatively speaking, with that deep source of generativity and I think there’s no mystery in that sense why Rumi, has ironically, become the most popular published poet in America today, because there is that sort of void that’s calling to us. There’s that desire to reestablish a sense of generative balance that you talked about right at the beginning. The need is to “find the Grail” in a new contemporary co-creative and cooperative way, to once again “green the kingdom (the Planet)” from “ the wasteland” (in T.S. Eliot’s poem describing the modern world) that it is becoming. And Rumi in his timeless poetry is calling forth this sense of generative balance from us and we’re collaborating actually with Rumi as an elder spirit of the species from hundreds of years ago. He is perhaps as present or more present today in those of us that hear his call than he was in his own community, in his own time, in the 13th century.

Coleman Barks: Yes, and I think it’s important to take up on a point Joe Campbell was making in that quotation you cited, that we talk about poetry and even ecstatic poetry in this time, when it might seem so extraneous, because it’s important to the inner ecology. It gives the soul a place that it can enjoy living. You know, and it nourishes it. I find as I read these Rumi poems to people in these terrible times, after the 9/11 terrorist attack and before whatever the next one is, that they feel fed somehow by these poems in a way that’s important.

Duncan Campbell: I think that’s the balance that has to be struck if we’re going to go forward, it’s something that I think we can look to the experience of Rome and what happened when that balance was not struck. We may repeat that history or we may be able to go beyond it. But I think that’s what’s up, it seems to be at this point, and I think Joe Campbell really put his finger on it when he said if we lens it exclusively or preponderantly through the economic and military viewpoint – the merely measurable and mental viewpoint -- we’ve lost touch with some crucial and essential part of ourselves. So that when we talk about ecstatic poetry, the word ecstasy itself means “to stand outside of”. To stand outside of is the literal translation of ex-stasis, so we need to train ourselves to “stand outside of” the existing either-or, polarizing paradigm and reclaim some more fundamental aspect of our universal and shared humanity which can be the bridge building that will lead beyond the impasse.

And in the end, we need to remember that Rumi exhorts us not to go to meet on a morally relativistic “field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing”, but to meet in a “field beyond ideas [exclusivistic and polarizing, ideological and rigid] of wrongdoing and rightdoing”, a very different place of open-hearted, open-minded cross-cultural common communication, no longer clinging to our narrow idea of being the only one who is or ones who are “right”, but to learn from one another and to be in dialogue and work together.

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The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.