Associating with Kings

December 14, 2007

In Rumi's discourses I ran into the following paragraph concerning the danger of associating with kings:

The danger in associating with kings is not that you may lose your life, for in the end you must lose it sooner or later. The danger lies in the fact that when these "kings" and their carnal souls gain strength, they become dragons; and the person who converses with them, claims their friendship, or accepts wealth from them must in the end speak as they would have him speak and accept their evil opinions in order to preserve himself. He is unable to speak in opposition to them. Therein lies the danger, for his religion suffers. The further you go in the direction of kings, the more the other direction, which is the principal one, becomes strange to you. The further you go in that direction, this direction, which should be beloved to you, turns its face away from you. [Signs of the Unseen, trans. W.M. Thackston, Jr., pg. 10]

Conventionally the problem with associating with kings is that they turn on you and you lose your life. Wiser to stay away from power. Rumi takes up this bit of wisdom but adds a deeper spiritual danger that comes from such an association: the pressure to see the world in a non-spiritual manner.. and to speak of the world in a way approved by the king.

Rumi is a writer I greatly enjoy and this passage exemplifies why. I don't accept the mystical and theological basis for his work, but it is generally possible to translate his message into something like a secular spiritualism. In this case I am moved by the notion that there is a direction in which I should be traveling.. a direction that I know inside is my true path.. and that it is possible to be subtly and internally pushed away from that direction. Association with kings is hardly a modern temptation, but the analogous danger must be celebrity or worldly respect. Getting taken up into the popular frame of a culture results, almost always, in a person learning to adopt that same frame as one's own. Our goal here at Old Roads is to loosen and question this tightly held modern frames.. and wealth and celebrity therefore represent a false path. Movement down that path runs the danger of making the true path appear strange.

Rumi is not only a light from the religious past (doctrines untenable now), but a continuing source of wisdom for living this life.. that is, if one sets value on an internal ideal and not simply the acquisition of wealth and pleasure. Rumi is not a writer who pushes us toward the sweet life, rather the true life.