An Introduction Who was Rumi? Sufism and Islam God and the World Universal Man The Fall The Trust Union with God The Nafs Knowledge and Method The Limitations of Rational Knowledge

slide 9 of 11 “If ye pass beyond form, O friends, ‘tis Paradise and rose-gardens within rose-gardens. When thou hast broken and destroyed thine own form, thou hast learned to break the form of everything.” —Rumi “A theme to which Rumi often returns is that the ego or carnal self (nafs) is a veil which prevents man from knowing his own true nature… The true ‘monotheist’ (muwahhid) sees with the vision of gnosis that all things depend absolutely upon God and derive their total reality from Him. The ‘associator’ or polytheist (mushrik), however, suffers from an optical illusion whose source is his attribution of reality to his own individual self. As long as he has not escaped from the limitations of his ego he cannot help but act as if phenomena were independent realities, detached from God.”