Attar's Conference of the Birds, Part 3

Leyla: salām bé hamegee, welcome to part three of our discussion of Attar’s Conference of the Birds. I'm joined again by Omid Arabian of YOUniversal. salām, Omid jān.

Omid: salām, Leyla jān.

Leyla: Thank you for joining me again. So if we want to give a little recap of where we left off of our birds, last time.

Omid: Absolutely. So, the birds have decided that they want to find the king so that they can have order and “nazm ō tarteeb” in the world. And they've set their mission, they've set their intention. So, we've seen the birds kind of express their desire for this king, and we've seen the Hoopoe come forward and tell them that she knows who the king is. His name is Simorgh. And she knows where the king is, which is beyond the mythological Mount Qaf which is kind of really saying beyond the limits of the physical world and all the descriptions that the Hoopoe has given of Simorgh and his magnificence has really moved the birds to become “beegharār,” restless. And so they're excited to go. They are in love already with the Simorgh and they're “doshmané kheesh,” literally their own enemies. But symbolically, the idea of they're ready to put their old lives and their old selves aside to go and find this true divine ruler, and their love has multiplied into 100,000 times than what it was before. So that's I think where we left off.

Leyla: Wonderful. Okay.

Omid: Yeah. Great. So we'll pick up where Attar tells us now sad hezārān morgh dar rāh āmadand sāyévāné māhee ō māh āmadand. He says hundreds of thousands of birds set out on this journey, on this path, on this “rāh.” They were like a canopy that cast its shade or its shadow upon the fish in the sea and the moon in the sky. In other words, there were so many of them that they covered the entirety of the world, almost, and together they made this huge kind of entity that casts its shadows, not just to the deepest part of the ocean, but kind of high up in the sky as well. That's how high they flew, that they were even going beyond the moon, again, taking us beyond the limits of the physical world on this journey. And again, “sad hezārān” is just hyperbole. Typical kind of Persian hyperbole meaning numbers that are beyond actually counting. Yeah. And I love “māhee ō māh” also. It's just a lovely alliteration. “māhee ō māh” And they're kind of the same word. Just one additional letter. But it really serves to signify “māhee”, the fish at the depth of the ocean, and “māh” high up in the sky to show the breadth of the space that the shadow of the birds kind of fell over. Yeah. So he says “chon padeed āmad saré vādee zé rāh anafeer az ān nafar barshod bé māh” Again, the moon shows up. But here, in a very different way, things take a little bit of a turn. What happens is, Attar says, when the beginning, when the edge with the brink of this wilderness, path that they had to go on appeared to them, a cry of distress rose from this crowd of birds, and this cry went all the way up to the moon. So, we see now something shifts, right? Once they see, once they really get a little glimpse of what's ahead of them beyond just the words, what they actually see what the road is like, and it's like a long wilderness ahead of them, there is a sense of, oh, crap. What are we about to undertake? And so we're at the “sar” here means the head or the beginning of this journey, and once they see it, they let out a “nafeer”. “nafeer” is from the Arabic meaning ‘a loud cry, an alarm, a cry of despair, an outcry’. And so it's almost like their confidence takes a little turn for the weakness, for the worse, when they see that the real journey is about to begin and it’s daunting. And so Attar describes that a little further. He says “haybatee z'ān rāh bar jān ooftād ātashee dar jāné eeshān ooftād” He says, an awe fell upon them, upon seeing this path. Upon their souls, their souls became awestruck and fire engulfed their being. “haybat”, there's a word that implies an ‘awe’ or a ‘reverence’ that's mixed with some fear, usually. So when you see something so grand and so overwhelming that you feel small in comparison, that's what we call “haybat”. And so here, this “haybat”, this awe of this road, has created a fire. Not in a good sense. Not in a passionate sense, but really they feel like they're full of anguish, in a sense, at the enormity of what's ahead of them, they’re kind of shaken. And so, this is kind of a little turn in the story. They go from deep excitement and “beegharāree” now to this kind of “haybat” and this fire, of kind of a little bit of anguish and fear and anxiousness about it. And that's very human, right? It’s a very, I think it’s a great psychological observation that we get excited about a lot of things. But once we see what it actually entails, the excitement gets a little bit dampened. And then we're like, oh crap, what did I get myself into?

Leyla: I feel like that happens sometimes with our program. People are so excited at the beginning and they're like, oh, I actually have to work to learn.

Omid: Well, that's a good point. And I think part of what we hopefully will find out is that, it takes endurance to really do anything amazing, do anything worthwhile and that endurance has to be found. And hopefully the birds are going to find that endurance in the face of this anxiousness that they find at the beginning of the journey. Yeah. For, for sure. But we get one more verse of their state of being here. Attar says, “barkesheedand ān hamé bar yek degar ché par ō ché bāl ō ché pāy ō ché sar” You get all the different parts of the birds. “par” meaning their ‘feathers’, “bāl” meaning their ‘wings’, "pāy" meaning their 'feet', and "sar" meaning their 'heads', but what is he saying? He says they all huddled together, “barkesheedand bar yek degar” They kind of came close and huddled together. And so they became a tangle of different body parts, wings, feathers, feet, and heads. It’s a really visual image of these birds coming together to the point where you can't tell one apart from the other, they're just a bunch of body parts. And again, the repetition here is also beautiful: “ché par ō ché bāl ō ché pāy ō ché sar” It’s like a common Persian construction meaning ‘whether this or that or this or that’. It doesn't matter what parts, they're just all tangled up together. Yeah. All these hundreds of thousands of birds become one big mess of body parts. And so, while they're in this state, the hoopoe speaks to them again. And because they're kind of in awe of this road, the hoopoe tries to give them a little bit of a sense of what's ahead, a little bit more of an idea of what they can expect. So here, we get the beginning of the hoopoe’s description and really it's Attar describing these very famous seven stages of the journey, which are presented as seven valleys - “haft vādee.” “vādee” is an old word meaning ‘valley’. So this is what the hoopoe says: “goft mā-rā haft vādee dar rah ast chon gozashtee haft vādee, dargah ast” “dargah” means the court of the king, of Simorgh. So the hoopoe says: ‘there are seven valleys that lie ahead of us upon this path. And once you cross these seven valleys, there will be the Royal Court. You will arrive at the Royal Court of the Simorgh’. And so, it's important here again to say that even though this is a very beautiful physical description of the road, ultimately, metaphorically, the valleys are not literally seven physical locations. We can look at them, if we want, as seven stages of our own transformation, the transformation of our consciousness. Seven stages of the changes in our relationship to reality, and to truth, and to ourselves, and to the divine. And it doesn't mean that every journey like this has these exact seven stages, but I think it gives us a general idea of what the mystics thought this very deep, mystical journey involves, this quest involves. So now, the hoopoe is going to take us through the seven valleys, before we even go on the journey, and tell us again what to expect. He says, “hast vādeeyé talab āghāzé kār vādeeyé eshgh ast az ān pas, bee kenār” She says, ‘the Valley of the Quest is the beginning of this work, of this journey, of this undertaking’. ‘Next comes the Valley of Love, which is endless or boundless.’ “bee kenār” literally means it ‘has no edge.’ There are no sides to it. So, let's look at this for a second. The whole thing begins with seeking again, with “talab”, with that ‘quest’ that we talked about earlier. Everything else really depends on the sincerity of this initial desire to seek something greater than the ordinary life and the ordinary understanding that we usually have. That's really kind of the beginning. But immediately after that seeking comes love. Because in that quest for the ultimate mystical truth, what cannot take us there is reason. And often the mystics kind of pit love against reason. Not that reason is bad, but that reason fails to take us where these mystics want us to go — to the ultimate truth. Right? So, in that sense then, love becomes something very, very key in the journey, and it becomes something that is “bee kenār”, ‘boundless’, ‘endless’, ‘without a shore’. And so this image of a space of love that has no visible edge, so that we can see that it's a very vast and very deep idea of love that he’s talking about. It’s a little bit more than like ‘I love pizza’ or ‘I love Disney movies’. It's something much bigger than that. Then, the hoopoe continues: “pas seyom vādee-st ān ma'refat pas chahārom vādee esteghnā sefat.” Continuing the valley, the third valley is the valley of Insight, and the fourth valley is the Valley of Independence. So we have the word “ma'refat”, which means ‘insight’, really, ‘knowledge that comes from within’. Right. ‘Sight that comes from within’, literally. So it's not information, it's not something that comes from the outside. It is knowledge that's acquired through direct, kind of, bringing up of our own awareness, and direct experience. And then the fourth valley called “esteghnā”. “esteghnā” comes from the Arabic root which means ‘to be free of any need’. To be “ghanee”, to be ‘needless’. To be so full that you don't need anything. And in mysticism, it implies a complete independence meaning we come to a place hopefully that we don't feel like we need anything from the outside world. We are so internally complete, we feel so whole and so not lacking, that we don't feel like we are dependent on the outside world to give us what makes us complete, right? There's no business of like, ‘you complete me’, right? None of that. It's an eternal sense of fulfillment. And so when we feel that, then we can give up the need to possess or to control or to depend or to beg from things in the outside world. And so that's the fourth valley.

Leyla: How does that square away with the hoopoe saying I couldn't do this alone, I needed others?

Omid: How beautiful. Yeah. So the idea is that you go on the journey of seeking together. There needs to be some sense of support. It's a collective journey often, right? But, there will come a stage where you will come to that sense of fulfillment and independence, and so much of your own power shows up, that now it's not like you let go of your companions, you don't suddenly say ‘oh F you, I don't need you anymore.’ But rather, the relationship changes. You’re still with them because of the pleasure that it gives you and the joy that it gives you to be with them. You're no longer with them from a place of neediness, from a place of lack. Yeah. And that's a great way to be in this world, as well, to choose your relationships not from a place of need, but from a place of, you know what? This gives me joy, this gives me pleasure. This gives me some sense of of beauty or love that I’d want in my life. Yeah. Wonderful. So we continue with the valleys. “hast panjom vādeeyé toheedé pāk pas sheshom vādeeyé hayraté sa'bnāk” ‘The fifth valley is absolute Oneness, pure one. And the sixth valley is the arduous valley of Bewilderment.’ So, I'm going to slow down here because I think these valleys really deserve a little bit more attention. The fifth valley is “toheed”, which means ‘oneness’. “toheed” is from Arabic “vāhed”, which means ‘one’. So “toheed” is ‘Oneness’. And so, this part of the journey is the realization that all the many forms of life are all expressions of one single underlying being, which we could call the divine or source or God, or whatever name we want to put on it. The name is not important, but the realization is important. That everything we see in Creation is really another expression of the same underlying one being. That's called “toheed”. That realization, that supposedly happens in the fifth valley, takes us to the next valley, which is “hayrat”. “hayrat” is ‘the state of bewilder’. In other words, realizing that, oh my God, everything that I see is just that same one being in different bodies, in different forms, in different disguises. That realization puts us in a state of bewilderment, as you can imagine, if you truly understand that idea, not just logically, but in your heart, it becomes a cause for great, great bewilderment, right? Not confusion. Right? That comes from ignorance. But just like you stop trying to understand in the usual ways and you just stand in awe and wonder of it all. And this “hayrat”, this bewilderment, is described with an adjective called “sa'bnāk”. “sa'bnāk” means, “sa'b” means ‘difficult’ or ‘difficulty’, and “nāk” which means ‘full of something’ we have “khatarnāk”, which means ‘full of danger’, or “ghamnāk”, something that is ‘full of sorrow’. Here “sa'bnāk” means something that is ‘full of difficulties’ or ‘arduous’. So this state of bewilderment, is not an easy state to be in, right? You walk around, you're in awe, you're bewildered. Which means that your logic can no longer kind of guide you, can no longer really tell you where to go. And that can be very difficult for us human beings that have always often relied on our logic to tell us which way to go. Giving that up can be very, very difficult. Giving in to the bewilderment can be a little bit difficult. And so that's how he describes it, “sa'bnāk”. And then finally he says. “haftomeen vādee faghr-ast ō fanā ba'd az een rooyé ravesh nabvad torā”. The final valley is the valley of “faghr” and “fanā”, ‘poverty’ and ‘annihilation’.

Leyla: Wow.

Omid: Sounds scary, right?

Leyla: Yeah!

Omid: But it's not.

Leyla: Okay.

Omid: He says, ‘after this’, “ba'd az een”, there is no way forward. So this is kind of the last valley of the journey. So “faghr”, let’s talk about it, “faghr” which means ‘poverty’. Here, it's not taken literally about, you know, giving up all your possessions necessarily, but really it means realizing that you're not any of the things you possess, and you're not the person that possesses these things, your possessions no longer define. And we're not just talking about objects that you possess, we're talking about even your name, your thoughts, your beliefs, your body. All of these things start to become, yes, things that you’re experiencing, your experience having a body, having a name, having thoughts, having beliefs. But you no longer identify as a person who has these things. You've become a little bit detached from them, but in the most beautiful way. Not that you necessarily give them up, but you realize they're something much bigger than all of those things. Does that make sense? So it's a real shift in your identity of who you are. That's really what “faghr” represents in the mystical sense. And then, “fanā”, which is really kind of the ultimate climax of the journey of the seven valleys; it means ‘annihilation’. But again in mysticism, it's really not a literal annihilation at all. It's a dissolving of that ego self that we were talking about. Right? So any existing notion of you being the small little person, the small little Leyla, fades away and you dissolve into the entirety of existence. So you go from feeling like ‘I'm this person that starts at my head and ends at my feet’, to understanding that who you are is actually something beginningless and endless, like that “bee kenār” that we were talking about or something boundless. So that's the idea of “fanā”. But the whole point of all of these descriptions of these valleys is not to just, for us to understand them logically, but to really hopefully go on this journey and experience these stages and these processes that he's describing. So I think what the hoopoe is doing is giving the birds a sense of what to expect, but not to say, well, now, now that you understand the journey is done, this is not at all the journey itself, understanding what to expect. Yeah. And so he says after this, there is no “ravesh”. “ravesh”, not as in ‘method’ but as in there's nowhere to go from here. From “raftan”, there's no course of travel anymore. And he explains why. Let me just read the next verse because it sheds some light here. She says, “dar keshesh oftee, ravesh gom gardadat gar bovad yek ghatré ghalzom gardadat” I’ll explain. She says, ‘you will fall into a “keshesh”’. “keshesh” is like a magnetic pull. So once you go through these stages and these valleys, now something else will move you. Just like the planets kind of in their orbits, they're being moved by a magnetic force of something central called the sun. In this sense, the birds now hopefully will fall into this kind of process where something else is now moving them, and they don't have to figure out where to go, and they don't have to put effort into where to go. Movement becomes really effortless and part of just the magnetic pull. And the other part of it is “gar bovad yek ghatré ghalzom gardadat” “ghatré” is, of course, ‘little drop’. “ghalzom” means a ‘great, vast sea, a great vast ocean.’ Originally it was the proper name of a town near the Red Sea, a town called “ghalzom”, near the modern Suez area. But by extension, it came to mean, first the Red Sea, so they've called, they start to call the sea “ghalzom”. And then they got even bigger. They started to call any big sea or ocean “ghalzom”. So here, he’s saying that something that, that felt like very, very small, like a little drop, now becomes the whole ocean. And we have the same metaphor in Rumi and in Hafez as well. The idea that, thinking of yourself as just a little drop shifts into you knowing yourself, understanding yourself as the entirety of the ocean of existence. You are all that is. That's the experience that they're headed for.

Leyla: Wow, beautiful. I think that's a good stopping point for this time. We passed through our seven valleys and we're getting ready for the next part. Is there anything that we should be thinking about before we come back to the next part?

Omid: Absolutely. One thing that I did want to make sure that I say is that, these seven valleys, which are very, very famous as the seven valleys of Attar are, of course, we read a very brief description of them. But each one of these valleys, each one of these ideas that the valley represents, is itself an ocean. It's really massive and magnificent. So I really encourage our students as they read through this and as they think about it, to if they wish to go deeper into each one of these descriptions of the valleys, and think about, for example, what true Oneness really is, what true insight really is. What true dissolution really can involve? There's lots and lots of things that they can go and read about it. But the mystics ultimately want us to reflect upon our time. Hopefully, maybe even go on our own quest, as I always say. So that's the idea of the seven valleys. Much, much bigger than just seven verses of description.

Leyla: Right. Wonderful. Okay.

Omid: Thank you, Leyla jān.

Leyla: So we'll be thinking about that and we'll be back with part four next time and see what the birds decide to do with this information.

Omid: Yes.

Leyla: All right. Thank you so much. And until next time.

Omid: Cheers, Leyla jān.