For the last thirty years I have held the question:
What is the relationship between knowledge (especially
scientific knowledge) and spirituality?
At the outset this may appear to be a question that one
addresses alone, without the benefit of others, and I do value solitary
study and contemplation. However, in recent years I have also come to
value more and more fully the role of partners in the exploration of
questions such as my own. Indeed, I have found again and again that
real insight, and especially the application of insight into life, requires
the joining of individuals to a common question or intention. It seems
almost like a moral law that as long as an idea or impulse is mine alone
it will remain sterile. If I can find a “consort,” a partner,
then the initiative will take on life.
Here the role of friendship cannot be overvalued. The
friend is the selfless partner whose only wish is to help. The force
of love is then added to the intellectual energy of individual inquiry,
and as a consequence one moves to another level of exploration. In a
Rumi poem one finds the line, “Don’t scatter and sleep,/
Our friendship is made of being awake.” Friends awaken one another,
sensing the highest in the other and holding faithfully to it under
all circumstances. That wakefulness not only draws the two towards one
another, but also acts as an illuminating energy that elevates their
common work.
What is true for two can be extended to a larger
group, but we should not underestimate the difficulty of this. Remember
that Rumi’s beloved friend Shams-i-Tabriz was driven away and
likely murdered by Rumi’s jealous students! The collective is
not always wise. It has committed every imaginable sin and perpetrated
every conceivable violence on those different from themselves. The only
collective worth having today is a community of free individuals who
love the otherness of those that surround them. In such cases the mystery
of number and harmony can weave though the group and help real good
to come about.
