Rumi Festival, August 2013


Why a Festival, why Rumi, why at Chisholme?

Both Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi are central to the educational provision of the Beshara School and have been so since its foundation. One could say that the School would have been inconceivable without them. Both of these supreme educators provide us with all that is necessary for us to reach Union with the One and Only. Their teachings are timeless and therefore totally contemporary.

Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi show us that our own time is both the flowering of all that has preceded us and the seed of what is to come. From this perspective, now is the time of preparation for the future, just as their lives in the 12th & 13th C were necessary and integral to our own times. Bulent Rauf alludes to this in his notes to students on the journey to Turkey. It was, he says, for Rumi “to continue the overall esoteric enlightenment of man and his progress towards a universal esoteric platform. That is why he had to succeed Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi in time, so as to channel what Ibn ‘Arabi had pronounced as the Seal of Universal Sainthood into universal flow and direct it in its spiritual context more towards the line of sainthood which is Christ-like.”  For a further commentary on this, see also: ‘At the Still Point’

The Beshara School is inexorably tied to the future of the world and of humanity, and is concerned, like Rumi, in mankind’s ‘progress towards a universal esoteric platform’. In this wider context the Rumi Festival marks a pivotal point in the life of the School and its education.  This Festival is a celebration, not so much of Rumi, but of Divine Love, which Rumi loved. As such it is an invitation to Divine Love and/or a promise from It. That this School at Chisholme be selected for an event of such magnitude is a singular honour. 

A 3 minute video, taken from the film 'Turning'