What Rumi, Buddhism, and Polyamory Taught Me About Falling in Love
By: Tim Aaron Gashiz
Tags: Buddhism, Religion, Sufism, Polyamory, Islam

About two years ago, I fell deeply, deeply in love. I was staying overnight at a friend’s place, discussing my ecstatic frame of mind. I tried to describe to him the state of being “in love”, and I did it like so:

I am in love with this person because I am more of myself when she is around.

I could feel that this definition was satisfying, but couldn’t pinpoint why.

It took me two years to figure it out, taking lessons from Buddhist tales and Muslim poems.

What Islam taught me about love

Sufism is a branch of Islam often qualified as “Islam mysticism”. Sufism shares troubling similarities with Buddhism. Both religions believe that reality and the self are an illusion. According to them, all beings are one with God, and it is possible to achieve this unity in the present life rather than after death.

The most common parable used by Sufi poets and writers is the one of Majnun and Layla. It is a Romeo and Juliet type of story of impossible love.

Majnun fell madly in love with Layla, but his family objected to the marriage. When he heard that she married another man, Majnun became insane and started roaming the desert. Layla became sick because she couldn’t be with her flame, and died. Majnun was soon also found dead next to her grave, wild animals protecting the bodies of the two lovers.

Azerbaijani folk art based on the Layla and Majnun poem by Nizami Ganjavi.

At first, I found this story puzzling. Why did Muslim ascetics pick such an intense romantic love story as their foundational tale? The story seemed at odds with the focus on inner life and meditation, which is at the core of the Sufi doctrine.

The Masnavi is another major work of Sufism, a collection of poems and tales written in the 13th century by the poet Rumi. Its first tale is also a story of romantic love: a king falls in love with a slave girl and tries to cure the illness that befalls on her.

On and on, Sufis use romantic passion as a metaphor for the love of God. This seemed strange to me. After all, don’t we often oppose romance and spirituality? Catholic priests take vows of celibacy so as not to be distracted from a life of service and love of God, and Buddhist monks abstain from sexual intercourse to reach enlightenment.

It then struck me:

The common point between romantic love and spirituality is the dilution of the self into a greater whole. In one case God, in the other, the couple.

To get a better grasp of this idea, we need to take a closer look at the concept of non-self.

The Buddhist idea of non-self & teleportation

One of the most central concepts in Buddhist doctrines is the idea that the “self” is an illusion. What we call “I” doesn’t exist, and given enough practice, we could be made aware of this fact.

This idea is a bit abstract, and a thought experiment first published by British philosopher Derek Parfit might help understand it.

Here’s the story:

A new technology just hit the market: teleportation. Get into a pod in New York. You will disappear, and an exactly-identical, atom-by-atom version of you will be instantly reassembled in Beijing. A few of your friends try it, and they love it: no more commuting time to go to work or on holidays. But one day, the engineers make a little tweak to the system. Before “disassembling” the version of your body in New York, they wait until you were fully “reassembled” in Beijing, just to make sure nothing went wrong. So for a few seconds, two versions of you exist, one in New York, and one in Beijing. And both have the feeling of being “you”. But which one is the real you?

This thought experiment poses a troubling question about what we mean when we say “I”. The feeling of “self” is more than the mere arrangement of our cells or memories. So why do we have such a strong sense of being ourselves, and staying ourselves over time?

For Buddhism, the answer is clear: this is all an illusion created by the “ego”. In reality, we are one with our desk, our IKEA sofa, the tree in our garden, and our local Starbucks barista. All of these beings and things are united in a cohesive whole, and our feeling of separateness is a nasty illusion that we should dispell.

And that is where love comes in handy: romantic love gives us, for the span of days, weeks or years, the feeling of not being separate, with at least one other being. It is the closest step to feeling the dissolution of the self. It lasts for possibly a long time and doesn’t require us to sit on a meditating cushion for years or to take LSD.

Or, as French writer Louis Ferdinand Céline puts it:

“Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles.”

From Sufism to polyamory

Let’s go back for a moment to the story of Majnun and Layla. It is a classic romantic story written more than a thousand years before romanticism surged in Europe. Both heroes meet a tragic end, a finale very far from the peaceful enlightenment expected for spiritual icons.

So, what went wrong?

Majnun and Layla, although they had the “right” feeling (love and merger beyond their ego) were not able to transcend it and bring this attachment to the next level.

What is this next level? It would have been realizing that once they became one with another, they could also be one with any other living or non-living being. The dissolution of self they had experienced in romantic love was just a glimpse of a more complete disappearance of self that could happen through loving “God”, or “Buddha”, or “Nature”, depending on what we wish to call “It”.

They were not able to reorient their loving feelings and extend them to a broader love, encompassing all beings, all things.

In the first tale of Rumi’s Masnavi, a slave girl falls in love with an artisan and turns sick when a king takes her away from him. To cure her, a “wise” doctor brings her back to the artisan and then poisons him, so he becomes disfigured. After seeing her lover turn uglier and uglier, she grows cold toward him, and can finally redirect her love toward God.

That is to say, love is right, but directing this love toward a singular physical “object” or person is wrong.

As for my own love, it broke apart. Our relationship could not endure, despite the intensity of our feelings. We turned out to be too different people. And as the slave girl of Rumi’s story, I had to redirect this love toward a different object.

I am not religious, and I knew that merely looking for another object of love would mean repeating the same pattern. I, therefore, started experimenting with something new: polyamory. I wanted to love, care, commit, without the exclusive entanglement of monogamy.

In retrospect, I realize that it was also a way to push this idea of love as non-self a step further. I could remain connected to several people at the same time and leave my ego to drift apart.

It was almost two years ago that I started my journey into non-monogamy, and is still a clumsy experiment, with limited means and an imperfect test subject.

It has not been a fun experiment, either. There was heartache, anger, and many days spent journaling dark thoughts while listening to sad music.

But I feel that the whole ordeal was a blessing. No matter whether I am sitting on a meditation cushion or tangled in the bedsheets, I am now working toward the same goal. I am slowly, very slowly, dissolving into something each time a bit bigger than myself.