“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.”
—Rumi, Sufi mystic and poet
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The Rumi line above is one of the most overused quotes of his. I myself have quoted it many a-time, not just in creative writing pieces but also in letters to countless girls after they dumped me when they finally figured out how vacuous I am.
I always looked at this quote as basically saying, “Look, sure we fight a lot and you’re a bitch and I’m a bastard. I just wish we could get past all that and back to the place of love.” It wasn’t until about six months ago that I was walking and reflecting on this line that I stopped in my tracks. It wasn’t just the revelation that it meant something greater than, “Let’s stop fighting” but I had stepped in some gum.
I realized that Rumi was talking about living in a non-dual reality, meaning a place where there is no comparison and therefore no judgment. This “field” Rumi is talking about is not a time-out zone from fighting but a place where fighting is impossible to even exist.
In our modern world of “making peace” with those who bug us, the prevailing mindspeak is, “She’s a jerk but I accept this.” The same inner dialogue occurs when we talk of “religious tolerance.” We literally “tolerate” the fact that, according to us, others’ belief systems are idiotic and they will be burning in Hell for eternity—“But hey, I can deal with that and how great I am for my tolerance!”
Rumi is talking about a place where even the very idea of “rightdoing” or “wrongdoing” is non-existent. It is not about, “You’re wrong but I’m going to be a better person than you.” No! It’s about “There is no wrong.”
This is very confusing to the logical-intellect that is very mathematical and thinks like a binary code in zeros and ones without any possibility for a 37 to pop its head in there. The only way I can explain such a place is by using how we compare and judge anything. We can’t have a TALL without having something that’s, if not SHORT then SHORTER. We can’t have a PRETTY without having an UGLY. But what if we looked at everyone as his and her own unique being that couldn’t be compared to another?
Imagine if we were comparing a baseball with a tree with a flock of seagulls. You can’t really say the baseball is “rounder” than the tree or the tree is “taller” than the seagulls. They are just in totally different ballparks and don’t really compare well. Now imagine if we weren’t so focused on the trivial of being human—that we tend to have two legs, two arms, two eyes, one nose, one mouth, etc. You look at this man with a 14” penis and don’t think, “Man, that’s huge!” Instead, if you were to even think upon the size of his penis, you would say, “That penis is just the size that it should be for that man.” You don’t see another man with a 2” penis and say, “Tiny pecker on that shmoe.” You instead seeing it as perfect for that man and comparison to another would be like comparing the baseball to the seagulls, somewhat bizarre.
Osho has been transmitting commentary to me on the Buddha’s Dhammapada, “The Diamond Sutra.” As is typical of Osho, he doesn’t stay focused on one topic but tends to jump around between examples and stories and jokes and somehow they all end up adding to the whole explanation of what he started out talking about in the first place. Well, in one transmission, Osho took sidestepped to discuss Rumi’s line: “Out beyond ideas or rightdoing and wrongdoing there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.” It illuminated the two lines of Rumi even beyond what I had thought I was so brilliant to discover. Below, unedited, is what he told me…
Jaluddin Rumi, the Sufi poet, said, “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.” His is not saying, “I’ll meet you in the rightdoing field,” because he knows that field is just as ugly as the wrongdoing field. Heaven as an idea of everyone good and pious—according to your thinking and judging—is as ugly as any Hell created by the sociopathic priests. “Out beyond ideas…”
When you drop the idea of rightdoing and wrongdoing what happens? All of a sudden you say hello to the burglar with as big a smile as you do the saint. While in the imagery of Rumi’s poetry you may see the field as one of grass, it is really one of pure essence, an energy field, that is not “beyond” in the distance but beyond in subtlety, that you don’t have to “get” to but will find yourself immersed in once you drop your mind, your thoughts, your judgments, your ego. Then everyone is in this beautiful field with you. From your new perspective, everyone is in your field. But from their perspective, they are still miles away from you and now judge you to be some crazy hippie.
Rumi says, “I’ll meet you there” for two reasons. One is a declaration that this is where he is heading regardless of who decides to join him and he is saying that eventually we all arrive in this field sooner or later. If you’re going to arrive later than him, he’ll greet you with open arms. If you manage to arrive before him, he will be just as joyous to see you.
The other aspect of “I’ll meet you there” is less obvious to the intellectual but maybe not so obscure to the meditator. As long as two people are living, breathing egos with ideas and thoughts and judgments, it is not possible for them ever to meet. Just like you can’t take your body with you into Heaven, you can’t take your ego into true union with another. The ego will always be a wall, will be a barrier to you melting into the other. The ego will act as a prophylactic preventing your life force from entering the other, becoming one with the other and creating a new life that is a combination of the two of you. It is only two no-things, no-bodies, no-egos that can come together in union. Until then, you can enjoy the sex but you won’t be making any baby.”
Most of us can’t even conceive of what it would be like to reside in a “field” where we have no identity, an anti-“Cheers” bar where nobody knows your name—not even yourself. This doesn’t mean that you would be walking around like an Alzheimer’s patient not knowing Who You Are.
The husband came home to find his wife balling in tears. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“I went to the doctor and he told me that I had The Big ‘A’!” she blurted out between heavy sobs.
“The Big ‘A’?” thought the husband, “what is that?” So he asked her. “What’s The Big ‘A’?
“It’s either AIDS or Alzheimer’s!” bellowed the wife and returned to her weeping.
“AIDS or is it Alzheimer’s? Well which is it?” asked the husband. In all the emotion, the wife couldn’t remember, so the husband called the doctor.
“Hello, Dr. Schwartz. This is Mr. Robinson. My wife just came back from your office and she said that you told her that she had The Big ‘A’. Is that AIDS or Alzheimer’s?”
“Mr. Robinson, I don’t have your wife’s chart in front of me right now and I am rushing off to another patient so I don’t really have time to retrieve it at this moment,” said the doctor.
“Listen Doctor, my wife is in tears right now and I want to know what the hell she has!” said Mr. Robinson.
“Okay, here’s what you can do,” said the doctor. “Tell your wife to walk around the block. If she makes it home—don’t fuck her.”
No, you are not walking around not knowing Who You Are. Quite the contrary, you have dropped your masks, your roles, your constant acting and now you know exactly Who You Are. And when others meet you in The Field, they too know Who They Are. And now you have left all the characters and games and barriers outside in the buildings and the offices and at home, in your various roles playing the good little worker or the strong, providing father or the funny guy at parties, and for the first time in your life there is no crowd of characters with you…just You. And it is only when you leave the crowd behind that you can truly come together with another in Union.
Union, Oneness, Enlightenment, Non-Dual Reality, Nirvana, The All—or any other term that the New Ager is quick to sprinkle about like a waiter bugging you with “Fresh pepper?” as he presents his large wooden pepper grinder, is not jumping into some soul log splitter where you dissolve into a million pieces that are so small you can no longer distinguish where your soul ends and the Universe begins. No, it is dropping the barriers, the identities, the classifications and categorizations. And with these drop the judgments, the comparisons and even the possibility of any idea of rightdoing and wrongdoing.
It is in this field where you can relax on the grass with as many others that want to join you and never feel crowded because the only crowd that was cramping was the one you carried with you in your head. Where you can watch the sun rise, watch it set, watch the clear blue sky…or maybe be unable to see the sun because of a black raincloud…but you will see the world, or others in the world, with the mindset of “If only…” Everything and everyone is how they should be. And it is perfect.
You have no complaints because there is nothing to complain about because nothing is “wrong.” Can you even imagine making it through a single day without a litany of complaints you’ve notated? John Lennon cut the line, “Imagine no complaints” from his famous song Imagine because he knew everyone would immediately turn the radio off and call the station to complain.
This is not some cheesy Heaven where you don’t have to lock up your bicycle because everyone is too busy playing harp and flapping their angel wings to steal your bike. This is a Heaven where the thought of stealing another’s bicycle could not even form in one’s head. But if some strange anomaly happened where one managed to steal your bicycle, you would not be disturbed in the least because you would know to the core of your being that at that moment your bicycle needed to be stolen. Unlike Larry Goldstein, the controller of the World Trade Center complex who took out millions of dollars in insurance coincidentally only a short period before 9/11, you aren’t relaxed because you know you will soon profit after the planted explosives bring down your property; you are relaxed because you are beyond judging situations as “good” or “bad,” “wrong” or “right.”
The obstacles in our life are not created from not having the money or the job or the opportunities but from not having the silence in our own heads beyond the constant voices of our parents and teachers and priests and politicians filling it with so much noisy echoes of useless facts and figures and fairytales and judgments of what constitutes right and wrong. When you can kick out this crowd, suddenly even standing in the center of Times Square on New Year’s Eve feels spacious.
In life our parents and teachers always wanted us to become some-thing, probably more for their fulfillment than our own. It will be the next generation of children that will stand up to their parents and declare, “I don’t want to be your some-thing. I want to be my own no-thing.”
And then it will be Heaven without harps, wonder without wings. Then the ordinary will be extraordinary. And like a weed that has overtaken a garden, The Field will overtake the minds of man and leave in its place no-thing.
“In that meeting, only two things will not be there: Your ego will not be there, and your lover’s ego will not be there. Other than these two things, the whole existence will be there. And these two egos were really the problem, were what was making them two parallel lines.”
—Osho in love, freedom, aloneness: THE KOAN OF RELATIONSHIPS (p. 97)