"The subject of Rumi's poetry is not life but something altogether more than life. While most poetry leads us through carefully arranged thoughts and feelings, Rumi writes from somewhere beyond thought and feeling as we know it: 'Your thoughts are the bar behind the door! Set the wood on fire! Silence, heart!' His poetry is not so much the search for some imminent truth and knowledge, or some discovery to be made in the outer world, but an elaboration of an instant hereness, the immediate inner song of experience that floods this world but is not of it. It is an ecstasy of knowledge that overflows into words, sounds, images. His is a knowledge of the Whole as well as the parts.

"Rumi is building a model of an immense inner world using every possible example and situation of the outer world as metaphor."

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