Zen Koans and Sufi Whirling

Self-inquiry and whirling dervishes on the island of Koh Phangan, Thailand

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“What is freedom?” a white-haired woman asks.

The sea shimmers to my left, agate-blue and doused in pearls of sun.

In front of me is a girl with kind brown eyes. She wears a worn ankle bracelet. Her brow furrows as she thinks.

“Freedom,” she says, as if tasting the word on her tongue. “I thought it was traveling. But I have realized I also love being at home. I love my bike, and my cat…”

Then the timer goes off. We switch places, and I spend the next five minutes delivering my own definition of freedom.

By all accounts, I say, I am as free as I’ve ever been. I’ve been traveling the world for six months, winding my way from Nepal to Thailand, all the way to this island by the sea, Koh Phangan. Yet through all my travels I have been remarkably unable to escape the prison of my own mind, with its many tricks and traps and labyrinths.

I wax rhapsodic for a while on the falsehoods of the American concept of freedom, feeling the need to invoke my homeland in this discussion, my homeland which calls itself the Land of the Free and yet is so remarkably unfree for so many. It is the Land of the Free, and yet it is home of rampant inequality and was literally built on destruction and subjugation. It praises an ideal of freedom, but inherent in that freedom is working to the point of misery.

And yet, as I continue to speak, I begin to wonder: can I really say that I know what freedom is and is not?

The longer we discuss freedom, switching back and forth in five-minute installments, the more porous the word becomes. Its meaning begins to seep beyond its edges. Its two syllables are too small to contain all its shapeshifting, kaleidoscopic meanings. As we speak, language reveals itself as nothing more than a mirror, a projection screen, a shadow on a cave wall.

Maybe freedom is discipline, too, I muse. There is inner freedom and there is outer freedom. And ironically, when we pursue outer freedom, allowing ourselves to entertain addictions and distractions and a desperate quest for accumulating and possessing more and more, we often become increasingly unfree inside. Many sages and wise people have said that that true freedom can only be found inside intensive discipline through meditation and measured renunciation, which is a portal to an infinite expanse of inner bliss.

By the end of our conversation, my partner and I realize have no idea what freedom is.

We switch partners, and my new partner is a man whose story seems to mirror my own: a journey from deep-rooted self-loathing to spirituality to realizing that spirituality itself can be a way of controlling or consuming experience at the expense of real freedom. Spirituality can become a box, too, he says.

Are any of us free if so many of us are not? I wonder, hearing the echoes of protest chants in my ears. Am I helping the world to become free by attempting to free myself and my mind from its destructive patterns? I hope so. We stare at each other, mirrors of each other, full of wisdom and unknowing.

We are practicing Self-Inquiry, a process that involves discussing a question in five-minute increments for twenty minutes total. We are not supposed to react to what is being said when we are listening. We are just supposed to truly, deeply listen.

Our facilitator tells us that this is a Zen practice, and the questions are koans. She also explains that she leads and attends retreats where this practice done for eight hours a day, eight days in a row, or something similarly extreme. I can only imagine how language would bend and twist beyond all comprehensibility at that point.

When we look close enough at anything, be it a word or a quantum particle, its meanings and borders tend to grow more complex and frayed. Eventually, they become warped beyond recognition. Yet when you look deeper, these warps and metamorphoses reveal that everything is one and that there is no division between anything at all.

Freedom is not freedom. What we think is not reality. Words are attempts to cage intangible concepts, but the concept always slips through the loops in the letters and the silence between the sounds.

Reality, I think as we end the conversation and stand up to stretch our legs, is deeper and wilder and more complex and more magical than we can imagine.

Into the Sunset

Right after the workshop is done, I catch the eye of a handsome man walking on the beach. I look down. I look up. I look down. I look up again and he’s approaching me. This type of random meet-cute never happens to me at home but here, I suppose, the freshness I am feeling inside must be radiating outwards.

We start chatting. He invites me to jump on his motorbike. I impulsively agree, and we fly down the labyrinthine streets of the island until we reach a small cafe.

We are both a bit shy, I realize quickly, despite our quick and impulsive meeting, and the conversation starts and stops. But in the cafe, we soon meet a couple he met before in a different part of Thailand, and the girl in particular a seems to radiate a profound joy. I feel instantly drawn to her.

On the traveling road, you tend to make quick, beautiful connections. These are not the possessive desire-filled love of traditional romance or even friendship — they are just flares admiration, respect, happiness at connecting briefly, and the freedom of knowing that none of it will last. Of course, nothing ever lasts, but it’s just easier to see that within the psychedelic trip that is traveling long-term.

We eventually say goodbye to our new friends, and I settle down with my companion and we share stories over smoothies as I read his tarot cards. Mine tell me I am in the process of blooming, but warn me to not become too attached to the past once I enter the future. Wise words, as I know I’ll be looking back on thi time with a great deal of nostalgia someday.

Afterwards, I want to return to the beach for another class at the retreat, I tell him. But I have some time, so we bike over to another beach, passing by naked men lying in the sunshine and thick coconuts spilling their guts out on the sand.

He steals a long kiss as the sun paints everything orange before I pull away and insist on heading back. The class that night is a Sufi Whirling class, which I will not miss for all the impulsive beachside romances in the world.

Whirling With the Dervishes

I’ve loved the Sufi mystics for years, and reading Rumi always feels like catching glimpses into the world’s deepest truths. I’m far from alone in feeling moved beyond measure by Rumi’s words — whirling dervishes originated as followers of Rumi and his brand of Islamic mysticism in the 13th century, though they were eventually suppressed. Yet, as with so many buried traditions that tap to the heart of meaning and threaten power structures with the force of their ecstatic communion and unwillingness to follow anyone but a God of love, they have outlasted all efforts to quell their spinning.

There’s still a layer of sand on my back when I enter the yoga studio, and I soon find myself sitting cross-legged, holding a rose blossom in my hand as the facilitator walks around and blesses us.

He then begins to show us the art of Sufi Whirling, showing us how this dance involves balancing firm on one leg while the other leg propels you around in circles.

The Sufi mystics’ poetry is an ecstatic expression of love for the whole world, he explains. For Rumi, in particular, his love for God was channeled through his love for Shams of Tabriz, his teacher and friend and possibly his lover. But his love for Shams is transcendent, world-shattering. Shams is the vessel and the symbol, but the love is God. In Shams the individual he sees love for all that ever is and ever will be, a love that collapses time and punctures every illusion straight to the interconnected oneness at the heart of all things.

Whirling, the workshop host tells us, is a way of emulating the whirling of the planets and the whirling of the particles within us. The word “dervish” means someone who walks between the worlds of the Seen and the Unseen.

Whirling is a way of unifying polarities and finding oneness — oneness in suffering and bliss, and oneness in the rooted left side and the moving right side of our bodies, and in deep focus and pure trance. The dance is meant to help whirlers transcend their egos and grow closer to God.

“Whirling is preparation for life after death. The whirler takes off the dirty black clothes of worldly life and puts on the bright (mostly white) clothes of eternal life to get ready to fly,” said Nesligül Doğan.

Like many transcendent practices, from the Elusinian mysteries to the Gnostics, the aim of whirling is to “die before you die”— or, to taste the infinite while you are alive.

I begin to spin, and soon I am impossibly dizzy. Sufi whirling is difficult, as it turns out. So many of these spiritual practices are difficult, using flashes of pain and discomfort to bring the body to an edge over which lies an ocean of bliss and truth.

I spin and spin, but soon I have to slow down to a crawl in order to remain standing. Even when I slow, the world spins fast around me. My whole body shakes like a tower on the verge of collapse. It feels like a kind of madness. I fight to hold myself steady, then remember that the point is not to be steady, but to lose yourself entirely.

So I spin faster and faster, moving like a top. I spin until I can’t anymore, and I have to sit and breathe and then I sit and breathe until I can start to whirl again.

One by one, most of us give up and sit by the wall, winded. But the mystic guiding the class spins on and on and on, through the ending meditation.

He is still spinning as we walk out into the night.

Whirling dervishes will sometimes spin for days at a time, a feat that seems impossible.

In my own way, I keep spinning.

I spin through meanings of words. I spin through friends and lovers. I spin from my body to my mind and heart and back again. I spin through different decisions and versions of how to think and the way my life could be.

Yet again and again I return to Rumi’s words, looping around the root. Returning to the poetry. Returning to the song at the center of all things.

At the center of the center there’s a light that never ends, a woman’s voice sings in a song that plays at the very end of the whirling session, puncturing through our nauseated silence, filling it with luminosity.

Rumi’s words tap into that center. Within the dance there is always a still poin, a light that never ends.

What a day it was, I think as I finally make it back to my bed, my insides still spinning.

What a day on this spinning planet whirling through the stars, galaxies whirling around galaxies, blood whirling around the heart, and what infinite gratitude, and what infinite suffering there is, whirling through it all.

At the center, beyond words, beyond the body, in the eye of the storm, at the still point of the turning world, in a field beyond wrong and right, there is a light that never ends. It contains all darkness and all light within it and transcends both. It is freedom and stillness, wildness and permanence. It is all there. It is all there really is.