M1:400 — رَفته در صحرای بی‌چون جانشان / روحشان آسوده و ابدانشان

Translation: Their souls have departed into the boundless, quality-less desert; their spirit is at peace, and their bodies are left behind. Meaning: Rumi here describes the state of sleep, in which the soul is freed from the body's confines and journeys to a realm beyond forms and qualities to find rest.

Here I find one of Rumi’s most subtle and profound interpretations of the phenomenon of sleep, which in fact serves as a prelude to his understanding of death and the relationship between soul and body. In this verse, Rumi clearly states that the human soul – our essential reality – is liberated from the shackles of forms and determinations during sleep and journeys into the “desert of bī-chūn.” Bī-chūn signifies beyond quality, shapeless, timeless, and spaceless; it is the realm of formlessness from which all forms arise and to which they return. This journey into the bī-chūn desert is a liberating one. The soul finds rest in this realm. This tranquility is a sign of a temporary return to its origin, to that primordial neyestān (reed-bed) from which the soul was severed. Contrary to the common perception that the body carries the soul, Rumi, following Aristotle and other ancient sages, considers the soul to be the bearer and sustainer of the body. The body is like a “saddle” on the “horse of souls.” In sleep, this saddle is removed from the horse, and the horse, the soul, returns to its true domain, albeit tethered by a “long hobble” to the saddle to return the next day. This concept of “He strips the horse of souls of its saddle” is the heart of this verse. It is our soul that keeps the body alive, not vice versa. The body is a vessel through which the soul flows and from which it draws strength. Thus, in sleep, the soul is freed from this vessel without occupying any specific location, for the soul itself is placeless and timeless; its presence is “with” the body, not “in” the body, just as time is “with” existence, not “in” existence. This analogy reminds me of bī-ṣūratī (formlessness), one of the Masnavi’s key insights; the soul, like water, light, wind, or the breath in the reed, is formless, and all forms arise from it. The link between sleep and death is quite clear here. Rumi alludes to the famous hadith, “Sleep is the brother of death.” This means that our experience in sleep is a preview of our experience after death. Just as in sleep, our will and agency are minimized, and we are in the hands of other forces, seeing dreams over which we have no control, so too after death, in “eternal sleep,” we enter that same bī-chūn desert, and our heaven and hell will be nothing but the continuation of those sweet and terrifying earthly dreams. This expression by Rumi is profoundly anti-existentialist; this departure is not loneliness (tanhāyī), but a return to the presence of the Truth, a presence in which the soul finds peace and escapes the storm of this world’s “wakefulness and consciousness.” This tranquility is the height of liberation and temporary union, which the mystic always yearns for, even to the extent of wishing: “Would that this soul had been preserved, like the Companions of the Cave / Or like Noah’s Ark,” never to return to this world.

Key takeaways

• Sleep is an allegory for death: the soul journeys to a formless realm to find rest, while the body is temporarily left behind.
• The soul-body relationship is inverted from common belief; the soul carries the body, not vice versa, like a horse shedding its saddle.
• The "desert of bī-chūn" refers to the quality-less, formless divine realm to which the soul returns.
• This verse emphasizes the soul's bī-ṣūratī (formlessness), which, like water or light, is the source of all forms without having one itself.
• The experience of sleep is a temporary jedāyī (separation), but not tanhāyī (loneliness); the soul returns to the primordial Beloved and finds peace in His presence.