M6:229 — لیس للجن و لا للانس ان / ینفذوا من حبس اقطار الزمن

Translation: Neither jinn nor humankind possess the power / To penetrate (and escape) the prison of time's confines. Meaning: This verse asserts that neither jinn nor humans can escape the inescapable prison of time; all are bound within its limits, and any worldly attempt to flee this confinement is futile without divine power and guidance.

Mowlana, echoing the Quranic verse from Surah Ar-Rahman (55:33) – «Say, 'O company of jinn and mankind, if you are able to pass beyond the regions of the heavens and the earth, then pass. You will not pass except by authority [Sultan]'» – extends this truth into the realm of time. Just as escape from the spatial confines of the cosmos is impossible for jinn and humankind without a divine 'Sultan' (authority/power), so too is liberation from the 'prison of time's confines' unattainable without recourse to a transcendent power.

This beyt is situated within a profound psychological analysis of human nature that Mowlana introduces earlier. In my view, Mowlana offers here one of his deepest psychoanalytical insights: all human beings flee from their 'free will' (ikhtiyār) and their 'self-existence' (hast-e khod). Why? Because they have keenly realized that 'existence is a snare' (hastī fakh ast), a trap and a prison that encloses them. Conscious and willed thought and remembrance (fekr o zekr-e ekhtiyārī), which is to say self-awareness and the responsibilities arising from it, constitutes a 'hell' (doozakh) that afflicts the human soul. This flight from 'selfhood' (khodī) into 'self-forgetfulness' (bī-khodī) occurs through various means, including 'intoxication' (mastī—via wine or music) or 'occupation' (shoghl—engrossing oneself in endless work and futile concerns).

This is precisely the fundamental existential anxiety that contemporary philosophers and psychoanalysts have explored, yet Mowlana delves into its very roots. Anxieties such as the fear of death, loneliness, the meaninglessness of life, and particularly the anxiety of freedom and responsibility stemming from free will, compel humans to immerse themselves in heedlessness. This verse unequivocally declares that such escapes are merely temporary and superficial. One cannot escape the prison of time—that is, from one's existential reality bound by time and its responsibilities. Intoxication and busyness are like a temporary delusion that makes one forget the jailer, but the prison walls remain. These are not solutions; in Mowlana's own words, 'these preoccupations are idleness itself.'

The path to salvation, therefore, lies not in fleeing from consciousness, but in discovering a 'Sultan' and a power that guides humanity from this temporal imprisonment—and its attendant anxieties—to a higher truth. This power is neither material nor solely the product of human efforts to deceive oneself; rather, it is a divine and mystical guidance that Mowlana expounds upon in detail throughout the rest of the Masnavi.

Key takeaways

• Liberation from the confines of time is impossible without divine power and guidance; purely human efforts are insufficient.
• Mowlana understands humanity's existential anxieties (death, loneliness, meaninglessness, responsibility) and identifies the evasion of free will and consciousness as our response to these fears.
• Worldly intoxications (both spiritual and material) and endless preoccupations are not true solutions to escaping the 'prison of time'; they lead only to temporary forgetfulness.
• This verse, rooted in Quranic scripture, emphasizes the inevitability of this-worldly existential limitations and points towards the necessity of a transcendent approach for true liberation.