Like This

About Like This

"Like This" is a ghazal from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, the monumental lyric collection Rumi composed after the disappearance of his spiritual companion Shams-e Tabrizi. The poem belongs to a strand within the Divan that uses the language of physical desire to articulate the soul's longing for divine union. This is not metaphor in the conventional sense, where the poet says one thing and means another. In Rumi's poetics, the erotic and the sacred are not separate registers. The body's hunger for union is the soul's hunger for God, experienced at a lower octave.

The poem is structured around a single rhetorical gesture: the refusal to describe and the insistence on showing. When asked how something looks, the speaker does not answer with words. He lifts his face and says, "Like this." The gesture replaces the explanation. The presence replaces the description. This is the Sufi teaching on hal (spiritual state) versus qal (speech about spiritual states): the state itself communicates what no amount of talking about the state can convey.

Coleman Barks' English rendering, which opens with the line "If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, Like this," has made this one of the most quoted Rumi poems in the Western world. The boldness of the opening line, with its frank reference to sexual desire in a spiritual context, has contributed to its popularity and its controversy. Readers unfamiliar with the Sufi tradition of using erotic language for divine love often misread the poem as either a celebration of sexuality or an awkward spiritualization of it. Both readings miss the point.

In the Persian Sufi tradition, the language of the lover and the beloved (ashiq and ma'shuq) is the primary vocabulary for the soul's relationship with God. This is not because the Sufis could not find other words. It is because the experience of intense love, with its dissolution of boundaries, its overwhelming of rational control, its annihilation of the lover's sense of separate selfhood, is the closest human analogue to the experience of fana (annihilation in God). The body knows what the mind cannot conceptualize. The body has been dissolved in another body. The body knows what it means to lose the boundary between self and other. Rumi uses this knowledge.

The poem extends far beyond its famous opening. It moves through a series of images, each answered with "like this": the sun setting, the spirit rejoining its source, candles dissolving into a larger flame, particles of dust becoming the ground. Each image is a variation on the single theme of dissolution without destruction: the individual becoming the universal without ceasing to exist. The refrain "like this" insists that each image is not a metaphor for something else. Each image is itself the teaching. Look at the candle. That is what union looks like. Like this.

Original Text

Translation

If someone asks you what the union of souls looks like,
lift your face and say: like this, like this, like this.

If someone asks you what makes this moon-face so beautiful,
show them your face and say: like this, like this.

If someone asks you how the cloud rains pearls,
let tears fall from your eyes and say: like this, like this.

If someone asks you how the lover gives up his life,
sacrifice your life before him and say: like this, like this.

If a candle melts from burning and becomes entirely water,
laugh and say to this burning: look, like this, like this.

If someone says, what is the description of annihilation,
become annihilated before them and say: like this, like this.

Commentary

The poem's opening gambit is its most radical move. It takes the most urgent human desire, the desire for total physical union with another body, and says: that is what divine union looks like. Not "is like." Not "resembles." Looks like. The body's longing is not a metaphor for the soul's longing. It is the soul's longing, experienced through flesh.

This teaching has deep roots in the Sufi tradition. Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), the great Andalusian mystic who was Rumi's older contemporary, taught that the human experience of sexual love is the most complete theophany (tajalli) available in the material world, because it is the moment when the illusion of separateness is most completely dissolved. Two become one. The boundary of skin breaks down. The sense of being a discrete, contained individual evaporates in the intensity of union. Ibn Arabi did not see this as a mere analogy. He saw it as a direct experience of tawhid (divine unity) occurring through the body.

Rumi inherits this understanding and gives it the force of lyric urgency. His "Like this" does not theorize about the relationship between physical and spiritual union. It demonstrates. When asked what divine union looks like, the speaker does not explain. He lifts his face. The face itself, in that moment of lifting, radiant with the lover's beauty reflected in it, is the answer. This is the Sufi concept of kashf (unveiling): truth is not argued into existence. It is shown. The veil is lifted and what was always there becomes visible.

The "like this" refrain functions as a pedagogical method that Rumi deploys against the entire tradition of theological discourse. Every question in the poem is a request for explanation. Every answer is a refusal to explain. "What does the union of souls look like?" A theologian would define terms. A philosopher would construct an argument. A mystic lifts his face. The poem enacts the Sufi insistence that the highest knowledge is not propositional but presential. You do not learn about union by hearing descriptions of union. You learn about union by being in the presence of someone who is in union. The answer to every question is: look at me right now. Like this.

The candle image carries a specific Sufi teaching on fana. The candle melts from its own burning. Its solid form dissolves into liquid. It does not fight the dissolution. It laughs. The burning that destroys the candle's shape is the same burning that produces the light. You cannot have the light without the melting. You cannot have illumination without the dissolution of the form that carries the flame. This is the paradox of fana: the self must dissolve for the light within the self to become fully visible. The candle that refuses to melt remains solid and dark. The candle that surrenders to its own fire becomes pure light at the cost of its own form.

The progression of images through the poem traces the Sufi path. The opening image is the body's union. The second is the face of the beloved reflected in the lover. The third is tears, the natural response to overwhelming beauty or devastating loss. The fourth is the sacrifice of life itself. The fifth is the candle dissolving. The sixth is fana, annihilation. This is a journey from the physical to the metaphysical, from the body's experience to the soul's experience, but Rumi does not frame it as a hierarchy. He does not say the later images are higher or better than the first. He says they are all "like this." They are all the same thing at different scales. The body's union and the soul's annihilation are not different in kind. They are different in scope.

This refusal to hierarchize the physical and the spiritual is one of Rumi's most distinctive teachings, and one of the most misunderstood. Western readers, trained by centuries of Christian body-spirit dualism, tend to read the erotic imagery as either scandalous or metaphorical. Islamic scholars uncomfortable with the tradition of ecstatic poetry sometimes argue that the physical language is purely allegorical, pointing to spiritual realities that have nothing to do with the body. Rumi's poem refuses both positions. The body's wanting is real. The soul's wanting is real. They are the same wanting at different frequencies. To dismiss the body is to cut the root. To stop at the body is to mistake the doorway for the room.

The Tantric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism developed a parallel teaching. In Kashmir Shaivism, the erotic union of Shiva and Shakti is understood as the fundamental creative act of the universe, replicated in human sexual union. In Vajrayana Buddhism, the union of wisdom and compassion is depicted iconographically as the sexual embrace of deity and consort. These are not metaphors. They are images of a process that operates at every level of reality, from the cosmic to the cellular. Rumi, working within an Islamic framework that does not share Tantra's explicit iconography, arrives at the same recognition through the language of the ghazal. The body is not an obstacle to spiritual realization. It is a laboratory where the dynamics of union and separation can be directly studied.

The poem's most subversive element is its treatment of language itself. Every religious and philosophical tradition produces enormous volumes of text attempting to describe the ultimate reality. Rumi was himself a prolific producer of such text, with the Masnavi running to over 25,000 couplets. And here, in the Divan, he says: all of that describing misses the point. The answer is not in the description. The answer is in the showing. "Like this" is not a description. It is a gesture. It is the finger pointing at the moon, and the poem is the instruction to look at the moon, not the finger.

In Zen Buddhism, this method is formalized as "direct pointing" (zhizhi): the teacher's words or actions aimed not at conveying information but at provoking a direct seeing in the student. The famous Zen exchange in which the student asks "What is Buddha?" and the master holds up a flower is the same gesture as Rumi's "like this." Both refuse the conceptual answer. Both insist that the truth is present, here, now, visible to anyone who stops asking questions long enough to look.

The tears in the third couplet deserve attention. "If someone asks you how the cloud rains pearls, let tears fall from your eyes." The cloud does not decide to rain. The rain is the cloud's nature, activated by conditions. The lover does not decide to weep. The tears are the lover's nature, activated by proximity to overwhelming beauty. In the Sufi tradition, weeping is a recognized station on the path. It is not weakness. It is the melting of the frozen heart. The heart that cannot weep is still solid, still opaque, still refusing to dissolve. The tears are evidence that the melting has begun.

The Arabic word for witness, shahid, shares a root with the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith. To witness and to testify are linguistically the same act. When Rumi says "like this," he is both witnessing and testifying. He is saying: I have seen this. And the seeing is the proof. The Sufi tradition holds that the highest form of knowledge is shuhud (witnessing), direct perceptual contact with divine reality that does not pass through the filter of reason or language. The entire poem is constructed around this principle. Every question asks for a description. Every answer provides a witnessing. The shift from description to witnessing is the shift from the mind to the heart, from aql to qalb, from knowing about to knowing directly.

The Persian ghazal tradition, in which this poem sits, provides a formal structure perfectly suited to Rumi's purpose. The ghazal is a sequence of couplets, each relatively self-contained, united by a refrain (radif) and a rhyme scheme. The refrain "hamchenin" (like this) binds the couplets together while allowing each one to present a different image. The form itself enacts the teaching: many images, one reality. Many faces of the beloved, one beloved. The ghazal does not argue for unity. It demonstrates unity through variety, which is the same thing the universe does.

In the Satyori 9 Levels framework, "Like This" speaks to Level 6 (SERVE) and Level 7 (UNIFY). At Level 6, the student learns that the highest teaching is embodiment, not explanation. You serve others not by telling them what you know but by being what you have become. Rumi's "like this" is the Level 6 teaching method: become the answer rather than reciting it. At Level 7, the boundaries between physical and spiritual, between self and other, between the question and the answer begin to dissolve. The student at Level 7 does not experience the body and the soul as separate domains with separate longings. They experience a single longing expressing itself through every available channel. The body's desire and the soul's desire are recognized as one desire. Like this.

The poem ends with its most extreme instruction: "If someone says, what is the description of annihilation, become annihilated before them." Do not describe fana. Undergo it. In front of them. The teaching is the teacher's dissolution. This is the ultimate form of Sufi pedagogy, modeled by Rumi's own teacher Shams, who did not teach through lectures or books but through the incendiary force of his presence. Shams did not explain love to Rumi. Shams loved Rumi, and the love burned away everything in Rumi that was not already fire. The poem "Like This" is Rumi's attempt to do for the reader what Shams did for him: bypass the mind's need for explanation and go straight to the experience.

Themes

The body as spiritual instrument. Rumi does not treat physical desire as an obstacle to spiritual realization or as a mere metaphor for something higher. The body's longing for union is the soul's longing operating through flesh. Sexual wanting, weeping, the dissolution of physical boundaries in intimacy: these are experiences of tawhid (divine unity) occurring in the material plane. The body is a laboratory for the study of union and separation.

Demonstration over description. The poem's refrain ("like this") is a formal refusal to explain. Every question receives not an answer but a gesture. This enacts the Sufi distinction between ilm (transmitted knowledge) and ma'rifa (experiential gnosis). The highest truths cannot be described. They can only be shown. The poem is an instruction to stop asking for descriptions and start looking at what is being demonstrated.

Fana as lived practice. The progression from physical union to tears to self-sacrifice to the candle's dissolution to full annihilation traces the stages of fana not as abstract theology but as embodied experience. Each stage involves giving something up: the boundary of skin, the control over one's emotions, one's life, one's form, one's separate existence. Fana is not a single event but a progressive surrender occurring at every level of being.

The unity of all longing. The poem refuses to create a hierarchy between physical desire, emotional devotion, and spiritual annihilation. All are answered with the same refrain. All are "like this." This insistence on unity collapses the dualism that separates body from soul, profane from sacred, human love from divine love. In Rumi's vision, these separations are products of the rational mind (aql) that love (ishq) has already moved beyond.

Presence as pedagogy. The poem teaches by being present, not by being explanatory. The speaker's lifted face, falling tears, dissolving form: these are the teaching. This models the Sufi concept of sohbet (spiritual companionship), in which transformation occurs not through instruction but through proximity to someone whose being communicates what their words cannot.

Significance

"Like This" is among the most provocative and most misunderstood poems in the Divan-e Shams. Its opening reference to sexual desire has made it a favorite of Western readers drawn to Rumi as a poet of love, while the same reference has made it a source of discomfort for readers who prefer their mystical poetry free of bodily reality. Both reactions miss the poem's sophistication. Rumi is not being scandalous. He is being precise. The body's experience of union is the closest available analogue to the soul's experience of fana, and he says so without apology or deflection.

The poem's pedagogical method, the replacement of description with demonstration, has influenced Sufi teaching practice for centuries. The Mevlevi tradition, in particular, has preserved the principle that the teacher's state communicates more than the teacher's words. The sema ceremony, in which the dervish whirls until the self dissolves and only the turning remains, is a ritualized form of Rumi's "like this": do not explain what annihilation looks like. Become annihilated. The watching student receives the teaching not through the ears but through the eyes, witnessing someone in the process of dissolution.

In the context of comparative mysticism, the poem is a key text for understanding the relationship between erotic and spiritual language in the Islamic tradition. The ghazal form, with its conventional address from lover to beloved, provided Persian Sufi poets with a ready-made vocabulary for divine love that was already charged with intimacy, longing, and the dissolution of boundaries. Rumi, Hafiz, and Iraqi all worked within this convention, but Rumi pushed it furthest, refusing the comfortable distinction between the human beloved and the divine beloved that allows readers to spiritualize the body away.

For the Sufi tradition as a whole, the poem articulates a teaching that remains controversial: that the body is not merely tolerated on the spiritual path but enlisted. The ascetic strand of Sufism, represented by early masters like Hasan al-Basri, emphasized renunciation of bodily pleasure. The ecstatic strand, represented by Rumi and the later Mevlevi tradition, emphasized the sanctification of bodily experience. "Like This" is the manifesto of the ecstatic strand: the body's longing is holy because it is the soul's longing expressed in the only language the body knows.

Connections

Tantra and the sacralization of desire. Kashmir Shaivism teaches that the erotic union of Shiva and Shakti is the template for all creation and that human sexual union, when approached with awareness, replicates this cosmic dynamic. Vajrayana Buddhism uses deity in sexual embrace to represent the union of wisdom and compassion. Rumi's "Like This" operates in the same territory without the ritual technology. He observes that the body's experience of dissolving into another is the same experience the soul undergoes in dissolving into God. The Tantric traditions formalize this observation into practice. Rumi leaves it as recognition.

Song of Songs and bridal mysticism. The Hebrew Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim) is the foundational text of Western bridal mysticism, using explicit erotic imagery to describe the relationship between God and Israel (in Jewish reading) or Christ and the Church (in Christian reading). Bernard of Clairvaux's 12th-century sermons on the Song of Songs developed the erotic-mystical vocabulary that shaped Western Christian mysticism for centuries. Rumi's method is structurally identical: the lover's body becomes the vocabulary for the soul's drama. The difference is institutional. Christian bridal mysticism was always accompanied by commentary insisting the language was allegorical. Rumi lets the body and the soul occupy the same sentence without apology.

Zen direct pointing. The Zen tradition's method of direct pointing (zhizhi), in which the teacher uses a gesture, a shout, a blow, or a silence instead of a verbal explanation, is the formalized version of Rumi's "like this." When Bodhidharma sat facing a wall for nine years, he was saying "like this" to every question about meditation. When Gutei held up one finger in response to any question about the Way, he was saying "like this." The refusal to explain is itself the teaching: truth is present, not propositional. It is here, not described. Look. Like this.

Bhakti and divine intoxication. The Vaishnava bhakti tradition, particularly in the poetry of the Baul singers of Bengal, uses the language of physical intoxication and erotic love to describe the devotee's relationship with Krishna. The Bauls sing of the "man of the heart" (maner manush) who can be found only through the body, not despite it. Their insistence that the divine is accessed through the human body, not by transcending it, parallels Rumi's refusal to separate physical longing from spiritual yearning. Both traditions insist that the body is not fallen matter to be escaped but sacred ground to be fully inhabited.

Dharma and the teaching beyond words. The Buddhist concept of dharma transmission, in which the teacher's realization passes to the student through a means that cannot be reduced to verbal instruction, underlies the entire structure of "Like This." The Flower Sermon, in which the Buddha held up a flower and Mahakasyapa smiled, is the paradigmatic example. Nothing was said. Everything was communicated. Rumi's poem is a literary enactment of this principle: the poem says "like this" instead of explaining, and in doing so it performs the very teaching it refuses to describe. The reader who understands the poem has not understood a description. They have received a gesture.

Sufism and consciousness studies. Contemporary research into peak experiences and the neuroscience of self-transcendence has documented that the dissolution of the self-other boundary occurs in both sexual ecstasy and deep meditative states. The default mode network, which generates the sense of being a separate self, becomes less active in both contexts. Rumi's equation of physical union and spiritual union turns out to be neurologically grounded. The body and the soul use the same language at different volumes.

Further Reading

Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz by Reynold A. Nicholson (1898) - The foundational scholarly translation of the Divan with Persian text, critical apparatus, and notes on Sufi terminology.

The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick (1983) - Essential treatment of Rumi's theology of love, including the relationship between human and divine ishq.

Mystical Poems of Rumi by A.J. Arberry (1968) - Scholarly translations from the Divan preserving the formal structure of the ghazals.

My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam by Annemarie Schimmel (1997) - Explores the erotic and feminine dimensions of Sufi poetry, including Rumi's use of the beloved as divine image.

Rumi: Past and Present, East and West by Franklin D. Lewis (2000) - Comprehensive critical biography with analysis of the Divan's poetic techniques and theological content.

Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition by Omid Safi (2018) - Contextualizes Rumi within the living Islamic mystical tradition, countering the de-Islamicization of Western Rumi reception.