Ney-stan

The ney is a musical instrument made from bamboo (reed flute). But Rumi uses it to explain the human condition. The voice of the ney is the voice of every human soul that has ever felt the ache of longing for home. And that home is Ney-stan. This is how Rumi’s Masnavi (6 books/25,000 verses) starts.

Ney-stan is the country of the ney (ney = the instrument, -stan = place of, like Afghanistan where Rumi was born, which is just so cute that he names a country like that). Ney-stan is the spiritual homeland where the soul originally belonged in unity with Allah (or the universe). It’s where the soul was universal before being cut away into individual existence. A place before separation, where we might live “as if you and I never heard of you and I”, beyond the illusion of dividedness.

The choice of using a reed/ney as the narrator is significant. When we’re born, the reed stalk is separated from the reedbed. Being cut off from Ney-stan, from the universal company, is a sad experience. It dulls our soul to be separated from its core. We forget who we really are. Our hearts fill up with ego, attachments, fears, the constant noise of “I, me, mine.”

For a reed flute to produce music, it must first go through a surgery. A surgery of emptying the stalk, punching holes in it, to transform it into a ney that creates music, an instrument that allows breath to move through it. This is in the same way that Sufis believe you must empty yourself of all egocentric tendencies before you can experience the divine. That transformation can be painful. But don’t let your heart break; instead, let it break open.

One of my favorite philosophers, Iris Murdoch, referred to this as "unselfing":

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

Another quote from Bertrand Russell:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

All three of them understood the same truth: the self, with all its grasping and defending, is the primary obstacle to clarity and connection.

For the journey back to Ney-stan, we need to empty ourselves so the music of the universe can flow through and guide us home.