The Guest House by Rumi

A few weeks ago, I came across The Guest House, a poem by Rumi in a subreddit about life advice.

The poem’s metaphor was truly remarkable, comparing our being human to being a guest house for numerous emotions and thoughts. A good friend of mine pointed out that the poem reminded him of Pixar’s Inside Out, and the similarity between the two made me wonder if the Pixar people knew about this poem or were inspired by it.

The poem also reminded me of this common technique frequently used in meditation community — Put a space between yourself and your thoughts or feelings. You are not your thought. You are not your emotion. Just acknowledge they came into your mind and leave them be. They will leave when their time’s up. Bring your attention to your breath… Count your breath…

One difference is that in guided meditations they compare the fleeting thoughts or emotions to the changes in weather (vs. Personifying them as Rumi and Pixar did) — sometimes it gets cloudy, rains or snows, but they go away and there’s always the clear blue sky.

I prefer Rumi’s analogy of thoughts or emotions as guests because imagining them as people help me paint more vivid picture of them in my mind so I can related to them, learn more about their story. It’s also like creating an object file (eg. JSON) that can contain numerous attributes (eg. name, age, farovirte word that surely summons them to the guest house, etc) as opposed to simple rain, lightning, hail and so on.

One thing I didn’t agree or like so much about the poem was the part about the crowd of sorrows who violently sweep our house and empty its furniture. Rumi advises us to treat them honorably because they may be cleaning out our house so it can be filled in with other good things in the future.

I can see that acceptance is the key message here, but what about our agency as human beings? Shouldn’t we at least try to reason with those destructive thoughts or emotions to the best of our ability? Even though later it turned out that we were wrong and whatever that happened as a result of that thought or emotion turned out to be beneficial to us, I couldn’t help but thinking that Rumi’s simply seeing us as a medium void of agency or volition that only reacts to the input from outside.

If I were an innkeeper and see some rowdy drunkards wreaking a havoc on my property, I’d first grab a weapon to protect myself and immdiately call the police or sheriff. I’d also do everything I can to drive them out and pursue legal actions agains them so they can pay the price. But even with all these efforts if the inn of my mind ended up getting pillaged, then there’s nothing I can do. Then I would just accept it.

I guess Rumi’s basically saying the same thing that Jesus said (Turn the other cheek). I hope I can achieve that mindset of sainthood some day, but seems like a long way to go.

Another tangential thought I had was about designing the guest house of our minds. How many rooms would/should it have? Where should I put my treasures in (to prevent that crowd of sorrows from stealing them obviously), should I build a crazy maze-like place like the Winchester Mystery House? Inception-esque mind-architecture continues.