I am grateful to Isa Daudpota for providing this translation by Jalaluddin Rumi’s verses that elaborate on the theory of evolution:
I have experienced seven hundred and seventy mounds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance though death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that soaring higher than angels-
What you cannot imagine, I shall be that.
Isa further writes in a recent piece on Darwin’s birthday:
He however is concerned with conscious evolution that allows him to interact with objective reality through going beyond the constraints of his own material and earthly characteristics. He continues in the Buddhist vein to say, “Let me therefore be nothing.” For him the deepest insight is gained in perfect ‘nothingness’ which is in harmony with divine consciousness, the kind claimed by Socrates and the Semitic prophets. Darwin’s theory overturned such spiritualistic ideas with hard empirically verifiable facts.
