The Mystical Nature: Understanding of Life in the Beginning - Book Report/Review Example

The fool appears many times in the narration, as a foil to someone who has a higher plane of experience. The fool fails to see beyond appearances and takes everything at face value. He confronts the one who wore the ragged dervish cloak in the desert and asks him what his work is. The dervish calls him a poor shallow wretch and explains that he is fainting with the strict pressure of the world’s constraint. The fool fails to grasp this idea as well since he thinks the desert is not constraining as it reveals itself right in front of them.

He is further chided by the dervish who asks him how it can lead the fool to him if there is no strict way in the desert. The fool appears again when the slave who was seduced by the beautiful princess tries to explain the experience he had when her maids made him drink too much and stole him in his sleep to the princess’s chamber. The elating experience he had with the prince seemed like an enigma to the slave later when he has transported again in his sleep back to his hard floor. The fool suggests that he had just had a dream in his sleep that has made him mad.

Here too the fool fails to perceive things beyond the details provided to him. He does not take pains to analyze the information he receives and comes to hasty conclusions, often reflecting the tendency of human beings to remain complacent, satisfied with the fragments of knowledge and wisdom they are given through experiences and never having the quest to go beyond them. Simorgh becomes the meaning of the word itself (si=thirty, morgh=birds). The poems reveal that the experience of a higher truth/enlightenment/God is possible only through the individual quest and perception of physical beings.

Once this perception leads them together in the right direction towards the ultimate knowledge, they see themselves and silence prevails. Even though the poem demarcates the spiritual from the mere physical understanding of life, in the beginning, it aims at a union of the physical and spiritual towards the end in order to explain the mystical nature of the search and its fulfillment.