Rumi's own teacher Burhanuddin said in response to the fool who wanted words without analogy, 'you who are without analogy come hear words without analogy'. "After all you are an analogy of yourself". You adumbrate you own inner reality which cannot be spoken because it is of a realm beyond concepts and sensible reality. You infer the real but you cannot know it.

When Rumi uses the term 'analogy' he distinguishes it from 'parallel'. "By way of analogy God likened his light to a lamp, and he likened the existence of the saints to the lamp-glass, also by way of analogy."

An analogy is a device like a mirror which in which you can see yourself "although your likeness is not really in the mirror".

pg.174: "Hence it can be understood that all unintelligible things become intelligible and sensible through analogies."

In the neo-Platonic way he sees a gradation of emanation from the central mystery the breadth or inclusiveness increasing with subtlety. The final state is beyond duality. This was the state of Mansur Al-Hallaj who in using language seemed to blaspheme. When he said 'I am God' then Mansur had passed beyond "and so his words were God's".

Concepts and sensibles are less broad than the world of mental images and the world which gives birth to mental images is broader than both of those worlds. Conflicts arise about doctrines when they are criticised from a level higher than they inhabit. Thus to set up liberation against salvation is to use criteria which the other does not recognise. They are systems, analogical systems perhaps, which are internally coherent. To use a metaphysical level of one system to judge the other when they do not share the same presuppositions is divisive and pointless.

pg.203: "If it could be known by means of words, there would be no need for the annihilation of individual existence or for so much suffering. You must strive to rid yourself of your own individuation before you can know that thing which will remain."

But words are useful. This is astonishing from a poet of world stature. They can inspire and there are some who love the dance of creation as there are others who long for its dissolution and absorption into the unity of being. Words have power and power is of God.

pg.206: "Speech is like the sun. (total page) The point is that each level of manifestation is good. "Scholars and learned men are also loci of manifestation. I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known."