Rumi and the Seven Cities of Love: The Path from a Divided Society to an Ever-advancing Civilization

Abstract

The poet Rumi became transformed when he met the mystic Shams. The seven stages of the transformation are present in various works of the great mystical poets and mystical religious tracts. This work uses these seven stages, sometimes called seven valleys, sometimes seven cities, and attempts to build the unrecorded dialog that may have taken place between Rumi and Shams. The written works of Rumi as well as the memoir attributed to Shams are also used to form their potential dialogue in their own words when possible. Historical information is used as landmarks to guide the narrative. The poems presented from Rumi are original translations rendered into English from the Persian. The concept that resonates through the works of Rumi is perhaps the idea of love as a fire that purifies as a force of transformative action. The second section of this work similarly follows the seven stages used in the Rumi narrative but for an objective presentation that applies much of what Rumi and Shams share as applied to today’s challenges as a non-fiction narrative based on recent research referencing relevant works. Ideas such as empathy extend from the Rumi narrative into this section. Here, the scientific method is used when applicable. Mathematical principles including those used in the underpinnings of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other areas of science such as Quantum Computing are used to help create an objective narrative. Effort is made to present findings while allowing the reader to decide the conclusions themselves. The final section includes a peer-reviewed paper, in Appendix A, that has been accepted for presentation and publication at the AI Large Language Model conference on November of 2024. This paper and subsequent completed work provide a framework to simulate and practically apply the concepts from sections one and two. The methods presented in these papers provide a means to run simulations of various types of group dynamics using Large Language Models and evaluate their efficacy in overcoming group polarization and finding solutions to extremely challenging problems.