The Rumi and Shams story has to be at least similar. I don’t think they’re really mentioned as the origins of twin flames but there is a lot of overlap and it would make sense.
Rumi was this established scholar and teacher in Konya, in his head with books and theology. Then in 1244 this wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz shows up and their meeting is described as a ‘spiritual explosion.’ How is that not straight from the signs of meeting your TF thread?
Shams challenged everything Rumi believed. Threw his books in a pond and within days Rumi went from academic to mystic poet. That kind of complete transformation from meeting one person.
Yeah.. the more I think about it the more I wonder why I haven’t seen it mentioned before.
They spent months in seclusion together just talking. Deep mystical conversation. And when Shams disappeared the first time so… separation (his students were jealous of their connection), Rumi was devastated. Wrote him letters begging him to return.
Shams came back but left again in 1248, some say he was murdered. Rumi searched for him for months in Damascus until he had this realization that they were one, that Shams was inside him (inner union). It isn’t a happy twin flame success story, but there are a lot of patterns there. And a lot of the wording from his writing really sounds like a lot of the same practices we use today.
He wrote like 70,000 verses after that. Named his entire collected works after Shams. Even signed Shams’ name instead of his own at the end of poems. Scholars say his ‘annihilation of his separate self’ was so intense that he saw Shams everywhere and in everything.