Discourses of Rumi

discourse 61Hearing something over and over from many peoplecarries the same authority as seeing for yourself.For example, you’ve been told that you wereborn to your father and mother. You never sawthis with your own eyes, but after hearing it manytimes from different people, you accept it as thetruth. If you were told that they were not yourparents, you wouldn’t listen. Similarly, you haveheard repeatedly from trusted people thatBaghdad and Mecca exist. If all those people werenow to swear an oath that those cities do notexist, you would not believe them. Therefore,when the ear has heard the same thing repeatedlyfrom many different sources, it carries the sameauthority as the eye.In the same way, if someone makes a statementthat is a well-known saying handed down generationafter generation, then that is not a singlestatement but a hundred thousand. What is sosurprising in this? A king exercises the authorityof a hundred thousand, though he is only one—if