Two Realms of Appearance and Hidden in Jalal Al-Din Mowlavi's Worldview

One of the most important pillars of mystical worldview is attention to two realms of appearance and hidden aspects of actuality. Accordingly, any real being, including world, man, and even the Most High God have these two aspects. Outward sciences try to know the appearance of world, but mysticism is man's attempt to understand the hidden aspect of existence. This doctrine is one of the pillars of Mowlana Jalal Al-Din Balkhi's mystical thought and the key to understand his works especially his masterpiece "Masnavi Manavi (spiritual ode).The present paper tries to explain Mowlavi's viewpoint on the matter through extracting related couplets from "Masnavi Manavi" and interpreting them. The research findings show that Mowlavi believes that world, man, knowledge, religion, Quran, Man's act, and any other reality has appearance and hidden aspects and real knowledge means achieving these hidden aspects. Mystical religiosity and religiousness mean discovering the geography of the hidden aspect and living in it.