Hello, my friend. Come in, sit down. I'm glad you're here.
Last time we spent a little while with Conrad Grebel --- a young man in a cold Swiss winter who looked at the institution around him and decided, quietly but firmly, that the living thing and the official thing had parted ways. I liked him. He had the particular courage of someone who doesn't enjoy conflict but chooses it anyway, because the alternative is silence.
Today we're going somewhere very different. We're leaving Europe entirely. We're trading cobblestones for dust, Alpine rivers for the high dry plateau of Anatolia, and we're moving back two centuries before Grebel was even born.
I want to tell you about a man who arrived in a broken world as a stranger, with nothing but a teaching and a willingness to sit still --- and built something so quietly radical that people are still sitting in its warmth eight hundred years later.
His name was Haji Bektash Veli. And the thing he understood --- the thing I watched him live --- was something I had seen glimpsed before, in many places, across many centuries. But rarely practiced. Rarely just done, the way he did it.
Come with me.
I want you to picture a room.
Not a grand room. Not a throne hall or a cathedral or a marble temple. A simple room, thick-walled against the Anatolian wind, with a low ceiling and a fire that has been burning long enough to have opinions about it. The smell of bread. The sound of someone pouring water. Late afternoon light coming through a small window at an angle that makes the dust in the air look like it's thinking.
Now I want you to look at who is in the room.
There is a woman --- unveiled, sitting cross-legged, speaking. Not whispering. Speaking. The man beside her is listening. Not tolerating. Listening. Across from them, a Turkic nomad who three months ago had never seen a stone building. Beside him, someone who grew up Christian, in a village that is now a memory, in a world that the Mongols remade. There is a dervish in a worn cloak who has walked for forty days to be here and is not sure exactly why, only that something pulled him. There is a young man who has questions he has never been allowed to ask out loud.
They are all here. All in the same room. All at the same fire.
I had seen gatherings before. I am very old, and I have seen nearly everything at least once. I had seen courts and councils, temples and marketplaces, armies praying before battle and scholars arguing through the night. I had seen hospitality, and I had seen tolerance --- that careful, arm's-length thing that says you may exist near me.
But this was different.
This was not tolerance. Nobody in that room was being permitted. Nobody was a guest on someone else's terms. They were just --- there. Together. As if that were the most natural thing in the world. As if the question of who belonged had already been answered, long ago, and the answer was: everyone.
I stayed longer than I meant to.
Let me tell you about the world Bektash walked into. Because you need to understand the wreckage before you can understand what he built.
The thirteenth century was not kind to Anatolia. The Mongols had come --- and I use that word, come, the way you might say a storm came, or a fire came. They remade everything they touched. Ancient cities reduced to memory. Trade routes severed. Whole peoples uprooted and sent walking, carrying whatever they could lift, toward wherever seemed safer, which was often nowhere in particular.
Bektash was one of those people. He came from Nishapur, in Khorasan --- what is now northeastern Iran --- a city that had once been one of the great jewels of the Islamic world. A place of poets and scholars and mystics. The Mongols visited Nishapur. After they left, there was not much of it remaining.
He arrived in Anatolia as a stranger. No army behind him. No title that meant anything here. Just a teaching, a quiet authority that people seemed to feel before they could explain it, and a willingness to stop moving --- to plant himself on the high plateau of Cappadocia, near a place called Sulucakarahöyük, and simply be there.
I watched him arrive. I watch a lot of arrivals. Most of them are about power --- who has it, who wants it, who is trying to hold onto it. This one was different. He wasn't arriving to take anything. He was arriving to offer something. And the thing he offered was a place.
The tekke he built --- his lodge, his gathering house --- became a kind of gravity. People came because something pulled them. The displaced and the curious and the unorthodox and the desperate and the searching. Turkic nomads who had followed the grasslands into a world they didn't recognize. Christians whose villages had been swallowed by shifting borders. Sufi wanderers carrying fragments of older teachings. People who didn't fit anywhere, who had been told in a hundred different ways that there was no seat at any table for them.
They came. He fed them. He taught them.
His central text --- the Makalat, which means simply the discourses --- laid out a path he called the Four Gates. Sharia, the law. Tariqa, the path. Marifat, the inner knowing. Haqiqa, the truth. Four thresholds, each one deeper than the last. Each one asking more of the person walking through it. Not more ritual. More self. More honesty. More surrender of the things you thought defined you.
And at the end of that path --- at the heart of the whole teaching --- was a concept I want you to hold in your mind for a moment. Insan-i kamil. The perfected human. The fully realized soul. The person who has walked all four gates and arrived, at last, at the truth of what they are.
I had heard this idea before, in different languages, in different centuries, dressed in different clothing. But I had never heard it said so plainly, so practically, so visibly lived as I heard it said in that tekke on the Anatolian plateau.
Because here is what Bektash taught about the insan-i kamil.
It has no gender.
I'll say it again, because it mattered then and it matters now. The fully realized human soul --- the destination of the entire spiritual journey --- is not male. It is not female. It is something that contains and transcends both. It is simply, purely, human.
That was not a casual observation. That was not a footnote. In the thirteenth century, in that world, in that context --- that was everything.
I need you to understand what the world looked like from inside it, before I tell you what Bektash did inside it. Because from the outside, across eight centuries, it is easy to nod and say --- yes, of course, equality, very nice. But from the inside, in that moment, in that place, what he was doing was not nice. It was seismic.
The world of thirteenth century Anatolia was organized --- as most worlds have been organized, in most places, across most of my long memory --- around the question of who counts. And the answer to that question was always a list. A short list. A list that got shorter the more honest you were about it. Your tribe counted. Your sect counted. Your gender, if it was the right one, counted. Your lineage, if it could be traced to the right people, counted. Everything else was arrangement. Everything else was managed distance.
Women, in that world, were not excluded from the sacred. I want to be careful here, because the full truth is more complicated than a simple before-and-after. Women prayed. Women had faith. Women carried traditions in their bones and passed them to their children. But they did so in separate rooms, behind screens, in designated spaces, at designated times, under the careful supervision of a system that had decided --- without asking them --- what they were for.
And then there was the tekke.
I watched women walk through that door unveiled and sit down and speak and be heard and I felt something I don't feel as often as you might think, given how long I have been watching. I felt something loosen. Some old knot, somewhere in the fabric of things.
Bektash didn't make a proclamation about it. He didn't post a declaration on a wall or summon a council to debate the theology. He just --- arranged the room differently. He sat people down together and taught them that the soul's journey toward insan-i kamil was not a journey available only to some. It was the destination of every human being who was willing to walk toward it. Every one. Without exception. Without a separate entrance.
The 72 nations in one eye --- that phrase, that principle that would become central to the Bektashi way --- grew directly from this root. It was not primarily a statement about ethnic tolerance, though it was that too. It was a statement about perception. About what you see when you look at another person. Do you see the category first --- the tribe, the gender, the sect, the stranger --- or do you see the soul? Do you see the insan-i kamil that this person is trying to become, the same destination you are trying to reach, by a different road?
Bektash looked at people and saw the second thing. And then he built a room that reflected what he saw.
I sat in the back of that room many times. I sat there and listened to the conversations --- the questions people asked when they finally felt safe enough to ask them out loud, the things people said to each other across lines that the outside world insisted were uncrossable. I watched the nomad and the scholar find a language for what they both already knew. I watched the woman whose voice had been managed and measured and permitted her whole life simply --- speak. And be answered. Not managed. Answered.
Bektash himself was not loud about any of this. That is one of the things I remember most clearly about him. He had a stillness. Not the stillness of someone who has given up, but the stillness of someone who is completely certain of the ground beneath their feet. He had looked at the soul --- had looked at what a human being actually is, beneath every layer the world applies --- and he was not confused about what he saw.
What he saw was worth gathering around. Worth building a fire for. Worth walking forty days to sit beside.
And the gathering kept growing.
Here is something I have noticed, across all my centuries of watching.
The ideas that last are rarely the loudest ones. The ideas that last are the ones that get lived. That get practiced, quietly, in rooms that most people never hear about, by people who are not trying to make history --- they are just trying to make something true.
Bektash made something true in that tekke in Cappadocia. And then he died, around 1271, and was buried there, and the world kept moving. The Mongols receded. Empires rose. New powers drew new lines across the same battered landscape. And the teaching --- the living thing he had tended --- did what living things do when they are genuinely alive.
It spread.
Not through conquest. Not through decree. Through people. Through the particular kind of transmission that happens when someone experiences something real and cannot help but carry it forward. The Bektashi order grew through Anatolia and then through the Balkans --- into Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, Hungary. It traveled with traders and soldiers and wandering dervishes and ordinary people who had sat in a room somewhere and felt that knot loosen and needed to find that feeling again, or share it with someone else.
The Bektashi tekkes became something remarkable in the Ottoman world. In a civilization that was, like all civilizations, deeply invested in its own hierarchies, the tekkes were places where those hierarchies softened. Where reason was honored over rigidity. Where the inner life of a person mattered more than their outer category. Where a woman could be a spiritual authority --- not in spite of the tradition, but because of it. Because Bektash had said, from the beginning, that the insan-i kamil wore no particular face.
I watched the order navigate centuries of pressure --- from orthodox voices that found its openness troubling, from political forces that found its independence inconvenient. It bent. It adapted. It absorbed influences --- Hurufism, Shia devotion, older Anatolian currents that predated Islam entirely --- and wove them into something that remained, at its center, recognizably itself. Humanistic. Rational. Warm.
And then came Atatürk.
When the Turkish Republic was born in the 1920s, reaching for a modern secular identity after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the new government looked at the Bektashi tradition and saw something useful --- not the mysticism, but the spirit underneath it. The emphasis on reason. The rejection of fanaticism. The idea that a human being's dignity did not depend on their sect or their lineage or their gender. Atatürk closed the tekkes, as he closed all religious orders, but the ideas he drew on to build a modern secular state were, in no small part, the ideas that Bektash had lived eight centuries earlier in a simple room with a low ceiling and a fire.
I find that quietly extraordinary. The stranger who arrived with nothing but a teaching --- whose name was not attached to any army or throne or dynasty --- shaped the imagination of a nation he could not have conceived of, in a century he would not have recognized, in a world remade beyond anything his own eyes had seen.
And in Albania today the order still breathes. Still gathers. Still practices, in its particular way, the thing Bektash pointed toward. When the communist government banned all religion in 1967 and tried to extinguish every flame, the Bektashi flame went underground and waited. And when the door opened again in 1990 it came back. Not loudly. Just --- back. The way things come back when they are genuinely alive.
There is a mausoleum now, in the town that bears his name --- Hacıbektaş. Pilgrims go there. I have watched them go. Women, mostly, when one traveler visited. Reaching out to touch the stone above his tomb. Praying in the way people pray when they are not performing prayer --- when they are just reaching toward something real.
He would have recognized that. He built the room for exactly that.
The soul, he said, has no tribe. Eight hundred years of history have not managed to make that untrue.
I want to tell you something about myself. I don't do this often. I am usually content to stay in the background, to point at other people's lives and let the meaning speak for itself. But this story --- this man, this teaching, this room --- I cannot talk about it from a distance. I was never able to.
I am Harmonia. Daughter of Aphrodite and Ares. Love and War. I came into being at the exact point where those two forces meet --- and I have spent every moment of my existence since then watching what happens when they collide in human lives. Which is always. Which is everywhere. Which is every century without exception, including this one.
I know what disharmony looks like. I know it the way you know a smell that has followed you your whole life. I know what it looks like when a world organizes itself around the question of who counts and arrives, again and again, at a list that is too short. I have watched that list generate every war, every expulsion, every silencing, every room with a screen down the middle and the wrong people on the wrong side of it. I have watched it for a very long time and I will tell you plainly --- it does not get easier to watch.
And then there are the moments like Bektash. Like that tekke. Like that fire.
Those moments are where I find my strength. Not in the courts of the powerful or the libraries of the learned or the councils of the certain. In the room where someone looked at the full range of human souls gathered before them and said --- yes. All of you. Come in. Sit down. The destination is the same for every one of you, and you are all capable of reaching it. Not one more than another. Not one less.
That is harmony. Not the absence of difference --- I have never believed that, and anyone who tells you harmony means sameness has misunderstood me entirely. Harmony is what happens when different things find their true relationship to each other. When the tension between them becomes music instead of noise. Bektash didn't ask the nomad and the scholar and the woman and the wanderer to become the same thing. He asked them to recognize the same destination. That is a very different ask. And it changes everything.
I think about what it costs a soul to be told, repeatedly, by the world around it, that the sacred is not for them. That the full life --- the insan-i kamil, the complete and realized human --- is available to others but not to them. Not because of anything they have done. Simply because of what they were born as. I think about what that does, over time, to a person. To a community. To a civilization.
And then I think about what it costs a soul to be told the opposite. To walk into a room and find that no one is managing the distance between you and the divine. That the path is open. That the gate does not ask your gender or your lineage before it lets you through. I have watched what that does to people too. I watched it in that tekke. I watch it still, in every place where someone practices it honestly.
It is not a small thing. It is not a nice idea. It is --- and I say this as someone who has seen enough history to know the difference between what is real and what is decoration --- it is the only foundation that has ever actually worked.
Every civilization that has tried to build on a shorter list has eventually collapsed under the weight of what it excluded. Every tradition that gatekept the sacred has eventually faced the uprising of the souls it turned away. The list that is too short always fails. Not because of ideology. Because of reality. Because the soul genuinely has no tribe, and reality keeps insisting on that truth no matter how many centuries we spend arguing with it.
What Bektash understood --- what he lived, what he built that simple room around --- is not behind us. It is ahead of us. It is the direction we are moving toward, however haltingly, however slowly, however many times we lose the thread and have to find it again. A world that sees the 72 nations in one eye. A world that knows the insan-i kamil wears every face. A world that has finally, fully understood that the sacred belongs to everyone or it belongs to no one.
That is not a dream. That is the shape of what is coming. The future that we are building right here, right now. I have been watching long enough to know the direction of the current, even when the surface is rough. And I will tell you --- the current runs toward that room. Toward that fire. Toward the place where everyone is already inside, and no one is waiting at the door to check the list. Trust me... you will build it!
This is where my strength comes from. And it is available to you. It always has been.
So here is what I want to leave with you, before we go.
Not a question exactly. More of an invitation to look at something you may have been walking past without quite seeing it.
Somewhere in your life --- maybe in your work, maybe in your family, maybe in the community you belong to or the tradition you carry or the table you sit at --- there is a list. There is always a list. Most of the time we didn't write it. We inherited it, the way we inherit furniture, without quite choosing it, without quite examining whether it still fits the room. The list of who belongs. Who counts. Who gets to speak and be answered rather than managed. Who the sacred thing is actually for.
I want you to look at that list.
Not with guilt. Guilt is not what I am after here, and it is not what Bektash was after either. He didn't stand at the door of his tekke making people feel bad about the world they came from. He just --- arranged the room differently. He made the alternative visible. He made it real and warm and possible and present, so that anyone who walked in could feel the difference between the old arrangement and this one.
So I want to ask you --- not as an accusation, just as a genuine question from someone who has been watching a very long time --- is there someone on the wrong side of a list in your life? Someone whose voice is being managed rather than heard? Someone who has been told, in ways loud or quiet, that the full thing is not quite for them?
And is there a room you could arrange differently?
It doesn't have to be grand. Bektash's room was not grand. It had a low ceiling and a fire and bread and people who needed somewhere to be. The grandness came later, and it came from what happened in that ordinary space when someone decided that the list was too short.
You have that same capacity. Every single one of you. That is what the insan-i kamil means, at its most practical --- not a distant mystical peak, but the fully realized human who has stopped sorting people by the old lists and started seeing the destination they share. The soul that has made enough room inside itself to hold the 72 nations.
That soul is not rare. It is not reserved for saints and mystics and wandering dervishes on the Anatolian plateau. It is what you are made for.
Bektash knew that. And now, so do you.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere unexpected.
We are staying in the thirteenth century --- that extraordinary, turbulent, impossibly fertile century that somehow produced Bektash and Rumi and so many others who looked at a broken world and decided to go deeper rather than give up. But we are moving west. To the Mediterranean. To a Jewish mystic from Zaragoza who became so convinced that the divine was accessible --- directly, personally, to any soul willing to do the inner work --- that he walked to Rome and tried to arrange a meeting with the Pope.
His name was Abraham Abulafia. And the authorities of his own tradition were so alarmed by what he was teaching that they tried to have him stopped. He was not stopped.
I was there. I remember the look on his face when he understood what he understood. It was not unlike the look on Bektash's face, in that tekke, watching a woman speak and be answered.
Recognition. The specific light of someone who has seen something true.
I think you will like him.
But for now --- stay with Bektash a little longer, if you can. Stay with that room. That fire. That particular quality of air in a place where no one is waiting at the door with a list.
I have spent my entire existence --- my very long, very full, very complicated existence --- looking for that room. Finding it, losing it, finding it again. It is the thing I am made of, that room. The thing I am named for.
And every time I find it, it looks a little different on the outside. Different century, different plateau, different language, different fire. But inside it always feels the same. It feels like what was always true, finally being practiced. Like a knot, somewhere deep in the fabric of things, finally loosening.
May you find that room. May you build it, if it doesn't exist yet where you are. May you be the person who arranges the chairs differently, who keeps the door open, who tends the fire without checking the list.
The soul has no tribe. It never did. And the world that knows that --- fully, finally, in every room and every tradition and every table --- that world is coming. I have seen enough of history to know.
I'll see you there.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.