| Shams-ud-din Mohammad, known as Hafez, lived during the fourteenth century and is widely regarded as one of the greatest Iranian poets. Hafez's book of poetry, an anthology of odes entitled the Divan, is a distillation of pre-Islamic and Islamic Iranian wisdom and is respected as a holy book.;This dissertation explores the implicit psychology of spiritual transformation in Hafez's poetry. To this end, the study employs a hermeneutic methodology to examine the psychospiritual dimensions of the concept of spiritual heart in his mystical poems: the non-actualized heart, the process of purification, and the actualized heart. The psychospiritual process of transformation needed to attain the spiritual heart occurs on three levels---personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal---with the ultimate goal of becoming one coherent whole.;The dissertation identifies three central psychospiritual notions in the Divan---del (heart), ishq (love), and rendi (slyness)---and explains how an individual, with the help of a pir (real guru), may apply these concepts in transforming an unrealized heart into a realized or purified heart. The central concept of nafs (self)---its potential, its process of growth through himmat (effort), and its relationship with the concept of spiritual heart---is also explained.;This study includes a text-based analysis of the phenomenological, cosmological, and psychological dimensions of Hafez's treatment of the concepts of the spiritual heart, love, and slyness. |
