See also Chapter 101, 'Religious Experience' in The Republic of Rumi: a Novel of Reality

Jamshid, the fourth king of Persia according to Zoroastrian mythology, is said to have a magical cup which contained the elixir of life and showed the seven heavens and the whole world.

The Cup of Jamshid – or Jaam-i-Jam – belonged to an age where matters of the inner life were perceived to have been settled by faith while knowledge about the physical world was clouded by ambiguities, uncertainties and unavailability of information. Addressing such a world, visionaries like Ferdowsi may have treated Jamshid’s Cup as a symbol for something that could bring clarity about the vague and the ambiguous.

The situation can be said to have reversed now: learning the latest happenings in the farthest corners of the world, once a miracle of Jamshid’s Cup, is now the game of a five-year-old who is playing with the remote control of a television. In order to have an idea of the feeling of splendor and awe which the mythical Cup inspired in the hearts of the listeners in the old times, we can try imagining a means through which one could acquire complete clarity about everything that is beyond the prevalent modes of information today – especially the inner world existing on the brink of the infinite Time, free from the limitations of past, present and future.
Hence, at the very beginning of the first book, Secrets and Mysteries, Iqbal proclaimed: “My dust is brighter than Jamshid’s Cup. It knows things that are yet unborn in the world.”