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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: Sufis - The People of the Path, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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A few have already become mad, a few are potentially ready. The difference between you and the mad people is not of quality, it is only of quantity, only of degree. Maybe they have gone beyond the hundred degrees and you are just lingering somewhere -- at ninety-eight, ninety-nine -- but any moment any situation can push you beyond the boundary. Don't you see it? Can't you observe your mind? Can't you see the madness that goes on and on inside? It is continuously there. You avoid it; you get occupied in a thousand and one things just to avoid it. You don't look at it, you want to forget about it. It is too scary, frightening. But it is there -- and whether you avoid it or not it is growing. It is continuously accumulating momentum. It can come to the peak any time. Any small thing can trigger it. When you choose, you have to repress.
The animal does not choose. Whatsoever is, is. The animal simply accepts it; its acceptance is total. It knows no choice.
So does a Sufi. A Sufi knows no choice. He is choicelessly aware. Whatsoever happens he accepts it as a gift, as a God-given thing. Who is he to choose7 He does not trust in his mind, he trusts in the universal mind That's why when you come across a Sufi you will see such animal innocence in his eyes, in his being; such freedom, such joy, as only animals know -- or trees or rocks or stars.
Idries Shah has condemned the definition of 'sufi' from 'suf' -- wool -- on exactly the same grounds as I am approving of it. He says that Sufis are so alert about symbols how can they choose wool as a symbol? The wool represents the animal and Idries Shah says Sufis cannot choose the animal as a symbol. They are the people of God -- why should they choose the animal? He seems very logical, and he may appeal to many people.
But on exactly the same grounds I approve the definition. To me, to be an animal means to be innocent, not to know morality, not to know immorality. To be an animal is not a condemnation. A saint is more like animals than like you, than like the so called human beings. The human beings are not natural beings, they are very unnatural, artificial, plastic. Their whole life is a life
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