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| | | Book Name: Sufis - The People of the Path, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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deception. If you touch somebody's face you will never touch his face, you touch only his mask. And remember, your hand is also not true. It has a glove on it. Even lovers don't touch each other; even in love you are not innocent; even in love you are not without masks. But when you want to love God you have to be without masks. You have to drop all deceptions. You have to be authentically whatsoever you are, to be choicelessly whatsoever you are. In that primal innocence God descends.
So the reasons Idries Shah finds to condemn the definition that 'Sufi' comes from 'suf' are exactly the reasons I approve it.
I have heard....
The Catholic priest was trying to get a Jew converted to his faith.
He said, 'All you have to do is say three times, "I was a Jew, now I'm a Catholic. I was a Jew, now I'm a Catholic. I was a Jew, now I'm a Catholic."'
He said it, but the priest thought he had better check up on his convert one Friday at his home.
The Jew was frying chicken. 'Now, you know you can't eat that chicken on Friday.'
'Oh, yes, I can,' he replied. 'I dipped it in a pan three times and said, "Once I was a chicken, now I am a fish."'
That's how we go on living.
All our religion is just like that -- just verbal. It does not penetrate into your being. And you know that whatsoever you say you do exactly the opposite of it. You think one thing, you say another, and you do something else. You are a trinity, you are not one. And all those three persons are going in three different directions. You are a crowd -- hence the misery.
The animal is one -- hence the blissfulness of the animal. The animal has nothing whatsoever to be happy about. He has not a big palace to live in and he has not the TV and the radio and all that. He has nothing and yet you will find great peace, silence, joy, celebration. Why? One thing is there: the animal is not a chooser.
The Sufi is not a chooser. Choose and you deceive; choose and you start going false; choose and you become plastic.
A man was going to attend a Halloween party dressed in the costume of the Devil. On his way it began to rain, so he darted into
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