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why things should be together. Of course, it is an invisible force.
Scientists believe in gravitation: without it the earth would not remain together. Nobody can see gravitation, nobody has ever seen it, but it explains something. Since that important day when Newton was sitting under the tree and the apple fell, something that had always been there became visible to him. He could see why the apple was falling towards the earth. Why not upwards? Why do things fall downwards? There must be a pull in the earth which can't be seen but can be felt.
God is the gravitation, not only of the earth but of the total cosmos. That is the meaning of 'Jami' -- one who keeps all things together. And love is that quality that keeps everything together. It is through love that the world is a unity, an organic unity. It is not just a mechanism. There is a soul in it. It is vibrant with life.
So remember two things: love is the closest experience to God and God is the ultimate experience of love.
Salam -- a name of God. The word has two meanings, two aspects of one phenomenon: silence and peace. Silence is the interior phenomenon, peace is its outer expression. When a person is silent within, he is peaceful outside. Unless silence is at the core, the peace on the surface is false, pseudo.
Never try to cultivate peace on the surface. That creates conflict, that is the sole cause of all schizophrenia in the world, it creates split. You cannot impose peace from the outside, and that's what has been done down through the ages: people have been taught to be peaceful. So they pretend to be peaceful and they are boiling within. They have learned etiquette but their beings are not transformed. They talk about peace and they prepare for war. The more they prepare for war, the more they talk about peace: they hide behind that peace-talk.
All natural phenomena have to begin from within and then they have to spread outwards, just like a seed. The tree is not imposed from the outside. The seed bursts forth into a tree; it comes from the within. The interior core slowly slowly becomes its exterior. That which is hidden becomes manifest.
Silence is
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