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it. And that is the work Sufis have been doing down the ages: provoking the potential into the actual.
Khwajah Esmat Bokhari says:
This is no Kaaba
For idiots to circle
Nor a mosque
For the impolite to clamor in.
This is a temple of total ruin.
Inside are the drunk, from pre-eternity
to the Judgement Day,
gone from themselves.
The Sufis call their assemblies "temples of total ruin" kharabat -- because you have to die, you have to disappear. When Sufis really meet, there is nobody to meet. The Sufi assembly is utterly empty of persons. Only God is. It is a kharabat, a temple of ruin. Very revolutionary words of Bokhari: "This is no Kaaba for idiots to circle."
I also say the same about this assembly: this is no Kaaba for idiots to circle -- hence idiots are very much angry with me"nor a mosque for the impolite to clamor in." This is not a place for the mob and the crowd. This is a place only for the chosen ones, only for those who are ready to die in their love, only for those who are ready to risk all in their search for God.
This is a temple of total ruin -- kharabat. If you come close to me, remember, you are going to die.
Mohammed has said, "Die before you die." That is a Sufi statement: die before you die. Death is coming, death will take you away, but that will not be a voluntary death. It will not be a surrender. You will be forced to die. A Sufi dies voluntarily; he dies in love. He does not wait for death to come, love is enough to die for. And to die in love is beautiful because to die in love is to go beyond death. Listen to Mohammed: die before you die.
If you can die here with me... I am a dead man. I have died. And all that I am teaching you is an art of dying so that you can move into the state of fana, you disappear. If you fulfill that condition of disappearing, God immediately rewards you with baka -- being descends in you -- and that being is eternal.
The door that you have to pass through is the door of love because only a lover is ready to die voluntarily. Nobody else can die voluntarily, only a lover, because the lover knows that death is
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