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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings | Previous Next | |
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that can contain life. There exists NO word that can contain love! There exists no word that can contain God!
Sufis have ninety-nine names for God. One wonders: Why not a hundred? Ninety-nine? One more they could have created. But there is a great message in it. They say: The real name is left blank, the hundredth, because God cannot be contained in any word. Ninety-nine are just toys to play with -- because you ask, because you CANNOT be at ease with a nameless God, because you feel uncomfortable. You want some name for God so that you can address Him. If God is nameless, you feel impotent -- what to do then? How to address...? where to look for...? what name to repeat?
So ninety-nine names are given, but even those ninety-nine names do not indicate anything. They indicate the hundredth, and the hundredth is just no word, emptiness. These ninety-nine names are nothing but ninety-nine names of nothingness, and the hundredth is nothingness itself. Those are toys for children to play with. But they are dangerous toys, because children have forgotten the hundredth completely and they have become engrossed in the ninety-nine.
Once a Sufi was staying with me and he used to repeat God's names, chanting morning, evening, in the night.... And I would ask him again and again "When will you remember God?" And he was a little worried why I asked -- he was remembering continuously, morning, evening, night. Two, three days and I was asking again and again, "When will you remember God?"
He said, "What do you mean? I go on re-membering Him. Can't you see my lips moving continuously? Can't you see my rosary? I am moving the beads!"
I said, "These are ninety-nine names, but when will you remember God? When will you throw these beads? When will you stop your movement of the lips? When will you stop your inner chattering, inner talk, this constant repetition of those ninety-nine names? They have to go -- only then does silence descend. And silence is mysterious. And silence cannot be contained in any sound. Truth cannot be forced into a word; the word is so small."
And you ask me IN SIMPLE WORDS -- simple or difficult, it makes no difference.
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