Saint and sinner

Meditativeness and love are opposites. Meditativeness needs aloneness, love needs the other. Sexuality and meditation are opposites. Sexuali...

Meditativeness and love are opposites. Meditativeness needs aloneness, love needs the other. Sexuality and meditation are opposites. Sexuality is a desire, a continuous desire, unfulfilled 8212; it remains unfulfilled. And meditation is desirelessness. These are opposites. When they meet, suddenly there is a flare-up. Something happens which was not contained in either.

The saint is just meditative. He is carrying one part 8212; hydrogen or oxygen. The sinner is just sexual, he8217;s carrying another part. When the saint and the sinner meet in you, the sage is born. When the polarities meet in you in deep embrace, are lost into each other, lose all definitions, merge, become one, the sage is born in you. The sage is the rarest flowering in existence. The saint is a faraway echo of it, as far away as the sinner.

So Sufis say that the sage is not a saint. You can find many saints, that is very easy. Saints are a social phenomenon. But to find a sage is difficult because the sage is as individual as the criminal and as cosmic as the saint. Here is both together. In the sage, God and Devil meet and lose all their identities. That is the highest meeting. There is no higher meeting than that. This moment of meeting within you of the sinner and the saint, of the negative and the positive, is the moment of samadhi.

The sage is no-mind. The sinner is negative mind, the saint is positive mind, the sage is no-mind. The sinner lives is constant duality. He has to fight with his saint, remember it. The sinner has continuously to fight with his saint, because the saint is there. The sinner is going to kill somebody and the saint says, 8220;Don8217;t do this, this is not right.8221; He has to fight. His fight is as arduous as the fight of the saint. The saint has to fight the sinner. If somebody insults him and a great desire to kill him arises, he has to fight with that desire. He cannot do it, he is a saint, he is a holy man, he is a religious man 8212; this and that. Both go on fighting. They have to because they live in the duality, and the repressed part goes on taking revenge. It waits for the right moments to assert itself.

In the sage there is silence, there is no duality. The sage becomes a silent shrine. There is no longer any conflict, any antagonism. There is no longer any war going on in him. There is utter peace. That8217;s what Sufis call Islam. There is utter peace, silence. Those warring elements have disappeared into unity. The marriage has happened.

Extracted from 8216;The Royal Man8217;