When coming to the question of God, I will repeat what I have always said, that to explain God is to dethrone God. God is an ideal, and any ideal, when you analyze that ideal you destroy it. In the East Majnun and Leila are known as Romeo and Juliet in the West. And in the greatest grief of Majnun, who was separated from Leila, someone came to console him and said, "What is Leila? Is she beautiful? What is she? The world is full of beautiful girls. Leila is not worth thinking about!" And Majnun lifted his head and said to him, "In order to see Leila you must have Majnun's eyes."

Can ideal be explained? Can ideal be discussed? Can ideal be analyzed? God is the highest ideal, as high as one can reach. And one will find the perfect ideal in God. And when one begins to realize if God is personal or whether He is abstract, in defining God one will break the ideal. And at the same time, if you can conceive of anything it must be personal, it must be individual, it must be a separate entity. Our mind is not capable of conceiving of something which is abstract. Our mind is not abstract, our mind is an object. And in any object, all that will reflect and be intelligible to our mind must be limited, must be objective. When people instead of learning "a," "b," "c," will begin to learn "z" first, that is wrong. "A" is the first alphabet to learn, "z" will come the last. When a person wishes to take his first step on the second floor without using a ladder, he must fall. A person who wished to reach God, an abstract God, without first building in his mind the objective God, he will never reach to the throne of God.

The Hindus have learned this idea most wonderfully and practiced it most splendidly. They have begun by molding the God of clay, and have put Him in a shrine and have said, "This is the God of clay we have made with our own hands and worshipped it." That is the symbolism. That is the symbol of the worship of God. If we do not make God of clay, we still must make him, for in order to know God we must make him first. Then God will come in the shrine which He has made. The Hindus make a rehearsal by going in the temple of a stone god. In this age they say, "A personal God! Never we can think about it. It is the simple ones who are holding that faith in a personal God thousands of years."

Men of medicine say that it is a religious mania; any great devotion or a deep concentration is called a religious mania. They do not know what money mania means. Most of all those who call it religious mania, they have money mania. From morning till evening .... If anyone thinks of something higher, greater, deeper, then they say that is a mania. That time has come when there are ninety-nine persons to say that one person is mad, and that one person has to see the ninety-nine as mad.

Life is flowing toward perfection. The greatest perfection is the knowledge of God. And how can one reach to the knowledge of God? By first stepping on and reaching the stepping-stone. And what is the stepping-stone to God's shrine? The personal God. Once a person has put his foot on the stepping-stone, when the objective God has become clear, his next step will be the abstract God. But if he wants that as the first step then he will be the loser. Because if a person does not know what an abstract God will give him, that knowledge will not be of any profit to him, not in the least.

The prophets of Beni-Israel and prophets who came in all ages, their efforts were to make the picture of God intelligible to the man of the day. That does not mean that what picture they had made, that was God. No, it was just a help; to help man to conceive the idea. They said, "God is the Creator, He is the Judge, the Forgiver, He is the Supreme Being, the King of the Day of Judgment." Every attribute that can be given to God and that can be conceivable to those who hear about it they have put there. And what they made of Him, that was their art. They made an ideal of God before them, that they could say the prayers and make that ideal real before them. And the more real that ideal became, the more there was in that ideal. And then in the end God came and took that shrine which was made for Him and made it living.

And now in conclusion of this subject I would like to say, neither is the Sufi's God abstract nor is He personal. It is all a process, through which the Sufi goes from the false to the real self. And before he arrives at the real self, his false self must be made a sacrifice. Before what? Before the ideal God he has made in his own self. When his false self is sacrificed then he goes further. Then it is not a personal God, then it is the abstract God. But where does one begin, and where does one end? One begins from the false self and ends in the real self.