Truth is. You are not to think about it – you have to see it, you have to be it.

The last sutras of Hakim Sanai.

No one knows how far it is
from nothingness to God.

No one can ever know, because it all depends on the seeker – his passionate, his intense search. It depends on your intensity. If you are just lukewarm in your search, then godliness is very, very far away from your nothingness. If you are total in your thirst, nothing is being held back, you have taken a jump into it, you have not left anything behind, no part of you is missing, you have jumped as a whole organic unity – your anger, your love, your hate, your greed, all together – you have staked whatsoever you have, whatsoever nature has given you, then the distance is almost nil.

It depends on your intensity. The proportion of your intensity will decide the proportion of the distance between godliness and your ungodly sleep.

No one knows how far it is
from nothingness to God.
As long as you cling to your self
you will wander right and left,
day and night, for thousands of years;
and when, after all that effort,
you finally open your eyes,
you will see your self, through inherent defects,
wandering around itself like the ox in a mill;
but, if, once freed from your self,
you finally get down to the work,
this door will open to you within two minutes.

Have you watched it, that whenever you are intense in anything the self disappears? You are in love with someone: in the very intensity of your love, the self disappears. You are no more, there is only love. Or you are in anger: in the intensity and totality of anger, the self disappears. You are no more there, only the anger is.

You can watch it in your own life. Whenever something is there, possessing you, all in all, the self is not found. That is a great clue. The self is there only when you are half-hearted in something. That which you keep back becomes the self.

If you are totally involved in painting or in doing some work, singing a song or dancing or playing guitar, if you are totally in it, you will immediately see you are not there. Something of the beyond has taken possession of you. The self is not there, unself is.

And to be in the state of unself is to be godly. To be in the state of self is to be far away from godliness – the self is the distance. And this mechanism has to be understood. Once this mechanism is understood well, there is no problem: then godliness is so obvious.