We enter today into the world of Sufism. It is a world, but not a world-view. It is a transcendence, but not a philosophy of transcendence. It does not preach any theories, it simply gives you practical hints.
Sufism is not speculative. It is utterly realistic, pragmatic, practical. It is down-to-earth, it is not abstract. Hence, it has no world-view. And also, because it is not a system, it does not systematize knowledge.
A system is a complete explanation of existence. Sufism is not a system; it has no explanation for existence, it is a way into the mysteries of existence. It does not explain anything, it simply points to the mysterious. It leads you into the mysterious. Sufism does not demystify existence.. All systems do that: their whole work consists in making the unknown known, destroying the mystery, destroying the wonder. Sufism leads you from one wonder to another, deeper into the wonderland.
It is not a system because it never gives any complete explanation about anything. It gives only very, very small hints, flashes of insight. It does not spin and weave philosophies; it spins and weaves stories, anecdotes, metaphors, parables, poetry. It is not metaphysics, it is metaphor. It is a finger pointing to the moon. You cannot understand the moon by analyzing the finger. But if you follow the direction with sympathy, if you fall EN RAPPORT, then you will come to see the moon. The finger is not the moon, the finger cannot be the moon, yet the finger can point the way.
The Sufi stories are not philosophical. They are just gentle hints, whisperings. Sufism does not shout, it only whispers.

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At last! Every consciousness reaches to a point of cul-de-sac, a point which Sufis call “the desert.” The desert is a point where you start feeling you are disappearing. The desert is a point where you feel you are dying. The desert is a point when you feel utterly hopeless, meaningless, a point where you start contemplating suicide, a point where you cannot figure it out — what to do, what not to do, to be or not to be. One day or other every consciousness has to face the desert, because without passing through the desert you will never really be mature. That is part of the training of every soul. In fact when you start encountering the desert, you start thinking of religion. When things are going good who bothers about religion? Who contemplates? Who meditates? Who prays? When things are not going good then you start thinking that there must be something basically wrong with you.

This is a strange phenomenon — that whenever a person has all that he needs he encounters the desert. The affluent society encounters the desert. The poor society is still far away from the desert. The affluence brings the desert very close by, because you have all that you were hoping for: you have the woman that you wanted, the house, the money, the prestige, the power. You have all that you had always dreamt about, now there is no more left to dream: the desert has come. Now you suddenly feel a kind of insomnia. You cannot even sleep, the desert is all around.

How to transcend this desert? — the desert of meaninglessness, the desert of anguish, the desert of absurdity.