Which Hundred? Which Fifty? Which Sixty?

“Upon that day when the secrets are explicit.”
In reality that which draws is a single thing, but it appears to be many. We are possessed by a hundred different desires. “I want vermicelli,” we say. “I want ravioli. I want halvah. I want fritters. I want fruit. I want dates.” We name these one by one, but the root of the matter is a single thing: the root is hunger. Don’t you see how, once we have our fill of but one thing, we say, “Nothing else is necessary?” Therefore, it was not ten or a hundred things, but one thing that drew us.
“And their number We have appointed only as a trial.”
The many things of this world are a trial appointed by God, for they hide the single reality. There is a saying that the saint is one, humankind is a hundred, meaning the saint’s whole attention remains upon the one truth, while people are scattered over a hundred appearances. But which hundred? Which fifty? Which sixty?
Lost in this world of mirrored reflections, they are a faceless people without hands and feet, without mind and Soul, quivering like a magic talisman, like quicksilver or mercury. They do not know who they are.
Call them sixty or a hundred or a thousand, and the saint is one, but is not this view a trial itself? For the truth is that the hundreds are nothing, while the saint is a thousand, and a hundred thousand, and thousands of thousands. 

A king once gave a single soldier the rations for a hundred men. The army protested, but the king said nothing. When the day of battle arrived, all the men fled the field, except that one soldier who fought alone. “There you are,” the king said. “It was for this I fed one man as a hundred.”

Fihi Ma Fihi - Discourse 2