Hallelujah!

Talks given from 1/8/78 to 31/8/78

Darshan Diary

CHAPTER 1

Sannyas is The Apprenticeship in Bliss

1 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[to a sannyasin returning to her husband in the West]

Just be there and be totally there. It is not a question of where you are; the question is always of being total or partial. Whenever you are partial, something goes on missing. But my feeling is that you will be partial there too – because you could not be total here, so how can you be total there?

Here you have been thinking of somebody who is there; there you will think of me and things that are here.

Partiality is the way of the mind. The mind can never be total in anything, because to be total means to commit suicide; as far as the mind is concerned, it is a suicide. The mind is very clever in creating new fragments. You are thinking that there you will be total, but you will be there – nobody else –

and this mind will be there – no other mind. If it cannot be total here, how can it be total there? Just by changing places, nothing is changed; the mind remains unaffected by changing your place. The mind has to be changed. If you had been total here then there would have been a possibility: you could have hoped to be total there too. But try. Who knows? It may happen there.

And it is always so that whenever you are not with your lover great romantic ideas arise, and when you are with your lover then all simply falls flat.

When you are not with your lover your heart is simply longing to be together, and when you are together suddenly you find the whole stupidity of it. What is there? All those dreams look childish.

Then you want to be alone or you want to be somewhere else. This is the game people are playing; it is not simply your game. It is the general game, the game of life: whatsoever you have immediately loses meaning; whatsoever you have not becomes meaningful.

Just the other day I was reading a story, a Sufi story.... A Sufi is on a sea voyage and a king is also on the same boat; he has a servant. One day the sea is very dangerous and it seems that any moment the boat can sink. The servant is in a panic – crying, weeping, shouting ’Save me!’ and praying to god and almost going mad. The king says to him ’Don’t be afraid. I am also here and so many people are here – if we are all going to die, we are all going to die, not only you.’ But he is not in a state to listen.

The Sufi mystic is listening to the whole thing, watching, and he says ’If you give me a chance I can put him right,’ and the king says ’Do anything!’

So the Sufi and his two or three disciples take the man up and throw him into the sea! Of course he shouts more loudly in the sea:’Save me! Take me out of it!’

For a few minutes he is left there and then the Sufi and the disciples rescue him and carry him back into the ship; now he is very calm and quiet. He sits very silently, and he is very happy that he has been saved. The king is surprised but the mystic says ’This is a simple application of a general law: People understand the beauty of something only when they have lost it.’

Your lover is there you understand the beauty of relationship; when you are gone from here you will understand the beauty of being here. This is the general rule. Beware of it!

So good. Keep to this – being total there. Don’t think of me and don’t think of Poona at all.

Just be totally there. If you can be totally there, next time you can be totally here. And it is not a question of where you are total; wherever you are total you are with me. To be total is to be with me.

To be partial is not to be with me.

So just go happily, with all my blessings, to be total there – try!

Para means’of the beyond, transcendental’; prem means love – love of the beyond, love for the transcendental.

Man is not confined to the body, neither is man confined to the mind. That’s the beauty and the grandeur. In the innermost core, something exists in man which is transcendental, which is infinite, which has no beginning and no end, which is the eternal flow of life. To become too attached to the body, to the mind and to the things of the body and the mind, is to be lost in the mundane. To remember the transcendental – to remember ’I am in the body but not the body, I am in the mind but not the mind’ – is the beginning of a great transformation. It takes you farther and farther away from things; and the farther away you are from things, the closer you are to the essence. The farther away you are from the mundane, the closer you are to the sacred; and only with the sacred does joy arise. It is a by-product, joy is a by-product.

When one remembers one’s sacredness, one’s infinity, joy wells up. When one thinks oneself limited by a thousand and one limitations, misery arises, because a limitation is a kind of confinement; it is a prison. How can one be happy in such a small body? How can one be happy in such a petty mind? It is impossible. They don’t allow you space to dance, to sing, to celebrate. One is cluttered, one is like a junkyard. One needs the vast sky. In that vastness is freedom. In that freedom is joy.

Fall in love with the transcendental... search for it. And I call it’falling in love’ because the search has to be through the heart and not through the mind. If you search through the mind, you will never go beyond the mind. The mind is very jealous – it won’t allow you to surpass it; it is very possessive.

The mind is the gaoler, it guards the gate. It won’t allow you to go beyond the limits. You can function within the limits – it gives you all freedom within the limits – but don’t step outside; that is not allowed.

The heart is not a prison, it is an opening; it is a door, not a wall. Hence I say ’Fall in love with the beyond’... and only the search for the beyond makes a man truly a man.

Friedrich Nietzsche has said ’That day will be the most unfortunate when man stops surpassing himself.’ When the arrow of human consciousness does not have anything like a target beyond itself, that day will be the most unfortunate. But that day will never come, it cannot come – the urge is built in. Man is man only because of the desire to surpass himself... that very desire is his humanness. Animals have no desire to transcend themselves. A dog is perfectly happy being a dog.

He does not want to become a god, he does not want to become anything else. A rose is perfectly happy being a rose.

It is the privilege, the prerogative, only of man – his agony and his ecstasy – that he wants to reach beyond, he wants to go above himself, he wants to do the impossible. That’s his specific adventure.

That adventure makes him human. He has to live in this search, as this search.

A few things can be done only when the energy is ready. Then one can ride on the energy and can go higher and higher; now you can go on a psychedelic trip!

Just be here, and absorb me as much as you can. Become a drunkard!

[To a sannyasin who does not want to do groups and has fallen in love]

If you don’t want to do them, don’t. But these men come and go (laughter) – they are just passing phases... and what the groups do will remain. So it is for you to choose, mm? One feels like being with a man; thats very natural, but it is not of much value really. The groups will make you capable of more love, more understanding. Then to be with your man will be of more value and more depth.

But still, you have to decide; if you feel like that, then don’t do the groups.

The difference between a belief and trust is immense.

Belief is directed towards an object. You believe in A, you believe in B; A may be a person or a book or a concept or a philosophy. Belief is objective, there is an object to it. Trust has no object. You don’t trust A, you don’t trust B or C. Trust is a quality. It is subjectivity; it has nothing to do with any object. Beliefs are bound to be disturbed, will be disturbed, and it is good that they are disturbed; otherwise you will be caught in them, you will be imprisoned in them.

Unless you lose all belief in beliefs, trust will not arise, because it is a totally different dimension.

A belief is looking outwards to somebody else as a redeemer. Christians believe in Christ and Buddhists believe in Buddha. They are looking towards somebody as if he is responsible. Nobody is responsible for you except yourself. Trust is not directed outwards. Trust is simply an inner quality, like a fragrance of a flower, undirected; it is simply there. Nobody can take your trust away because in the first place you never put it in anybody.

The real master never creates a belief and the pseudo masters always create belief. In the name of trust they create belief. The real master destroys beliefs. That’s why Zen people say ’If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him.’ They are saying to kill the belief in Buddha so your own trust is freed from all objects.

Trust is a quality of your heart as intelligence is the quality of your mind. And the less cluttered you are with beliefs, the more you will find trust arising. Who can take it away from you? Nobody can.

Nobody can shake it. You trust because you enjoy trusting. There is no motivation in it; it is trust for trust’s sake. If somebody deceives you, that is his business; in fact he is giving you an opportunity to test your trust. The man of trust will laugh at the whole thing – he has passed one barrier more!

So forget all about that. And whenever people seek and search for truth, many pseudo gurus are bound to be there in the marketplace... and California is the super-marketplace for all kinds of gurus.

First they used to import them from India; now they have started manufacturing them themselves.

How long can one depend on imports? Those imported were false and the ones that you are creating there are copies of the imported ones.

But don’t carry any grudge, don’t carry any scar; he only did his thing. It was wrong from your side to believe in a person. You have just been proved wrong – not that he has been proved wrong. That is not your business at all; that is his business. Only one thing has been proved, that one shouldn’t trust persons. Trust your own being... trust your own awareness, trust your own love. And that is the work of a real master: to throw you back to yourself.

Surrendering to a master is not really surrendering to a master; it is just taking the help of a master so that you can surrender to yourself. The master is just a mirror: he reflects you. But carrying any grudge, any scar in the mind, is bad, because that will affect your future. That means you are not yet free from that experience. Always remember: the past has to be dropped every day.

And sometimes it happens that even the wrong routes that you follow may bring you to the right route. Wrong persons whom you are with may help you to search for the right person; because to see the false as the false is a great step towards knowing the true as the true.

So ultimately, when one looks back and considers everything, all fits perfectly well. Those who cheated you and those who helped you – you have to be grateful to all of them. You may not have been here; if you had not been with F – your life would have been a totally different life. What he did is not the point.

Jesus says ’Judge ye not.’ Never judge people. Whatsoever they can do, they are doing. Why should we expect more from them? Who are we? Whatsoever you can take, learn, experience, you should take, learn, experience, and move – unless you come to a place where you can really disappear and there is no need to move anywhere else. That door comes, but one has to knock on many doors before that door comes.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine false masters... and then one arrives at the true master. And sometimes it is a surprise when you arrive at the true master: he may have lived just by your side, he may have been your neighbour.

A Sufi story...

A man went to seek and search. He asked the first man outside the town, sitting under a tree ’How to find a master?’ The man described him, saying ’These are the signs. he will be sitting under such-and-such-a tree, he will have certain eyes, such-and-such-a vibe’... and all that. The man was very happy – now he had a criterion – and for thirty years he searched. He came across many masters, many people, and he became tired, disillusioned and frustrated – so much so that he turned back home; he said ’It is all nonsense.’

He met that old man – noW he was very old – when he was entering the town. Suddenly he was surprised:’This is the tree that he described, this is the vibe.’ He looked into the eyes of the old man and the old man started laughing. This was the laughter and these were the eyes! He said ’But why didn’t you tell me before? Why did I have to go into such suffering and a nightmare for thirty years?’

The old man said ’I told you, I described everything, but you didn’t even look at the tree! You were not ready. The tree was here, I was here. When I was describing the eyes, I was looking into your eyes, but you were not there.

When I was talking about the vibe, you were not ready to feel it; you were dead. These thirty years have not been a wastage; they have prepared you. Now you can see the tree, you can look into my eyes and you can feel the vibe. I am your master. You have come home! And don’t be angry with all those people; they all have helped in their own ways. The good and the bad, the false and the true

– they all help.’

This game of life is really a very paradoxical game. So whenever you can come, come back – you may find the tree here!

CHAPTER 2

The Night is over

2 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, devayan means divine vehicle – love, the divine vehicle. Love takes you to the ultimate and love also brings the ultimate to you; it is a double-edged sword. It is like a ladder: you can go up and down by the same ladder. And the meeting happens somewhere in the middle. Man starts moving in love, god starts moving in response to man’s love, and just exactly in the middle, somewhere half-way, the meeting happens. Man disappears into god and god disappears into man.

Then there is no ’I’ and no’thou’; then there is only one.

And the search is for that oneness... the longing is to be one with the whole again. The suffering is that we cannot find the way; the suffering is that whatsoever we do fails. But love has never failed. Very few people try love. They try everything else but nothing else can succeed. With love everything is possible; without love nothing is possible.

Prem means love, shaila means the peak of the mountain. Prem shaila will mean the peak of the mountain of love. And love makes available the highest peak possible – what Abraham Maslow calls’the peak experience’. It is possible only through love. All other experiences are mundane, ordinary; only love takes one into the beyond. All other experiences are earthly, earthbound. Only love has wings... it can take you above the clouds. And that is not only a metaphor – literally it is so.

Man is an ambiguous being – half earth, half sky, half matter, half mind, half animal, half god. That is the agony of man and also the ecstasy. The agony is that man is always divided – to be this or to be that, to be or not to be. The animal pulls him backwards, and the god in him goes on calling him forth, to come out: Surpass yourself! Just a little more and you will have arrived.

The animal seems simple, comfortable, convenient, because it is our past. But it is boring, familiar, and familiarity breeds contempt. Easy, but not worth much; we have known it. To know it again and again is going to be just a repetition, and all repetition dulls the consciousness. All repetition reduces you to a mechanism, and to be reduced to a mechanism is to be in utter bondage.

So man is pulled backwards, towards convenience, security, familiarity, but repulsed also because it is boring and it has already been known; there is no adventure any more.

The body wants to fall back, the spirit wants to go ahead. And the call of god, the call of the beyond, or whatever you wish to call it – truth, beauty or any name will do – the call of the beyond is very alluring, enchanting. It gives a thrill, one feels alive again. It is a challenge, and challenge provokes the spirit, it is a provocation. Sleep disappears and dullness disappears – one becomes more alert and conscious. But then there are dangers; with the new there are always dangers... the unknown territory. Who knows what is going to happen? It is dark and there is no map. No map exists –

no map can exist in the very nature of things – no footprints. Buddhas have walked but they have not left a single footprint. It is just like a bird flying in the sky leaves no footprints. It is uncharted, unmapped, dark, but the call creates great desire, longing, hope – hope for meaning, hope that you can also live a life of thrill.

This is the dichotomy that man lives in. Hence I say that man is an ambiguous being... Like Janus.

The first month, January, is named after Janus because the first day of January looks both ways – at the past, at the last year that has gone, and at the year that is to come. Janus is a Roman god with two faces, facing in both directions. Man is a Janus; his whole life is a January. And both directions have something appealing and something that creates fear. One has to decide. If one decides to faH back, one disappears as an alive being; one has committed suicide. If one decides to go ahead in spite of all the fear that arises with the new, one is born spiritually.

Remember it. Listen to the call of the unknown – and it is always there. Whatsoever becomes known has to be dropped.

Once you have lived it, it is finished; to repeat it is a sheer wastage of life. Let the search continue.

Only then can one become a peak that goes beyond the clouds. Otherwise one becomes a flat land, lives a flat life. That’s what people are living – flat lives with no peaks. Nothing extraordinary ever happens to them because they never allow it to happen.

Love is the magic word. If you love, you are getting ready for the extraordinary to happen to you.

If you love, you have accepted the invitation of the unknown. If you love; you live. They are synonymous: to love is to live; not to love is not to live. Love can become such a peak, like an Everest. And there is no end to it, it goes on growing.

If your life becomes suffused with love, immersed in love... not that only a few moments of love are there but there is a continuous flow of love, whatsoever you are doing love is there. You are cleaning the floor but love is there, as if you are cleaning the floor of a temple.

Taking a bath and the love is there for your own body, because your body is god’s gift. Or just breathing and doing nothing, but the love is there, because to be able to breathe is such a miracle.

We cannot pay for it, there is no way to pay; it is such a valuable gift. All else becomes possible through it. Just seeing a rose flower with deep love, god is revealed.

Whenever your heart is full of love and your eyes are showering love, god is revealed. It is love that gives you the vision of god. To me, love is religion, love is meditation.

This single word contains all that is beautiful.

Deva means divine, manso means mind – divine mind. And the divine mind is not your mind, it is not the mind that we know about. The divine mind is exactly the absence of our mind. As far as our mind is concerned, it is a barrier to the divine mind; it has to go. From our side we have to become no-minds, utterly empty, and then the divine mind descends in us. We have to become a vacuum; that vacuum is immediately filled.

The mind that we have is nothing but memory. It is the garbage of the past, the dust that our mirrors have gathered. This dust has to be washed away. And when the mirror is pure and without any dust, it is not yours, it is nobody’s – it is god’s. The mirror is god’s, the dust is ours. And by’dust’ I mean the thoughts, the memories, the desires, the imagination, the dreams and all that. When I say’when we are utterly empty’, I mean when all these things have disappeared and there is nothing left – or only nothing is left, a pure silence; nothing stirs it.

That’s what meditation is all about, and once that nothingness is attained, one is surprised: something from the beyond descends and fills one. And that is fulfilment; then one is satiated forever. There is contentment, and a contentment that is eternal, not a momentary phenomenon –

that one moment it is there, another moment it is gone again and the thirst and the longing come back.

So divine mind means: the mind of the whole, the mind of the total, the cosmic mind. You have to disappear into it, like a dewdrop falling into the ocean. Your mind is like the dewdrop and the divine mind is like the ocean. The dewdrop becomes very afraid, naturally so, because it can see ’I am going to disappear, I am going to lose my identity; I will be no more.’ The fear is logical but still unfounded, because once the drop has disappeared into the ocean it becomes the ocean. It has not been a loser; it has gained. It has lost only a small definition and it has become vast. With god we lose nothing because we don’t have anything and we gain all. Or, we only lose our chains, our bondages, our prisons; and our so-called mind is just a prison.

The divine mind is absolute freedom – it is a liberation from all limitations.

Remember one thing always – that there is no cause to be anxious in life, and all causes are just excuses. If you decide not to be anxious, then nothing will make you anxious; there is nothing worth it. Life is such a fleeting phenomenon that is going to disappear one day. Why be bothered too much about it? We are only here for so few days. Just play the game and remain aloof. If one can remain a witness, aloof, distant from things, then anxiety is not possible. Anxiety comes into existence only when we become identified with small things. And they all pass.

There is a famous Sufi story: A great king wanted a special ring to be made for him. The ring was made...

The message of the story is: this too will pass. This was engraved on the ring, because the king had asked his goldsmith ’Engrave such a message that will be helpful to me in all kinds of situations

– good and bad, failure or success, life or death.’ The message had to be one single message, but it had to work in all kinds of situations.

The goldsmith was very worried:’Where to find such a message which can work when you are in pain and which can work when you are in pleasure? There is advice which will work when you are suffering and, naturally, there is advice which will work only when you are happy; but happiness and unhappiness are contraries, so how can one message work for both?’

The goldsmith was driving himself crazy – the time was coming closer and closer and the king was asking for the ring.

Then he went to a Sufi master and told him the situation and asked ’What should I do?’ The master said ’Just engrave the ring with this small sentence on it ”This too will pass away.” And tell the king that whenever he is in any need to read this, to meditate over it.’

And that’s what I would like to say to you. Situations arise when one feels anxious. Silently repeat inside ’This too will pass away.’ And just see: immediately you will feel a kind of relaxation, a calmness, a quietude; in fact it has already passed away.

All these are just on the surface, all these situations; your depth remains untouched. Remain the centre of the cyclone....

Just sitting silently is enough, and that will never become a habit. Sitting silently can be done any time. And you are not doing anything in particular, so it can’t become a habit. Just sit... enjoy just sitting. It is neither a ritual nor a prayer nor a mantra. It is for the sheer enjoyment of being – just enjoying the sounds around you, the trees, the birds, the people, the noise, all that makes this world.

And you are not doing anything special, sacred, religious – nothing – you are simply enjoying.

There is a very famous Zen story: A man was standing on a hilltop. Three persons saw him; they started arguing about him, about what he was doing there. One said ’He must have lost his cow – I know that man – and he must be looking for his cow from the hilltop.’ And the second said ’I cannot agree, because when one is looking for something one does not stand like a statue, unmoving; one moves, looks this way and that. But he is just standing like a Buddha-statue He is not looking for something – he is waiting. Maybe a friend has come with him for a morning walk and is left behind and he is waiting for him to come.’

The third said ’I disagree, because when somebody waits for somebody who has been left behind, once in a while he looks back to see whether he has come or not. But that man is not looking back at all; he is not even moving. He is not waiting. My feeling is that he is meditating.’

They could not agree on what that man was doing so they decided to go to the man and enquire. The first man said ’Are you looking for your cow?’ The man said ’No, I am not looking for anything.’ The second said ’Then I must be right: you must be waiting for your friend who has been left behind?’

The man said ’No, I am not waiting for anybody.’ The third said ’Then I have to be right – now there is no other alternative left – you must be meditating.’ And the man said ’No, I am not meditating either.’ Then all three asked ’Then what are you doing?’ He said ’I am just standing.’

But Zen people say that this is real meditation: just standing, not even doing meditation! See the beauty of it: the man said ’I am just standing. Is there any need to do anything? Can’t I just stand?

Won’t you allow me this freedom, just to stand? Have I to look for something, wait for something or do something? Can’t I just be?’

So just sit – no meditation, nothing – and you will feel a great joy welling up inside. You can continue Kundalini but this is a separate thing. In the morning, afternoon, whenever you feel any tension arising in the head, just sit silently and keep in mind that you are not supposed to do anything. Don’t start repeating a mantra, otherwise you will never be out of that habit. And one should not fall a victim to any habit whatsoever – good or bad; habits are habits. All habits are bad, because habits make you a robot; then you have to function only like a machine. You don’t function like a man, you don’t function like pure consciousness – and that’s how one should function.

So just sit, and soon the tension will disappear and something very positive will start welling up and will fill you with such joy that you have not known before. And when it comes without any effort on your part, it is tremendous. Because through your own effort you can create only small things; man’s efforts are limited. And when something comes while you are only waiting and doing nothing, then it is a grace – it comes from the beyond. It has a purity of its own....

CHAPTER 3

Love is The Introduction to The Book of Bliss

3 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, dharia means patience – divine patience. God is not available to those who are in a hurry. God is not instant, and the more you are in a hurry, the less is the possibility. Patience is a very basic requirement... infinite patience. Only when you are in a deep state of patience are you silent; otherwise the mind is tense. When there is hurry, there is tension. Then the mind is constantly longing, and because it is not happening the mind feels frustration.

For those who are not patient, frustration is their lot. One can choose between frustration and patience. In frustration you become a hell; in patience heaven descends in you. In fact nothing else needs to be done. If one can silently wait everything happens in its own right time. We cannot make it happen sooner, but if we are in a hurry we can delay it, certainly. So all that man can do is to delay.

It is not a question of our doing; our doing is our UNdoing.

It is a question of being. And that is the meaning of patience: one simply is, waiting, waiting, waiting.

And then one day suddenly a door opens, and all the darkness disappears. It happens naturally – it is not produced by your effort. It is a grace, a gift. It flows out of god’s love.

Deva means divine, veeresha means courage – divine courage. And the greatest courage in life is to accept oneself as one is. And I say that this is the greatest courage in life; very few people are so courageous. Hence the hankering to improve upon oneself: to be this, to be that, to have this, to have that. Either a person becomes interested in having more and more – that is one way of desire, and it leads into more and more frustration – or one becomes interested in being more and more, not having but being more and more; that too lands one in frustration.

The first way is of the worldly and the second is of the religious. But as far as their deep desiring is concerned, it is the same. Both are unsatisfied as they are, both are incapable of accepting themselves as they are; they want to deny it. Somebody wants to deny it by having more money or more power, more fame; somebody else tries to deny it by having more spiritual experiences, psychic experiences. But the basic thing is the same: both are trapped in becoming. And once you are trapped in becoming you forget who you are. Then the becoming creates too much noise in you.

It creates much smoke and in fact only smoke, because it has no fire in it.

The real fire is in being, and being is smokeless fire. Becoming is just smoke and no fire. Becoming is a shadow existence; it is not true. It is creating an illusion around yourself – without or within – but it is the same illusion.

The real man of courage simply drops becoming. He starts living this moment as he is, his acceptance is total. He has no complaint. He does not ask for more. He is thankful for whatsoever has been given to him; he is in tremendous gratitude. The person who is running after becoming is always ungrateful because he thinks something is missing, god has been cheating him, god has not been good to him, existence has been unjust to him. How can he be grateful?

The man who has no more desires to become anything, anybody, but is simply celebrating the way he is, the one he is, his every breath becomes gratitude, his every heartbeat is a prayer. His whole being is a celebration. And not only does he become a celebration, he also creates a climate of celebration around himself. It starts gathering of its own accord. He triggers thousands of people’s capacities for celebration. And that’s how a religious person should be.

Religion has nothing to do with Christianity, Hinduism – no, nothing at all. Religion is a tremendous upsurge of energy because the energy is released from becoming; it is no more engaged anywhere.

When the energy is unoccupied it becomes a dance in the moment, herenow. It becomes a song; it is hallelujah! That I call the greatest courage in life.

And initiating you into sannyas, I have that hope for you. Anything to say to me?

Deva means divine, dwarika means door – divine door. Man can live either closed to god or open.

Ordinarily people remain closed, hence their life has no joy, because joy happens only when you are in tune with god. And by’god’ I mean the whole, the total – all the stars and all the planets and all the rivers and all the trees and all the mountains. This sum total is god. God is just a name for this wholeness.

Whenever one is in tune with the whole, joy arises. Joy is a by-product of being in tune with the whole. Whenever one is not in tune, misery arises. Misery is an indication that you have to tune yourself again with the whole. Misery is not bad; it is a signal. It is very significant. If it was not there nobody would ever be able to know that he has fallen away from god. It is not a punishment as people think.

God cannot punish – god is not a person. And god cannot punish because god is love. How can the whole punish the part? It would be stupid. It would be like a small child who slaps his own face because he has done something wrong, or who beats his own hand. God is not a stupid child: he cannot punish his own parts. Misery is not a punishment. You have fallen away from the whole; it is an invitation to come back home, to get in tune again.

And when one is closed, one is out of tune. One has to open to god just as one is open to air.

Constant air comes in, goes out, keeps you alive, keeps you vibrant, keeps your blood circulating, keeps your blood pure. One has to be open to god continuously, twenty-four hours a day – waking, sleeping. Just as air is needed for the body and the body’s life, god is needed for your soul. If there is no air available you will feel suffocated. And you cannot stay alive for more than a few minutes without air. That’s why millions of people live without souls. They have never allowed god to come in and go out and cleanse their souls and keep them alive.

A man has to be a door, constantly open, so that the air can come in, the sunshine and the rains, the sounds of the birds... so that one can go on absorbing all that existence showers on one. Then life is really life, otherwise people are just living at the minimum. Their life is only a so-called life, at the most. All that can be said about them is that they are not dead, that they are still breathing, that’s all. But they have not known peaks of being and they have not known depths of love. Their hearts have not ever been in tune with the purity, the poetry of existence. They have lived in dark cells. Their lives have been just a slow kind of death.

Come out of it! People are carrying their graves around themselves: Come out of the grave! Just as Christ called Lazarus out of the grave ’Come out, Lazarus!’ I am calling you and each of my sannyasins ’Come out of your graves. Life is tremendously beautiful, and it is all yours just for the asking.’

But one has to become a door, an opening.

[A question about continuing TM]

You can continue TM; it will not harm you at all. And it suits a few people perfectly well, so you need not stop it. Continue it in the morning, and in the evening if you can find time then you can do one dynamic meditation. Which one of the active meditations do you like most?

[Kundalini, Nadabrahma.]

Nadabrahma will do, but TM you can continue. It will disappear on its own one day, and when it disappears, just for twenty minutes sit silently, no mantra. When it disappears on its own – when you don’t feel any need, when you feel both are exactly the same, whether you do something or you just sit silently, when both give you the same feeling – then forget the mantra.

The mantra has not to become a habit, that’s all. And it will disappear. Your energy will be able to discard it soon.

Anand means bliss, para means of the beyond, transcendental. There is a bliss which comes from the beyond. We cannot do anything to create it but we can be available to it; we can allow it to happen. We cannot bring it but we can hinder it. It always come – each moment it goes on coming

– but we exist in such a way that we go on missing it. It comes in the present and we are never in the present. It knows only one time, and that is this moment. We know the past and we know the future, but we are completely oblivious of the present. Hence the meeting never happens.

It cannot be in the future, it cannot be in the past, because the past exists no more and the future is not yet. Our mind is in the past and in the future; it is a ghost. Hence all the traditions of meditation work, focus, only on one thing: how to drop the mind. Once the mind Is gone, the past and the future are gone. Then suddenly you are here and you are now, and the meeting happens. Then one is simply surprised that the miracle was so close and the key was so simple.’We were searching so hard, and we were missing because we were searching; we were not getting it because we had become seekers.’

It cannot be found by seeking because it is already there, it is already the case. All that is needed is to be available to it, to be open to it, to be vulnerable to it, to be in a receptive mood.

Anand means bliss, param means ultimate. Our joys are momentary – they come and they go. They are toys, they keep us occupied, but nothing is really gained through them. They are like beautiful dreams, and when they leave us, they leave us in tremendous darkness; all beautiful dreams turn into nightmares.

But there is a totally different kind of bliss which is ultimate. Once you have contacted it, it never leaves you. It cannot leave because it has no reference to time. It is beyond time, it is timeless.

And it is not something that happens to you, it is not accidental. It is your very essence. Once understood, it is forever – call it’god’ or’nirvana’ or what you will; those are just names for the same thing. But the best name is’ultimate bliss’ because it need not be supported by any theology, any church, any philosophy.

The search for bliss is so natural. It is not only confined to human beings. Trees are groping for it in their own way, birds are searching for it in their own way, and the rivers and the mountains and the stars – all are moving, groping. Deep down there is only one search: how to be blissful, and how to be so blissful that nothing else remains; how to be full of it, overflowing, and how to attain to such a bliss that never leaves you.

The atheist agrees with it, the theist agrees with it, the Hindu agrees, the Christian agrees. So the real religion is a search for bliss. Those who only know the body and who don’t know who resides in it will miss the whole point of life. The god that resides in it is the god of love. The body is beautiful, but one has to search for the god that lives in it.

So don’t become too occupied with the container only; search for the content. The body is just the envelope; the letter and the message are inside it. But there are many people who go on worshipping the envelope and never read the letter.

Your name is just a hint to you: love the body but search deep into it and ask the question ’Who am l?’ And when the real existential answer comes, it is: I am love. You are not to answer it. You have only to question; the answer will come of its own accord.

And remember that the momentary joys that come and go are good to play with – nothing is wrong in them, I am not against them – but one has to be mindful that they are not all that is available to us, not all that we have to claim.

And find a few moments when you are neither interested nor occupied with the toys of life. You are simply unoccupied, in a kind of emptiness. In those moments of emptiness you will have the first taste of ultimate joy, ultimate bliss.

Orange is the colour of sunrise. It is the beginning of the morning, a declaration that the night is over, a declaration that now there is no need to live in darkness; you can live in light, and the light is yours. All that is needed is to open your eyes and see. The world is tremendously beautiful and full of light. But people live with closed eyes, with closed hearts... hiding behind walls and walls and walls. Then they go on crying and weeping and saying ’Why is there so much darkness?’ but they don’t open their eyes.

Sannyas means to live your life with open eyes, with open heart, with open being, and the sunrise is always there.

[A question about falling in and out of love]

Then one has to suffer! We suffer because we never listen to life and we try to impose ourselves upon life. Life has no obligation to fulfil our expectations. Then suffering arises. One has to learn.

When you are in love with a person, remember it: enjoy it while it lasts, but it cannot last forever, nothing lasts forever. That’s how life is, but we start hoping that it will last forever; then we are creating misery. Sooner or later we will be in a dark valley, but it is not life’s fault, it is our fault. Then we suffer much, and again we will do the same thing.

Soon you will be out of it. How long can one remain in darkness? I have seen you in darkness many times, and you come out of it. So I know you will come out of it again, and you also know! But you will do it again – that’s the problem. You will fall in love with somebody else again. Right now you think you cannot fall in love with anybody, but that you have told me before too.

You will fall in love again because you will still be alive. How long can one linger in darkness? And there is no need to. If something is finished, something is finished; it is better to get out of it as soon as possible. Don’t allow it to linger because these lingering sadnesses leave scars in the soul.

There is no need, no point.

All are strangers here. We meet somebody on the road and it feels good and for a few days we walk together. Then the ways part and we have to say goodbye. Even though it is with heavy hearts, we have to say goodbye, and we have to find somebody else to walk with... till we become capable of walking alone. And this is how slowly slowly one becomes capable of walking alone: again and again this happens and one understands that to be alone seems to be the ultimate fact. You can deceive for a few days, a few months, or a few years or even a few lives, but it will assert itself. The truth will surface again and you will have to see that you are alone.

I am not against love and I am not against friendships. All that I am saying is: one has to be very alert; don’t take it for granted that it will remain forever. Nothing remains forever. Everything is a flux, so while it is there, enjoy, and when it is gone, forget and forgive. Be available for a new adventure.

And one day the ultimate adventure happens when one starts walking alone. Then these miseries don’t come.

But till one is capable of that, one has to pass through many experiences, and all those experiences are a must. They make you mature. And don’t think ’Why does this happen to me?’ You always think

’Why does this happen?’ This happens to everybody! In fact, to be in love in my ashram for fifteen months together with one person is simply a miracle! I have not seen it before and I am not thinking that I will see it again! Fifteen months?! Life moves so fast here. People used to do so many things in fifteen lives. So don’t think ’Why does this happen to me?’ That makes you more miserable – you think god is especially against you. It happens to everybody; it is not personal, it is universal.

In other places, in conventional ways too it happens, but then people go on pretending; they don’t say the fact. That is more ugly: love dies and still people go on clinging and pretending. That is far more ugly. Both know that now nothing is there, but out of security, finance, this and that – and there are a thousand and one things which have to be considered.... For those considerations people go on clinging – prestige, society, what people will say. My people are becoming more true, so when they see that it is no more there, they simply say ’It is no more there so it is better that we should part.’

This is far more compassionate, because they are not deceiving each other and they are making the other free again. Otherwise, in that deception you will not be free and you will not be able to find another friend again. You will be carrying a corpse. And it will stink! Remember: love is very very fragrant when it is alive, and when it dies, then just the other extreme happens: it stinks, as bad as anything can. It is really foul! It moves from one extreme to the other extreme.

It is good to be honest, and you have to understand it, because love is a contract between two people. Love needs two people to agree; divorce needs only one person to disagree. So if one person is not agreeing any more, then there is no need to waste your time.

Just get out of it. If you are thinking to go to the West for a few weeks, go, mm? – it will help you to get out. If you can get out here, get out here, but if you feel like going you can go and then come back.

CHAPTER 4

Religion: Allowing God to Find Us

4 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means god, svarupo means self-nature. God is our self nature. God is not separate – god is our very being. He has not to be attained, only discovered. He is hidden in us; there is no need to go anywhere else to find him. One has to be silent enough and relaxed enough to feel him. It is not a journey, it is already the case: we are in god, god is in us. And god is not a person – you cannot worship him; there is nobody to be worshipped. The worshipper is the worshipped. The arrow has to turn inwards.

We are focussed outwards, so god has fallen in the shadow, and the obvious has become impossible and the impossible has become our very search. God is very obvious. ’One does not even have to go outside one’s room,’ says Lao Tzu, ’to find him.’ And I say ’One does not even have to go outside one’s body.’ One is it. That is the meaning of svarupo: it is your very nature, your very ground. ’Thou art that’ – when this recognition arises, all misery disappears and all darkness, and one is transported into a totally different kind of reality. With the change of vision, the whole world changes.

So don’t look for god in the churches, in the temples, in mosques; he is not there. Look for him within. And god is not a goal somewhere in the future. He is our very source. We have just to be a little calmer to feel him. The turmoil in the mind does not allow us to feel, the noise in the being does not allow us to hear the still, small voice within.

Deva means divine, asangato means inconsistent, self-contradiction – divine inconsistency or divine contradiction. Life is not logical, so those who search for consistency in life go on missing. Life consists of contradictions. It is a constant balancing between contradictions – day and night, love and hate, life and death, summer and winter, man and woman. If one looks deeply into life one will find that contradiction is the rule, not the exception. It exists through paradoxes.

The logical mind insists on consistency – then it has to choose. And whenever you choose, you can only choose half and the other half has to be denied. That’s what has happened down the ages: those who choose the body deny the soul; they have to, to be consistent. Those who choose the soul have to deny the body; they have to deny the body to be consistent, otherwise they look inconsistent. If god is, then they have to say that the world is illusory, ’maya’. If the world is true, as Marxists say, as Communists say, then god is just an illusion.

The whole of philosophy up to now has been a kind of choice: either/or. My whole teaching is not of either/or, but of both/and. Don’t choose. Choice makes a person lopsided. One becomes a materialist, another becomes a spiritualist, and both are half-half: half dead, half alive. Both are missing the totality, and the reason is their chronic insistence on consistency. They are not courageous enough to accept the contradiction, they are not courageous enough to accept life as it is. They have a ’should’: it should be like this.

We cannot impose anything on life. It doesn’t care a bit about our logic, about our mathematics, about our minds. It goes on its own way. It is dialectical. And it is good that it is dialectical and not logical. If it was logical it would be flat. Just think of a world of only women, no men – it would be a flat world – or of men only and no women; again it would be flat. Just think of a world where only pleasure exists and no pain; it would be a flat world. Even pleasure would become nauseating, unbearable. People would want to vomit it. It would not be possible to digest it any more. Just think of a life of only roses and no thorns. People dream of that life but they don’t know – that life would be utter boredom. Those thorns are a must. They make life a challenge, a struggle, an adventure; they make it worth living.

I am all for this self-contradictoriness of life. That’s why many people are so puzzled by my statements, because I contradict, and I constantly contradict because I believe in life and not logic.

I have to contradict to be true. Consistency is always false; truth is always inconsistent. It has to be big enough to contain the opposite polarity in it. And I also contradict continuously as a method so that you don’t cling to anything. I don’t give you a certain philosophy of life. I give with one hand and I immediately take it away with the other hand, because I don’t want to tell you the truth – it cannot be told.

All that my effort is is to provoke the truth in you, not to tell it to you. Confusion is my method. You can call me a ’Confusius’, but life is that.

Deva means divine, dhyano means meditation – divine meditation. Man can do meditation on his own; that remains a human effort. It is good – it leads to a certain point, but only to a certain point; it cannot lead you the whole way. It stops at a certain point because man has limitations.

When it stops, one has to surrender. In that very moment one is taken over by the divine energy of existence; then you are no more the doer. Something possesses you... you are simply riding on a magical wave of energy. You cannot understand what it is, you cannot analyse it. It is so vast and it is so mysterious that there is no way to catch hold of it. You can only ride on it, and it takes you to the beyond.

These are the two steps of meditation. The first step is the human step. You start trying: you dance, you sing, you sit silently. This is human effort – it is a must. The second can happen only if the first has been done to totality. Dancing, dancing, dancing, a moment comes when the dancer disappears, the dancer melts into the dance and is no more. Suddenly a great energy descends in you, one knows not from where – or from everywhere – and you are uplifted. That moment is divine meditation: when you exactly see that you are not the doer of it, you are just an instrument, a hollow bamboo, and somebody has started singing a song through you. You have become a flute, but the notes are not yours; you are just a passage.

Hope that moment comes soon. It can come. It is everybody’s birthright; we just have to claim it, we just have to put all that we have at the stake of meditation. If somebody goes on meditating half-heartedly then this moment never comes. One has to be totally into meditation. Put all that you can, don’t save yourself, not even a bit. And whenever it happens that you have put yourself totally into it, the second step is taken, and that second step is the real experience of meditation. Before that is only preparation. Man can only prepare; the real thing happens through god or through the whole. Man can open up... then god descends in that emptiness, in that opening.

That is the meaning of your name. It will remind you again and again to put all that you have into the effort. Don’t hide, don’t withhold, don’t be lukewarm. Meditation has to be an utterly passionate affair, a love affair. And when meditation is really a love affair it brings you to great orgasmic experiences, and those orgasmic experiences are far deeper than the sexual orgasm. That is nothing compared to those orgasmic experiences. And after those orgasmic experiences, the cosmos descends in you. You disappear and god is. That is the moment of deva dhyano.

Deva means god, layo means dissolved in – dissolved in god... just like a river dissolves into the ocean or sugar dissolves into water. Man is not an island, but people think of themselves as separate from reality, and the very idea of separation creates nightmares because it is against the truth.

Anything against the truth is going to create misery and hell.

We have been brought up in such a way and we have been taught again and again that we are separate. The society cultivates the ego. It depends on it, because only the ego can be manipulated, only the ego can be made ambitious, only the ego can be forced to do things.

A man who has no ego will not be of much use – not at least for this neurotic society.

He will need a totally different kind of society because he will function in a different way. His function will be love, and this society functions through hate. All the smiles are false and pseudo, because if competition is the foundation of the society, how can we be loving to each other? Everybody is our enemy, everybody is a competitor, and everybody is fighting for his own survival. This society is violent, and violence is possible only if the ego is cultivated.

An egoless person will be a non-violent person; he will be loving. He will not be a competitor, he will not be jealous. This society cannot tolerate such a man. He will be sane, and this society is insane.

And insane people become very angry whenever a sane person comes into the world. They crucify him, they poison him, they murder him.

The revolution that brings joy and celebration into life comes through this understanding that we are not separate from existence, that we are part of the continent, not islands.

In deep love sometimes that moment comes like lightning. Love is the experience when two persons feel that they are no more separate. That’s the beauty of love, and that’s its religious quality. That’s why Jesus says ’God is love.’ He says ’God is love’; I say ’Love is god.’ It is only for a few moments in deep love that one feels that the idea of being separate is false, pseudo, absurd. But those moments come and go and we are again separate. In meditation that moment slowly becomes our whole being. That becomes our very climate – that we are one with the whole.

Then trees and the mountains and the stars are not separate. Then we are all manifestations of one reality. In that vision of oneness is bliss, is benediction. All fear disappears, because there is nobody else to be afraid of, and love wells up, tremendously, because all is ours. ’I’ becomes false, and ’we’

takes its place. And the ’we’ includes not only men and women; ’we’ includes all – the rocks, the rivers.... That vision of unity, of oneness, is what god is all about.

Deva means divine, nadama means sound, melody, music – divine melody, divine music, divine harmony. And there is a music which is constantly present in everybody’s being. But we can hear it only when all inner talk stops. Once it is heard, you have heard god. God does not speak in language – he speaks in music. Music is a pure message... truth uncontaminated. You need not interpret it, you need not analyse it. You need not bring in your intellect to understand it, still you understand.

Music does not say anything in particular, but it still says a lot. It speaks to your guts, to your very cells, to the very fibres of your being. It is cosmic language, without words, because words can be misinterpreted And words are always misunderstood. It is a wordless message.

God has always spoken in music, as music. And he is always speaking; it is a constant sound inside you. Without it you cannot survive for a single moment. It nourishes you, it keeps you alive; it is your very source of life. But our heads are so full of noise, the inner talk is so continuous... waking, sleeping, it goes on and on; it does not give you a gap.

Meditation is nothing but creating those small gaps when the inner talk stops, when suddenly the road of the mind is empty and no traffic moves and the inner sound bursts like an explosion. It cleanses, it purifies, it transforms; it is alchemical.

That sound is called ’nadama’. It is not created by you; you are created by it. You are just a note of nadama, just a note of that eternal music.

And once you have caught hold of a single note, then there is no problem. Then you can search for the very source through it. A single ray of light can lead you to the very sun from where it comes.

Jesus heard it, Buddha heard it, and anyone who has ever heard it has been no more part of the earth, has become part of the sky, has been no more part of time, has become eternal. And unless one becomes that, one suffers. Suffering is because we are missing our own treasure. Suffering is because we have not been able to see our own kingdom.

[To a sannyasin who has been living in a cave in the mountains]

That always happens: if you live in the mountains too long then you become habituated to the mountains and the silence. These are just habits of the mind. Then you come back to the marketplace, to the world, and you will feel disturbed. After a few days the disturbance will disappear; the habit will be dropped, and then there will be no problem. But for a few days there will be a turmoil

– just the change, and it is a great change.

If you really want to grow then it is good sometimes to come into the world, to face the world, to encounter the problems that it creates and remain alert that your peace and silence are not disturbed by it. Keep your cool. Let the turmoil be there all around you but you remain the centre of the cyclone. Then go back to the mountains, be there, enjoy; come back into the world. One day, when you start feeling that now there is no problem, no difference – whether you are in the caves or in the marketplace it is all the same – then you have really attained peace, and that is yours. If in coming to the world your peace is disturbed, then it is not yours; you have borrowed it from the mountains. It is not true – it is only a new conditioning.

So if you really want to grow then my suggestion is: be here and go again, come back, and go on moving between these two poles – the mountains and the market. Don’t get fixed at one point, remain moving, and one day you will be able to find the balance between the two. And you will be able to be just a witness; if you are in the mountains you witness the mountains, if you are in the market you witness the market but you remain the same, undisturbed, undistracted. That is true peace.

That’s why I have not chosen the Himalayas. I love the Himalayas, but I have not chosen it for my people because that will not be true peace and they will all be in an illusion. They will all think that they have attained great silence, etcetera, and whenever they go to the world all will be shattered. I have chosen the world. If something has to grow, it has to grow here so nothing can disturb it; then you can go anywhere. Even if you are thrown into hell, nothing will be disturbed. That’s why I have chosen India. Hell is far better! In hell you will simply feel that you have been promoted!

CHAPTER 5

Prayer is the Highest Form of Play

5 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, vandano means prayer – bliss is prayer. Whether one believes in god or not does not matter. A blissful man is a religious man. A blissful man is in prayer, because out of bliss, gratitude naturally arises, and gratitude is prayer... and out of gratitude, the vision of god.

But the so-called religions start upside-down. They say ’First believe in god, then you can pray, and out of prayer you will find bliss.’ This is just a falsification of the whole process.

To start with belief is to start with dishonesty. This is what psychologists call ’the double-bind’.

Religions teach people ’Be sincere and believe in god.’ Now this is a double-bind; if you are sincere and honest you cannot believe. How can you believe?you have not known yet. If you believe, you are not sincere and honest. And remember: honesty and sincerity are far more valuable than all the beliefs.

My approach is just the opposite: start by being blissful. Enjoy life, enjoy the small things of life, enjoy each moment of it, let it become an hallelujah, a celebration, and forget all about theology –

Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism. Forget all that has been taught. Life is enough. Learn to live, and out of that learning, out of that getting deeper into life, you will become more and more blissful.

Life is made of bliss. It is available everywhere... it is hidden in every atom. We are living in the ocean of bliss. We just have to be here and now, open, available, and bliss rushes into our being from every side; one is flooded with it. And then gratitude is natural. How can you avoid gratitude when there is so much bliss in life? It is a natural consequence. And out of gratitude, the vision of god.

The eyes of gratitude can see god everywhere. Gratitude gives a penetration to the eyes. The eyes become like arrows. They simply go to the very core of existence. All becomes transparently clear and loud.

Prem means love, sangito means music. Love is pure music between two beings. It is creating a harmony. It is not only togetherness on the outside but a togetherness within. It is a miracle, because the two become one. It defies all science and all mathematics and all logic. Still the two remain two; hence I call it a miracle, a mystery. It is really a Zen koan – no other koan is so puzzling as love. It is the oneness of two persons; it is twoness in one music, in one harmony. And those who are very logical go on missing it, because it does not follow the rules of logic; it is very illogical, it is absurd.

So only those who are ready to go into the absurd are capable of knowing what love is. It needs tremendous courage, it needs a readiness to risk, but life belongs only to those who can risk. It does not belong to those who are always longing for security, safety. Love is not for them, and the music that comes out of love remains unheard. And unless that music is heard, one’s life remains meaningless. Only that music of love gives meaning to life. It illuminates small things, and they attain to such splendour and grandeur that it is unbelievable, that it looks almost impossible... but the impossible happens!

Anand means bliss, unmani means no-mind. Bliss is a state of no-mind. It exists only if the mind disappears. By ’mind’ I mean the whole thought process – imagination, memory, desire. All these ripples keep the lake of consciousness disturbed, and because the lake is so disturbed, it cannot reflect truth. Truth is always there like the full moon in the sky, but the lake is so disturbed that it is impossible for the moon to be reflected in it.

Our consciousness is a small lake, a mirror. All that is needed is not a search for truth – because truth is everywhere, confronting you from all sides; all that is needed is to drop this constant disturbance inside, this constant inner talk, these waves upon waves of thought, this continuous traffic in the mind. When the traffic disappears and the road is empty6, suddenly one knows what truth is. It has always been there, it was just that we were not able to reflect it. In the beginning only moments of no-mind happen, just small intervals. For a second all stops and you can have a glimpse of the truth.

But even those glimpses are so enriching, even those glimpses are so transforming; even those glimpses give you a mutation. You start living differently, you start living on a different plane. All that was important before becomes unimportant, and all that was never important before becomes important; all values are transvalued, revalued. Everything goes through a new adjustment, a new tuning, and as you become more and more tuned, those gaps become bigger and bigger and bigger.

Those gaps are called ’satories’. When you have become capable of remaining without mind whenever you want, then it is a state of samadhi. That samadhi is called ’unmani’ – that is the ultimate state. The mind has become a slave: when you need it, you use it;; when you don’t need you turn it off, you put it in the garage, and you live without mind. That life without mind is utter bliss.

And that’s what sannyas is all about: an effort to create this state of no-mind, an effort to dissolve the mind and to bring that interval, slowly slowly, in greater and greater quantities, so that one day you can find yourself so empty that not even a ripple is there, no even a small vibration of thought.

Immediately truth explodes, and that truth is our search, our longing; that is our home. Without it we are in a strange world. Without being rooted in it we remain strangers and life remains a very neurotic affair.

Veet means beyond, samvado means saying – beyond saying. Truth cannot be said; there is no way to express it. Language fails, grammar goes bankrupt. the mind feels utterly at a loss, because grammar has limitations... language too. and the mind is a very small thing – it cannot contain the vastness of truth. So there is no way to say it. It can be shown but cannot be said. It can be indicated... fingers pointing to the moon. That’s what all scriptures are: fingers pointing to the moon.

But the finger is not the moon and the word ’god’ is not god;; the word ’love’ is not love either – just fingers pointing to the moon.

The fingers have forgotten – one has to look beyond the fingers; one should not become to much attached to the fingers. One should not start sucking the finger. That’s what people have been doing down the ages. Reading the Bible again and again, or the Geeta again and again, is just sucking the finger. Just like a small child sucking his won thumb – utterly stupid; it is not going to help. See where the finger is pointing and don’t be caught in the finger itself.

All words are impotent when trying to say the truth, for a very basic reason: language is schizophrenic. It divides reality, and god is indivisible, whole. If you say ’God is light,’ then of necessity you have denied darkness its divinity, then darkness is excluded and nothing can be excluded; god contains all. He is light and he is darkness too, because only he is. If you say ’God is love,’ then what will happen to hate?

Just the other day I was reading a very strange but very beautiful Hassidic saying:’God is not nice; god is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.’ But again, even though the saying is beautiful, something is excluded:’God is not an uncle.’ I say he is and he is not; he is both. God is a rose flower too, as much as he is an earthquake. And yes, god is sweet and bitter both. But this is the problem: if you say one thing, you exclude the other, and nothing can be excluded. Language cannot say anything without excluding something. Language cannot be all-inclusive, otherwise it will be meaningless. Its meaning depends on creating a split in existence.

Only music comes very close to saying it, but music is not language. No word is used – you can only feel. Music makes no statements. It simply shows. You can be engulfed in it, you can be lost in it, you can have a taste on the tip of your tongue, or you can have a great pain in your heart – sweet, ecstatic. You can fall into oblivion, you can become drunk with it, but it says nothing: it shows. Music comes closest. Music is the best finger pointing to the moon. Even a song is not so good. A song is a compromise between language and music; a song has to use words. It becomes contaminated that much, but music is pure.

[Veet samvado] means: it cannot be said but it can be experienced. Just as one experiences music, just as one experiences love, god is an experience, an existential experience. God is not philosophy but music, not theology but a dance.

Veet means beyond, vivado means argument. It cannot be argued; there is no way to prove or disprove god. One cannot say anything for and one cannot say anything against. Theists are as wrong as atheists, because both have accepted one thing – that god can be argued about, that we can come to a conclusion through argumentation. There is no way to come to any conclusion through argumentation. Logic never comes to any conclusions; all its conclusions are only tentative, arbitrary, and all its conclusions can be again argued against. There is no finality. Only experience gives finality.

Unless you experience, everything remains in doubt. Even the so-called religious people are full of doubt; they repress their doubt by their belief. If there is no doubt inside there is no need for any belief either. The belief is just like a medicine and doubt is the disease: through the belief one goes on repressing the doubt, but the doubt remains; in fact it goes deeper into your unconscious. Hence all the religious people are always afraid of argument; they are afraid that their own doubt will be provoked again. Who knows? somebody may convince them that there is no god. They don’t read others’ books: Christians have been prohibited from reading others’ scriptures, Hindus have been prohibited from reading Buddhist scriptures, Buddhists have been prohibited from reading scriptures of the Jainas. Don’t read anybody else’s scriptures, because who knows? – something may strike in your heart and your doubt will surface. This is very impotent religion, worthless, just rubbish. One has to be completely empty of it.

God cannot be argued about, but god can be experienced. And that is a totally different dimension to be approached. Argument is of the head and experience is of the heart. Argument is superficial; you are not involved in it. Experience is total – you are involved in it; it is a question of life and death.

So I don’t say to my people: believe in god – because belief will need argumentation. I say: enquire into god. And you can call it god or nirvana or enlightenment or truth or what you will – X,Y,Z; I am not interested in any particular name. But enquire into it; enquire into the mystery of life, and not only with intellect but with your total being. Take a plunge into it. Experience it in all possible ways.

Eat god... drink god... smell god... touch god. Reach him through all the senses. and you will be surprised – he comes through all the senses. Just floating in the river, he is there... or just standing naked under the sun on the beach, he is showering his rays on you. Or just after a long walk , resting under a tree, a cool breeze comes, and his is there. He is that coolness... the beauty of existence, the harmony of the stars, the possibility of love and poetry.

Experience all these things. Forget the word ’god’; that has been used too much by the priests and they have destroyed the beauty of it. then one day one comes to know, and only that knowing is conclusive. Only that knowing transforms a person.

And when a religious person is born, he is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan – just religious. i believe in that pure religiousness....

Prem means love, raquibo means god; it is a name of god – god of love. and there is not other god; all other gods are inventions of man, inventions of the cunning mind. Only love is not an invention; it is inborn. The natural has to be discovered and the natural has to be helped to grow and bloom.

The god of the Christian and the god of the Hindu are just invented gods, arbitrary, man-made. But there is a god that is hidden in every heart; its taste is that of love. So whenever you are in love you are close to your god, and whenever you are anti-love you are far away from your god. That should be the criterion in life: become more and more love, and you are coming home. Love creates that which is called god; love creates the creator in you. A loving person becomes creative. He starts participating in creation; and then only can he understand how god has created the world.

What exactly is creation?

Creation is bringing something from the invisible into the visible, bringing from the intangible into the tangible, bringing something from the beyond and helping it to materialize.

When a poet feels an urge to create poems it is all invisible, vague, a chaos, all smoke. Slowly slowly he brings it down, helps it to descend onto the earth, to get roots in a soil, and there is a tree called poetry; it blooms and it brings much fruit. That’s how the whole world has been created: it is poetry of god... or a painting. But one can understand the creator only by becoming a creator oneself in some way or other. So the people who understand god the most are not the priests but the poets, not the ministers of religion but the painters, the musicians, the dancers, not the philosophers but the lovers.

Remember: if one is lost in the world of philosophy, theology and priesthood, one is moving in a desertland, a wasteland. One will come across many ruins but never across a living temple of god.

God has deserted those temples long ago. God is always in a living tree, in a living person, in a living river. God’s time is now and god’s space is here. And it is love that brings you herenow. It is only in love that the past disappears and the future becomes meaningless, and only the present has its unfolding.

So I say that love is the only true god. It has no church, no popes, no shankaracharyas... it is everybody’s birthright.

[To someone who is crying]

Good! Come here... come here. Yes, something is already there! The energy is ready to take a great jump – don’t be afraid of it. It frightens one in the beginning because it seems uncontrollable and one feels as if one is going mad. But it is a blessing. Only on this energy can you ride and attain to new planes of being. And you have come in the right moment....

Prem means love, aziza means friend, friendship – a loving friend or a loving friendship. Befriend life. Befriend as many people as possible... befriend trees and rocks and stars. Start having a dialogue with the whole of existence. Create an ’I-thou’ relationship in as many ways as possible.

Lying on the grass, talk to it – just a simple ’hello’ from the deepest core of your heart – and it becomes prayer. And soon you will find responses coming to you from the grass and the trees and the birds. They do respond. It is not just a story that they were responding to Saint Francis. They can respond to everybody; Saint Francis is just an example. They responded to him because he was so innocent, and out of his innocence he called to them. He would talk to a tree and would say

’Sister, how are you?’ Or he would talk to his donkey and would say ’Brother, you look very happy today.’ And it was not just from the head – it was coming from his whole being. It was not false, it was not an act, a performance. And whenever something is not an act, existence replies to it. It is obliged to reply. We belong to it, it belongs to us; we have some claim over it. It is our mother... but we have forgotten how to have a dialogue with nature.

Become loving and very friendly to everything – even to so-called dead things, because even they are not dead. Even a stone is as much alive as anybody else; just the life is fast asleep, snoring in it, that’s all. And if somebody calls it forth with great love, even a rock can be awakened.

And your energy is really good. Become more vulnerable, relaxed, and don’t try to control it. Now leave everything to me. I will see to it that everything moves in the right direction.

You can be close to me only when you are blissful, because you are close to everything when you are blissful. You are close to existence, close to god, close to yourself when you are blissful. Bliss is a bridge, misery is a wall.

[To a sannyasin who often feels miserable]

That we can destroy. That is not a problem. That is not a problem because misery is an unnatural phenomenon; bliss is a natural phenomenon. You must be creating it, so it can be stopped. You just have to become more alert about how you create it, and you have to learn how not to create it. You have to learn to put the same energy into blissful ways. This will happen. Just do a few groups.

[To a sannyasin who is here for nine days]

Sometimes even nine seconds are enough! It depends on the intensity. If you can be intensely here for nine days that is better than being here lukewarm for nine years.

[To a sannyasin who plays piano]

That’s very good. Make it a meditation... go deeper into it. If one can find some bridge between oneself and any kind of music, that is the best thing in life. Then everything else is unnecessary.

Music is the short-cut to god; all other paths are long and arduous. Just go deeper and deeper into it.

CHAPTER 6

Joy is Intunement

6 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[To a sannyasin with his wife and child who is afraid to ’burn all his bridges’ in the West in order to be with Osho]

Because of that fear.... Fear always holds one back, keeps the past safe so that one can fall upon it if the moment arises. But then the whole journey remains half-hearted and lukewarm. Better than being cold, but the evaporation comes only when you are totally with me, and to be totally with me means burning all the bridges. That is trust. Otherwise yoU go intelligently. You see, you judge, and you go so far; you follow yourself really. And whenever something arises about which your mind is not convinced, you will immediately stop... and that is the point from where the transformation happens.

Trust means something that is not visible to you, that is not believable... and yet one dares! Trust is daring, it is courage. But the more you trust, the more life happens to you, because life happens only through risk.

It is a risk to be with me. And it is not you alone who are half-heartedly here – there are many. But you will grow as much as you are with me. If you are totally with me then the growth will be a kind of explosion.

But good... better than nothing. You have come – that’s good. Next time you may gather more courage. Even this much is good, even this much has changed you a lot. You are softer, you are more calm and quiet. Just see: even this much can help, then more will help more. Nothing to be worried about – a few people take the jump in a few steps. But the jump is going to happen – I am determined upon it!

So you can hesitate a little – that is not going to disturb much. It will be only a little delay, that’s all –

but I will bring you to the brink from where there is no way to go back, where one has to go ahead into the abyss. That abyss is god.

Deva means god, anugata means a follower who follows like a shadow. Just as your shadow cannot be separated from you, the real follower cannot be separated from god. He lives in god, he becomes part of god. He becomes a shadow to god. He leaves no distance. And even an inch’s distance is enough to keep you far away. It is not a question of a big or small distance; distance is distance.

One should become like a shadow to god.

And what I mean exactly is: one should disappear as a controller from one’s life. Let god control.

One should start living in a kind of let-go, moment to moment, wherever he leads... not living a life out of the past, because that means you have already decided how to live, you have imposed a pattern.

The real believer lives without a pattern, without a character. He lives moment to moment in simple trust, in Utter surrender. His only prayer is ’Let thy kingdom come, let thy will be done.’ He disappears as an entity: he becomes a nobody, he becomes a shadow. His soul is not in himself any more. He is at god’s disposal.

In the beginning it is very frightening, because we can’t see god and we don’t know his ways, and when we don’t know him and don’ t know his ways, how to surrender, how to trust? In the beginning it is frightening, but slowly slowly once yoU start surrendering a great joy arises... and not only joy but insight too, clarity. You start seeing things with new eyes, and everything that was a puzzle before is no more a puzzle. All the pieces start falling into a harmony; the old discord disappears into a new accord. Then one can take a little bigger jump, then one can risk a little more. And slowly slowly the moment comes when one simply takes the ultimate jump, disappears as an entity.

God cannot be possessed but we can allow him to possess us. That is the meaning of becoming a disciple, and that is the meaning of the word ’anugata’: following like a shadow, not separate at all, with no will of one’s own. When you are not there, god functions through you. When your will dies, his will starts functioning in you. And your heart cannot contain two: either you can live there or god can live there.

Deva means divine, raso means juice – divine juice. Life is a divine flow. It is not stagnant – it is riverlike. And the more riverlike one is, the more one is in tune with life. But people have become very solid, hence god cannot flow through them. The moment god stops flowing through you, you don’t have any juice. You only appear to be alive but you are not. One is only a skeleton; the soul is missing. There are very few people in the world who have souls. To have a soul means god is flowing through you, pulsating through you, streaming through you, that god is circulating as the inner juice of your life.

My whole work here consists in melting yoU. The frozenness has to go. Once you start melting, you start becoming religious, joyous and utterly happy for no reason at all. Just to be is enough; one need not have anything to be happy. Happiness has nothing to do with having something.

Happiness is a state of being: being in flow.

And god is also a juice because you have to taste it. It is like wine: one has to become drunk with it.

Unless one is a drunkard one remains in the head.

Prem means love, prasado means grace – love is a grace, a gift from god. One cannot create it, one can only allow it to happen. You cannot make it; whatsoever you make will be plastic, will not be true. In the West the usage of the phrase ’making love’ is utter nonsense. If you make it, you miss it; it cannot be manufactured. And if you make it, it will be only an empty motion, a gesture, utterly insignificant... just empty, nothing inside it – a container without a content.

Love is a happening. It comes from the beyond. One has to receive it as a gift; one has to be open and vulnerable for it. That’s why closed people are unloving people: they don’t have any opening to receive god’s gift. They are closed from every side, surrounded by a subtle wall, a subtle structure that they have developed for security, safety... a kind of armour. They live behind walls in a prison.

The walls are transparent – they are glass walls so nobody sees them – but love cannot penetrate.

Children are more loving than grown-ups. Why? They are still without armour. They are still open from everywhere; all windows and doors are open. They are available to the sun and the rain and the wind and god. They are simply available. They are unafraid, they are innocent.

Fear creates cunningness. Out of cunningness one starts creating an armour. But it is suicidal – all armours are suicidal.

Life is in insecurity, because love comes only to those who remain utterly insecure... and it comes in abundance, it comes in torrents. It comes so much that you cannot exhaust it. It comes as a flood.

It cleanses you; it washes away all the impurities of your being. And when you have it, you can give it, you can share it. You have to share it. It cannot be contained; it overflows.

Remember that love is a grace, and unless one becomes a child again – without armour, without cleverness, without cunningnes – sunless one becomes a child again, available to existence, love cannot happen. And if love does not happen, nothing has happened. One can accumulate money, riches, power, prestige, and all is futile; one remains a wasteland. One simply dies slowly slowly, that’s all. Life does not happen. What we call life is nothing but a slow suicide. Real life knows only one taste: the taste of love.

But let me repeat it: you cannot create it, you cannot make it. It is not in your hands – it always comes from the beyond. You have to receive it, you have to be a host to it. It is a guest.

Prem means love, bijo means seed – seed of love, potential of love, possibility of love. Man is born as a seed. One has to work upon the seed, one has to help it to grow. And the first thing to help it to grow is to help it to die in the soil. Only when the seed dies does it sprout in a new life. After the crucifixion, the resurrection. That is the whole meaning of Jesus’ story: he dies on the cross and is resurrected. And this is repeated every day, in every garden, in every field: the seed dies and there is a resurrection. In fact, the seed was not alive. When it dies it becomes alive. The miracle – that through death life happens.

So those who are ready to lose themselves will be able to gain, and those who cling and are miserly remain dead, they remain just seeds. And if a seed remains a seed, it is a dead thing. Unless it is transformed into a tree and blooms... a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, these are the people who have bloomed; they have become great trees. Even after centuries the air is fragrant with their being. Even after centuries one can sit under their shade, in their shelter. Still the world vibrates with their being. The world is more colourful because of these people who bloomed. The world is more beautiful because of these people who bloomed.

Millions are born but they remain seeds, they die as seeds. Their death, their life, both are meaningless. What to say about their death? – even their life is meaningless. But when a Jesus dies, even his death is significant. What to say about his life? His life is significant. Each moment of it has been lived in totality. Each moment has been a revelation of god, and each moment has been an expression of the ultimate.

Remember that one is a seed, and much has to be done so that the seed does not remain a seed, so that the potential can become the actual, so that the shadow can become substance, so that the dream can become real, so that the hope is not only a hope but becomes a realization.

It is possible and one has to accept the challenge. It is a great adventure – the search for one’s own being, the search for one’s own flowering. This is the spiritual search!

Prem means love, svargo means paradise – love paradise. Love is paradise. Paradise is not a place, not part of geography. It is a space inside, part of the inner being, not geographical but spiritual.

And so is hell. When you are in anger you are in hell; when you are in love you are in heaven. And the distance is not much, because love can easily become hate, hate can easily become love. The boundary is very thin and very ambiguous. So heaven and hell are neighbours and just a very thin fence divides them.

One should not think that after one dies one will go to hell or heaven; each day, many times you move between them, you struggle between them. There are moments when you are in hell, every day, and there are moments when yoU are in heaven. But one thing is certain: whenever you are in heaven the quality of your being will always be of love; that fragrance is necessarily there. So let that become an indication. And once you know the indication, slowly slowly you can lean towards heaven more and more. Then it is within your hands.

The more you become aware that you create your own hell, the less is the possibility of creating it, because who wants to create hell? People live in hell because they think others create it for them.

What can you do when others are creating it? If they insist on creating hell, you have to live in it. The moment you realize the truth – that you are the creator – a great transformation happens through that understanding. Then you need not create it. Who wants to live in hell knowingly? Slowly slowly one starts leaning more and more towards those things which are part of heaven – love, beauty, poetry, music.

Lenin is reported to have said that ethics will be the aesthetics of the future. I say just the contrary: aesthetics will be the ethics of the future. One has to be more and more sensitive towards beauty; that is true virtue. One has to be more and more sensitive, that’s all, and one finds oneself more and more in paradise.

It is a kind of knack: nobody can really teach you how to be in paradise. It is just like learning to ride a bicycle: nobody can teach you verbally exactly what it is, how one balances oneself on the bicycle. But it happens – you can learn it; it is a knack. A few times you will fall and slowly slowly you will come to understand how to balance. And the moment you have understood how to balance, you wiO be surprised why you could not see it before; it was so simple. But even then you will not be able to tell somebody else how you do

So even a Buddha cannot say how he manages to be constantly blissful All that he can do is to give a few hints, but you have to work out those hints in your life. Love is the hint. Be more loving; don’t miss a single opportunity of being in love. And slowly slowly you will find that the balance is arising –

yoU are riding on a great wave of joy and one day you see the whole truth of heaven and hell. That day is a day of rebirth.

Anand means bliss, daksha means skill – one who is skilful in being blissful. And that’s my whole philosophy: how to be skilful in being blissful. It is an art, and nobody is born with the art. Everybody is born with the potential but nobody is born with the art. The art has to be learned and the art is arduous. That’s why millions of people – the majority – have decided to remain miserable. To be miserable is easy. One need not be very intelligent to be miserable; any stupid person can do it.

One need not know anything to be miserable; one need not grow at all to be miserable.

Misery is so easy that anybody can do it but bliss is arduous; it has to be learned. It is creating inner music, creating inner poetry. It is creating an orgasmic state with existence. Only a very few people succeed. In the first place very few people try, and even those who try, if they try with wrong methods or in wrong directions, their effort brings no fruits.

Rare is a person who tries and succeeds. It is the greatest art. If one can learn it even in many lives, then too it is early. But if one is really longing to learn it, it can be learned in a single moment too. It depends on the intensity on how much one longs for it, on how thirsty one is for it. If one is ready to die for it, it can be learned in a single moment too.

It is possible. I am creating this whole Buddhafield as an opportunity, so that those who are ready to get involved with me can have an opening in their lives, can find the treasure that is hidden within themselves.

And it can happen only with a person who has attained it. One cannot learn it through books; ’how-to-do’ books won’t help. In fact, they confuse people more. They go on giving short-cuts to people, easy solutions to very complex problems. They go on giving hopes to people and those hopes make people more and more desperate. Their frustration grows deeper and deeper and deeper, and life becomes an anguish.

It can happen only with a person who has attained it. Then it is like a spark: it can jump from one soul into another soul. And that is the meaning of being a disciple, of being a sannyasin: to come close to the master, so close that your unlit lamp can get the fire from the master’s lamp. In a moment of deep closeness, intimacy, suddenly the flame jumps into the unlit house and all is light.

So you have a beautiful name... but the name alone won’t do. It has to be made your life too.

[To a sannyasin starting a centre]

Just let me in... become a vehicle. Just represent me – become completely oblivious of yourself, as if you are not, and things will start happening. Many things will happen and you will be surprised.

You will say things that you have never thought and you will do things which are not in your capacity to do. But my whole being can become available to you if you allow!

So just remember that – that you have to become just a vehicle, a medium. Then nothing wrong ever happens, then all is right. Slowly slowly you will learn how to become more and more clear a vehicle... and then the joy is great, because each moment brings a new surprise and immense power, with no ego. That’s the miracle. Because whenever power comes, the ego exploits it.

If you are really allowing me then your ego cannot exploit the power. Once the ego exploits the power it turns into poison. If the ego is not there at all then the power is nectar, it remains nectar. It will nourish you, it will nourish many new people.

There are many who need me, and I cannot go anywhere else. But my sannyasins have to take me everywhere, to every nook and corner of the world.

[To a sannyas who is afraid of going from one extreme to another]

You will not go... and even if for a few days you do, don’t be afraid; you will come back to a balance.

The fear is understandable, because that one extreme always creates another extreme. But don’t be afraid. It is as if you have been fasting and then suddenly you start eating and you start eating too much; but how long can you do that? After one or two days it is gone. After denial one can indulge, mm? – but that is a momentary phenomenon. Don’t be worried about it. Just continue to meditate and that will keep bringing you back to the middle.

Meditation is a balancing force, it is the golden mean. Only non-meditators can go to the extremes; meditators cannot. The extreme is the way of the mind. You can become an ascetic – that is the way of the mind – or you can become an indulger; that is also the way of the mind. If you meditate you are moving away from the mind. The mind lives through extremes, polarities. You are transcending the mind, and that transcendence brings balance.

So just continue meditating and don’t be worried; even if for a few days you start moving to the extreme, it is just natural, mm? You are swinging to the other pole because you have remained at one polarity too long, that’s all. Nothing to be worried about. I can see the balance coming. Mm, the grace is there. Something immensely valuable has happened, and it will go on growing. And with me there is no problem of the extreme, because I don’t teach denial.

If you deny, then you can indulge. If you don’t deny, how can you indulge? For how long? If the saints disappear from the world, sinners will disappear. It is the saints who go on creating the sinners. If the priests disappear from the world, prostitutes will disappear; it is the priests who create the prostitutes. On the surface they look like enemies; deep down they are in a conspiracy, and they may not even be aware of the conspiracy.

Don’t be worried. Simply be there, meditate, and be natural – enjoy everything. Everything is god’s gift to you.

I love one Hassid mystic, Joshua, very much. He used to say God is not going to ask me how many wrong things I have done – because I cannot think that he is so mean as to count wrong things –

but one thing is certain: he will ask ”Joshua, how many opportunities to enjoy things did you miss when rightfully you could have enjoyed and you did not? Answer for those opportunities, because I was giving you opportunities and you were not using them.” He is certainly going to ask me this.’

And Joshua is right. He is a simple man but of very profound insight. God will ask you ’How many opportunities to be joyous, celebrating, did you miss which you could have rightfully enjoyed? Why did you miss? Why were you so ungrateful? Gifts were being given and you didn’t receive them. I knocked on your doors and you didn’t open the doors. I was ready to shower on you and you were hiding your head!’

I absolutely agree with Joshua: god cannot be so mean as to ask ’How many cigarettes have you been smoking and how many times have you been drinking and what have you been eating?’ That would be really mean... and not only mean but stupid too.

But Joshua’s point is right – he can ask ’Why were you so ungrateful as to not enjoy? Life was given to celebrate!’ So just be natural – I will take care!

One has to become a moon of love. Love is a feminine phenomenon just like the moan. It is not like the sun. It is cool, tranquil, silent, and it has the same hypnotic qualities as the moon. It has the same psychedelic qualities as the moon.

Love is the natural psychedelic. When you are in love the whole existence has a different colour to it, a different intensity, a different beauty. All dullness disappears, all dust disappears. Everything becomes luminous: trees are greener, roses are rosier. Everything seems to be more alive, more vibrant. And it is not that it only appears so – love gives you the vision of the reality as it is. Reality is psychedelic. It is really colourful, it is a rainbow. It has immense beauty and great splendour. Love brings you face to face with it, and love is light.

All those qualities are represented by the moon. Become a cool, silent, meditative love.

[To a sannyasin who was feeling confused and ”I found the only thing left was just a very strange longing – loving my wife, wanting to be one with her]

That’s perfectly good. Nothing to be worried about. One should learn to accept whatsoever life brings. If this is what life has brought, accept it. Confusion arises because you don’t want to accept it. Then there is a division. There is no need to worry – it is perfectly beautiful. Just love your wife; that’s enough. And one day when even that disappears, one has to accept that too. This is how, slowly slowly, one comes to know one’s ultimate aloneness. And if one can accept that ultimate aloneness, one has come home.

This is good: your attachments are disappearing. It hurts in the beginning – one wants to cling to many things, but now clinging won’t help. This is something one should be happy about. One day when you understand and when you look back, you will be happy. This is how one comes to one’s own being where nothing else exists... just a silence. In that silence is truth, our truth. That silence is the moment of truth. Just accept it, welcome it and rejoice in it!

This is what I call trust, mm? Life brings loneliness – trust it. Life one day brings absolute aloneness

– trust it. And as the trust grows and you settle with the new space, confusion will disappear.

Confusion is because you want to cling, you want to have something to cling to, and everything is disappearing, the earth beneath you is disappearing and you are falling into an abyss. I want you to fall into this abyss; this is what meditation is all about.

Just fall blissfully... Like a feather falling into an abyss. There is no bottom to it, but then one starts enjoying it; just the -very fall is such a thrill.

Just wait – something good is happening!

CHAPTER 7

Whenever you are Total you are with Me

7 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, unmado means madness – a loving madness. And that is the greatest sanity in the world. One who is not capable of loving madness is not even capable of living. He only thinks, never feels. And life is not a thought; it has to be felt, lived. Those who cannot live and feel remain hung-up in the head. Their life becomes only a dream phenomenon – it has no objectivity. It is all thought stuff, and thought is nothing but a form of dreaming. Dreaming is thinking visually, and thinking is dreaming conceptually; they are two aspects of the phenomenon called dreaming.

Real life starts only when you start feeling. But feeling looks like madness to the head. It represses feeling, emotions, sentiments – and they are the real juices of life. Through them one comes closer to god, and only through them. God is not a concept but the uttermost orgasmic experience of love.

When one can feel one with the whole existence, that experience is god. It is making love to the whole, it is being loved by the whole. It is a love experience.

That’s why Jesus said ’God is love.’ It is literally so – it is not a metaphor.

Veet means beyond, dvesha means jealousy, possessiveness, competitiveness, any kind of conflict.

And to go beyond jealousy is to go into love. It is jealousy that does not allow people to grow into love. And to go beyond possessiveness is to go into god, because god cannot be possessed, and the people who are interested only in possessing remain godless. God cannot be possessed; on the contrary, you have to be possessed by god.

There is a statement of William Blake, and I love it. He says ’Religion is love and not property.’ Love is never property. To educe love to property is to kill it. On the contrary, you have to be so available to love that it surrounds you, possesses you, holds you, becomes your very soul. Not that love is in your hands but you are in he hands of love.

Jealousy, possessiveness, kills the very quality of love and transforms it into a form of hatred. On the surface it pretends to be love and deep down it is just the opposite. Then the mask is of love and the reality is of hate. And hate has learned the trick of masquerading as love. It even knows how to deceive people, it even moves in pious forms.

The closest to the devil is the priest. And there is every possibility :hat the priest represents the devil and not god, because the devil is clever enough. He cannot manifest himself in his naked truth; he has to take beautiful forms. You are deceived by the form, but by the time you become aware of the reality it has already poisoned your being. You have already swallowed it; then you become aware that it was poison. So the poison is sugar-coated. That’s what our so-called Love is: poison sugar-coated. The real love knows nothing of jealousy, and real love becomes prayer.

So that is going to be your work: never be jealous. And always remember that there are many forms of jealousy – drop all those forms unconditionally. And the more you become rid of jealousy, the more you will find springs of love flowing... and that is joy! That is really being grateful to god. Then life becomes weightless, one starts growing wings.

The jealous person remains tethered to the earth. He creeps, he cannot fly. He is so heavy that he goes on down and down; gravitation functions on him, not grace. The more jealous he becomes, the more loaded, and the deeper he falls into darkness. In fact, that is what hell is all about: falling into a deep darkness, becoming so burdened that one cannot fly.

Whenever we think of hell we think of somewhere deep down. It is not just an accident, because all over the earth, in different times, by different races, hell has always been thought of as being somewhere deep down, and dark. One falls into hell. And heaven has always been thought of as something above. It cannot be just accidental, because without any exception whenever people think of heaven they look up. There is a subtle hint in it – that heaven is going higher and higher, above the clouds, above the stars, becoming so weightless that you can fly, so weightless that gravitation cannot function on you any more.

And this is the secret of becoming weightless... become non-jealous, non-possessive.

One should respect oneself, one should love oneself, one should worship oneself... because we come from god, god is our nature. We are not sinners, we are adventurers. Man has not fallen from god, man has not committed any sin. It is just god himself exploring himself. It is an adventure of self-discovery – just as one has to look in the mirror to see one’s face. You cannot see your face without the mirror; even to see one’s own face something else is needed to reflect it.

The world is a mirror. God has created it to reflect himself; it is his effort to discover himself. God wants to know who he is, and without the other this is not possible. This is very strange but this is how things are: one comes to know oneself only through the other; that’s why love is so revelatory.

When you love somebody he becomes your mirror. Love is self-knowledge.

God is deep in love with the world, naturally – just as a musician is in love with his creative music or a painter is in love with his painting. God loves the world immensely. It is his creation, and for a particular purpose. The purpose is: god wants to see his own face. In millions of ways he is exploring himself: in the animals, in the trees, in the stars, in man; they are different ways to explore.

This is my vision and this I call true religion. The true religion has no idea of sin at all; the true religion is so innocent that it knows nothing of sin. And the idea of sin has condemned people so much that they have forgotten all their glory, they have forgotten all their splendour. The priests have condemned man so much that he feels ugly, unworthy, worthless. This is just a strategy of the priests to exploit man. You can exploit man only if you can make him feel guilty.

My work is to undo what the priests have done, to destroy all guilt and instead to create self-love.

And whenever one loves oneself, one becomes capable of loving the whole existence.

Love and god are one, but love is only the seed and god is the flower; so they are one and yet are not one. Love is the beginning and god is the very climax of it; love is the first step and god is the last in the same process. So they are one and yet separate.

It is just as the seed is separate from the flower – it is the same continuum: the seed will become the flower. The flower cannot exist without the seed, the flower will never come into existence without the seed, but still, you cannot call the seed the flower. It has to go through a long process of dying, of transformation, and it has to pass many stages. Love is the lowest form of god, and god is the highest form of love; it is a ladder. You can think of love as the first step of the ladder and god as the last step of the ladder. They are one because they are part of one ladder, but they are still two because one is the beginning and the other is the end.

So one has to keep both things in mind. If you forget one, your whole understanding of love and god will be faulty. There are people who think that if they are one, then why not simply god? Forget all about love! If god is love then there is no need to talk about love; god is enough. This has been the attitude of many religions in the past – that god is enough, forget all about love – but then people became unloving, and an unloving person never knows what god is. He worships, he prays, but all his worship and all his prayer are empty gestures. He has missed the whole point. The first step in the chain has been missed – now you cannot go to the second step; there is no way. In the past many religions with the same argument dropped love. God is enough, and ’god’ is such a beautiful word, so why use love?

Buddha never used the word ’love’, never; he did not even mention it. And he is right, because god is enough. As far as he himself is concerned, it is true. But what happened to his disciples and the followers? They became anti-love. They became very very life-negative, because love means life.

They became deniers of life, escapists; they condemned the whole of life.

The same has happened from a different angle in Tantra. Tantra says there is no need for god; love is enough. So Tantra became slowly slowly entangled in sexuality and disappeared into sex.

I want you to remember both: love is god, and yet there is a distinction – a distinction in oneness.

So I have given you the name ’Prem Sadhya’: love, the goal, the end, the ultimate end. Begin with love and bloom into god. Use love as a jumping board, because that’s all we have. God is just a word now; it means nothing because it has no existential roots in us. But love we know – we know at least a little bit – so we can start with love and slowly slowly grow towards god.

As love deepens it becomes divine. One day suddenly you realize the truth, that love has taken a new form – the form of prayer – and from that very moment, love is sacred. It has transcended the body, the mind; it has gone beyond. Not that it is against the body or against anything, but it has gone beyond. It has become something more... something new has started happening.

Hence I use both the words again and again. Love is your existential state; you can begin with it.

It is already a given fact. God is not yet a given fact. God has to be searched for through love, in love. When love becomes a crystallized phenomenon, not a relationship but a state of being, then suddenly it is no more love: it is god. But that is the ultimate. And the goal has to be remembered so we are not lost in the journey itself, otherwise there are many sidetracks. If you keep the goal in mind, then you go straight to the goal like an arrow. If you forget the goal then there are many sidepaths, by-paths, and from each stage you can bifurcate into so many dimensions that you may never reach god.

So your question is relevant, meaningful. It has been one of the most argued about questions in the past. A few people decided for god, against love, a few decided for love, against god, and both went wrong. I want to keep both together.

CHAPTER 8

To become a Song is to become a Saint

8 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, astika means one who trusts, one who believes, one who trusts in bliss; and that’s my definition of a religious man. I don’t say to trust in god, because that is very far-fetched.

God is very abstract – it is only a word; you don’t have any experience of it. To believe in it will be dishonest. You cannot honestly believe in god. It will be deceiving yourself – a kind of self-deception, creating an illusion around yourself. And if you start with illusion you cannot end with truth. If you begin in dishonesty, you will end in dishonesty. The first step has to be very true, authentic; only then can the last step be in ultimate truth. Otherwise it is not possible. That’s why so many people believe in god – millions of people believe in god – but only once in a while does somebody come to know him. Why this disparity? When so many people believe, many more should attain. Because belief is dishonest, to begin with it is to go astray.

So I don’t say ’Believe in god’; I simply say ’Believe in bliss.’ And that’s a natural phenomenon –

not part of any theology, neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan. One need not be taught to believe in it; one is born with that trust. It is intrinsic, it is built-in. All life is a search for bliss. Even the most unconscious life is a search for bliss. Trees are searching for it, rocks are searching for it, animals are searching for it. The whole existence moves around the centre of bliss. It is so natural that one need not enforce any belief; it is already there.

One has to help it to grow. One has only to remove the hindrances in its path so it can start flowing.

One has to be deliberately in it. One is in it naturally; you have to be in it consciously, because if you remain unconscious in some search it will take millions of years. Then it is very haphazard, then arriving is almost accidental. One can hope for the best but one should be ready for the worst. Unless the search becomes conscious there seems to be no possibility of arriving. The more conscious it is, the straighter you go.

Jesus says ’My way is narrow and straight.’ The way of truth is always straight, but one has to be straight to begin with. So I say forget all about god, trust in your natural desire and longing for bliss.

Follow it, create as many opportunities for it as possible. Help it in every way and don’t hinder it in any way, and slowly slowly the search for bliss one day makes you aware that you are searching for god in the name of bliss.

But that happens.... The very search takes on such intensity that it transforms itself, and instead of bliss one day suddenly you are searching for truth, because one day you realize the fact that only with truth is there a possibility of bliss. Bliss is a shadow of god. If you start searching for bliss, sooner or later you will come to see that bliss is just a shadow of something else. Who is that? What is that of which bliss is a shadow? And god starts looming large before you.

Once you are in his shadow you are very close to him.

Veet means beyond, daso means in the service of – in the service of the beyond. The beyond surrounds us, but there are many people who never look at it. They remain confined to their routine lives. Their lives are lived at the minimum; they never become aware of the mysteries that abound.

Life is not a simple mystery, not a single mystery, but mysteries upon mysteries, and each mystery leads into more and more mysteries. But there are many people who are not aware of it at all. The sun never rises for them; it is never full moon. Whether stars exist in the night or not is immaterial to them. Whether birds call or not, they are deaf. They see and yet they don’t see. Flowers bloom, rainbows come and go, clouds gather and disperse, but they remain completely oblivious of it all. Their life remains in a prison of very small things: their jealousies, their possessiveness, their quarrels, their families, their children, their jobs, money and bank balances. To live in such confinement is to live the life of a materialist.

A materialist is a prisoner. Even though he goes to the church, even though he goes to the temple

– that is just a formality. He never becomes aware of the mystery of Christ. He goes to the church every Sunday, but how can he become aware of the mystery of Christ if he is not aware of the mystery of the trees in his garden? How can the cross have any mystery if the real, alive wood has no mystery for him?

How can he look into the mystery of Buddha if he cannot see it in the stars, in the rivers, in the mountains? – because the eyes of the Buddha are like the lakes. Unless you are aware of the beauty of the lakes you will not be aware of the beauty of the Buddha’s eyes. And the heart of the Buddha is like the open sky. Unless you have seen the sky, felt it, lived it, you will not be able to enter into the heart of the Buddha. You can go and worship, but your worship is formal, your religion is Sunday religion; it does not make you spiritual.

Spirituality has nothing to do with the churches and the temples and the mosques, nothing to do with reading the Bible and the Geeta. Spirituality has something to do with the mysterious in life, with the beyond, with the unknown and the unknowable.

You can gather answers from the Bible and the Koran, but you miss the point. Spirituality has nothing to do with answers, because all answers are false. Life is an ultimate question. You cannot find any answer that can solve the mystery of it. All your answers fall short. All your great systems are just poor efforts of the human mind to console itself. It does not even touch the mystery of life.

I call that man spiritual who has become aware of this miracle that is within and that is without – this poetry, this music – and one who is ready to be in the service of this miracle. That is the meaning of your name – ’Veet Daso’ – to be in the service of the beyond, the miraculous, the unknowable. And that’s all that god is about; but I have not used that word because the priests have used it so much.

They have made it almost ugly. They have quarrelled about it, fought about it. They have been killing each other, murdering and butchering, and doing every nasty thing that can be done in the name of god. So much bloodshed has happened in the name of god that the word has become obscene; it has become a four-letter word. Hence I use such words as ’the beyond’ – which is uncontaminated, which is still pure, innocent – ’the unknowable’, ’the mysterious’. But I am indicating towards god even though I am not using the word. These are all qualities of the ultimate truth. Life becomes a celebration if you are in the service of the beyond, and only then does life become a celebration.

Otherwise life is a misery, a burden to be carried. One can drag on and one can wait for death to come and relieve one of the burden, but it can’t be a dance. Without the beyond penetrating you, it can’t be a dance.

The religious person is one who can dance – the dance is just an outer gesture of his inner dance

– one who can sing – and singing is just an outer gesture of his inner singing heart – one who can laugh and who can love. But these are all outer gestures. There is more in them than is seen by the eyes and heard by the ears. They are just overflowings of his inner experience of the beyond. When the mystery overwhelms you, you start overflowing with love, compassion. Then each moment is so precious, so sacred. One need not go to any church, to any temple. In fact, wherever one is, in that moment that place is holy. It is not a question of the place outside but the place inside.

When the inner temple opens its doors, wherever you are, you are walking on holy ground.

Whenever you are full of mystery, you are full of god. Whenever there is a dialogue between you and the unknown, you are in prayer.

This meaning has to be lived.

Deva means divine, lokesh means a king – a divine king. A great Hassid master, Joshua, used to say to his disciples ’At least for one hour every day think of yourself as a divine king. Even if you cannot believe it,’ he used to say ’at least pretend.’ I love his saying ’At least pretend,’ because this is our reality. Even if you start pretending, sooner or later the reality will explode. If your pretension is in tune with reality, it will help to reveal it. Pretension is bad only when it is against reality; then one becomes false. Then slowly slowly one becomes a split personality.

For example: if a beautiful man has forgotten his beauty and thinks himself ugly because the mirror in which he looked was distorted – or somebody played a joke on him and told him ’You are ugly’

and he has fallen a victim to the idea – if he starts even pretending that he is beautiful, in those few moments he will be closer to reality. Because he is beautiful, and those few moments, slowly slowly, will allow the reality to surface and the distorted vision of himself will disappear.

I perfectly agree with Joshua, that if you cannot trust that you are a divine king, then at least pretend.

This has been my observation of thousands of people – that if you can start moving in the right direction, even though it doesn’t seem to be believable in the beginning, sooner or later it starts happening And when it starts happening, what can you do? You have to believe it.

The initiation into sannyas has two steps. The first step is: you simply trust me when I am saying that you are a divine king. The second step will be taken the day you come to realize it on your own.

I see you as I see everybody, as a divine king. Nobody is a beggar, but everybody has become a beggar. It is our own creation. We are in a kind of dream and we have forgotten who we are. Now, even if you can pretend in your dream that you are awake – that you are not a beggar, that you are a king – that is going to help. It will be moving away from the dream.

Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples ’If you can remember in your dream that it is a dream, that’s enough – you will come out of it immediately.’

Try it and you will be surprised: just before going to sleep every night, just go on thinking ’I will be able to remember when a dream comes that is a dream.’ And you will be surprised: the moment you remember ’This is a dream’ suddenly you are awake. Exactly in-the same way, start with this seed thought: ’I am not a beggar, nobody is a beggar. God has never created a beggar. God only creates gods; he cannot do otherwise. A god can only reproduce gods.’ And Jesus is not his only son. Every being that has existed, exists, will exist, is a son of god... and that is our sovereignty, our kingship.

In the beginning it seems unbelievable, but if you start just allowing the seed to sink into the heart, one day it sprouts and you see the first green leaves coming out of the earth... and the magic has worked. That is the second initiation. Then you know on your own, who you are – the glory, the splendour of your being.

And it is not that you think that you are special and others are ordinary. This is the beauty of religious experience: it makes you beautiful and it makes the whole world beautiful with you. The moment you think of your glory, the whole world becomes full of glory. So it is not a kind of superiority complex – that you are higher than others, holier than others, that you are more special than others

– there is nothing special. Either everything is special or nothing is special. That understanding transforms your whole vision. Each small thing becomes so luminous, has such beauty, that one feels continuously grateful, and everything is a surprise.

But we are very insensitive; we don’t even know who we are.

This is our insensitivity, our

unconsciousness, our dullness, our unintelligence. From this moment start thinking about yourself, and you will immediately see something changing. Each thought becomes a thing. One should be very careful about what one thinks. What you think today will become a reality tomorrow: ’As a man thinketh, so he becometh.’

CHAPTER 9

Sannyas is Initiation into Light

9 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Love is a breakthrough; a breakthrough from the ego, from all boundaries, from all limitations. Hence love becomes the sky, the inner sky. And the outer sky is nothing compared to the inner; the outer is just a pale reflection of the inner. Once one has looked into the inner then for the first time one feels that even this sky that we have known always is not so unlimited; it has its own limitations. And modern physics says that it is limited. But the inner sky has no limitation.

That inner sky has been called by many names. Buddha called it ’nirvana’: cessation of the ego.

Mahavira called it ’moksha’: absolute freedom. Jesus is more poetic about it; he calls it ’the kingdom of god’. But they all indicate the same thing: the moment ego disappears there is freedom, and that freedom is unlimited. The moment the ego disappears the kingdom of god descends in you. When the king dies, the kingdom arrives. If the king lives he remains a beggar.

One can have either one: either you can have the king – the ego, which wants to dominate, wants to possess – or you can have the kingdom. But nobody can have both; that is not the nature of things.

And millions decide to have the king although in deciding to have the king they remain beggars, because a king without a kingdom is nothing but a beggar. And a kingdom without a king is a real kingdom. Even that interference of the presence of the king is no more there.

Lao Tzu says ’The greatest king is one about whom the people never come to know.’ The greatest king is one who goes on doing things for the people, but people think that they themselves are doing them, one who remains absent, who remains subtle.

Lao Tzu is right: when you are really the king, you don’t brag about yourself. There is no need to beat the drums, there is no need to shout and to make the world feel your presence.

The idea of making the world feel your presence comes from an inferiority complex – because you are afraid, you are suspicious; you are not certain that you are. You want others to confirm it – that you are, that you are great, that you are beautiful, that you are wise, that you are this and that. And if others are not confirming it you yourself start bragging. You start saying things loudly to yourself.

Even if nobody listens, at least you are listening. This is a way of convincing oneself that one is somebody, but deep down in it there is the feeling that one is nobody.

But when the presence is really there, when one is there – not as an ego but just as an eternal presence – one can be absolutely absent. That’s why god is so absent in the world: he is a true king. He goes on doing things and everybody thinks that they are doing them. He breathes in you and you think you are breathing. He becomes hungry in you and you think you are hungry. He is thirsty, you think you are thirsty. When the thirst is quenched he is contented; you think you are contented. And he is so absent that he does not interfere with your false notion. He allows you that much freedom.

Because god allows freedom we have created the ego. Because of his utter absence we have created the ego. And the stronger the ego becomes, the more we will be unaware of god. That is the meaning when I say ’Let the king die.’ This king is a beggar. When the king is dead – only the kingdom is left and the king is absent – then you have become a sovereign... you are a Buddha, a Christ. And those are all names of the inner sky. But the way to it is love. The boat to the other shore is love.

Deva means divine, nirmoh means non-possessiveness – divine non-possessiveness. And one of the greatest problems for the human mind is how to drop possessiveness, because the human mind feeds on possessiveness. It wants to possess more and more, it wants to possess everything. The more it possesses, the more it feels secure. So it hankers for money, it hankers for prestige, power.

Even in relationship it starts possessing people. And to possess a person is to destroy him, because the moment you possess a person, the person is reduced to a thing. One should not even possess things, but people are even possessing persons. That’s why in the world you see so many robots: they have all been reduced to machines, things.

The day the child is born the parents start possessing him; they cripple, they destroy. Then the church possesses the child; immediately he is to be baptized. He becomes a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. Then the society possesses him, the country possesses him; and this goes on and on. Then his wife will possess him, his children will possess him. It is a long, long story of being possessed. It is natural that the person is reduced to being a robot. All his freedom is poisoned, all his being is crippled. He can only crawl and creep; he cannot fly. This is what hell is: to be reduced to a thing. But if there are so many people ready to reduce you to a thing it is very difficult to escape.

But one needs to escape.

To escape from being possessed is the rebellion of religion. That is true religion when a person refuses to be possessed by anybody. The moment you refuse to be possessed by anybody you have to refuse to possess others too, because it is a double-edged sword. You should not possess anybody. Love people but don’t possess.

That is the meaning of the word ’nirmoh’; and it is one of the most beautiful states to be in. If a person is in a state of non-possessiveness, meditation has happened, silence has come.

All our anxieties are by-products of possessions. The more a person possesses, the more anxious, worried, he becomes. The richer people cannot sleep: they go on driving themselves mad. And the paradox is that they have been searching for all these things – bank balance and power – their whole lives in order to live. But the moment they possess all these things, life becomes impossible. They have lost their souls on the way. They themselves have become possessions of their possessions.

They are no more free people: they are slaves of their things.

And now there are so many worries: whether they will be able to maintain so much money, whether they will be able to remain rich – it is a very competitive world. They lose sleep, they lose silence, they lose relaxation... they suffer. This is hell. Hell is not some place somewhere. It is a state of anxiety, utter anxiety, insecurity, fear.

’Nirmoh’ has to be your key. Live in the world but live like a lotus. The lotus lives in the water but remains untouched by it; that is ’nirmoh’. So use it as a key and slowly, slowly as you live it, the meaning will become more and more clear, more clear and transparent.

[About jealousy]

It will go... it will go, because it only creates suffering. The moment you become perfectly aware that it only creates suffering it will drop of its own accord. We can carry a thing on only if we hope that something beautiful is going to happen out of it – but never has any beautiful thing happened out of jealousy, and it is not going to happen ever. It simply poisons your sources of love. It poisons all possibilities of your growth, it poisons all relationships. It creates only smoke around you.

There is no question of finding a way out. The question is to see how you go in. Going out is not the question at all. You are out of it. The only thing to watch is how one goes into it. The moment you have seen the process of going into it, you will not go into it. That very awareness becomes the disappearance of jealousy.

Next time it happens, just watch it. Become very objective, a detached watcher, just to see what exactly it is, how it arises just like a small seed, and then how it grows and becomes a big tree and how you are completely lost in it. Just see the whole process of its growth and just see how you help it to grow. Don’t be in a hurry to drop it and don’t be in a hurry to get out of it; that’s where people are wrong. People are in such a hurry to get out that they can’t see how they get in, and that is the secret: just watch how you get in.

Once you have seen the whole process and the misery that comes out of it, in that very understanding something evaporates. It is not a question of dropping – just an old habit evaporates.

Suddenly you are out of it and laughing, and suddenly you see the whole foolishness of it, the whole stupidity of it. And then one is surprised at how one suffered so long because of such a stupid thing!

So I will not tell you how to get out of it: I will tell you to watch how you get in. Never be worried about dropping a thing – always remain concerned about understanding it. Dropping is not the question at all. It is just as if somebody asks how not to go through the wall. We will say ’If you can see that this is a wall you will not go through it.’ It is not a question of how not to go through the wall; the only thing is to see clearly where the wall is and where the door is. If you see clearly, you will go through the door; you will not go through the wall. It is only a question of clarity. But down the ages we have been told to change our habits, to drop this, to drop that, to create this character, this style of life, this virtue, and nobody has really been telling the secret. The secret is: just watch who you are, how you function, how you move into things. And forget the question of dropping, because if you have already decided to drop something, your observation will be biased. If you have already decided to be against something how can you watch it?

Nobody can watch one’s enemy; one wants to avoid him. If you have already decided that something is ugly, bad, evil, then you start looking sideways; you don’t encounter it. If it is evil, who wants to see it? You want to escape somehow – and you cannot escape unless you encounter the evil. So don’t call it ’evil, don t call it names. Even to call it ’jealousy’ is already to condemn it. Call it X, Y, Z.

Say ’I suffer from X, an unknown quality – something mysterious – that makes me suffer, so I have to watch this X and see what it is.’

And once you can watch rightly clarity arises, and clarity is transformation. To understand a thing is to be free of it. To be aware is enough. It is in this sense that Socrates has said ’Knowledge is virtue.’

To know a thing is enough – it becomes your virtue; your character is immediately transformed. My emphasis is not on character at all but on consciousness. Character follows consciousness like a shadow. You need not be concerned about a shadow; a shadow will come automatically.

So while you are here, go through groups, watch – it will arise many times – and watch it in a very friendly way. It is something in you; you have to become acquainted with it. It is part of you; just by denying it, nothing is helped. You have to learn about it. And be unbiased, unprejudiced. Remain open: as if we don’t know what it is – good or bad, we will see. If it is good then it will grow with awareness; if it is bad it will disappear with awareness. When you bring light into a dark room, darkness disappears, but you can see the paintings on the walls; they don’t disappear.

With awareness growing all that is good remains, becomes more clear, more prominent – you can see it better, you can enjoy it better, you can live it better – and all that is bad starts disappearing like darkness. It is going to happen!

Relax more and more into the work. Make it more and more loving and prayerful, and that becomes meditation. And finally the work has to become meditation. One can only live in meditation if meditation is not something apart that you do it for one hour and then the rest of your life you do something else. Meditation cannot go very deep unless it is spread all over your life, unless twenty-four hours a day become involved in meditation, but to do that, you have to transform the quality of your work.

That is the purpose of all the activities of the ashram. I am interested in making it a really big commune, so many activities, so that almost all the activities that are possible in the outer world are available in the commune. You can live the whole world in the commune and live it with a new quality and a new awareness and a new love. Then life is a joy, then life has meaning.

Bliss is not a goal it is a by-product. When a painter is painting, he is not searching for pleasure. He is simply painting, he is enjoying painting. He is completely involved in the painting, he is lost in it; and then joy arises, pleasure arises, bliss arises – they are consequences, by-products.

One of the most harmful things that Sigmund Freud has done to this age is that he has based his whole psychology on the will to pleasure, on the idea that man is searching for pleasure. Nobody ever searches for pleasure, and those who search never find. Pleasure can never be a goal; it is always a by-product. Whenever you are involved, deeply involved in any activity, there is pleasure.

One cannot seek it directly, one cannot go towards pleasure as a goal; one has to do something else and then pleasure comes.

Life is not a will to pleasure: life is a will to meaning. Do something meaningful, do something significant and creative, and pleasure is the reward; it comes of its own accord. The singer sings a song or the musician plays on the guitar.... They are completely lost in their activity; they are not there, separate. The dancer becomes the dance... and then there is joy, then there is pleasure and great bliss and benediction.

The purpose of all the activities in the ashram, and finally in the commune, is to teach you how to remain in meditation for twenty-four hours. So we are going to create a miniature world where all that is available outside is available, but with a totally different quality. That quality will be meditation.

[To a sannyasin who feels restless]

The head always goes ahead! But nothing to be worried about; that’s the function of the head. It has just to go on looking into the future – groping to find where to go, what to do, what will be better, what not do to. That is the function of the head. Don’t be worried about it; it is doing its function.

Don’t get too identified with it, that’s all.

CHAPTER 10

Love is a Jumping Board

10 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, mouna means silence. So learn two things: be loving to everybody – to people, to trees, to animals, even to the rocks – and the second thing: learn to be silent. Whenever you have time just sit silently with closed eyes. If these two things are attained you become a sannyasin!

Deva means divine, vasant means spring – divine spring. Sannyas is divine spring, and the colour orange is traditionally the colour of spring in India, because it is the colour of flowers. I have chosen it as a symbol of becoming yourself, flowering into your being. And the ultimate goal is that one should become what one is carrying within oneself as a potential. One should become that, the seed should become the flower. It is possible and it is within our grasp; it is just by the corner. One simply needs to go on an adventure – an adventure to find oneself.

The only problem is that we have been taught to imitate. If we imitate, we miss, because you cannot be anybody else except yourself; you can flower only as yourself. A rose has to become a rose – it cannot become a lotus; and the lotus has to become a lotus – it cannot become a rose. But when both bloom to their uttermost, it is the same flowering. The joy is the same, the benediction is the same. You cannot become a Jesus or a Buddha – there is no need to either – you can only become yourself. In trying to become somebody else you will miss becoming that which you are; that is the only trouble.

Once that trouble disappears from the mind there is no hindrance. The river starts flowing and reaches the ocean of its own accord.

Anand means bliss, veetman means beyond the ego.

Bliss is beyond the ego. The ego consists only of misery; the ego is another name for hell. The more egoistic one is, the more one suffers. Nobody else is responsible for the suffering. All that is needed to get out of suffering is to drop the ego. By dropping the ego all misery simply disappears – it cannot exist without it. One is simply silent, empty, but that emptiness is not negative; it is overflowing. The ego is absent but god is present. And to have the feel of god in your being is what bliss is all about.

Remember these two things: one has to go beyond the ego; there is no way otherwise. This has to be allowed to sink into the heart as deeply as possible. Once this understanding takes roots in you

– that the greatest thing has happened – then the path is very simple And to drop the ego is not very difficult; only this understanding – that the ego only creates misery and nothing else – is enough to drop it. We carry it because we think ’This is our cherished treasure.’ It is not! It is simply poison.

We are deluded.

Just watch the functioning of the ego. And whenever you are feeling very miserable, look inside and you will find the ego hurt, wounded or something has happened to the ego; it is always the ego behind the misery. And whenever you are feeling blissful, watch: you will not find the ego inside.

Once this becomes your understanding – not my statement, but your understanding, that you always find the ego with the misery, misery with the ego, bliss without the ego, and whenever you are without ego suddenly the bliss starts descending in you – once this has become your understanding, your experience, in a single step the journey is over.

Prem means love, animo means the smallest of the small. Jesus says ’Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of god.’ The poor in spirit is one who has no idea of the ’I’, who has no idea that he is somebody, who is utterly at ease with his nobodiness. To be at ease with one’s nobodiness is ’animo’. That is what Jesus again says ’Those who are the last will be the first in my kingdom of god, and those who are the first will be the last.’ That is the meaning of ’animo’: the smallest of the small, the last... one who is in no competition to be ahead of anybody, one who has no desire to have any conflict.

When one drops comparison completely, one is simply happy by being oneself. One does not think in terms of comparison – that ’I am richer than that’ or ’I am poorer than that’ or ’I am more intelligent than this’ or ’I am less intelligent than that.’ When one stops thinking in comparison, when one compares not, one is utterly happy just as one is, that is ’animo’. And that is the greatest spiritual quality to evolve in oneself. The more it is there, the more one feels the presence of god.

Yes, blessed are those who are poor in spirit.

Anand means bliss, Rama is a name of god, almost synonymous with god. The full name will mean

’god of bliss’. That is our ultimate destiny, and until it is achieved one has to strive for it. Unless one becomes a god of bliss – just pure bliss and nothing else, eternal, endless bliss – one has to work.

One has to cleanse oneself, purify oneself. One has to drop a thousand and one toxins from the soul. One has to destroy many conditionings that surround the mind. One has to transform the very armour that this society has created around each one.

We are imprisoned in a subtle armour. It is not visible to the eyes but it is very solid. People only appear to be free; they are not. Each one is carrying his prison cell around himself; that’s why they look free. The prison is just surrounding their bodies... a very invisible phenomenon but very solid.

One is a Christian, one is a Hindu, one is a Mohammedan – these are prison cells. Unless one is simply human, one has not accepted freedom. One is a Chinese, another is Indian, another one is German, somebody is Italian – these are prison cells. Unless these are dropped, unless the very idea of nation disappears from the mind and one belongs to the whole, one lives in prison. It does not matter what that prison is – Italy or France or Sweden, it doesn’t matter – if one thinks of oneself as black, as white, as this and that, it is all slavery. And one can never feel at ease with all these prisons surrounding one.

Just think of the moment when all these ideas disappear... then you are the sky. Then the sun rises in you and the stars move in you; you contain the whole within you. That is the meaning of becoming a god of bliss. Then all is joy, because nothing can be taken away from you. Then there is no death, because the whole never dies. Only parts change, the whole continues. One tree dies, another tree is born. One river dries up, another starts flowing. One cloud disappears, another comes into existence. Earths disappear, planets disappear, stars disappear, but somewhere else... but the total remains the same. It always contains the same.

When one feels one with the total there is no death any more. Waves die, the ocean remains. To be identified with the wave is to be miserable. To know that one is the ocean, to be oceanic, is to be blissful.

Deva means divine, dipam means light – divine light. Light is the fundamental constituent of existence. In the ancient days they used to call it fire. Hence Zarathustra started fire-worship. It was a technique to create your inner fire, to kindle it, to provoke it.

Modern physics calls it ’electricity’; that is only a change of the name. But modern physics agrees perfectly with Zarathustra that something called electricity is the basic constituent of existence. I say

’something’ because modern physics has not yet been able to define it. In fact the ultimate cannot be defined. With what will you define it? – it is the last. You can call it fire, you can call it electricity, you can call it life, you can call it love, you can call it light – all these names indicate the same phenomenon, but light seems to be the best.

The Bible says ’In the beginning God said ”Let there be light.”’ The world starts with that statement; it is immensely significant.

Search for this light inside; it is there in you. It is the innermost core of life, and once you have found it, you have found the source. To find the inner light is to find god. The inner light may be just a ray, and god is the sun from where the ray comes. But if you have found the ray then the thread is in your hands; you can just follow it and go deeper and deeper into it. One day suddenly you have reached to the very source of it all.

Light has to be your meditation; meditate on light – outwardly, inwardly. Let light become your companion; think of it, contemplate on it. Just watch, observe a star appearing or disappearing in the sky, the sun rising or the sunset, the moon, or just a candle in the room. Then sometimes just close your eyes and start searching for the inner light. One day you will stumble upon it, and that day is a day of great discovery; no other discovery is comparable to it. That day you become an immortal.

Sannyas is an initiation into light.

[To a sannyasin going to the West]

Continue to meditate. Make it a regular thing. Even if you cannot do anything, just sit silently. Just to give specific time, deliberately, to meditation is enough... just the very idea that for one hour you will be sitting for meditation, and then you sit. Even if you don’t do anything, you simply sit under a tree or in your room, slowly slowly that one hour becomes the most precious time.

You start waiting for it. You look forward to it. Slowly slowly something starts settling in you; that one hour becomes sacred. And you can see the difference between your other twenty-three hours and that one hour. It is like a diamond in a heap of pebbles: it shines, it has a grandeur of its own. And that one hour finally becomes the only time saved. All else has gone down the drain. One day one understands that those were the only moments that one lived.

When the German poet, Goethe, was dying, somebody said ’In your long life you must have enjoyed many beautiful moments.’ He was a man of great calibre, one of the greatest geniuses of the world, and multi-dimensional. But the question made him very sad. He said ’If I count then it can’t come to more than two weeks in my whole life. But those are the only two weeks that I have really lived

– a few moments far and few between; those were the real moments. I have lived only two weeks, the rest has been just a wastage.’ If Goethe said that, what about an ordinary man? – not even two weeks.

But if one meditates, one simply sits for meditation, one keeps that one hour sacred and separate, slowly slowly that one hour becomes a window: it starts giving you glimpses of the beyond. In that one hour you become open to something unknown, mysterious. You start feeling the presence that can only be called divine; there is no other word to express it. That one hour becomes a transforming process.

So even if nothing happens in the beginning, don’t be worried; just go on sitting for that one hour. It brings great fruit. If you can, do Dynamic, Kundalini, or simply dancing will be good. If you cannot do anything – the situation does not allow – then simply sit silently. The whole question is: you should be deliberately in meditation for one hour. What you do is not so important, so all kinds of meditation help, because the basic thing is there: the deliberate effort to keep a few moments apart, away from the marketplace.

[To a sannyas couple who are going to the West]

... now the life has to start here on a new plane. The first steps have been taken already; the journey has started. You have fallen in tune with me, and that is the most fundamental thing. If that doesn’t happen then nothing happens. Once that happens then everything starts happening, then nothing is difficult. Once a sannyasin is in tune with me and feels a harmony, and once I start overlapping your being, then all is very simple.

When people try to keep their identities separate then everything is difficult because then they have to do the thing on their own; I cannot be of any help. I have to be just a helpless watcher. I can suggest, I can advise, but that’s all – they have to do it on their own; and they are not capable of that. If they had been capable they would have done it already.

So whenever somebody falls in tune with me and starts feeling a kind of unity, an inner unity, then all becomes so simple. Things start happening without one doing them, and then they are beautiful.

When you have to do something it is never as beautiful as when it happens on its own.

So you are perfectly in tune with me. The seed of the miracle has already fallen into the heart. Now you just have to watch many things happening – they will happen. Come back soon!

[To a sannyasin who left the primal group]

That is not good. If something is terrible one should never leave it; one has to go through it. That’s how one grows. Never leave any challenge. One has to fight the challenge and go into it. Never escape – an escapist never grows. And that’s how there are so many juvenile people in the world, because everybody has escaped from challenges.

Real therapy is a challenge – a challenge to your manhood, a challenge to your potential, a challenge to your possibilities. And certainly it is painful; one has to leave many consolations, many deep-rooted habits, many patterns of the mind. One has to change the whole gestalt of the personality.

It is painful. It is not like taking off your clothes, it is like peeling your skin. But the conditioning has gone deep into your body, it has become part of you. It has to be destroyed, and it feels as if you are being destroyed. You are not being destroyed – just your chains have to be broken, but you have lived with chains so long that you think they are ornaments. So when somebody takes your chains away you feel you are being cheated or it is terrible and you start escaping. Your treasure has...

Somebody was trying to take your treasure away. It is not your treasure.

If all this rubbish disappears you will find your treasure for the first time. You will find who you are.

Sometime you will have to go through it; whenever you decide to. But then you will have to go through it again from the beginning. That’s the way: if you miss you have to go through the whole misery again! (laughter) But whenever... I will not say to do it right now. Whenever you can gather courage again...

... One just has to relax – one has to relax and accept things, that’s all. There is no problem. You could not accept things, you could not relax. You became more and more tense – that’s why you had to leave. If you had relaxed and accepted you would have passed through it very easily. You became resistant.

Have you sometimes seen? – a drunkard falls but he is not hurt. Lao Tzu is very fond of saying again and again that if a bullock cart falls into a ditch, everybody else is hit; only the drunkard in the bullock cart remains unharmed. When everybody is crying and weeping and people are having broken bones, the drunkard is fast asleep in the ditch. He has not even been aware of what has happened. Why is he not hurt? Because he is not at all tense! He goes with it, he is so relaxed.

When you fall consciously and you know that you are falling, you become tense, you become resistant. Because of your resistance you will have fractures. Those fractures are not because you fell but because you were resistant; a drunkard falls every day and never has those fractures.

Small children fall every day – they simply fall, they go with it!

That’s what has to be done. That’s the way: relax and go with it. Accept the pain, in fact, enjoy that it is surfacing. And you will be relieved of it soon, because whatsoever surfaces, evaporates; you are relieved of it. But even nine days is good. Mm, you tried hard. Next time, eleven days!

... So whenever you feel like it, when courage rises again, enquire. Or if you have enough courage you can book on your own, no need to enquire... because it has to be done whenever you feel like it, whenever you feel very lucky.

I have heard about one man: he went to his dentist and said ’Now you can drill anywhere.’ But the dentist said ’Why?’ He said ’Because I am feeling very lucky today!’

So whenever you are feeling lucky, you can go to [Primal] – it is time that dentistry.... One feels afraid, but there are days when one can even face the dentist!

CHAPTER 11

When one’s whole Being is in Celebration...

11 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, nityo means eternal. Love is the only phenomenon in life which has the quality of eternity in it. Hence even a single moment of love takes you beyond time, takes you into timelessness. A single moment of love is a moment of eternity; it is not an ordinary moment. It is not horizontal, it is vertical.

All other moments are horizontal. You are eating, you are sleeping, taking your bath, earning your bread – these are all horizontal. One moment is followed by another in a sequence; it is a chain.

Each present moment of the ordinary life is surrounded by two other moments: the one that is disappearing and becoming the past, and the one that is just coming on the horizon, the future.

The ordinary present is sandwiched between past and future; but love knows no past and no future.

It is a very extraordinary moment; it is vertical. It is not part of our time process. And that is the meaning of the Christian cross: one line is horizontal, the other line is vertical. It is not just a symbol of the crucifixion; it is a symbol of time and eternity. Eternity penetrates the river of time only when you are in love. Jesus is a man of immense love, hence he could say ’God is love.’ He represents love.

So remember it, that the more you become loving, the more you transcend death.

That’s why a lover is never afraid of death. Only the people who don’t know how to love are afraid of death, because the people who don’t know how to love remain in their egos. And they know only one kind of time. They know everything begins and ends; they don’t know the beginningless and the endless, they have never tasted of it. They have lived only in one-dimensional time; eternity has remained completely unknown to them. They are afraid of death – they know that they are going to die. And they are going to die, because time is a process that begins and ends.

Once you know what love is you have tasted something that is beyond death, you have tasted something that is never born and never dies. To taste love is to taste god. And only those who know love know what god is all about. Others simply talk, others know not.

Remember it: love is the existential meaning of god. God is only a philosophical term, non-existential, for love. Love is god alive and the concept of god is love dead. The concept of god belongs to theology: love belongs to existence. So forget all about god and go deeper and deeper into love... and you will know god! That’s the only way there is.

Prem means love and sheila in Sanskrit means a peak, a mountain peak – a mountain peak of love.

To live without love is to live on flat land. There are no peaks and no valleys either, because peaks and valleys exist together; they are aspects of the same phenomenon, two sides of the same coin.

The higher you move, the lower becomes the valley by your side. The greatest valley is always around the greatest mountain, and naturally so.

That is the risk of love: love takes one very high but one cannot remain on those heights forever.

One has to come back, and when one comes back, one falls into a dark valley. Love gives you great ecstasy and also great agonies. People who are afraid of the agony will by and by become afraid of the ecstasy too, because they always come together. That’s why millions of people have decided not to love – the risk is too great. They are afraid of the valley which always comes with the peak.

They would like to have the peak but they would like to have it without the valley; that is not possible.

If you want the day you will have to accept the night too. If you want life you will have to accept death too.

That is the polarity of existence: it exists through opposites, and the opposite is really a complementary. In fact the peak is created by the valley just as the valley is created by the peak.

If you really love the ecstasy you will also be ready to welcome the agony that follows it. Never be afraid of the valley; otherwise people become flat, their lives become flat. Of course they live in comfort and convenience, no problems in their lives, but no life either.

Life exists in risk, in danger. The lover has to encounter many problems, and the greater the problems are, the more they help you grow. Only lovers grow. Others have escaped from the challenges. They are hiding, they are cowards. Non-lovers are cowards. They live in convenience.

There is no fear of falling into sadness because they never aspire to happiness; they simply live a mundane, day-to-day life. They don’t try to reach the moon, hence they can never fall. They are secure, but security is not life; security is death. Life is intrinsically insecure, uncertain, and that’s the thrill of it and the joy of discovery and the great ecstasy of balancing oneself between the opposites.

That very balancing is integration.

Aspire to the peaks and be not afraid of the valleys. Let a higher valley, a greater valley, a deeper valley, be welcomed, because that is the only way to reach a higher peak.

Deva means divine, masto means madness – divine madness. And that is the highest form of sanity.

The really sane man is drunk with the divine; and only those who are drunk with the divine, utterly drunk, are sane. Others are only neurotic, more or less. The whole of humanity exists in a kind of neurosis. The difference between the mad people in the mad asylums and the people who are not mad and live in the outside world is not much. It is only a question of degrees; no difference in quality, but only in quantity. And any person who is sane this moment can become insane the next; everybody is on the verge. Just a little push, accidental – the bank goes bankrupt, your husband dies or you fail in an examination – anything, any trivial thing and your balance is lost and you have crossed the border. It is as if you were almost always boiling at near about ninety-nine degrees...

just one degree more, and any excuse is enough to give you that much heat, and you have crossed the border: you are mad.

Psychology tries to bring you back to the so-called normal state which is nothing but ordinary neurosis, ’normal’ neurosis, ’average’ neurosis.

The whole effort of psychology is to bring you back so that you can be capable of doing your ordinary things again in a more or less consistent way. Deep inside you remain the same. The same thoughts rush – relevant, irrelevant, consistent, inconsistent – the same crowd, so many selves inside, so many minds, and such a noise that continues day in, day out. But psychology is not worried about it; its only concern is to give you a face that looks sane.

Religion’s concern is not just that. Religion’s concern is to give you a being that is sane, not just a face – not just to give you a face-lift, but to give you a being that is sane. And that means a being that is thought-less, a being that is tranquil, calm, cool, a being that lives in the herenow. But to live in the herenow one has to get rid of the so-called mind. Hence the state is called ’a state of divine madness’ – madness in the eyes of the world, but not in the eyes of those who understand.

Jesus is mad – in this sense people think he is mad; so is Buddha, so have all the great masters been. The ordinary world has always thought them a little eccentric, gone off the track, outlandish, or something like that. One thing is certain, that they are no more the average person. Another thing is certain: that they are more blissful than the average person, more full of light. A new kind of being, a new radiance and a new joy surrounds them. They are drunk with god – they have found the very fountain of nectar. And they don’t care what the world says about them. Once you have tasted inner joy then it doesn’t matter whether people agree with you or not, whether they approve of you or not. Who cares about their approval? Once you have your own being, you need not beg for your being from others and from others’ opinions.

That hurts the crowd very much, hence they poisoned Socrates, crucified Jesus, stoned Buddha

– because these people seem to be so happy with themselves, so utterly happy in themselves, as if they don’t need the world. It hurts the crowd – that they are no more needed, that their opinion makes no difference to them. You can call them mad and they will laugh and they will still love you.

You can crucify them and they will laugh and they will still love you. The last words of Jesus were

’Father, forgive these people because they know not what they are doing. They are mad but they think me mad. They need me but they are destroying me. I had come for them but they have rejected me. Forgive them, because they know not what they are doing.’

That is the meaning of the word ’masto’; it is a Sufi word of immense value. Slowly slowly move towards that. Become less and less a mind and more and more a heart, less and less logic, more and more love; less and less concerned with the trivial, more and more concerned with the essence.

Prem means love, karuno means mercy, compassion: love compassion.

Compassion is the

fragrance of love; you cannot cultivate it, and a cultivated compassion is not a true compassion.

It is false, it is pseudo, it is a hypocrisy. That is what is being cultivated by the so-called religious people. They try to be compassionate but just the very effort to be compassionate shows that they have no compassion; otherwise why the effort? You don’t make any effort to breathe – it is natural, it is spontaneous. Effort always means that the inner reality is just the opposite.

You try to be loving; that simply shows you are not loving. You try to be good; that simply shows you are not good. The very effort is absolute proof that just the opposite is the reality. And once you are a hypocrite, you will never be religious. You have learned the ways of being schizophrenic, you have learned the double standard of life. You have become two, you are split. You have two faces: one, the real that you never show to anybody – not even to yourself – and the other that you show to everybody. By and by you start believing in the other yourself; when you see so many people are convinced by your outer face, the mask, you become convinced yourself. So the mask becomes the face and the original face completely disappears. The Zen masters say ’The first thing for the initiate is to discover his original face; only then can the journey start.’

There is a compassion that is not cultivated at all, that comes only as a fragrance of love, which follows love like a shadow. And love is a quality of our essence. Just as the body lives by breathing, the soul lives by loving. Just as breath is an absolute necessity for the body to exist, to survive, love is an absolute necessity for the soul to exist and to survive. Love is your soul’s breath. So only people who are tremendously loving have great souls. They are soul people. Others are only for the name’s sake; others are only personalities, not souls. A personality is a cultivated phenomenon; a soul is a natural growth. Everybody brings the potential but very few people develop it. And for those who develop it, great is their reward.

Remember, there are two things in you: one I call the essence or the soul, the other I call the personality. The personality is learned from the society, family, culture. It is a learned phenomenon; others give it to you. The essence is that which you bring with yourself; nobody can give it to you.

The essence comes with you, it is your in-born potential. And people are lost in their personalities.

They have completely forgotten their essence; they don’t know who they are.

Love is a fundamental quality of the essence. So if you allow love to happen more and more... and I will not say to love, because then you can misinterpret it and again you can fall into the trap of hypocrisy. I will say: Allow love to happen more and more, and whenever an opportunity is there, don’t hinder it. If you are standing by the side of the tree and the feeling arises to hug the tree, allow it, don’t hinder it. Just allow it. If seeing a flower tears start flowing from your eyes, allow it!

Don’t hinder it for any cause for any reason. Don’t think that others will think you mad. Why are you crying just seeing a rose flower? But poor is the man who has not cried on seeing a rose flower.

Really poor is the man who has not cried out of joy hearing the cuckoo calling from the mango grove.

Poor is the man who knows not how to cry when something wondrous happens... and it is always happening. And the person who cannot cry and love cannot laugh either.

So allow laughter. crying, dancing singing... allow loving. Become more and more vulnerable to love – that is my message to you – and then compassion will follow. You will find you have become compassionate... not that you have done anything for it. Allow love and compassion comes automatically.

Anand means bliss, hadio means divine – divine bliss. Pleasure is of the body, joy is of the mind, bliss is of the soul; and they are very distinct from each other.

Pleasure is gross. Somebody may have pleasure through sex, somebody may have pleasure through eating – it is gross. Joy is subtle: listening to music or listening to great poetry or just the wind passing through the pine trees or the sound of running water... seeing a great painting or just a sunset – it is more subtle.

Pleasure is bound to create competition. If one is interested in a man there is competition because other women may also be interested in the man. If one is interested in a woman there is bound to be conflict because others may be interested in the woman too; then you have to struggle. And when you get the woman, others are miserable; you may have gained a little pleasure but you have made others miserable. It is an ugly affair, it is political. It creates conflict, clash, and people become violent through it. Whenever a society is too obsessed with pleasure it becomes violent. It is not an accident that America has become very violent, because the whole society has only one concern: how to have more pleasure. So everybody is at the other’s throat. If you want to have more money, naturally somebody will have less. And there is violence.

Joy is more non-violent. It is non-competitive. If you love music nobody is deprived of it. If you love a sunset it is not that you have possessed it: millions of people can share it. Pleasure cannot be shared; it is very possessive. It is a kind of property: one claims ’This is mine.’ Joy can be shared.

In fact the more you share it, the more you have of it. It has a higher quality. If you enjoy a poem you would like to read it to your friends, because if they can also enjoy it they enrich your enjoyment.

You don’t lose anything by sharing, you really gain. It is better to search for joy than for pleasure.

Bliss is the ultimate. Joy has some objects just as pleasure has some objects; the objects are different but still the objects are there. In pleasure a woman is the object; in joy music is the object.

But in bliss there is no object, only subjectivity. You simply are... and the bliss, the bliss of just being.

To be-is enough, more than enough. For joy you will need something, something outer – a poem, music, a painting, a sculpture, a sunset – something outside. It may be available, it may not be available. You will remain tethered to the object, you will remain dependent. Bliss is independent; you need not have anything. You can simply close your eyes and just be and it is there.

That is the meaning of your name: go from pleasure to joy, from joy to bliss. Ordinarily people remain hung-up with pleasure. A few people, very few, move to joy, and even fewer, very few, move to bliss.

Those who have moved to bliss have known something of the eternal.

By repetition pleasure becomes unpleasant – it can even become painful. One gets bored. You may have enjoyed a certain food today but tomorrow it will be less enjoyable and the day after tomorrow, even less. If you have been given the same food every day you will be bored by it by the end of the week, bored to death. Certainly you had enjoyed it the first time but the repetition destroys it.

Joy is not so easily destroyed, but still over a longer time repetition destroys that too. If you listen to the same poetry again and again and again, a few times repetition will give you more and more joy because you will understand more on different planes – new doors will open, new meanings will arise – but that too has a limit. It is bigger, wider than the pleasure, but still it is limited. There comes a moment when you have explored the whole poem; then you are finished with it, there is no more in it. You can’t get anything more out of it – you will have to move to something else.

But bliss is qualitatively different: the more you sit silently, just enjoying your being, the more and more blissful it becomes. Every day it becomes deeper and it knows no end, it is infinite.

... and the new name is a new birth. It is the beginning of life again on a different plane, in a totally separate reality. Life is multi-dimensional, and we live only on one plane, the mundane. That’s why life becomes tedious, a boredom, because sooner or later one finds that it is just all senseless, it makes no sense. Even existence seems to be meaningless, because meaning does not exist on the plane of the mundane; meaning exists on another plane, the sacred.

You can call it anything – the holy, the sacred, the divine, the religious. Meaning is a phenomenon of a totally different dimension. You cannot find it in the mundane. It is not in the marketplace: you cannot purchase it, you cannot sell it; it is not a commodity. You cannot create it, because all that you can create will be false.

One has to become receptive. One has to be open in a totally new way from what one has been before. One has to open a window that one has never opened. Maybe one has not even thought that there is a window; one has not become aware of the fact. Sannyas is an effort to open another window.

The ordinary life is always a life of motivation. The life of a sannyasin is a life which is not one of motivation – it is festive. And that is the name of that dimension: the festive dimension. One dances because one enjoys dancing. There is no profit in it, there is no purpose in it, there is no motivation beyond it.

The life of a sannyasin is the life of play – what in the East we call ’leela’ – not of work. In the ordinary life even play becomes work. To the sannyasin the work becomes play. He simply plays with so many things. He is a child on the seabeach running hither and thither, collecting seashells and coloured stones, as if he has found a treasure. He is utterly lost in the moment. He has forgotten the whole world.

The sannyasin lives in a life of play – all is play for him. He is not serious; sincere, certainly, but not serious. He is festive. He enjoys each opportunity that comes his way, lives it in its totality... not thinking of any profit, not thinking of gaining anything out of it. Not that he does not gain – only he gains, but he is not concerned with that. His gain is great, but that is a natural by-product; it happens of its own accord.

So from this moment think of life as a play and then it will have meaning.

Think of life as a holiday, a rest, a play, a drama, but don’t think in terms of profit, motive, gaining, reaching somewhere, finding something. There is nothing to be found, there is nothing that can be reached – we are already there. From the very beginning we are that which we are going to become, so there is no need to worry about it. Relax and enjoy.

This will be your new name: Swami Deva Amrito.

Deva means divine, amrito means immortality: the source of immortality, the juice of immortality, nectar, elixir. The secret is in being festive... and suddenly nectar starts showering on you, it pours down in torrents. Life becomes a multi-splendoured phenomenon. Just forget the ideas that have been given from the world and become a child again.

Jesus says ’Unless you are a child, you will not enter into my kingdom of god.’ And to be a child is to be a sannyasin – to be a child again so that you can destroy all that has been forced upon you by the society. Your freedom has been crippled, you have been surrounded by walls upon walls from everywhere. Destroy all those walls, jump out of them, be a child again and start playing with life. And to be playful is to be prayerful. Prayer is the highest form of play, and if you understand it, immediately a new meaning to prayer arises. It is the highest form of play playing with existence.

Somebody is praying, talking to the sky. Mm? Just listen to Jesus calling god ’Abba.’ There is no god like a person there, but see the immense play of Jesus calling existence ’Abba’, relating to it, communicating with it.

To an outsider it is nonsense, it is neurotic. Psychologists say that, that Jesus is neurotic, because with whom is he talking? This is a monologue and he thinks this is a dialogue. There is nobody there! Jesus also knows that there is nobody there but the sheer joy of calling ’Abba’ to existence...

the sheer joy of relating to our own original source. It is a playful activity.

Jesus is not worried about whether god is there or not. God is not the point – he is enjoying praying.

There is no other motive in it. The motivated person will think ’If there is somebody, then there is meaning in praying. If there is nobody, why are you praying? For what purpose?’ He cannot understand that prayer can be its own purpose. See the tears flowing from Jesus’ eyes and the joy that’s there on his face, and the aura of delight. You are thinking of god and you are not seeing the joy. That is the reality, and it is created by the prayer. God is not the point at all. The point is to be prayerful, to be playful.

So think in terms of play, prayer, and don’t think in terms of getting anywhere, reaching anywhere, attaining something. All that is nonsense. We are already there. We have never for a single moment been anywhere else, so that is not the point. We are in paradise. Adam has never been expelled; he has just fallen asleep because he has eaten from the tree of knowledge. Knowledge makes people serious. He is no more a child – that is the whole meaning of the parable – he has become mature, adult.

We say to people ’Don’t be childish’; in fact we should be saying ’Don’t be adultish.’ Adam has become an adult and lost the joy of a child, the innocence of a child. Now he is hiding his nakedness; he has become cunning and clever and calculating. He has not been expelled. God cannot expel you, because there is nowhere else to expel you to. It is all his existence, it is all paradise. But if you become too cunning you have expelled yourself; you live in it and yet you have forgotten where you are. Become a child and suddenly one remembers; suddenly eyes open and the wonder, all the wonder is there, and paradise is there.

So let sannyas be the beginning of a new dimension, a rebirth.

Anand means bliss, tosho means contentment. Bliss comes only to those who are contented.

Contentment is the preparation for it. The ordinary state of mind is that of discontentment, that of desire; desire is discontent. It means ’l am not there where I should be.’ It means ’I don’t have that which I need.’ A is trying to become B, B is trying to become C, C is trying to become D; that is the process of the mind, the process of desire. And it is not that when you have what you had desired you will be fulfilled. The moment you have it, it is useless. The mind only asks for that which you don’t have. Once you have it, it is no more concerned with it. It is finished with it, it is of no more import.

The mind lives in constant discontent. Not that desires are not fulfilled, they are fulfilled, but the moment they are fulfilled the mind is no more interested in them. You wanted to purchase a house; once you have purchased it, suddenly the mind starts jumping into other things. You wanted to have this, and that is there and suddenly you find new discontents arising in you. The mind cannot live without discontent. In fact, the mind is discontent and the mind is misery. To understand it, to see through and through, and to cut this discontent to the very core, is what I mean by contentment.

Contentment has not to be practised. One has only to see the futility of discontent, that’s all. Once the futility has been seen discontent disappears, and what is left is contentment. And remember the difference: contentment has not to be practised at all; if you practise it you will simply repress discontent.

That’s what the so-called religious people have been doing down the ages: they only repress desiring. But a repressed desire is even more dangerous than an expressed desire. It becomes a wound in your being. It remains there, it gathers pus, it becomes cancerous. It is better to live it than to deny it, it is better to indulge than to repress, because through indulgence one day you may see the futility of it all, but through repression you will never see the futility. It will remain green and it will remain alluring. So I am not for any kind of repression.

Contentment has not to be practised, one has not to become content. One has just to see the futility of discontent, the vicious circle of it. Watch, see, become more aware: again and again you have a desire; it is fulfilled, and nothing is fulfilled. The begging-bowl of the mind always remains empty.

Even Alexander dies a beggar with an empty begging-bowl. Seeing it is enough; nothing else has to be done. Once you have really seen it, it is dropped; in that very seeing it is dropped. Seeing is dropping it. Not that you have to drop it, seeing it is enough: it is dropped, no effort is needed to drop it. And then suddenly you find a new quality to your being – contentment, you are utterly contented.

And then very small things, a few things are enough... just to be is enough.

And remember: I am not against the world, I am not against enjoying and I am not against anything.

You can have all that the world gives to you, but only a contented man can enjoy it. This is a paradox: the discontented wants to enjoy the world and cannot because of his discontent; and the contented is no more worried and has the capacity to enjoy infinitely because of his contentment.

So whatsoever he touches becomes gold and whatsoever he drinks is nectar and wherever he looks is god. And to be in a state of contentment is to be blissful.

[To a sannyasin who is ’tired of himself’]

Things will be settled – nothing to be worried about. This is a common disease: everybody is suffering from himself. But this can be dropped very easily; if you are really suffering you will have to drop it. All that is needed is to make you aware of your suffering, of the intensity of the suffering.

Once you see the hell of it, you will drop it. You have not yet seen all; you have just seen the tip of the iceberg. These groups will help you to see the whole of it and then you will drop it. Good!

Maya can have many meanings. Deva means divine; maya can mean magic; the English word

’magic’ comes from the root ’maya’. Maya can also mean illusion, but illusion does not mean illusion.

Illusion itself comes from a Latin root ’ludere’ – it means ’to play’. Illusion does not mean that it doesn’t exist; it simply means it is a play, it is a game. Don’t take it seriously; that’s the whole meaning of it. It is like seeing a movie... not that it is not – it is, otherwise how can you see it? – but it is just a game, a game of light and shadow. Enjoy it but don’t take it seriously.

This whole existence is like a drama. Play it and remain unaffected by it. Remain detached, distant, far away, in it and yet not in it. That is the whole message in the world ’illusion’. Think of life as a divine play. Think of yourself only as a witness, a spectator, and that will bring great bliss and great silence.

CHAPTER 12

The Taste of God is Love

12 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Kusum means flower, swarna means gold – a golden flower. It is still in the seed but it can come; it has to be provoked, it has to be ca]led forth. One should not dissect the seed. If you dissect the seed you will not find the flower. That’s what people are doing all over the world. If you dissect man you will not find god... and then they think there is no god.

Man is a seed, god is a flowering. You cannot find the flower in the seed if you search for it directly.

You have to give the seed the right soil, the right climate, and you have to work on it for years; then one day, the miracle. And that is the greatest miracle – when a seed becomes a sprout. Just those two small leaves coming out of the earth is the greatest miracle in the world, the greatest revolution.

That which was dead has become alive. That which was potential has become actual. That which was invisible has become visible. Now the journey has started... but it happens only when the seed disappears. You cannot find god in man: god happens only when man disappears. And to allow oneself to disappear is what sannyas is all about.

It is an effort to efface oneself. to empty oneself of oneself, and when one is not, suddenly god takes possession. Those first two leaves start growing. Now the flower will not be far away; the real thing has happened. Now the flower is only a question of time. The spring will be coming and the tree will bloom.

Don’t go and cut a tree to see where the flowers are hidden; wait for the spring. If you cut the tree and its branches to find the flowers, you will not find them. And that’s what science goes on doing: cutting branches looking for flowers, and there are no flowers; hence the conclusion. It looks very logical that there are no flowers at all. Wait for the spring, and then out of nowhere, thousands of flowers will be arriving. That arrival is the kingdom of god. Begin by dropping the seed into the soil; help the seed to die, don’t hinder its death. Let the ego die and wait: in the right time the tree starts growing.

So wait again and wait prayerfully, because there is no other way to wait. Waiting is prayer, because waiting means trust. Only one who trusts can wait and know that the spring and the blossoms will come. And it is really difficult to believe, because you cannot see any signs anywhere of those blossoms coming. The leaves are green and they don’t give any indication of the red flowers, but one day the flowers come and there is all joy.

That flowering is known as the golden flower. It is golden because it is the most precious thing in the world.

Deva means divine, pantho means path – divine path. Sannyas is a divine path. You are not to do much on it; you only have to allow god to do something to you. The path on which you have to do much and god is just a spectator is a human path. And the path on which you are just a spectator and the god has to do much is a divine path. The human path is a path of will, and the divine path is a path of surrender. All that is needed from your side is vulnerability, openness, let-go. So if god wants to do something to you, he is not hindered... and god certainly wants to do something with you. He wants to do something with everybody!

It is not only that man is seeking god; far truer is vice versa: god is intensely seeking and searching for man. Man has forgotten god: god has not forgotten man. Man is not an abandoned project, yet.

God still hopes, god still enquires, tries to reach each human being, because the failure of man is his failure. Man is his project after all.

Your name is an indication for you to learn let-go, to surrender, to just go with the river wherever it leads, to go with the wind like a dry leaf, with no resistance... effortlessly. joyously, dancingly.

Dhyana means meditation, yogesh means god of the yoga: god of the yoga of meditation. Meditation is the ultimate yoga. All that is known in the name of yoga is just introductory. Those body postures, asanas, breathing techniques, they are just to prepare the body. But many get lost in that; they think ’This is all’, and their whole life is simply wasted in a kind of gymnastics. Good in itself, nothing wrong in it – health-giving, vitality-giving, prolongs the life – but ultimately it is meaningless. Whether you live seventy years or eighty years does not matter, if you lived in a nonsense way. It doesn’t matter at all whether you were healthy or ill. In the ultimate sense only one thing matters: whether you were able to know yourself or not; everything else is irrelevant. And I am not saying don’t try to be healthy; be healthy, but remember that’s not the goal. It is good to have a good body, a good vehicle is always good. But it is just like a car: you have a good car, perfectly good, but unless you have a direction to go in even the most perfect engine is useless; it will take you into trouble. If you go on simply rushing here and there with no direction you will go mad. The body is a mechanism, a very beautiful mechanism; use it, but it has to be used for something higher than it.

The meaning always comes from the higher. Unless you are committed to something bigger than you, you will remain meaningless. And ’dhyana’ is that something that is bigger than you: bigger than your mind, bigger than all your dreams, expectations, bigger than you can ever conceive. And once a man is committed to meditation, life starts having meaning. Suddenly you start falling into a pattern. You are no more a crowd, you start becoming integrated – a centre arises in you. The whole purpose of meditation is to create a centre in you. Right now you are just a circumference, no centre.

There are many ’i’s’, but no ’I’: and each ’i’ pretends in its own time ’I am the capital ”I”.’ When you are angry you have one kind of ’I’ which becomes dominant, and when you are loving it is a separate kind of ’I’ which becomes dominant; and they are not even on talking terms with each other. So what you decide in anger is cancelled in love, and what you decide in love is cancelled in anger. And you think you have one ’I’ – you don’t. If you have one ’I’ your life will have an order, it will not be a chaos.

But ordinarily people are living in a chaos, they don’t have any order. And remember: order is life and chaos is death. To live in chaos is not to live at all.

So put your whole energy into meditation. Keep one goal in your vision: that you have to create a centre in you. With that centre arising, with that master coming in, all your senses simply start following; you need not control them. The very presence of that ’I’ inside you is enough; the very presence puts everything in order. So think, contemplate, meditate more and more, find ways and means... and there are millions of ways and means. Once the goal is fixed you will find the right techniques. Once your energy is motivated it starts finding its own way.

I am just an occasion to motivate you, to give you a certain goal. Once the goal becomes so important to you that it is a question of life and death, then there is no fear, no problem: you will find the right track to it. The goal just has to become such an intense longing that you become aflame with it.

Prem means love, anurodh means invitation – a loving invitation... a loving invitation to the unknown.

We don’t know its name – it has none. All our names are just inventions. You can call it ’god’ or ’tao’

or anything else that you like, but it is nameless and it is formless. And it is not only unknown; it is unknowable. One can live it but one cannot know it. One can love it but one cannot know it. In fact the very idea of knowing it is a sacrilege; it is vulgar, profane. It is an effort to de-mystify existence.

That’s what the scientific endeavour has been in the past ages. The whole effort has consisted of only one single desire: how to de-mystify existence. And by de-mystifying existence it has de-humanized human beings. People have become knowledgeable and have forgotten all joy and wonder; they no longer know what awe is. They have become smug – smug about their knowledge.

They have become snobbish, they have lost the innocence of the child.

God cannot be known but can be loved, lived. Invite him: you be the host, let him be the guest.

That’s the meaning of your name. Become a loving invitation to god.

Prem means love; hassid is a Hebrew word it means ’the in-dwelling spirit’: the in-dwelling spirit of love. Love is the very core of our being. Everything else is peripheral. Love is the centre of all.

And a man who misses love misses all. He never comes to know who he is. He may succeed in everything else but he has failed in his very humanity.

The only religion I teach is the religion of love; that is my whole theology. Love in every possible way so that love can grow in you in all its dimensions, so your every act becomes infused with love.

When your whole life is permeated with love you have become a hassid. When your every act is out of love you have become a hassid.

Anand means bliss, gora means whiteness – blissful whiteness. And white symbolizes purity, clarity, innocence and unity. When all the colours are mixed in one they become white. Light is white but when it passes through a spectrum, through a prism, then the seven colours of the spectrum are created. The rainbow is nothing but the white ray broken into seven colours. The whole world is a rainbow – god is the white ray.

And another thing to be remembered: Gora was a great Indian mystic. He was a poor potter but one of the greatest mystics the world has ever known. Pottery was his method. Through pottery he would teach centering, through pottery he would teach meditation. It was not an easy process. One can learn about pottery within one or two years easily, but to be with Gora meant to be with him for at least ten, fifteen, twenty years. Only then would you be a real potter.

The process would go on very very slowly, and the very patience would transform the person. More than the pottery, the patience was important. For one year the person would have to learn just how to mix clay with water – one year. It can be learned within days. Just kneading clay for one year....

One would become angry with the master, one would become resentful towards the master, one would see the whole absurdity of it. But slowly slowly one would relax... what else to do? And the moment one relaxed, one would come to know that the real thing was not the kneading Of the clay: the real thing was to learn patience.

This way the process would continue for twenty years. By the time one was a potter, one would be almost enlightened. This was a great mystic.

[To a sannyasin who wants to be an actor]

That’s perfectly good – become an actor! That’s what I do here: make actors...(laughter) create actors. Just act in the world as if it is a drama, that’s all. Acting is perfectly good. Go and act!

[To a sannyasin in who ’just waiting’]

That’s very good! That’s what prayer is. Just wait. Things are going perfectly well; the energy is good.

... Just wait with joy, with hope, with great expectation... as if it is an emergency, as if it is going to happen right now....

Prem means love, biju means seed. Man is a seed, and man can die as a seed without growing. If one does not start working on oneself consciously, one is bound to die as a seed, and that will be very unfortunate; then one opportunity is missed again. The seed has value only if it starts growing.

And the essence of the seed is love, the soul of the seed is love. If one works upon oneself, sooner or later something starts growing; but it never happens unconsciously.

The body is given to you when you are born but the soul has to be earned; the soul is not given to you. Only the potentiality of it is given to you. You can become a soul, that’s all. You may not become, you may become; it is just open. If you work hard you can become, if you don’t work you will live a life of futility, meaninglessness, absurd... doing a thousand and one things but for no purpose.

One has to take hold of oneself very consciously. And that is the purpose of sannyas: to start working consciously upon your being. Then great is the treasure. The name of that treasure is love.

You can call it god or enlightenment or what you will, but love seems to be the most beautiful name for it – unpretentious, simple. That is the meaning of your name: you are a seed, but the value of the seed is only when it grows and blooms. Otherwise it is valueless.

If you keep it waiting, sitting, it will simply become dead, it will go rotten. That is not the place for it to be. Its place is there under the open sky, under the rain and the sun, in the soil where it can die and resurrect. It is going to die anyhow, but to die just as a seed will be pointless – you died and nothing was born out of you. That’s how millions of people die; don’t be one of them. Try to die in the way Jesus died, Buddha died... then great resurrection happened. This life disappears but a greater life takes its place. The mundane existence becomes meaningless but the sacred descends.

To be a sannyasin is to be in a great experiment. This is the experiment of helping people to become themselves, to be that for which they are born, to help them attain their destiny.

You have a beautiful name there but you will have to work hard!

CHAPTER 13

Only in Bliss are you Close to Me

13 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Avoda means service out of ecstasy. The Christian idea of service is that service has to be first then ecstasy follows. The Eastern idea is just the reverse: ecstasy has to come first then service follows.

If service comes first it will be just a duty – imposed, cultivated, practised; it is impossible for ecstasy to arise out of it. It will create only a hypocrite, and that’s what the Christian missionary has become in the world.

Service is something outer, something you do for others, but how can you love others if you have not even arrived at your own centre? That love will be only lip-service. You can force yourself into many kinds of services but there will be greed behind it: greed to go to heaven, greed to be known as virtuous, greed to become famous as a public servant, but deep down it will be greed. Out of this kind of service nobody has ever known ecstasy.

Ecstasy has to come first, and then service flows out of it of its own accord. When you have something to give, only then can you give. When love is overflowing in you it can be shared, and then there is no greed in it. In fact you are not obliging anybody; on the contrary, you feel obliged because they allowed you to serve them. You feel grateful because they did not reject your love.

They could have, but they accepted it, they welcomed it.

And you don’t ask for anything out of the service. Now service is a joy in itself. You don’t ask for any virtue, you don’t ask for any account of it in the bank of god, you don’t ask for paradise for it; its value is intrinsic. In fact it is a by product of your joy. It is just like a shadow: you move – your shadow moves with you.

’Avoda’ means service out of inner ecstasy. Religion becomes morality if service is first, and a morality is not really a religion. A morality is just a convenience, it is a social formality. Ecstasy is a totally different phenomenon – it is a dance within your soul, it is grace. And you are so full of it that it starts overflowing.

Remember: first one has to learn +o meditate – meditation is the method to create ecstasy – and then service comes. But then service is no more duty, it is love. Then it has beauty.

Deva means divine, anupam means uniqueness divine uniqueness. Man is not created on an assembly line. Each individual is created in a unique way. There has never been a person like you and there will never be. If one can understand this gift of uniqueness great gratitude arises. It is such a tremendously vast world – infinite time behind; infinite time ahead – but never again will a person like you be repeated.

Once you see the beauty of it, great joy arises that you are worthy, that to condemn yourself is the worst kind of sin you can commit. But the priests have been telling people that they are worthless.

It is not god’s voice; it must be the devil speaking through them. God’s declaration is very simple –

it is written everywhere. You cannot find two pebbles alike. You cannot find two leaves on the same tree or in the whole world alike. Even twins are not exactly alike. God takes infinite care to make each one unique.

Never compare yourself with anybody, because all comparison is false; only similar people can be compared. You don’t compare a tree with a dog and you don’t compare gold with stones. Only gold can be compared with gold; only one tree can be compared with another tree. But if you go deeper that too is false, because each tree is unique; it cannot be compared with any other tree either.

This uniqueness is a gift. One who understands it falls into prayer without any effort. A great sense of dignity arises, and that dignity has no pride in it – that’s the beauty of it – because that dignity arises not because of comparison but because you are incomparable, neither superior nor inferior.

You are just you! Nobody is ahead of you and nobody is behind you. You are standing alone.

And once comparison disappears from the mind, all violence disappears automatically, all jealousy drops, and one feels free. Then nobody is your enemy.

If you are in competition with anybody – and comparison breeds competition, naturally, if you think that somebody is superior to you or somebody is inferior to you – you have started creating enmity.

You will be afraid of the inferior because he must be trying to go ahead of you; he is just behind you honking his horn. And the person who is ahead of you, how can you be friendly towards him? It is because of him that you are humiliated. You have to overtake him. This is what is happening in the whole world: everybody is at each other’s throat. It is a cut-throat, competitive world, but we have made it that way.

Jesus says ’Love your enemy as you love yourself.’ I say ’There is no enemy at all.’ You are alone; there is no friend, no enemy. You are utterly alone. See the purity, the austerity and the pristine clarity of being alone. And out of that aloneness is all celebration, celebration of being! That is the meaning of your name. It can become a key, it can open the door of infinity to you....

Deva means divine, chetan means consciousness divine consciousness. Man can live either as body or as consciousness. These are the two alternatives to live. Two roads are possible for man to follow: either one can remain identified with the body... then one will have pleasures of the body and pains of the body. They will all be momentary and life will have a superficiality; because the body is only a periphery. The wall that surrounds the temple is not the deity itself. And then it is born and dies, so the life span of the body is very small. And if one feels identified with the body one is always in a hurry, hence the Western hurriedness, hence the Western obsession with speed. Basically it is identification with the body. Life is running fast, going out of your hands – do something and do it instantly, and be in a hurry otherwise you will miss. And find better means of doing it, faster means of doing it. Speed has become a mania. How to reach some place with greater speed; that has become the sole concern. Why you want to reach there is nobody’s concern. Why in the first place do you want to go there? That is not the point, but you should reach faster. And the moment you reach there you start thinking of reaching somewhere else.

The mind remains in a constantly feverish state. This is basically because we have got identified with the periphery, and the body is going to die, so death haunts one. In the West death is still a taboo. One taboo has been broken – the taboo about sex – but the second taboo, which is deeper than the first, still exists. It needs some Freud again to break this taboo. People don’t talk about death, or even if they do, they talk euphemistically – that the man has gone to god, to heaven, has gone to eternal rest. But if the man has only lived in the body, he has not gone anywhere. He is dead, simply dead – dust unto dust. And the one who has gone into another body was never here in this body, because he never became aware of it; the man remained completely oblivious of it.

The other way is to become alert about your inner consciousness. The body is heavy, very prominent, apparent, visible, touchable, tangible. The consciousness is not visible, not so much on the surface. One has to search for it, one has to dig deep. It needs effort, it needs a constant commitment to explore one’s own being. It is a journey, but once you start feeling yourself as consciousness you live in a totally different world. Then there is no hurry because consciousness is eternal, and there is no worry because consciousness knows no disease, no death, no defeat.

Then there is no need to search for anything else. The body lacks everything, hence it creates desires upon desires; the body is a beggar. But consciousness is an emperor – it possesses the whole world, it is the master. Once you have known the face of your inner being, you become relaxed. Then life is no more a desire but a celebration. Then all is given already: the stars and the moon and the sun and the mountains and the rivers and the people – all is given. You have to start living it.

This has to become your exploration. This is what sannyas is all about: an exploration into consciousness. It is there but it is a hidden treasure. And naturally, when you have a treasure you keep it hidden deep down so nobody can steal it. God has put consciousness at the deepest core of your being. The body is just the porch, it is not the innermost chamber. But many people simply live in the porch and they think this is life; they never enter the house of their being.

Let sannyas become a journey into your own self. Use the body, love the body – it is a beautiful mechanism, a precious gift, great are its mysteries – but don’t become identified with it. The body is just like the aeroplane and you are the pilot. The aeroplane is beautiful and very useful, but the pilot is not the aeroplane and the pilot has to remember that he is distinct, distant, aloof, away, far away.

He is the master of the vehicle.

So use the body as a vehicle but let consciousness be enthroned.

Prem means love, diwano means mad – love madness. And love is a kind of madness. Of course, madness with a method. Not just ordinary madness: extraordinary madness. The ordinary madness consists of falling below the mind. Love madness consists of going beyond the mind. In both cases the mind disappears, so both are mad. But there is a great difference too, because to go below the mind is to fall back; to go beyond the mind is to rise up. To go below the mind is to fall into the world of the animals, and to go beyond the mind is to reach into the world of the Buddhas.

There are similarities and there are dissimilarities. The Buddha is as innocent as an animal but with no animality in him – just pure innocence, as innocent as a child but without any childishness in him.

Animals also have something of Buddhahood – the innocence, the simplicity, the naturalness, the tao – but in an unconscious state. In a Buddha the innocence has become awakened, but to the world the Buddha also looks mad.

Psychoanalysts still go on saying that Jesus was neurotic, and in a way they are right. He is not normal, that is certain; he is abnormal, that is certain, but psychoanalysis knows only one kind of abnormality – that of falling below the normal. Psychoanalysis has not yet taken note of another kind of abnormality: that of rising above the normal.

So become mad with love, and you will know what god is.

[A sannyasin asks about fasting]

No need... no need. Your body need not go on a fast. A fast is needed only when the body has too much fat; otherwise it is a torture, it is masochism. Never be a masochist, and be very alert – in India there are many masochist mahatmas; in fact all the masochists in India have become mahatmas. It is easy for the masochist to become the mahatma, to become the saint, to become the martyr, but behind his religiousness is nothing but masochism: he enjoys torturing himself.

There are two kinds of people: a few enjoy torturing others – that is the sadist, the sadistic person

– and the other kind is the one who enjoys torturing himself. And that is more dangerous, because the other can protect himself against you, but how can you protect yourself from yourself? For the other the government exists and the police and the court, but for you there is no protection at all. On the contrary, when you start torturing yourself people start respecting you; they think you are holy or something, and that gives a great boost to the ego. Never bother about such things.

Never torture the body. A fast can be a healthy thing only when your body has too much fat. Then it is a load; it is unnecessarily carrying a load. That load is heavy on the heart and that load is heavy on the head too. When the body is too heavy it is very difficult to grow in consciousness. You must have observed: when your stomach is full you fall asleep naturally, easily. If you have fasted the whole day, sleep in the night becomes difficult because the body is not heavy.

So only for people who have something wrong with their bodies can fasting be a health measure, but it has nothing to do with spirituality at all. And your body is perfectly normal – you need not worry about it.

Deva means divine, habib means beloved beloved of god, beloved of the divine. Habib is a Sufi word. God loves... we have only to allow his love to penetrate our hearts. And this is not just a metaphor, it is literally true; it can’t be otherwise. Change the word ’god’ to ’existence’ and things become simple: existence loves you, otherwise you would not have been here. You are not an accident; nobody is.

Existence needed you – it still needs you. As much as you need it, it needs you. Even the smallest thing in existence is needed as much as the greatest. In the vision of god or existence there is no distinction between the small and the big. A grass leaf is as precious as any great star.

And a dewdrop is needed as much as a Buddha. Without this dewdrop existence will be less –

less beautiful, less majestic, with less grandeur; it will miss something. We are interdependent...

existence is an infinite net of interdependence. That is the meaning when I say god loves you. To let the idea sink into the heart is of immense importance, because then suddenly you start feeling at home; you are no more an outsider, not a stranger.

The greatest calamity that has happened to humanity in this age is alienation. Man has started feeling as if he is a stranger. This is a new kind of disease; it has never been so in the past. No other century has had this idea in such great proportions, and the reason is that god is missing from our vision. After Nietzsche declared ’God is dead,’ man died. God is still alive. God cannot die, because god simply means the eternal life, nothing else. To say ’God is dead’ is a contradiction in terms. God means that which doesn’t die, that which cannot die. Even if god decides to commit suicide, that is not possible, that is beyond his omnipotence, because god is life and nothing else. Life continues, forms change.

But one thing happened: since Nietzsche declared ’God is dead’.... And his declaration became the declaration of this age; it is not personal any more. It has become the dictum, the paradigm, the whole mind of this century. God remains as alive as ever, but in declaring god dead, man has died. He has lost his roots in existence. He has become uprooted; now he no more knows who he is. The whole context is missing; now he no more knows why he is. Now he cannot find any purpose, because without god there as the context there can be no purpose. Now he feels a kind of utter meaninglessness arising, a futility – what Sartre means when he says that man is a useless passion. But how long can you remain passionate if you are useless? Sooner or later that uselessness will overpower your passion, will destroy it.

All that is left to man is either to go mad, as Nietzsche himself did, or to commit suicide, as many others have done. If one cannot gather courage to commit suicide then one commits suicide slowly, inch by inch, part by part, in instalments. This is no way to live.

Man can live only if he starts feeling his roots again in the soil, if he again becomes part of the greater context of life. That is the whole purpose of sannyas: to give you back your roots, to make you aware that life is not an accident, that you are tremendously needed, that without you life will not be the same, that god is in utter need of you.

Remember: we need many things in life but the greatest need is to be needed; no other need is of such importance. The moment you feel needed suddenly you become significant. A woman needs you – without you she will be in despair – and suddenly there is meaning in your life. A child needs you – without you he will be an orphan, without you there will be tears in his eyes – and suddenly you are no more a useless passion. But think: a woman needs you, a child needs you, a friend needs you, a mother needs you, and around you a pattern, a gestalt arises that gives you significance.

But this is nothing compared to the declaration that I make ’god needs you!’ That means rivers and mountains and stars and trees and animals – they are all in need of you, they will all miss you. The world will be in deep despair without you.

Just that perspective and suddenly you are at home, at ease. Life is no more an accidental jumble of events. Now there is a poetry, a consistency – one thing leading to another, a progression, a continuum. And whenever there is a feeling of progression, continuum, one can know that one is moving in a direction, that there is a goal somewhere, a destiny to be fulfilled, a hope to be materialized. That is the meaning of your name: think in terms of god loving you, and slowly slowly your heart will respond. That response is prayer... that response is sannyas.

Prem means love, ushma means warmth a loving warmth. Become that. There is no other prayer.

If one can be lovingly warm the prayer has happened. To live a cold life is to live without prayer, and many people, millions of people, are living cold lives, frozen, ice cold. That’s why there are so many lonely people in the world. They themselves are lonely and they create loneliness for others. And they could easily have been warm, because to remain warm is very natural to life. Life is warmth: death is cold. They have died before dying, they have not lived.

Warmth is the language of life. The more you allow warmth to flow from you towards others, the richer the life you have. And love is the secret of remaining warm, so love as deeply as possible and love as many people as possible. And not only people – love existence as such. It is really very strange to see people passing through the trees without any warmth for them, looking at the stars with dead, cold, ice-cold eyes, talking to people with no warmth in their words and no warmth in their hearts, holding hands, but dead and dull. There is no wonder why they are in such suffering. And it is their decision.

The decision has a reason in it: there is a fear in being loving – you may get involved, you may get caught, you may become committed. And people are afraid of getting involved, people are afraid of getting committed, so they are escaping from all commitments. But to live a life of no commitment is escapist. Then your life will never have any splendour to it; it needs the challenge of commitment, involvement. One needs to be involved in as many things as possible: in art, in poetry, in music, in people, in dance, in as many things as possible. The more you are involved, the more you are, the more being you have.

This century has more human beings on the earth than ever before, but less being. More humans and less being. Being has disappeared. Being comes only by being warm, being comes only by getting involved, committed... involved in something higher than you, bigger than you. People want to remain uncommitted, but then they remain cold.

Another fear is that if you love, you may be rejected; the other may not respond. The other is also thinking in the same terms: ’Who knows? If I extend my hand in welcome and the other does not respond, then it will be humiliating.’ That fear cripples people and people become frozen ice cubes inside themselves – always holding back, watching if the other will start. The same is the case with the other, so nobody ever starts the dialogue, nobody ever starts being warm. Slowly slowly these habits become settled, they become second nature.

There is no need to be afraid. Even if love is rejected, there is no humiliation. The real humiliation is not to give love when you could have. If somebody rejects it, that is his problem; that is not your problem. You had given your warm hand to him but he was so frozen that he became afraid. Feel pity for him, compassion for him, but don’t feel any hurt. There is no hurt in it for you. Always remember: if love is rejected that simply shows that the other is afraid of love, and the one who is afraid of love is in a very poor state of health, spiritual health. He has simply said that he is a coward.

He has insulted himself, he has not insulted you; there is no need to feel hurt.

Only if these two things are dropped – the fear of rejection and the fear of commitment – can one be so warm, so glowingly warm, that each moment of life becomes a prayer, a dialogue with god. And remember: all these people are nothing but different forms of god. You need not go to the temple

– god comes to you in so many forms. Just be loving, and slowly slowly you will attain to that eye which will make you capable of seeing god in everybody.

Deva means divine, hanso means a swan – a divine swan. And the swan is a symbol. In India the swans live deep in the Himalayas. They come in certain seasons to the plains and then they go back. So they have become symbolic. They are one of the most beautiful birds – no other bird is so white and so innocent – and they live in such silence in the Himalayas.

They became symbolic of the soul’s journey to the earth – symbolizing that we just come from some deep unknown centre of existence. We come from there for the time-being to the earth, and when the season is over, we go back. This is not the place we belong to.

When the swan is on the plains, naturally it continuously dreams of the Lake Mansarovar in the Himalayas, and the beauty of it and the silence and the purity. That lake has the most crystal clear water. That may be the only place in the world left which is absolutely unpolluted, because very rarely does a human being reach there, very rarely; it is very difficult to reach. And surrounded by the Himalayan peaks and the virgin snow, where nobody has ever walked, just the vision of it, the dream of it, is enough. The swan has to come to the plains, but this is not his home. He lives in small muddy tanks, but continuously remembers vaguely the beauty of his home.

This is so with man too. That’s why we are never satisfied here. Everything seems to be topsy-turvy; something seems always to be missing. You can have all the riches of the world and still you remain poor. You can become very famous and still be dissatisfied. You can have all that this world can give to you, but deep down the emptiness persists and persists. You never feel a kind of fulfilment, a satiety, a contentment. Maybe we have forgotten completely from where we come – we have forgotten the original source – but somehow, somewhere in the deep unconscious the memory persists. It goes on pulling us towards the real home.

To become a sannyasin means to recognize this deep urge consciously, to be respectful to this urge.

To be a sannyasin means to start finding ways and means and to prepare for the journey back home.

[To Prem Chandro:]

Moon and love have something in common. The moon is feminine, so is love. Even when a man is in love, his love is feminine. Love as such is feminine; it is never masculine. Hate is masculine, anger is masculine, love is not. So whenever a person is in love, in those moments at least he is not masculine, he is not a male; he becomes tender, soft, feminine.

Love has the same kind of beauty as the moon, the same kind of magnetic attraction as the moon.

The moon pulls, attracts. It not only pulls the sea water; it pulls your very heart. It is not only that the sea is affected by it: the very sea of consciousness is also affected by it. As the moon grows there are changes in your consciousness. On the full-moon night you are in a different state. Many more people have become enlightened on the full-moon night than on any other night, and many more people go mad on the full-moon night than on any other night. Hence the word ’lunatic’; it comes from ’lunar’, the moon. Either you fall or you rise – either the tide or the wave, but the moon affects you. And so does love.

In love a person can fall and become blind, and in love a person can rise and can start seeing for the first time. It all depends on how one uses the love energy. It is a ladder: you can go down through it, you can go up through it.

Remember: for you the full-moon night will be of great importance. Dance under the full moon, sing under the full moon and soon you will find what I am indicating. You will find a different being arising in you which is not your personality – which is your essence. The moon will pull it up; you just have to be conscious of it

Dancing on the full-moon night is one of the greatest meditations. For no other purpose – simply dancing with the moon, allowing the moon to penetrate you. And when you are in a dance you are vulnerable, more open. If you really become drunk with the dance – the dancer disappears and there is only dance – then the moon penetrates to your very heart, its rays reach the very core of your being. You will start finding that each full-moon night becomes a milestone in your life.

Deva means divine. sagaro means ocean – divine ocean. Never think of yourself as a wave; think of yourself as the ocean. Never think about yourself as limited by the body; think of yourself as unlimited consciousness. Because whatsoever you think, you become: ’As a man thinketh, so he becometh.’ Always think of the immense, of the infinite, and through it comes freedom. But people are very miserly: they think of themselves as very small, limited to this body, to this mind... and then the misery. Then they feel suffocated, they feel imprisoned, chained, and they start asking how to be free.

A disciple asked a Zen master how to be free, how to attain freedom. The master said ’Who has made you a slave and who has imprisoned you?’ The disciple said ’Nobody.’ The master said

’Where are your chains?’ and the disciple said ’I don’t have any chains.’ Then the master said ’Why are you trying to be free? From what? From whom?’

The very idea ’I am imprisoned’ is but an idea; drop the idea and you are free! Our prisons are made of ideas, our chains are made of ideas... ideas of limitations. Think of the vast, contemplate on the vast. Go to the sea and watch the sea and become it. Look into the sky... feel it, be it. This is going to be your meditation. And soon you will find that there is no need for any drugs to expand your consciousness. Just drop the idea of limitation and your consciousness is expanded. And there is no end – you can go on expanding and expanding. And to be expansive is to be blissful: to be confined is to be miserable.

[A sannyasin asks about her relationship and being attracted to other men]

The problem is natural and everybody has to face it. If you want relationship... and to want relationship means security, safety, intimacy, love. And only in a very very intimate relationship can love grow – love needs time, patience. If you want all these things then you have to sacrifice your momentary desires – that somebody looks attractive and you are sexually attracted. You have to sacrifice. If you want those momentary joys, pleasures, of being sexually related to this person and that, then sacrifice relationship and all that is possible through it; that has to be sacrificed. And one has to choose, you cannot have both. And if you try to have both, you will go neurotic. Many people are trying to have both and are going neurotic, because then you are pulled continuously, and you will destroy both.

When you are with somebody else you will feel guilty, and how can you enjoy if you are feeling guilty?

What enjoyment can be there? The guilt is there that you are doing something wrong, that you are harming him, that he will not feel good, that he will be miserable, mm? – that you are betraying. So you will feel guilty and there will be no joy. And, because you feel guilty, you will be angry with him when you are with him, because it is because of him that you cannot enjoy: he is depriving you of your freedom. So you will not be able to enjoy even being with him, and you will destroy both.

You cannot have both. You can destroy both, certainly, but you cannot have both. You can have only one: either you can have the free relating, floating with people. That has its own beauty, but it remains superficial, it never goes very deep. But if somebody chooses that, that’s perfectly good: I am not against it. That is your choice. Relationship has its own beauties. So you have to be very clear and choose, clearly choose; and once you have chosen then forget the other.

Life is a constant choice. Whenever you come to a place where two roads fork, you have to choose.

Both look alluring. This road also looks beautiful – great trees and the river and the mountain – and the other also looks very beautiful – beautiful flowers, green grass and the birds singing. But you have to choose!

And remember: if you choose one you may not ever have the other, because you cannot go back in time. Once you have chosen, the other is to be dropped, completely forgotten, as if it never existed.

And at each step there are roads forking. If you become very hesitant and you want to go one step this way and one step that, and you want to have both, you will go crazy.

So simply choose, and whatsoever you choose is good. I am not saying choose this or choose that; I am saying choose. Both have beauties.... So ponder over it, meditate over it, talk with him, and decide something. Something will come out of your meditation!

[A sannyasin asks: I don’t know what’s happening. Sometimes I’m crying and sometimes I’m laughing... sometimes both at the same time.]

Allow it. Don’t be worried about it – it will disappear, and when it disappears you will feel very relieved. It is a catharsis; it will release many poisons from your being. When both things come together – laughter and crying – it is very good. It means that something that was accumulating in you and which could have created a kind of craziness some time is being thrown out of the system.

But it will be gone, and once it is gone you will feel unburdened, weightless.

Just do the groups and go on reminding me how it is. Before you go, it will be gone.

CHAPTER 14

Music is a short-cut to God

14 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, abhavo means absence. The moment you are absent, god is present; and god is present only when you are not. There is no co-existence possible – man cannot encounter god.

That is impossible, as impossible as darkness encountering light. Darkness is possible only when light is not. If the light is, darkness is not. Man is a darkness. So the more capable we are of losing ourselves, the more full of god we are; and the more full of ourselves we are, the less is the possibility of god penetrating us.

One can call it meditation, one can call it prayer, but the most essential thing is your absence, your disappearance. And remember, it is not empty; in fact your presence is a kind of emptiness When you are not, you are so full of god – how can you call it empty? So the absence is divine. It is the greatest possibility... not to be, utterly not to be. And it is not a negative state at all, the most positive, but one has to know it only by knowing it.

A few glimpses come of it in deep love, but only glimpses, momentary flashes. In deep love one disappears, and in that disappearance there is great joy. The absence is so full of something unknown that the absence becomes celebration. So this is going to be your work on yourself: disappear, dissolve.

Prem means love, diwani means mad – love mad. Love is illogical, irrational, not of the mind at all.

The mind is clever, calculating. Love knows no calculation, *nc, cleverness; love is innocent. Love is always a child: it never ages, it never becomes old. It always remains fresh. And only love is capable of penetrating the reality and its mysteries. The greatest insight happens only through love.

The mind can only play on the surface – it is too clever to dive deep.

A madman is needed to dive deep, because to dive deep is risky: you may never come back. The mind cannot take that much of a risk. The mind is a businessman, love is a gambler, so where the mind feels afraid to go, love simply enters. And all the mysteries are at the centre; nothing is at the surface. The mind goes round and round. It works hard, but its work is trivial. It never touches the essence, never reaches the core of things.

Poets are mad half-mad. Mystics are totally mad. So whenever one is in love one becomes a sort of poet. And if the love deepens one becomes a sort of mystic. Remember: we have to pay with our head – that’s the price god wants. Unless one is ready to cut off one’s head completely, god remains unavailable. The head represents the ego. The heart is completely egoless; it knows nothing of the

’I’.

That is the meaning of diwani. I am giving you a secret – you will have to discover in your life. Love more, calculate less; be innocent, don’t be clever. Cry, laugh, live... but don’t pour too much of your energy into thinking. Thinking robs one of energy. Thinking is a kind of exploiter. Avoid it, and then slowly slowly you will see a totally different vision of reality.

By becoming love mad you will become wise.

Deva means divine, akarmo means inaction – divine inaction. Truth cannot be conquered, you cannot fight with it; hence no action is needed. Truth has to be allowed in. You need not go in search of it because it is already here. It has always been here... it is always now. It is within you and without you. There is nothing else than it. So you need not go anywhere. It is not a journey to a goal – it is just an awakening to herenow. And in inaction, in deep inaction, that awakening happens.

The seeker’s energy remains involved in action. When you are not seeking, not doing anything, the whole energy is available. You are unoccupied, full of energy, vibrating, pulsating; in that very vibration, in that very pulsation, truth happens One has just to be alive here and now... and truth happens.

Truth is a happening in deep inactivity. Hence the importance of meditation. Meditation is nothing but a learning to be inactive, to be unoccupied, an art of not doing anything. Or you can call it an anti-art, because every other art teaches you to do something and meditation teaches you not to do.

And not to do is to be.

Veet means beyond, samayo means time – beyond time. Time is, the only problem. If one can transcend time, one has transcended mind. Time and mind are two aspects of the same phenomenon: if you can kill one, the other is killed automatically. The mind continuously creates time, because to live it needs time. It can live either in the past or in the future; it cannot live in the present, hence the present is not part of time. It is said to be so, but it is not. Time consists of past and future; the present is just a gap between the past and the future. The present is non-temporal just an interpenetration of eternity into time.

All the methods of meditation that have been developed down the centuries are nothing but efforts to approach this interval – how not to be in the past and not to be in the future so that you can enter into that tiny gap of the present. Once you enter into that tiny gap you have gone beyond time and beyond mind.

To live in the present is to be a sannyasin. To live in the moment and moment-to-moment is to be a sannyasin.

Start dropping the garbage that the past creates. It is just futile. It is no longer anywhere except in your mind; it is just a ghost. You cannot go back to it so why waste time in thinking about it?

Whether it was good or bad both are irrelevant now. And don’t move into the future, because there is no way to go into the future. You can only go into the present. Playing with the future is avoiding the present, and to avoid the present is to avoid life and to avoid god.

Slowly slowly one has to learn how to drop these explorations into the past and the future. Whenever you catch yourself red-handed – flittering in the past or in the future – pull yourself back to the present. Anything will do in the present: this sound of the music, the sound of the insects, the train passing by... anything that is present will do.

Bringing yourself again and again to the present will make you capable of going less and less into the past and the future.

And one day the miracle happens: you have entered into the small gap called the present. Suddenly you are out of the womb of time, and the world is tremendously different. Then everything has the quality of eternity, deathlessness. That’s what in the East we have called freedom. Then you are no more a slave to anything, all chains have disappeared. In that freedom there is bliss.

Deva means god, homa means dedicated – dedicated to god. And remember that life has meaning only when you are dedicated to something greater than yourself. If a man has nothing in his life bigger than himself, he will live an utterly insignificant life; it will be a drag. He will never know what meaning is. Meaning arises only in the context of something bigger than you. And meaning is life.

Without meaning, one only goes through the empty gestures of living; it is not life.

Take a leaf from a tree, separate it from the tree – it is dead. Joined with the tree it is alive. Life comes only if it is part of the big tree. If it is no more part of the big tree it is dead. Take the tree out of the earth and it is dead. The tree is alive only if it is part of the earth. Take the earth away from the sun and it is dead. Life arises only when it is part of the solar system, and so on, so forth.

God means the ultimate centre of existence. If you can relate with that centre you will be more and more alive. God means the whole, the total. Poor is the person who lives without god.. utterly poor and pitiable, because his life will be futile, empty of all poetry, all song, all rejoicing.

He will live and yet he will not know what life is all about. That is the meaning of your name. Start searching for greater values so that you can look upwards to the sky. Think in terms of the vast.

Relate with the stars and the clouds and the rainbows. Have a dialogue with existence and feel part of this beautiful cosmos.

That’s my concept of how a sannyasin should be.

Deva means god, dasi means servant – a servant of god. And that’s what makes a person a king, a queen. To be a servant of god is better than being an emperor, far better, because only the servants of god have known the splendour of life... they have known the beauty of existence. Not Alexander, not Napoleon, but a Christ, a Buddha. And those are the servants of god – utterly humble, nobodies, who have completely disappeared into the service. They live not – god lives through them, they have become vehicles. They speak not; god speaks through them. They have surrendered themselves totally – they have no will of their own.

That is the meaning of ’dasi’: having no will of one’s own. Let thy will be done – that is the meaning of ’dasi’. And the beauty of it, the purity, is tremendous.

[Dasi asks about making stringed instruments]

There are a few sannyasins who are doing it and are experts. You can learn perfectly good, something beautiful. Create as much music in the world as possible.

That’s very good – that’s a great service to god. You can learn and can start doing it. Good!

Anand means bliss, blissfulness, hafiz is a Sufi name for god – blissful god. And always contemplate on god as blissfulness. Let bliss and god become synonymous in your being; they are two names for the same phenomenon.

Don’t think of god as the creator, because god is not the creator but creativity itself. The moment you think of god as the creator you have created a division: the creator and the created. Then he is the creator and. you are the creature, and how can the creature be the creator? That’s why Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, don’t like the things that the Upanishads say, like ’Aham Brahmasmi – I am god,’ or like the Sufi mystic declared ’Ana I haq – I am truth.’

Jews could not forgive Jesus because he declared himself god, and even though Christians follow Jesus they say he was the only begotten son of god, that nobody else should try it again. There is a constant fear – how can the creature be the creator? The painting cannot be the painter, true; and the poetry cannot be the poet, true... but in the first place to think of god as the creator is wrong.

God is creativity. God is not separate from his creation. He is not a painter and the world is not a painting. He is a dancer and the world is a dance, and they are together; you cannot separate them, no separation is possible. You cannot take the dance away from the dancer or the dancer away from the dance. And once you think of god as the dancer, immediately a very blissful god arises in your being, because only bliss can dance. There is no possibility of anything else out of bliss than dance, a song, a celebration.

Don’t be serious about sannyas. It is a non-serious approach towards religion, a festive approach towards religion. It is fun to be a sannyasin.

It has nothing to do with those old attitudes of holier-than-thou. It is a beautiful game, a play, a leela.

Then suddenly the whole meaning of religion changes. Then you are no more concerned with the priests and the churches which look like graveyards, where laughter is not allowed, where to dance and to sing is not allowed, where to be serious is the right way to be – stiff and serious, not relaxed and rejoicing.

If you can rejoice wherever you are god is there around you. If you can move in dance he is bound to be there because he is dance. And whenever you have a real laugh spreading all over your being, he is there because he is laughter!

There is a Hassidic saying that god loves stories. So when a great Hassid master died, his disciples said ’Master, are you ready to face god?’ He said ’What are you talking about? The whole of my life I have been telling such beautiful stories to you – he will be waiting for me! He will ask me ”Tell me a few beautiful stories.” And I will tell him ”That is my preparation – I have not prepared anything else but I know a few beautiful stories.” I know that god loves beautiful stories!’

This is a totally different kind of preparation from the preparation that an ascetic does: fasting, torturing the body, continuously guilty, feeling afraid, frightened, having nightmares of hell and longing for heaven. He is stupid, and the idea of god that he has is nothing but his own idea.

This Hassid master seems to be perfectly right: ’What else? I can tell a few beautiful stories. God will ask and I will tell him then. That is my preparation.’ This is a non-serious approach.

Prem means love, islam means surrender – love and surrender. These two steps are enough to reach the ultimate. And they are not really two, because love prepares you for surrender; it is the beginning of surrender, and surrender is the climax of love. So they are not really divided, there is no demarcation line between them, but in the beginning it starts as love and in the end it is concluded as surrender.

Start loving... and I am not saying ’Love god’, because how can you love god? You don’t know anything about god.

How can you love something unknown? So I am not bringing god into it at all. When you are ready he will come in. Start loving people, animals, trees, birds, flowers. There are so many beautiful things all around... start loving. Pulsate more and more as love. Don’t miss any opportunity to be loving. If you can be loving to a rock, be. Just the touch of a loving person or just the hug of a tree...

because it is not a question of to whom you are loving; the question is that you are loving. Whether the rock receives it or not, that is the rock’s business; you need not be worried about it. Whether the rock responds or not, that is not your problem either; that is for the rock to decide. One thing that you have to be constantly aware of is that you have been loving, that you have not missed a single opportunity to love.

The more you love, the more your heart opens; the more you love, the more the golden flower opens. The more you love, the more you surrender. And the surrender is not towards somebody in particular. It is just that as love grows you suddenly feel a new capacity of surrendering arising in you... for no reason at all. In the first place it looks very strange. The mind asks to whom to surrender; it is not a question of whom.

There are moments when you will simply feel like surrendering to the earth. Then lie down on the earth and surrender to the earth. And there will be moments when you will feel like Lying down and surrendering to the stars – surrender to the stars. Just go with the feel, flow with it, and slowly slowly, as love becomes surrender, one day suddenly the world has disappeared and all over the place is god. The rock that you touched was one form of god, the tree that you had hugged was another form of god, the earth that you surrendered to was part of god, the stars that you talked to were nothing but god listening to you in a certain form. All the forms are his; he has no definite form of his own.

All bodies are his but he has no body of his own – or the whole universe is his body. But don’t bring god in; there is no need to think of god. Think of love, start loving, and the day it starts becoming surrender, be ready: the guest is coming, and at any moment the guest will knock on your door.

And that moment is the moment of great bliss – when the guest knocks on your door and you become the host. To become host to god is the ultimate experience of joy. You have arrived... now there is nowhere to go. You have found your home, your original source. Now there is only contentment, infinite contentment.

[A sannyasin asks: When I wake up I feel that my eyes are very tense and my mouth is closed tight, so I try consciously to relax it... since ten, twelve years.]

Just do one thing: every night before you go to sleep, sit in your bed and start making faces – just as small children enjoy doing. Make all kinds of faces – good, bad, ugly, beautiful, so the whole face and the musculature start moving. Make sounds, nonsense sounds will do, and sway, just for ten to fifteen minutes and then go to sleep. In the morning before you take your bath, again stand before the mirror and for ten minutes make faces. Standing before the mirror will help more: you will be able to see and you will be able to respond.

All that you have done is that in your childhood you have controlled your face too much. It looks... I can see it: it is a very controlled face, very disciplined.

On your face you have the quality of a marble statue. You have repressed all kinds of emotions. You have made your face absolutely non-expressive; nobody can judge from your face what your feeling is.

Mm, here is Mukta – she is just the opposite. She cannot hide any feeling. If she is angry with me, immediately I know; if she is happy, I know. Just the moment I see her, I know how she is.

Impossible for her! But you have a very controlled face, so this control has to be dropped.

So in the night for ten to fifteen minutes make faces, make sounds, and enjoy it just like a small child, and in the morning before the mirror, so you will become an expert. Within two, three months it will be completely gone. Don’t be worried!

CHAPTER 15

Love’s madness takes one beyond all insanity

15 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, veetkam means beyond sex. Bliss is the same energy as sex. If the energy remains completely involved in sex it cannot become bliss. Even in sexual orgasm that little bit of bliss comes to you because in that moment you are free of sex. This will look strange, but while you are making love, when the moment of orgasm comes you are free of sex for a moment. That freedom from sex brings bliss.

It is just as when you have eaten, for a few hours you are free from hunger; just as when you have drunk water, for a few hours you are free from thirst. The bliss that comes from sex is not really from sex: it is because for a few moments sex has disappeared from you. It is satiated – there is no longing, there is no desire; it is a moment of desirelessness. The orgasm is a moment of no passion, hence something of bliss descends in you.

A Buddha lives in that moment continuously. So this is the meaning of your name: bliss beyond sex... and it is my message to you. I am not against sex, and I am not saying drop sex. I am saying understand it, meditate over it – don’t just go on making love in an unconscious way – and that will become your greatest meditation. Be more conscious, alert, aware, and see what is actually happening. Is this moment of bliss coming through sex or because there is no sex any more for a few moments and the desire has disappeared? For a few hours after sex you don’t think of sex, hence the peace, the calm, the quiet. Again the desire will come and again the desire will disturb; again there will be turmoil and the lake will have ripples, waves.

If one meditates on one’s sexuality, one starts understanding great secrets of life; they are hidden there. Sex is holding the very key. If is not only the key to reproduce children, it is also the key to recreate yourself again. It is not only reproduction, it is really recreation.

In English the word ’recreation’ has lost its original meaning. Now ’recreation’ means enjoying a holiday, enjoying fun, playing around. But in fact, whenever you are playing and you are on a holiday, something is created in you – it is actually recreation, it is not just fun. Something that dies in work and in the day-to-day world, is born again. And sex has become the most recreational act in people’s lives. That is their recreation. But on a higher plane it is really recreation, it is not just fun.

It holds great secrets in it, and the first secret is – if you meditate you will see it – that joy comes because sex disappears. And whenever you are in that moment of joy, time also disappears – if you meditate on it – the mind also disappears. And these are the qualities of meditation.

My own observation is that the first glimpse of meditation in the world must have come through sex; there is no other way. Meditation must have entered into life through sex, because this is the most meditative phenomenon – if you understand it, if you go deep into it, if you just don’t use it like a drug. Then slowly slowly as more understanding grows, the more the hankering disappears, and one day comes of great freedom when sex no more haunts you. Then one is quiet, silent, utterly oneself. The need for the other has disappeared. One can still make love if one chooses to, but there is no need.

Then it will be a kind of sharing.

Prem means love, subodhi means awareness. Love is the feminine part in you and awareness is the masculine part in you. And they both have to meet and merge into each other. If one only knows how to love and is not aware, one remains half. If one knows how to be aware and does not know how to love, again one remains half. And to be half is to be in misery. Hence the so-called worldly man is in misery and the man who lives in the monastery is in misery. They have chosen different kinds of miseries – that is true – but misery is misery. From what end you progress towards it makes no difference.

There is only one bliss in the world, and that bliss comes by becoming whole. And this is the most fundamental thing in becoming whole: your man and your woman inside must fall in love and disappear into each other. The inner being should become androgynous – neither man nor woman.

Then one is integrated, one is one. Otherwise one is many, otherwise one is poly-psychic, and to be poly-psychic is to be neurotic. To be poly-psychic means that one has many minds, one is a crowd

– a thousand and one voices, and each dragging one in its own direction. One’s life remains just a constant struggle... for no purpose. One rushes into one direction and then into another and then into another. This goes on and on and then one falls into the grave. From the cradle to the grave one rushes, runs too much, but reaches nowhere.

To become one is to arrive. And it is easier to choose one of the two; that’s why people have chosen one. The worldly people have chosen love, the other-worldly people have chosen awareness. It is easy to choose one – it seems simple, less complicated, but then your being remains poor too.

Richness is always complex. One need not be afraid of complexity; one should be afraid only of a crowd. Complexity is perfectly good if it is centered in oneness, if it is a harmony.

If you listen to people’s hearts they are like single notes – repeating the same. Very rarely do you find a man who is an orchestra. But an orchestra needs a great order. If every player in the orchestra goes on his own way then it will be maddening... unless there is an order and a harmony in which they are all separate and yet falling into one, all centered and rooted in oneness. Then life has richness.

So let love and awareness merge into you. Be more loving and be more aware at the same time.

Be aware and be loving at the same time. And great richness follows, great fulfilment, great fruition.

Anand means bliss, shamo means flame – a flame of bliss. Bliss is one of the most alive phenomena in the world. It is a flame. It is life. It is fire. Of course, it is cool fire, and the flame only gives light, it cannot burn. It is divine fire. This is the fire that Moses came across on Mount Sinai – the bush was not burning but the fire was there. It only gives light; it is the highest form of fire. And unless one becomes a flame of bliss, one remains discontented. It is as if the tree has not bloomed yet. When the tree blooms there is joy in the being of the tree. And when man becomes a flame of bliss there is fulfillment, contentment. Then only does one feel at home in the world, otherwise not.

I have chosen the orange colour for my sannyasins, symbolic of fire, flame, aliveness... of Dowers, of the rising sun, of all that is alive, flowing, flowering.

Start thinking about this flame, contemplating on this flame more and more. Think of yourself in terms of a flame, rising higher, reaching to the moon.

And one thing more: just as water flows downwards, the flame always flows upwards; it is a symbol of energy rising up. Soon you will come across it. Meditating you will start feeling it in your heart or some day in your dream, you will see yourself as a flame.

Deva means divine, manu means man. The English word ’man’ comes from the root ’manu’; the root is Sanskrit. Divine man: man has to surpass his humanity. Man is only man in surpassing his humanity. Man is the only animal who can surpass himself. No dog can do it, no lion can do it, no elephant can do it. An elephant is born an elephant and will have to die as an elephant. They are completely programmed. By their very birth the whole programme is determined; they cannot go anywhere else than is destined by nature. Man is the only free animal in existence. That is his dignity and the danger too, because if man decides to fall he can fall below man. Just as he can go beyond man, he can also fall below man. So when man falls he is far more dangerous, ferocious, murderous, than any animal in the world. If he rises, then even gods are jealous of him.

In the East we have many beautiful stories.... When Gautam became Buddha, became enlightened, gods came to worship him. He was surprised. He said ’But you are gods – you live in heaven.

Why have you come to worship a man?’ And they said ’You don’t know – we are jealous of you.

We are not yet enlightened. You have gone beyond. You have transcended humanity, you have transcended all forms. We are still tethered to a certain form – the divine form. We are gods but you are nobody; you have become a nothingness Your purity is infinite, your innocence is infinite. Your ego has disappeared. Hence we have come to prostrate ourselves before you.’

Man can go so far beyond that gods can feel jealous; man can go so far below that even animals will feel condemnation. Man is openness, freedom; man is not a built-in programme. It is up to you, it is absolutely up to you, up to everybody, to be decisive. And even if somebody decides not to decide, he has decided: he has decided not to decide. But you cannot avoid decisions. Not to decide means to remain wherever you are; evolution cannot happen without your effort. The natural evolution has brought you up to man, now only revolution can take you beyond it, hence religion is revolution. Nature is evolution.

Evolution is very slow. It takes millions of years to pass from one stage to another. From monkey to man it took millions of years, but in a single instant one can move from man to a Buddha. In a single instant one can become son of god from being son of man. All that is needed is an intensity, a totality, a devotion, a dedication, a commitment.

So let sannyas become your dedication, a commitment, your devotion. Let sannyas become the beginning of a journey beyond man. Look upwards to the faraway stars.

When I say man has to surpass humanity, I mean man has to surpass the earthly, the dark, the gross. In fact, the word ’humanity’ comes from ’humus’, a Latin root. Humus means the earth; human means the earthly. One has to go beyond the earth, one has to use the earth as a jumping-board. One has to use this body made of the earth as a vehicle to go beyond earth, the earthly, the material. The journey is from dust to the divine. As man is born he is only dust, humus, just the earth element. But a potential is there to become the sky, to transform the gross into the subtle, to move from the visible to the invisible.

Deva means divine, mani means diamond – a divine diamond. The diamond is there in the heart, it has always been there – it has to be discovered. And it is not in the outside world, so one need not go anywhere to discover it; one has just to look within. It is not something that has to be created; it is already there. We have forgotten about it because our eyes are looking and searching outside.

We are putting ourselves at the back. Our nature is no more in front of us. Our nature has become covered with the dust of centuries, of many lives. We have thrown our nature into the basement of the house; we never go there. And it is in that nature that our treasure lies... what Jesus calls ’the kingdom of god within’.

It is there. But people are looking in the heavens and they are searching everywhere. The search is becoming more and more frantic because nothing is found, it is becoming more and more desperate because nothing is found. Slowly slowly man is entering into a kind of despair, as if there is nothing...

in a kind of stoic depression: ’Okay, if there is nothing, there is nothing. We have to pull on together somehow, we have to drag on. There is no meaning in life, no significance in life. Life is an utterly useless passion.’ This is not true. We have not looked in the right direction. We are gods and the treasure is infinite, inexhaustible, but it has to be discovered, or, to be more true: rediscovered. It has to be remembered. It is a forgotten treasure.

To be initiated into sannyas means to become available to a person who has discovered it so that he can also supply a map to you... if not exactly the map, then a few hints, fingers pointing to the moon.

Deva means divine, daya means compassion, ananda means bliss – divine compassion and bliss.

Compassion is divine when it is not out of sympathy; otherwise it is human. If you feel sympathy for somebody because he is in suffering, it is compassion but it is not divine. Divine compassion is when you are so full of joy, so full of bliss, that it is not a question of whether somebody is suffering or not; you go on showering it. The other does not need to be in suffering to receive it: you give it because you have it. That’s the difference. When the other needs to be in suffering and then you give it, it is human; not to give it would be inhuman. It is better to give than not to give.

But there is a higher quality of compassion when the other need not be in suffering. You simply give because you have it, you cannot help giving. Then you are not obliging anyone: in fact the other is obliging you by receiving it; he could have rejected. You have to be thankful to him who receives anything from you; then compassion has the quality of divineness.

God gives not because you are in suffering but because he has. He gives to those who are in suffering, he gives to those who are not in suffering. He gives to the saints, he gives to the sinners

– he gives to all. He is an overflowing, and when one becomes an overflowing love, an overflowing bliss, then that bliss has a beauty, a transcendental beauty to it. And because of that transcendental beauty, I call it divine.

Contemplate on it, and slowly slowly drop the inhuman. Become human and then drop the human and become divine. These are the three possibilities: inhuman, human, divine. But remember, the goal is to be divine.

Anand means bliss, and vineet means humility, humbleness – a blissful humbleness. Jesus says

’Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of god.’ That is the meaning of your name: to be meek, humble. And humility brings bliss as a by-product; bliss is a spin off, a by-product of humility.

Just a few moments ago I was saying that the word ’humanity’ comes from ’humus’; so does humility

– that also comes from ’humus’. One has to remember that we are made of dust and soon we will go back to dust, so what is the point of being proud and egoistic? It is stupid. Only stupid people are egoistic people. And the moment the ego disappears, all misery disappears with it; misery is a shadow of the ego. When there is no ego there is humility. And humility is bliss. Become humble, become nobody.

Don’t feel in terms of competition, ambition. Ambition is violence. Ambition is enmity with other people. And the ambitious person is the shallowest person in the world; that’s why politicians are so shallow and so stupid too. The humble person has depth – his very nothingness gives him depth.

And his very nothingness makes him incapable of being miserable. He cannot be wounded. How can you wound a nothingness? He is not there to be wounded at all.

Somebody insults him, but that insult comes and goes just as the breeze comes and goes, and the humble person is there, just watching. It hurts not. It is only the ego, the knot of the ego that hurts.

And when that knot disappears – and it can disappear any moment; one just has to see that this is the root cause of one’s suffering – then there is no problem at all. One simply drops it; one simply drops the style of life that creates the ego. The ego gone, all becomes possible.

[To a sannyasin about her relationship]

But anyway, if he wants to move with some other woman – whatsoever the excuse is, that is not the point – if he wants to move, he wants to. There is no point in suffering unnecessarily. What can be done? He cannot be forced. If he is forced, and he is with you because he is forced, it is pointless; he will take revenge on you.

And my feeling is that it is very good: let him be free and you also be free. Whenever freedom comes, welcome it! Freedom is always good. I have never seen that freedom can harm anybody in any way. It never harms – it always proves a blessing. But in the beginning it all hurts a little, mm? because your security, safety, entanglements, investment.... And whenever a person leaves, you don’t think ’What is coming?’ – you only start thinking of the past, of what is going. That’s where you miss.

Always look to the future, because the future is to come. Don’t be bothered by the past. All this misery is because now you are thinking of the past – all the good moments that you had with him.

But they are gone and they cannot be repeated. And even if they can be repeated, it will be pointless because it will be a repetition and you will not enjoy them. In fact, they will only create boredom in you.

Always look to what is going to happen. Look forward; one cannot go backward. But that’s how people are: they have eyes at the back. They move ahead and they move back. Just think: what would happen on the roads if cars had lights at the back and there were only rearview mirrors available for the driver and he could not see ahead? If he had to look at the rearview mirror and lights were falling on the road which he has already passed. There would only be accidents and accidents. If somebody were to come home alive that would be an accident then! And how could you survive?

This is what is happening in human life: you move ahead and you look back. Welcome freedom; it is perfectly good.

And why make him guilty? – because your misery will make you miserable and will make him guilty.

That is not right at all. Why waste time in being miserable? Time is precious. The same time you can enjoy and celebrate. And there are so many beautiful people. Why get so tethered and chained to one person? Have a little bigger heart! Be a little available to more people. And you will not feel that it is a curse. Within a week you will see that it has been a blessing and you will thank him. Then he will not feel guilty either and both will be enriched by the experience.

This much we owe to each other, that when a certain relationship disappears we should not make each other feel guilty. And this is part of the feminine mind: to become very clinging and to create guilt in the other and to create the feeling that he has sinned or he has done something wrong; not actually saying it but creating the whole thing in such a way that the other becomes miserable.

So let him enjoy! If he is happy with some other woman, perfectly good. You always wanted him to be happy and he is! And that’s what love is: you want the other to be happy. Give it to him as a gift.

Tell him ’Veetraga, don’t feel guilty. You be happy, and I will try on my own; I will seek and search.’

It will be good if you are both free; and if out of freedom you meet again one day, perfectly good. But this way you will create barriers. If you make him feel guilty then the possibility of meeting again is finished. But if he can see that Prarthana is feeling happy because he is happy, he will see the point of your love, he will feel your heart, and he may come back! I am not saying that he has to come back or he will come back... he may come back. But don’t cry and weep and don’t waste time.

The ego feels hurt. It is not love that feels hurt, it is the ego. It is the ego that starts thinking and comparing with the other woman: ’So what is he seeing in the other woman? So he has found a better woman than me?’ Deep down these are the real wounds. It is not a question of better: people get tired of each other. It is nothing personal about you. People get tired of each other because life becomes a routine, monotonous phenomenon.

Simply drop it right now, forget about it, and start looking for a friend.

[She asks about her daughter Kiran understanding this.]

She will understand, because for Kiran, Veetraga [her father] will remain available; there is no problem about it. So many children.... And children are very understanding. Kiran will feel very miserable if you are miserable: she will feel miserable. But if she sees that Prarthana is happy, within two, three days she will see that the whole thing is perfectly beautiful, nothing is wrong. You think you are miserable because of her and she will remain miserable because of you, because the child remains in a very sympathetic relationship with the mother. If she sees that you are happy, she will forget all about it. It is not her love affair, and she has not chosen another child, adopted another child.

There is no problem – the problem is with you. Deep down you would like to see her miserable so that you can create more misery for Veetraga: ’Look what you have done to the child. You have done this to me and you have done this to the child, and you are feeling very joyful and are enjoying.

We will poison your joy.’

Never poison anybody’s joy, because by poisoning anybody’s joy you are poisoning your own well-being, because whatsoever you do to others will be done to you.

Just try my recipe: drop the whole thing and go dancing and say to Kiran ’This is so good – he is free, I am free and it is perfectly beautiful.’

And my understanding of children is this: that they are so understanding.

They become

unnecessarily involved in the parents’ fight, they are pulled in. The mother wants to pull, the father wants to pull, and the child’s life becomes a misery. He becomes a politician by and by: he will say one thing to the father and something else to the mother. With the mother he will be with the mother, with the father he will be with the father. He has to become that political because he is in between these two persons. So don’t create that thing. It is nothing. She will understand; children forget very soon.

The question is yours, and the sooner you drop it, the better. There is no need to wallow in this misery. And you will be surprised: if you start feeling happy, if tomorrow Veetraga looks at you and sees that you are happy, he may start feeling miserable: ’What is happening? Has she found somebody better than me?’ (laughter) Just let him feel it, and let him come crying and weeping!

These are the games that people go on playing. He will feel very good if you are miserable. Deep down he will say ’Look, now you know what I mean to you. You never recognized it before, but now it is too late.’

Just be a little more courageous – this much has to be learned here. And these things are going to happen again and again. I am here to make you more and more strong to go through all these things. Drop it! By the morning be completely out of it. And you will be out of it only if you start finding somebody; otherwise, alone, you will remain in it. So find a lover!

CHAPTER 16

Bliss is a Shadow of God

16 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, sandhan means enquiry into... enquiry into love. Life is an enquiry into love. All else is secondary; the primary thing is love. Those who miss love, miss all. So remember it always, that only a life of love is a fulfilled life. Love immensely.

And this is the right time to start the enquiry. Once habits of non-loving become settled it becomes more difficult. Every child is born loving but soon we teach him not to love. On the contrary we teach him to be ambitious, to be jealous, to be possessive. By the time he becomes capable of standing on his own he has completely forgotten the language of love.

Sannyas is nothing but a language of love.

Prem means love, nartan means dance – a dance of love. Always think in terms of dance and love.

Love is the soul of dance, and dance is the body of love. Only those who know how to love know how to dance. Without love dance is dead. Without dance love has not yet manifested. If both are there then life is a great joy. Then the tree has bloomed.

[A thirteen year-old girl has two difficulties. One is: she can’t look into a person’s eyes for a long time; and she can’t always express to a person what she wants to say.]

Mm mm... mm mm. The first difficulty is not a problem. It is good. There is no need to look into somebody’s eyes for a long time unless you are tremendously in love with a person. And when you are in love you can look; everybody can look into the eyes. And without love, looking into somebody’s eyes for more than three, four seconds, is offensive. It is violating the other person’s freedom. It is trespassing into his being, because the eyes are doors of the other’s being. So one should not look too much into somebody’s eyes unless the other invites, unless you are interested in the person so much that you both would like to melt into each other. Then it is perfectly good, and then you will be able to look into the eyes.

But sometimes children try these things – looking into each other’s eyes, and it becomes difficult. It is not good. No need to look into somebody’s eyes.

And the second problem is: you cannot express, mm?

... Mm mm. But you have been explaining to Haridas [the translator] so perfectly well! (laughter) I have been watching you....

Don’t be worried, you will be able... you will be able. You are one of the best Germans to express themselves in front of me! (laughter) Even Haridas finds it difficult! Nothing to be worried about.

Just do this group, and start doing meditation, mm? Good!

Sat means being, savya means all – being is all. Having is nothing, doing is nothing: being is all.

People are lost in doing and having, and they have completely forgotten the being. They are so occupied by these two – having and doing. And these two are partners. If you want to have more, you will have to do more; if you have more, then again you will have to do more. They perpetuate each other. And slowly slowly you go farther and farther away from the being, and the being is the essential part of you. You come into the world as a being and you will leave the world as a being. All doing and all having will be left behind. One should not become too interested in things which have to be left behind; they are not real treasures.

The being is not affected at all by these two things, having and doing. The difference between a sinner and a saint is that of doing. The saint has been doing one thing and the sinner has been doing something else; their doing is contrary but both are doers. And so is the case with the poor and the rich; the difference is that of having. But whether you have much or not much, the being is not affected by it.

The being is just a witness to all that you are doing and having. You may be in a beggar’s robe or in a king’s robe; the being simply watches it. It makes no difference for the being whether the robe is that of a beggar or that of a king. You can have a very big palace or just a hut; your being is just a watcher. This watcher has to be remembered because that is our reality, and only through our reality can we connect with the reality of the whole, of the universe.

Only your being can have a communion with god’s being. He will not ask what you have done in the world and he will not ask what you earned in the world. He will ask ’Do you know who you are?’ So the fundamental question of religion is not god, not heaven, not hell, neither good nor bad, but ’Who am l?’ One has to go into that deeper and deeper: ’Who am l?’ A moment comes when all answers disappear. They have to disappear because they have only been learned from others. Then only the question resounds in you. And a moment comes when the question also disappears, and suddenly you are in all its brilliance, in all its intelligence, in all its splendour. That is the meaning of your name.

Anand means bliss, nartana means dance – bliss dance. Life is not static, it is dynamic, it is movement. And god must be so because this life represents god; it is his creation. His signature is everywhere. And life is movement, it is a constant riverlike flow. The movement is not haphazard either: it has a rhythm, it is very harmonious. Such an infinite universe and moving in such a harmony! It is an orchestra, and everything seems to be in tune... except man. Man has fallen out of tune. He has to learn the dance again.

He has fallen out of tune because of a certain potentiality: because he is given freedom. He is the only animal who is free to choose his being, to choose his path. No other animal is allowed freedom; they are all programmed. They have simply to enact their programme – their roles are determined beforehand. A dog cannot be anything other than a dog. He will simply live as a dog and die as a dog. Man can be many things.

Man is born only as an opening with a thousand alternatives available. That is the dignity of man and the danger too, because he can choose the wrong, he can choose the right. But the freedom to choose implies also the freedom to choose the wrong; they come in the same package. So if one chooses the right, one becomes a Buddha or a Christ, or even closer, a Krishna: a dance. If one chooses wrongly one becomes an Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane. It all depends on your choice, and each moment is precious.

The way to judge whether you have chosen right or wrong is to feel the rhythm. If you are becoming more harmonious with existence then you are on the right track. Then whether you are alone or with many people makes no difference. You can move alone – you will find the source. If you start feeling disharmonious, tense, if anguish arises, trembling arises – you start losing sense of direction and you start feeling that you are accidental, that there seems to be no meaning – then that is a clear-cut indication that you have fallen out of the rhythm of existence. Just as the disease is nothing but the body falling out of its natural rhythm, so is the case with evil. Evil is an inner disease, a spiritual disease: falling out of the inner rhythm of existence.

I give you this as a key, as a criterion, as a touchstone. Keep it always in mind that whenever you are feeling uneasy, disturbed, restless, remember: you are doing something which is against the universal rhythm, the universal dance. You are out of step, that’s all. Start moving back into rhythm, come back into harmony, and suddenly there is sunlight; the clouds have disappeared and the path has been found.

Dance is a rhythmic movement. Dance represents god more than anything else. In my observation, dance is the most prayerful activity possible. When your body is in a dance and you are utterly lost in the rhythm of it, you start coming closer to god.

The indian story is beautiful... in India the story of creation starts with a dance. God started dancing and out of his rhythm and movement the world arose. The Christian idea, that god said ’Let there be light,’ looks very intellectual... a kind of commandment, an order. The Hindu idea looks more in tune with existence: god wanted to create so he started dancing. His first step is the beginning of creation, his first movement... he started moving. He must have remained stagnant, he must have remained dormant, he must have been fast asleep, unmoving until then. He started moving. In that very movement, creation started. Hence you see the statues of Shiva dancing. He is called Nataraj

– the god of dance.

And the world also ends in dance.... The dance becomes more and more mad, maddening. It becomes a frenzy, a fever, it becomes chaotic. And with that chaotic dance coming to a peak, the world collapses, disappears. Again there will be a long period of rest. The first step, the movement, and the creation starts. It is a cycle. Mm? The dancer gets tired, but before he stops he brings the dance to a crescendo. That is called ’tandeva’: dance becoming such that it is almost mad, inconceivable; it loses all possibility of being comprehended. It becomes dangerous, but it comes to a peak beyond which there is no possibility of going. It is a climax, like a sexual climax; and then one falls into deep sleep.

The Eastern idea is very psychological, very existential. Think of prayer in terms of dance, think of existence in terms of dance, and think of sannyas in terms of dance.

Veet means beyond, manaso means mind. Beyond the mind is god, is truth, and beyond the mind Is your reality. The mind is a shadow existence, as if one is looking in a mirror and starts thinking ’I am inside the mirror.’ You are not inside the mirror; the mirror is reflecting something that is confronting the mirror. The mind is a mirror, a beautiful mirror, very useful, but it is very easy to get caught in the mirror... because you don’t know yourself, and whatsoever you know about yourself, you know from the mind. Your face you know only because of the mirror; the mirror becomes very important. And all that one knows through the mind is a reflection, it is not real. The real has to be known without the mind; the mind has to be put aside. One has to face oneself immediately, without the mind. And that’s all, the whole of the science of meditation: how to put the mind aside, how to be mindless for a few moments.

In the beginning they are very tiny moments, just drops of mindlessness, but immensely illuminating, immensely transforming. Because even if a drop of mindlessness enters in your being, you have tasted something of the reality. And that taste lingers on your tongue forever, you cannot forget it.

And only after that taste can you see that the mind is only reflecting things, because now you can compare. Without that experience there is no way to compare. With what to compare? You know all that the mind says to you, and it is all from the mind. Something has to be known that is not from the mind and then you will see that the mind starts becoming pale. Then you know that the reality is totally different, utterly different.

So that has to be done, and it can be done. The mind is not a must; it can be put aside. It is an activity – it can be put to rest. It is like walking: when you need to walk, you walk: when you don’t need, you put your legs to rest. The mind is an activity, more subtle than walking, but there is no need for it to continue for twenty-four hours a day. When it is needed use it; it is a biocomputer, immensely helpful in work. But when it is not needed put it aside, tell it to slow down, tell it to go to sleep and rest.

In the beginning it will not listen because for so many lives you have been listening to it. The servant has become the master and the master has been behaving like a servant. So right now it is not going to listen if you say ’Stop!’ But if you go on, slowly slowly the master begins his mastery and the servant starts behaving. The mind is beautiful as a servant but it is very evil as a master. When you are the master and the mind follows you like a servant, it is a beautiful instrument, a great mechanism to be used and it can be helpful in many ways, but only as a servant....

Anand means bliss, zeno means meditation. Meditate on the blissful aspect of existence. Make it a point to see the positive. Don’t count the thorns; count the flowers, even though they are few and far between. Count the flowers and you will become a flower. Count the thorns and you will become a thorn. A man becomes that which he contemplates. Don’t contemplate on the misery of life; contemplate on the joys. Don’t think that there is only death; think of the eternal beauty of life.

Then a great transformation happens: if you go on looking and seeing the silver lining in the dark black clouds, slowly slowly even the dark black cloud is no more dark and no more black; you start befriending it, because the silver lining is possible only because of it. Then even death is no more the enemy. Then death makes life possible. How can it be the enemy? Then thorns are not ugly.

They protect the flowers; they are soldiers on guard. The same tree nourishes the flowers and the thorns; there is a deep unity.

Once you start going deeper into the positive aspect of life you will be surprised to see that the negative starts disappearing into the positive. And one day the whole of life is beautiful. And unless the whole is beautiful without excluding anything, one has not come home yet. Even the sinner becomes a saint when you see the ultimate unity of the polar opposites; and when the sinner is also a saint there is no problem left for you. You can live without problems, you can live as a celebration, and to me that is the culmination of religious life.

Anand means bliss, dharma means the ultimate law, endra means god – god of the ultimate law of bliss. Bliss is the ultimate law of life, hence the longing for it... and not only in man but in animals, in birds, in trees. The whole existence is searching for bliss. It is the deepest desire. It must be something of the nature of the ultimate... god must be a synonym for bliss.

This desire has not to be dropped. This desire has to be intensified. One has to put all one’s energy into this desire so that it becomes a flame, so it is not just a lukewarm longing but a matter of life and death. The moment the intensity is total, the thing happens. Nothing else is needed – just the totality of the longing is enough. You become afire, and that fire burns all that is unessential in you, and the essence surfaces in its absolute purity.

CHAPTER 17

Sannyas is the Dimension of the Festive

17 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, paribhasho means definition. There is no definition of love, but one can become it. Life can become the definition of it. There is no possibility of defining love in words, but one can live in such a way that one’s whole being becomes its definition. And. each one has to find the definition on his own. Nobody can live somebody else’s definition, otherwise one has missed one’s life.

Life is an opportunity to carve out the definition of love. It is a raw opportunity, just like a marble rock.

Each one has to carve something out of it. The whole of life is raw: we have to create it, we have to give it a form. We have to make that which is unmanifest, manifest. We have to bring the seed to its flowering. And each individual is so unique that there is no possibility of general definition, hence love is indefinable... because your definition will not be my definition, my definition will not be your definition.

And it is beautiful that no imitation is possible; hence the authenticity of love. Love makes people authentic, and those who are authentic, only they can love. There is a deep synchronicity between authenticity and love.

So live in such a way that life becomes more and more love... Less and less-business, more and more love; less and less rice and more and more roses, so something of the beyond starts penetrating you. Love makes one open to the beyond. And love has to flow in as many directions as possible. It should not move only in one dimension – otherwise life remains one-dimensional; it should be multi-dimensional. One should love people, one should love poetry, one should love music; one should love as many things as possible. Then each dimension gives a new richness to your being. And when all the dimensions are flowering, for the first time you start feeling what love is.

One can feel it, one can know it, but one cannot say it. One can show it, but one cannot say it.

Deva means divine, mimanso means enquiry – a divine enquiry. Life has meaning only when it becomes a divine enquiry... when one is not just curious about life but is ready to plunge into the depths of it, one is ready to pay whatsoever price life demands for the enquiry. And nothing is possible without paying for it. Life is a great taskmaster: it demands and demands unless you have surrendered your totality to it. Only in the moment of total surrender does life reveal its beauties and benedictions. Only in that moment when you are not does life reveal its truth.

Let this initiation into sannyas be a great enquiry for you not just a sensation and a momentary trip but a life-long devotion.

Anand means bliss, margo means the path – the path of bliss, the way of bliss. And it is only the blissful who know god. One has to learn how to love, how to dance, how to laugh, because these are the steps towards god. The serious grope in the darkness. Unless there is blissfulness and humour there is no light. Laughter brings light. Seriousness is dark, heavy. And this has been one of the calamities – that religious people become very serious. They think that to look happy and joyous is something worldly. They have to be other-worldly, so they have to wear a long face. But god does not love long faces, he avoids long faces.

God loves laughter, joy, so to come close to him, the only way is to learn the way of blissfulness. Be more and more blissful for no reason at all. For just being, be blissful – it is such a gift!

Just these sounds of the birds listened to silently will give you a profound experience. It is life, it is aliveness all over. It is such a benediction to be herenow in this moment. To be at all is such a miracle that one should dance, one should be grateful. To praise is to pray, and only the blissful can praise, because only the blissful have something to praise.

The serious and the sad always complain. His seriousness, his sadness, is a complaint against god; his complaint is written all over his being. He is saying ’I don’t agree with your world.’ He is saying

’You have committed a sin by sending me into the world. Why have you given me life? Why? I am unhappy here. I am miserable here.’ He wants to return the ticket. As one character in Dostoevsky’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV says ’I want to give the ticket back. I want to get out of this world.’

The sad person is always searching for the exit.

The blissful is full of praise, and in that praise one comes close to god. When the praise becomes really of the heart and you throb with joy in it, god has come to you, you have come to god.

So become blissful. And I am not saying to be blissful for any reason, because if the bliss depends on some reason you cannot remain blissful for twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the reason may be there to be blissful; sometimes the reason may not be there, so you will go on falling into misery again and again. Bliss can become a continuum only when it is not based on any reason at all. It is just based on the sheer joy of being here... on this tremendous gift of life.

Anand means bliss – blissful moon. The moon is very symbolic. Start worshipping it... start being in love with it. Start having a dialogue with it. In the beginning it will look like madness but soon it becomes of tremendous significance because responses start coming from the moon. And once the responses start coming from the moon then you are not alone – the moon has become a person. It depends on you, on how you call it forth, on how you pray.

Prayer can confer beinghood on anything. Basically everything is alive – only prayer knows the way to provoke life. Prayer knows how to call forth the energy that is fast asleep, how to make it respond to you. Prayer is a way, a subtle technique, of creating response from the universe. Prayer is not just a monologue. In the beginning it is, but not in the end: sooner or later it becomes a dialogue. You are not saying things alone; you are responded to, and those responses are of immense delight.

Start with the moon and then move to the sun. But it is better to start with the moon, it is easier: the moon is more responsive, closer too, cooler too. The sun is more fiery and can be contacted only in a few moments, early in the morning, when it is just coming on the horizon and in the evening when it is going down on the horizon. In the daytime you cannot have any contact through your eyes with the sun, it is too much, but the moon can be contacted any time. And the best way is to start when the moon starts growing – the first-day moon, the second-day moon, the third-day moon... go on slowly slowly. As the moon grows, you will see something growing in you; and when the moon becomes full there is every possibility that you will start a response.

The moon is very very subtle energy. One can live on it. Gurdjieff had the idea that the moon eats people, that man is food for the moon. If man is unconscious, that is true: then man is food for the moon. But if man is conscious, prayerful, then the moon is food for man. That he never talked about; that is the other polarity of the same phenomenon. And my whole teaching is how to make the moon your food, because it is the best food possible, the most nourishing energy in existence, because it is mother-energy; you can feed on the breast of the moon.... Start communing with moon!

[Tara says her name is Irish and Indian too.]

Mm mm, it is Indian as well. And it must mean the same in Irish as it does in India, because it is the same root that has moved in many languages.

’Tara’ means the star. The English word ’star’ also comes from ’tara’. So there is every possibility that the meaning will be the same.

Deva means divine and tara means a star – a divine star. It is there, it is in everybody’s being. Even though the night is very dark, even though we are completely lost in darkness, the star is there. We just have to search for it a little bit to uncover it, to discover it.

At the very centre of our being there is light, eternal light. And darkness is not our nature. Darkness is surrounding us but our nature is light. That’s why we cannot accept darkness; it is against our nature. We cannot accept misery; it is against our nature. We cannot accept things only when they are against our nature. Disease is not acceptable because it is against nature. But health? Nobody rejects it; it is how things should be. So is light, so is love, so is bliss.

Remember: whatsoever we long for naturally is part of our being; that’s why we long for it. Unless it is attained we will not be true to our being; hence the longing, hence the search. And whatsoever we reject is something alien, foreign – it has to be rejected. The journey may be long but one can hope that one will succeed. One succeeds if one goes on searching long enough. It is only a question of patience... patience and intensity of search. Search as if you want it today, this very moment; and be patient even it happens in eternity. With these two paradoxical qualities together one is on the right track, one cannot go astray then.

Deva means divine, nishkam means desirelessness divine desirelessness. The mind always wants more, and because of that constant hankering for the goal, it remains restless. And it cannot be satisfied: you can give it anything that it longs for, but the moment you do it wants more. Its very nature is a demand for more, so there is no way to quench its thirst. And the sooner one understands this, the better. To go with it is a sheer wastage. It says ’A little more and then everything will be okay, and then a little more, and then again a little more,’ and it is never enough. It is a bottomless pit: you can go on throwing things in it and they all disappear and it remains empty.

A famous Sufi story is: A beggar asked a great king ’Can you fill my begging-bowl?’

The king was surprised. He said ’What kind of demand are you making? This small begging-bowl

– can I not fill it?’ The king was very egoistic. He told his grand vizier, ’Fill the bowl with gold!’ The bowl was filled but the moment it became full, suddenly it was empty again, the gold disappeared. It was filled again and again and again, and the whole treasure of the king disappeared. Desperate, humiliated, the king fell at the feet of the beggar and said ’You tricked me. What kind of bowl is this?

Is it a magic bowl? You defeated me, you humiliated me, you put me right. You have destroyed and shattered my ego! I was thinking that I have the greatest empire in the world and I could not even fill the beggar’s bowl. What kind of bowl is this?’

And the beggar started laughing. ’There is nothing magical in it,’ he said ’it has been made by the mind of man. Every man has it inside his skull; I have just brought it out from the skull, that’s all. It is a very ordinary bowl, and every man is carrying one in his skull. You come across it every day but you don’t recognize it.’

Man is in misery because of his constant demand for more. Man immediately becomes blissful if he drops this constant madness for more, this mania for more. That state is called ’nishkam’: no desire any more. Then the whole energy turns inwards, because desire keeps it occupied outwards, desire keeps it occupied with the future. When there is no desire, there is no future either; when there is no desire, there is no going anywhere either. One is suddenly herenow, utterly herenow, totally herenow. In a state of desirelessness your whole energy is centred in you. In that very moment bliss happens. You are back home.

You have to work it out; the name has a great key for you. Watch the mind. It has deceived enough.

Now is the time to get out of its enchanted circle. See the futility of it, become disillusioned by it.

Then one is surprised that one could have always enjoyed bliss, because it was always here, it was always now, but the mind was taking one farther away, farther away, for more and more and more.

The mind keeps you out of your home, keeps you away from yourself.

In the beginning just a few moments are enough to give you the taste of desirelessness and then they start growing on their own. Once you have tasted a single moment of desirelessness you know the secret; then the secret can be spread all over your life. And that is the meaning of sannyas: to live a life of desirelessness... to live in utter joy, to enjoy whatsoever is available, to enjoy it to the very last, to squeeze all the juice out of it.

My sannyas is not that of renunciation. You are not asked to renounce the world, you are only asked to renounce the mind. Live in the world and enjoy the world and be in it – it is divine. Just drop this hankering for more. And suddenly this very earth is paradise and this very body the Buddha.

Anand means blissful – blissful Maria. Jesus came out of the womb of Maria. Become the womb so that your own Jesus can also come out of it. Everybody has to give birth to their own Jesus, or call it Buddha or Krishna; it doesn’t matter. These are just names for the same truth. The fire that burnt in Krishna was the same fire that burnt in Jesus. And the light that was shown in the eyes of Buddha was the same light as was shown in the eyes of Jesus. Every human being is an opportunity to become that, and unless we become that we can’t be blissful.

The misery is just because we are missing our destiny. The misery is because the tree is not blooming; something is hindering the blossoms from coming. And the misery is natural: the spring is all over but the tree is not blossoming. There is deep pain in the heart, and anguish. But one should not become too concerned with the pain and anguish; one should simply take note of it and start working for blissfulness. Because nobody can drop the negative; once the positive is attained, the negative disappears. You cannot fight with darkness. Bring light in and the darkness is gone.

Prem means love, mouna means silence. Love is always silent. Its language is silence. Its language is wordless: it can commune without bringing any words in. It can commune through energy. When love is there, it is simply transmitted, you need not say it. We have to say because we have forgotten how to love. We have to say it because people have forgotten how to understand silence. In fact whenever there are two persons silent, they both feel embarrassed and they immediately start searching for something to say about the weather, politics. Anything will do, but talk, because talking keeps them engaged, occupied, and talking functions not as a communication but as a screen to hide behind – a screen of words and one can hide behind it.

Silence seems to be dangerous, vulnerable. The other may look into your being, the other may discover you. You know your ugliness and you know your inner nightmares that continue day in, day out. You know all kinds of madness are inside you, and you are afraid. A great screen, a curtain of words keeps you hidden, and the other also keeps hiding behind his own curtain of words.

People don’t talk to communicate; people talk to avoid communication. Love can communicate without saying a word. But one will have to remember the language again; we have forgotten.

Centuries of civilization and centuries of cultivation – of the mind and the conditioning of the mind –

have destroyed something very precious in us. They have destroyed silence. It is not only that there is the noise of the traffic and the train and the aeroplane and the market. It is not only that it is noisy outside – even more than that society has created noise within. That inner noise has to be dropped.

That’s what meditation is all about: dropping the inner noise. And once the inner noise is dropped your love can start flowing again. That is prayer. Meditation prepares the way for prayer. Silence prepares the way for love.

So these two words you remember: become more and more silent so that you can become more and more loving. Become more and more loving so that you can become more and more silent.

They are two wings. Once you have those two wings, the whole sky is yours.

[A sannyasin says she is still ’holding on’]

Simply accept it. You are trying too hard not to hold, and that is creating a contradiction in your energy. That contradiction is more dangerous than holding. On one hand you are holding and on the other hand you are trying to drop it. You are becoming divided because of it. Always remember: you cannot force these things. You can understand but you cannot force; and through understanding one day they disappear. Transformation happens: it cannot be done. And one has to learn the difference between happening and doing. That is one of the most important things in life to understand.

You are trying to do it. And because you have been trying to do your whole life, that’s what has created the holding. Now again you are trying to do – now you are trying to do against it, but it is the same process. You don’t allow things to happen; you always want to remain in control. Now, you even want to remain in control of let-go, and that’s what is creating the conflict. It is so clear that your energy is moving in two directions.

The first thing: accept it, so that the energy starts moving in one direction. Accept it as one accepts one’s height – that one is this height, this weight, that one is black or white, that one has two eyes, blond hair or brunette... one accepts. Just accept this too, and accept it totally. That will be the first act which will help, because that will be the first thing that you will not be controlling. You accept.

You have moved towards acceptance and that means you have moved towards let-go. Accepting is another name for let-go.

And then wait: whenever your acceptance is total, it will leave. And there is no hurry either. So for the days you will be here, simply enjoy, don’t fight. Nothing has to be done.

[Osho suggests she do the Massage group, then Body Awareness, followed by the Sarjana group.]

But relax, and these groups are meant to help you relax. Don’t be in a hurry and don’t be speedy.

Even walking, slow down. Do everything very slowly. Dancing, singing, meditating – in everything slow down. And accept yourself. If for these three weeks you can remain in silent acceptance, it will be a great experience and you will start feeling that that tension inside is relaxing. It will disappear.

[A sannyasin, who teaches archery, has been told by Somendra the group leader that she was a healer in a past life. She wondered if she should explore this latent skill.]

Somendra is right... the possibility is there that healing energy can flow through you. But there are many blocks also. Those blocks will have to be melted.

Because the work of an archer and the work of a healer are totally different, they need a different kind of training inside. They create different kinds of minds inside. The archer is active and the healer has to be inactive. And Somendra’s feeling is right, that in your past life you may have been a healer. So the potential is there, it can be provoked. If you want to become a healer, you can be turned into a healer. But my feeling is that it is better you remain an archer, because healing will destroy your archery. And healers we have many, archers we have not many (laughter)... so I would like you to remain the archer, right?

You have to be the commune archer!

CHAPTER 18

Love is the Soul of the dance, dance, the Body of Love

18 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[To Ma Anand Christa]

Anand means blissful; and Christa is not Christ’s name but a state of consciousness, what in the East we call Buddhahood – the ultimate state of consciousness where all darkness has disappeared, where all is light, when man is no more identified with the body but knows himself as the supreme self, where one can say ’I am god!’ That state of consciousness is Christ-consciousness.

Jesus is only one of the Christs – there have been many, there will be many; but Christians are not so generous as to recognize it. Buddha is a Christ, Krishna is a Christ, Lao Tzu is a Christ and there have been thousands. Buddhists are more generous in recognizing Christ as a Buddha, recognizing Lao Tzu also as a Buddha. ’Buddha’ is the Indian word for Christ. They are not personal names, they indicate the ultimate state of consciousness.

So your name will mean: blissful ultimate state of consciousness. That has to be searched for. It is a long journey but if one goes on it, then each step is a fulfillment and at each step the celebration of life goes on growing. And this should be understood as a criterion: if your bliss goes on growing then you are on the right track. If your bliss starts diminishing, your misery grows, then you have missed, you have gone astray. Bliss is the criterion. If one can only go on checking again and again

’Whatsoever I am doing – is it creating more bliss for me or not?’ one will never go astray. And even if one does, one will come back soon.

The closer we are to god, the more blissful we are. And when we dissolve into god and god dissolves into us, there is pure bliss and nothing else. That state is ’Christa’.

Anand means bliss, mantro means chanting, singing, sound, melody – a blissful singing, a blissful chanting, a blissful sound. This sound is constantly there inside you as it is inside everybody else; we just have to be silent to hear it. Because the head is too much in noise it cannot hear the still, small voice of the heart, and that is a very small, still voice. Unless all is quiet you never hear it, but it is the link between you and god. Once you have heard it, you know from where you are joined, linked, bridged to god. Once you have heard it, it becomes very easy to go into it. Then you can concentrate on it and easily slip into it. And whenever you go into it, it rejuvenates; it gives you tremendous strength, makes you alive again and again.

If a person can go into this inner sound again and again, he never loses track of god; he can live in the world and can remain in contact with god. By and by the knack is learned and then even in the marketplace you can go on hearing it. Once you know it is there it is not difficult to hear it. Then the whole noise of the world cannot prevent you from hearing it. The problem is only to hear it for the first time, because you don’t know where it is, what it is, how to allow it.

All that is needed is: become more and more silent, sit in silence. Whenever you have time, just for one hour every day don’t do anything – sit and listen. Listen to the sounds all around, for no particular purpose, with no interpretation about what it means. This screeching sound....

[The screech of owls]

Just listen for no reason at all. It is there so one has to listen.

Slowly slowly the mind starts becoming silent. The sound is listened to from the outside but the mind is no more interpreting it – no more appreciating it, no more thinking about it. And suddenly the gestalt changes: when the mind is silent, listening to the outer sound, suddenly a new sound is heard which is not from the outside but from the inside. And once you have heard it the thread is in your hands. Just follow that thread, go deeper and deeper into it. It is a very deep well in your being, and those who know how to go into it, live in a totally different world, in a separate reality.

Anand means bliss, leena means lost into, dissolved into – lost in bliss, dissolved into bliss. Bliss is possible only when you are capable of losing yourself. You and bliss cannot exist together; either you are or bliss is. And you means misery, because if there is no bliss, there is misery. Absence of bliss is misery, just as absence of light is darkness.

People are in misery because they are not courageous enough to lose themselves in anything. The blissful people are capable of losing themselves; in what they lose themselves is irrelevant. A painter can be lost in his painting; there will be bliss, immediately. A singer can be lost in his singing and there will be bliss. A dancer can be lost in his dancing and there will be bliss. Bliss is a by-product of being lost.

One can use any activity, then any activity that brings bliss becomes religious. There is no need to go to church. All that is needed is to lose yourself in something – whatsoever it is – and then you can attain to great heights of bliss. One can remain floating in bliss twenty-four hours a day because it is no more confined to any particular activity. Not that you meditate and only then will you be blissful, or that you pray and only then will you be blissful. Once you know that bliss is a by-product, a spin-off of some activity in which you are lost, then you can be lost in any activity. Just going for a morning walk, you can be lost in it, and there is bliss. Or just listening to music or just looking at the starry sky.... Then one can move from one bliss to another bliss. And they are all the same – just your activity changes. Then one can walk in bliss, sit in bliss, sleep in bliss.... Bliss is not a goal but a by-product, a consequence of being lost in something.

So only those few people know bliss who are capable of losing themselves – lovers, poets, painters, musicians, dancers. These are the people, and these are the people who are really religious, not the priests – unless a priest is capable of losing himself in prayer, which is very rare, very rare. Unless you have learned to lose yourself in natural things it will not be possible for you to lose yourself in prayer. If you cannot lose yourself in love, how can you lose yourself in prayer? If you cannot lose yourself in the beauty of the sunrise or sunset, how will you lose yourself into prayer? If the birds and their singing is not enough to provoke you to be lost, the Bible, the Koran, the Geeta, are not going to help at all, because god is so immediate in the song of the birds. If god cannot provoke you from your sleep, cannot awaken you from your sleep, cannot take you out of your ego, from such close quarters, how will he be able to take you out of your ego just by your reading the Bible? That song is twenty centuries old – there is a two-thousand-year gap – and god has just called you through a bird....

So just remember it and start losing yourself in meditations, in anything that you do. Try it again and again and see how the quality immediately changes. The moment you come, there is work, a kind of duty to be done; the moment you disappear, there is joy and play and fun and prayer. And the whole sky starts showering bliss upon you.

Anand means bliss, rafia is a Sufi name for god, so the full name will mean god of bliss. And never think of yourself as less than that, because that is our true identity. To think of oneself as less than god is to insult the inner reality; it is degrading. But remember that it is not that you are god and others are not, otherwise it can become an ego trip. Then you have lost, you have missed.

In feeling, in thinking, that you are god, you are imparting dignity to the whole of existence. Then even a dog is a god. Then the difference is only in form: you have a human form and he has an animal form. Then the tree is also divine... then god exists in many forms, millions of forms. Just think for a moment that all forms are divine and you are transported into a different world. Then the whole world appears in a new vision, in a new light. Suddenly it is tremendously significant and meaningful; it is not dull any more, not a drag. Everything becomes luminous... full of light. Then the phenomenon is not only a phenomenon, but a noumenon too, and you can see the inner light in everything. Even in a rock there is a light inside.

Once you recognize your light, you have recognized the light of everything.

Anand means bliss, vedika means altar. In the temple where the deity is placed, the innermost shrine, the altar on which the deity is placed, is called ’vedika’. In your being there is an innermost shrine where god resides. And god resides in everyone as bliss. The first experience of god is the experience of bliss; that is our first contact with the divinity. You don’t see god, you can’t touch him, but when you feel blissful, you know. God has to be felt. Your heart starts throbbing with an immense blissfulness.

Man is a temple. In fact the temple has been created in the form of the body. The temple simply represents the body and the innermost shrine represents the heart. The temple is just a symbol.

There is no need to go to the temple – the temple is a map; it indicates to go within. To go to the temple is as foolish as if one starts worshipping a map.

The Himalayas are beautiful but the map of the Himalayas is... is nothing! It has nothing to do with the Himalayas. If you want to go to the Himalayas the map can be helpful, but just by worshipping the map you will never go to the Himalayas; and there is nothing of the Himalayas in the map.

The temple is just a map of the body; it is actually made in the same geometrical form as the body.

And the innermost shrine, where god resides, is the altar in the temple; and the deity, the image of the god, is nothing but your supreme self. One has to go within. The kingdom of god is within you, because god himself is within you. This is the meaning of your name.

Deva means divine, mandiro means temple – divine temple. The body has all the mysteries, all the mysteries that the whole universe has; it is a miniature universe. The difference between the body and the universe is only of quantity. Just as a single atom has all the secrets of matter, the body has all the secrets of the universe. One need not go to search for any secrets outside, one has just to go in.

And the body has to be taken care of. One should not be against it, one should not condemn it. If you condemn it, you have already condemned god, because in the deepest recess of the body god resides. God has chosen this house of the body to live in. Respect your body, love your body, care about your body.

The so-called religions have created much antagonism between man and his body. It is true that you are not the body. That doesn’t mean that you have to be against the body; the body is a friend.

The body can take you to hell, the body can take you to heaven too. It is simply a vehicle. It is neutral: wherever you want to go, it is ready. It is a mechanism of immense complexity, beauty, order. The more one understands one’s body, the more one feels awe. Then what to say about the whole universe? – even this small body contains so much of a miracle. So I call the body the temple of the divine.

And once your attitude towards the body changes it becomes easier to go in, because the body becomes open to you. It allows you to come in, it starts revealing its secrets to you. That’s how all the secrets of Yoga were first known. That’s how all the secrets of Tao were first known. Yoga didn’t arise out of dissecting dead bodies. Modern medical science is based on dead bodies and their dissection. It has something basically wrong in it. It has not yet been able to know the living body. To dissect a dead body is one thing, to know something about it is one thing, and to know something about a living body is totally different. But the modern science has no way of knowing about the living body. The only way it knows is to butcher it, to cut it, but the moment you cut it it is no more the same phenomenon. To understand a flower on the stem, on the tree, is one thing; to cut it, dissect it, is totally another. It is no more the same phenomenon. Its quality is different.

Albert Einstein has some qualities which the corpse will not have, cannot have. A poet dies – the body is there but where is the poetry? A genius dies the body is there but where is the genius? The body of the idiot and the body of the genius are the same. You will not be able to know by dissecting the body whether it belonged to a genius or it belonged to an idiot, whether it belonged to a mystic or it belonged to somebody who was never aware of anything mysterious in life. It will be impossible because you are simply looking into the house and the being who lived there is no more there. You are simply studying the cage and the bird has gone; and to study the cage is not to study the bird.

But still, the body contains the divine in it.

The real way is to go within yourself and watch your own body from there, from the interiormost of your being. Then it is a tremendous joy... just to see its functioning, its ticking. It is the greatest miracle that has happened in the universe. Everything else is less complicated than the human body. So think of it as a temple, because it is a temple. And respect it, be prayerful about it, because something of infinite value is contained in it. It is a container – it contains an eternal diamond.

Prem means love, tantro means expansion – expansion of love. One is nothing but one’s love. The more loving you are, the more you are; the less loving you are, the less you are. Your being is of the same quality and quantity as your love. One can be measured by one’s love, one is known by one’s love.

Become more and more loving and you will find yourself expanding: you will become bigger and bigger, huge. The more your love spreads into different dimensions, the more roots you will have in being, and you will become a big tree with much foliage, great foliage. And only a loving person knows how to blossom. Only the loving person knows when the spring comes. An unloving person never knows the climate of the spring because he never blooms. He lives, he dies, without knowing anything of the innermost secrets of life. Love opens the door....

Anand means bliss, sambodhi means the ultimate state of awareness – bliss and awareness. They are two aspects of the same coin. Either become more blissful and you will find awareness growing, or become more aware and you will find bliss growing. The best way is to work on both together; they help each other. One brings the other, and then the other in its own turn helps. So whenever it is possible to be aware, be aware, and you will find more and more possibilities opening for being blissful. And whenever it is possible to be blissful, be blissful, and you will find more doors opening for awareness. They are mutual. Just as there are vicious circles, there are virtuous circles; this is a virtuous circle. There are moments when it is easy to be blissful, then use them; and there are moments when it is simple to be aware, then use them., When you are alone, be aware; when you are with people, be blissful.

To be aware when you are with people will make you look cold, because awareness is a kind of coolness... not really cold but to others it appears as cold. If you try to be aware with people they will feel a distance between you and themselves. They will feel a little offended... unconsciously, but they will smell that you are aloof, detached, and that’s not good, that is inhuman. Mm, that’s what Buddhist monks have been doing down the ages. They look inhuman. Love has disappeared, they cannot relate, because if you are trying to be aware twenty-four hours a day you cannot relate.

Relationship is possible only when you are blissful, warm, loving.

So when you are with people, be more and more blissful and they will find you closer, more friendly, more warm, more available, more interested in their being. But deep down you will feel that the awareness is helped and nourished by it, indirectly nourished, not directly practised. And when you are alone, just be aware, alert about everything that is happening around you, outside, inside. That will give you great silence, great coolness, tranquillity, centering. And indirectly it will help you to be more blissful, because a centred person is capable of losing himself more deeply in others than the person who is not centred.

This is a paradox. Logically we would think otherwise, but the uncentred person is always afraid of losing himself in the other because he knows he has no centre. Unless he protects himself he will be lost, the other will possess him. He is afraid, fearful; he creates an armour around himself. The uncentred person has to create an armour to protect himself because he knows that he can go too far and he can be easily influenced by others, possessed by others, hypnotized by others, used by others. So he creates an armour. And that armour makes one a machine. He relates mechanically through the armour... as if he touches you but with gloves on his hands. He wants himself to be protected; he is always afraid.

But the centred person need not have any armour. He knows he can go as far as he wants and he will be able to come back. That trust is there, so he can get involved in deeper relationships.

He can love to the very uttermost and yet remain himself because he knows that he can go as far as possible – he will come back home. He knows the way and he knows his centre. It is a single moment’s work to fall back on the centre. He need not have any protection.

So these two things I give to you – this is my message for your sannyas: in relationship be blissful, in aloneness be aware, and they will help each other, like two wings of a bird.

It means servant of god. One has to surrender oneself totally, only then is god possible in life. We have to become utterly empty of ourselves. If we are too full of ourselves there is no space for god to enter in.

Sannyas is nothing but an effort to help you to empty yourself. Once you have become a deep emptiness, god descends in you of his own accord. One need not go in search, and even if one wants to, where can one go? If you remain the same, wherever you go you will miss god. So it is not a question of travelling. It is not a journey from here to there – it is a journey from being full of the ego to the utter emptiness. It is simple: one just has to vomit the ego. And it is easy because that ego is already making you sick. It is nauseating, it is making everybody ill. We just don’t know how to throw this poison out. I will teach you that. It is a very simple procedure.

Sannyas is already a step towards it, because it means surrender. Surrendering to the master is the beginning of surrendering to god. So keep in mind: you have to become a servant. And that is the most exalted state possible, because only the servant can become the master.

CHAPTER 19

Aloneness is Celebration of Being

19 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, gariba means poverty. Jesus says ’Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of god.’ To be poor in spirit means to be egoless. It means to be humble. It means to be a nobody. To be poor in spirit does not mean to live in poverty – because one can practise poverty and can be very egoistic about it. That’s what happens to people who renounce the world: they start having a pious kind of egoism, which is far more dangerous and poisonous than the ordinary kind.

One has to be aware that inside all is empty. One has to live without any ambition. One has to live without any desire to be powerful over others. That makes one poor in spirit. But those who are poor in spirit become rich in spirit. That’s the miracle, and that is the meaning of the Jesus’ saying

’Blessed are the poor in spirit...’; that is the first part. And the second part is:’... for theirs is the kingdom of god.’ It means that those who are poor are rich, and vice versa too: those who are very rich in their egos are really very poor spiritually.

The way to inner richness is the way of inner poverty.

Anand means blissful, suviro means courage – blissful courage. And that is one of the most important qualities because the search for god needs great courage, it needs guts – because it is going into the unknown. No map is available, no guide book either. One has to find one’s path by groping. There is no ready-made road to it; just by walking on it one creates it. Hence great courage is needed. And one has to go alone, one cannot be accompanied by anybody else. Plotinus says ’It is a flight of the alone to the alone.’ Hence, unless one is really courageous it is impossible to move a single step into it.

And the second thing: the courage has to be very blissful. It should not be enforced, it should be spontaneous. If it is enforced then sooner or later you will have to come back. Enforced courage means that deep down you are a coward and just on the surface you have painted courage. It cannot help, it cannot take you far. One needs the courage to go dancing into the unknown. And the more blissful you are, the shorter is the way, because the length between you and god is the length of your misery. The distance is not measured in miles, the distance is measured in misery.

If you are utterly blissful then even a single step may do... or maybe not even a single step is needed.

If one really dances, in this very moment – totally, utterly, with no holding back – one will find one has arrived, because in fact from the very beginning we have never left this place.

Deva means divine, nayano means the eye – the divine eye, the third eye. You have to search for it, and those who seek and search always find, because it is there; it is waiting for you. It just has to be remembered. And once it starts functioning you are no more a body, no more material. Suddenly the whole sky opens up. Then life never knows any darkness, any gloom, any sadness; the night is over. And without the third eye functioning, the night cannot be over. Whatsoever we do is going to fail, is bound to fail.

People do all kinds of things to create a little joy in life but all efforts fail, fail utterly. They go on changing from one to another, but slowly slowly hopelessness settles in. By the time a person becomes old he is completely disillusioned. Life has been nothing but a long frustration, a tragedy.

The only thing that has ever succeeded is the opening of the third eye. Then joy is natural, bliss happens of its own accord; it does not depend on anything from the outside. Whether you are rich or poor, whether you are in a palace or a hut, it doesn’t matter – wherever you are it is with you. It is you.

So all these talks on THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER are really for you. [morning discourse series]

Listen, meditate and start searching.

Prem means love, and devi means goddess – goddess of love. And this is love that wants to explode, this is love that wants to find an outlet. It is love crying in the wilderness. It is love searching, seeking, groping in darkness. It is love that needs fulfillment.

This love will become a flower soon, and the same phenomenon that looks like crying today will change into a great laughter, and the same sounds become great music. As you start going deeper into your being, all that looks chaotic starts falling into a certain order and a great harmony arises.

All that is needed is to be centred in one’s being, and all the meditations are ways and means to force this centering in you, to enhance it, to facilitate it.

People are just going round and round around the centre; they move on the periphery, and on the periphery there is nothing to be found. You can go on and on for lives together but you will never find anything, because it is the same circle that you have been travelling again and again. Unless one jumps out of this vicious circle and rushes towards the centre of one’s being, nothing is ever found.

At the centre of your being all is – god is, love is, bliss is. All that one desires is available there.

On the periphery, only desires and desires and no fulfilment. At the centre, no desire, and all is fulfilment.

Satya means truth, devi means goddess – goddess of truth. Truth is not far away; it is just within you. It is not even close by, because to say it is close means it is at a certain distance from you. It is synonymous with you: you are truth. Truth is not a property that you will possess some day. It is your innermost core, your very being, your soul.

That’s why philosophy thinks about truth but never finds it – religion never thinks about truth and finds it – because philosophy starts moving outward, thinking about a thousand and one things, and gets lost. There are millions of questions to be solved, and you solve one question and ten more arise out of your answer, so it goes on and on ad infinitum.

Truth is a simple phenomenon: you just look within and it is as truth is concerned. Truth cannot be thought, and if you think you will miss. It can be seen in a thoughtless state of mind. It is an experience... an existential experience.

And your truth is your truth; nobody else can deliver it to you. Yes, the master can point the way but you will have to walk. And once this seed gets deep into your heart ’I am carrying truth in my own womb,’ the search becomes very easy, great hope arises, because even if we don’t know it, it is there and it is within us. So the only question is: how to see it, how to know it? The question is not of finding, the question is only of remembering... as if we had known before and we have forgotten it, fallen asleep and started dreaming.

The purpose of all the meditations is tc wake you up, to pull you out of your dreams so that you can see who you are. Once you have seen you cannot go back into your dreaming state again. Just as the fallen flower from the tree cannot jump back to the branches again....

Prem means love, and das means a servant – a servant of love. And that is the only way to become a master. In the world of the inner to be poor is to be rich, to be a servant is to be a master, to be a beggar is to be a king. It is just the opposite of the outside world. Jesus says ’Those who are first in the world will be the last in my kingdom of god, and those who are the last will be the first.’ This is a saying of immense importance. In a very simple way he has put the whole philosophy of the inner, the whole mathematics of the inner.

If you want to be somebody in the world you will have to fight to be somebody, you will have to be ambitious, violently ambitious, aggressive. You will have to strive; you will have to push and pull and manipulate people; you will have to use people as stepping stones; you will have to be cruel – only then can you reach the top. That is the mathematics of the outer world.

In the inner you have just to be a nobody. You have to stand last in line. You have to give way to everybody; whosoever wants to be ahead of you has to be allowed. And if you can be the last, you will be the first! And to be nobody inside is to be really divine. All that is beautiful happens in that nobodiness, blooms in that emptiness, because it is spacious.

Prem means love, pavitro means purity – purity that comes through love. Love is a great process of purification. It is an inner bath, a soul bath. Without love the inner consciousness of man remains very muddy, full of dust, much garbage. Unless you start loving, that garbage goes on accumulating in you. Love starts circulating in your inner energies just as blood circulates in the body and keeps the body pure, keeps the body alive, takes all the impurities of the body out of the body, takes all the toxins out of the body – dead cells and anything that comes on the way. Blood goes on circulating and taking in its flow all the dead parts. If the blood circulation stops you will die; physically you will die immediately.

The same is the case with the inner world, the soul: love is its circulation. It keeps it alive, young, pure; love is the holiest quality. To be loving is all that is needed, required of a religious person.

Nothing else is needed: if one is loving, all is fulfilled. It will make you so pure that god will long to become a resident in you; god will like to be part of your inner being.

We need not search for god. If we are pure enough, he searches for us. The ancient saying is: Whenever the disciple is ready the master appears. It is true about the outer master, it is true about the inner master too. And what is the readiness of the disciple? – a purity, a humbleness, a simplicity.

And all those qualities come as consequences of love.

Forget the old name – feel disconnected from it. From this moment start a new life, from ABC...

fresh and clean, unburdened by the past, as if you are born again.

In fact sannyas is a new birth and the real birth too, because in the ordinary birth only the body is born. It is not the beginning of real life, because sooner or later the body is going to die. -In sannyas your soul is born. And if you really work sincerely to remember yourself, something is bound to happen which will never die, which will be deathless.

So the really worthwhile is that which gives you a life which is immortal. Sannyas is a search for immortality, deathlessness, eternity. The whole problem of the mind is the problem of time. Time is very short... so many things to do, and death is always imminent. It does not give you space enough to be; it does not allow you freedom to move at your own pace. It hangs over your head like a naked sword from a thin thread. It can fall any moment and your head will be cut off. How can you be at ease? How can you relax? How can you avoid anxiety, anguish? It is just hanging there; any moment the next breath may not come back. Because of this constant presence of death man remains in constant fear and trembling. Because of that trembling he cannot do anything. To do something significant one needs to be calm and quiet and at ease. But death will not leave you alone even for a single moment; it is always surrounding you. It is like an octopus, reaching towards you from everywhere. You are always in its grip. And nobody knows when the last moment is going to happen.

We live in a kind of prison where everybody is sentenced to die and everybody is waiting for his date, that’s all. This world is like a prison and everybody is sentenced to die, everybody is waiting for his death to come. It is just a question of the date. But once it is decided that death is going to happen, how can you live? How can you dance? How can you sing? One remains paralysed. Unless something in you is found which is deathless, dance is not possible, celebration is not possible.

Sannyas is the search for something immortal in you. And it is there, because you are not your body.

It is there, because you are not that which is born through the mother’s womb. You were before that womb, you were before your mother was born. You were before your birth and you will be after your death. But one has to recognize that element in oneself, and the best way to recognize it is to go on dropping the past. As fast as it becomes the past, die to it, don’t accumulate it. If it becomes accumulated around you it does not allow you to see yourself. Too much accumulated past functions like a barrier. Hence the change of the name. It helps: the old identity disappears; you start thinking of yourself in a new way. Hence the change of the dress.... These are outer things but they give you a good start.

And once you start feeling clean of the past, a great burden, like a mountain, disappears from the head, and then things become very much easier, clarity comes easily. All confusion is confusion because of the past.

So forget the old name. Just tell your friends ’The old man is dead. I am a new person and I have to start everything from the very beginning.’ And you will be surprised how much can happen just through this small strategy. And then start meditating....

This will be the name for your centre: Habibo.

It means the beloved. And think of god as the beloved... not as father because that is very institutional, not as mother because the mother loves the child but it is not the same from the child’s side. Sooner or later the child will have to fall in love with somebody else and go away from the mother. As the child grows he grows away and away from the mother. He will have to find a beloved.

So think of god as the beloved. That is the most intimate relationship, and the most beautiful too. It comes closer to prayer, because prayer is a love relationship with existence.

And help people!

Prem Madhava

It means god of love. Prem means love, Madhava is a name of Krishna, a name of god. Literally it means: one who is sweet. The Eastern concept of god is that of immense sweetness. It is not so with the Jews and the Mohammedans. The Talmud actually says that god is not sweet, god is not your uncle – god is an earthquake. A very ferocious idea of god! That too is an aspect of god.

because all that is, is divine. But to think of that makes people afraid. To think of god as ferocious, as an earthquake, does not help people. It makes them frightened, and if you are frightened of somebody, you cannot love. Fear can create hate but not love. How can you create love when you are afraid of somebody? If there is fear, no possibility of love; if there is love, no possibility of fear.

So the insistence in the East is on god’s sweetness, his loving qualities, his feminine face. In the East god is depicted as a dancer, as a lover, a flute player, a singer. He is not a very ferocious father-figure, sitting on a golden throne, just waiting for you to be caught and punished and thrown into hell, for small, tiny reasons... in fact, silly reasons that don’t mean much.

What great sins can man do? Somebody drinks alcohol, somebody smokes cigarettes, somebody plays cards and somebody has fallen in love with somebody else’s wife – things like that. What do you call it in Italian, Deeksha? ’Peccadillos’?...

... Peccadillos? That’s right... just small sins. God must be very mean if he counts these things, really mean.

The Eastern concept is that god is love, sweet. Yes, god is your uncle. And god is not an earthquake but a flute player. From there you can start becoming more and more available to god.

That is the meaning of your name. God is love – you also become love, then you are bridged with god. Good, Madhava... good!

CHAPTER 20

Prayer is a Love Affair with Existence

20 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, gitama means a song – a song of love. Life cannot be more enriched by anything, except love. Life remains poor without love and life remains a hell without love. Love is the only quality that transforms life from misery to bliss. Love brings the transformation. So if one can love then the impossible becomes possible, then each moment is joy and each breath is a song. Then just to be is enough... nothing else is needed. So let this secret become your very foundation of life.

Deva means divine, paritosho means contentment. And contentment is the door to god. If one is contented, one has already arrived. And the meaning of contentment is absolute acceptance as you are. Contentment means acceptance, discontentment means non-acceptance. A wants to become B – that is discontent. A is perfectly happy in being A, there is no desire to become B – that is contentment.

In the state of contentment desiring disappears, and when there is no desire there is no tension, no anxiety, no anguish. When there is no desire there is no mind either. The mind can only exist in desiring. The mind is the name of the whole process of desiring. And desiring is based in non-acceptance.

The moment your mind says that things are not as they should be, desire arises. The moment you say that things are as they should be, desire disappears. And the disappearance of desire is the appearance of the divine. Hence I call contentment the door to god. To be contented is all.

Prem means love, lauree means a lullaby – a loving lullaby, a love song... a song that can relax you totally, that can take you to the deepest core of your being, that can help you release all the tensions, anxieties, that can create a possibility for god to descend in you. And love is that song, that lullaby.

It not only helps people to fall into a tremendously deep sleep; it also helps people to fall tremendously into awareness.

In India, down the ages we have been searching into human

consciousness very deeply and we have come across four stages of consciousness. One is the ordinary state of day-to-day awareness – the state in which we say we are awake, the daytime state of consciousness. The second we call dreaming – the state in which we fall before we enter into sleep. Between the so-called waking and sleep we have to pass through the passage of dreaming. Then the third state is dreamless sleep. And there is a fourth state also that is thoughtless awareness; that is deeper than deep sleep.

So first, love can help you to go into dreaming. It always helps people to go into dreaming, so many people stop there. Love creates a kind of fantasy worLd and that’s all, the romantic. But if love goes a little deeper it helps you to go into deep sleep. Very few reach that state. And if love goes still deeper it can create the fourth state of consciousness – of full awareness, of Buddhahood.

Prem means love, baulo means mad – one who is mad because of love. And that is the highest kind of sanity possible. There are people who are mad for money; that is the worst kind of insanity.

There are people who are mad for power; and there are a thousand and one kinds of madness in the world. But the only redeeming madness is that of love: that takes you beyond all madness.

Once love enters into the heart you are transported into another reality. Love is the only psychedelic there is; all others are just pseudo imitations of it, chemical imitations of it. And because the world has become less and less loving, so many drugs are needed. Because people have forgotten how to be in love they need drugs. The drug gives you a little glimpse of how beautiful reality can be, how colourful reality can be. It gives you a little glimpse of expanding consciousness. That is the meaning of psychedelic: that which expands consciousness. I call love the most important, significant, natural psychedelic, and it is given by god as a gift. Those who know how to love will not need any kinds of drugs in life – alcohol, or marijuana or LSD – because they will be all pale. They will not make reality more beautiful, they will make reality more ugly.

Now this has been an experience of people, that the drug cannot automatically make the reality beautiful; it depends on you, on where you are. If you are living in a high consciousness the drug will pull you down. If you are living in a very low consciousness the drug will help you to come up a little bit. It depends where you are. Those who know how to love will always feel that any kind of drug makes them less sensitive, makes them less part of the beautiful world that they are already in.

Then trees are not so green as they were. So once a person knows the beauty of love he is freed from all kinds of drugs.

Otherwise the whole world is moving towards drugs, and particularly the modern generation, because the modern generation is very unfortunate: it knows not what love is. The family has disappeared, the parents are nothing but an institution, and they are constantly quarrelling. The children never know what love is. They have never seen it happen anywhere. They only see quarrel, fight, anger, rage, struggle, competition, war, violence, murder. They are surrounded by hell from everywhere. They are helpless. They cannot find a way out of it, hence the attraction of drugs. And they will go more and more into drugs if they are not redirected into the alchemy of love. Hence my insistence on love, because to me love is the only redeeming kind of madness. Beyond love there is nothing but god.

Jaya means victory, ananda means bliss – bliss that comes through victory. Man ordinarily lives like a slave – a slave of the society, a slave of the state, a slave of a thousand and one things. But one has become so accustomed to all that slavery that one takes it for granted. And it is because of this slavery that man lives in misery. One has to become free from all this slavery, one has to become free from all conditioning. Only an unconditioned mind is a victorious mind.

That is the whole effort through all these meditations and therapy groups: to bring you to a point where you can see that this is only a conditioning enforced on you from the outside and it is in your power to keep it or to drop it, that it is not inevitable, that it can be dropped. And the moment it becomes your understanding that it can be dropped, who would like to carry slavery? One drops it. In fact it drops of its own accord the moment it is understood that it is not part of one’s essential being; it is just hanging around one, and it is in one’s capacity to be detached, disconnected from it.

That moment is one of freedom and that moment is one of bliss. To be a slave is to be in misery. To be a master of one’s own self, to be free, is to be blissful.

It means eternal bliss. And less than that cannot satisfy anyone. All the pleasures that life makes available are just momentary. Through them one becomes even more frustrated than one was before, because they create great hope and that hope is never fulfilled. That’s why you see children so happy and old people so unhappy. It is not because of bodily age, it is because of the experience of life. The child lives in hope, the old man is disillusioned. He lives in a kind of chronic frustration.

He knows through his experience that all is momentary, that all is illusory, that all has been just a dream, that he has been cheated by life. He simply feels used and ready to be thrown on the junkyard.

But there is a different kind of life too. That’s what sannyas is all about. It is an initiation into a kind of bliss that is non-temporal, which begins but never ends. And once you have tasted of it there is no way of going back. Just a single drop of it and you are transformed. And this bliss is not outside of you either; it is just hidden in you. It has only to be dug up. Just as a man digs a well, meditation is a kind of digging a well inside your being. There is much rubbish and mud to be thrown out, but once you have worked on it you will find the eternal source of joy, eternal waters of life.

This will be the name of the centre: Leela. It means divine play. Religion has not to be taken seriously. The moment you take it seriously, you destroy it. The spirit of seriousness is a very destructive spirit. It does not belong to life, it belongs to death. Life is the spirit of playfulness: the more playful you are, the more alive you are.

My whole approach towards religion is that of play. And all that is great in humanity has happened through play. All the great inventions, all the great paintings, all the great works of art, poetry – they have all happened out of play. The state of seriousness is basically uncreative because it is heavy.

To be creative one needs to be light, light-footed, so that one can dance easily, so that one can even fly.

Help people... and that will be a great help to you too.

Prem means love, kovida means wisdom. There is a wisdom that arises out of the heart. It is totally different from the knowledge that is of the head. The head can never give you wisdom, it can only give you knowledge. Knowledge means borrowed. Others have given it to you – it is not yours, it has not arisen in you. It is like an adopted child: it has not been born out of you. You have not carried it in your own womb, you have not nourished it with your own blood, with your own life juices. You can adopt a child and you can pretend that you are his mother and he is your son, and legally it is okay, but deep down you are not the mother and he is not the son... because you never became a mother! To be a mother is a long journey.

In exactly the same way, knowledge is adopted wisdom. You have not paid for it, you have not earned it. You have not drowned your heart in it. It is not your song. It is sung by others; you have heard it sung, you have learned to repeat it. Knowledge is ugly – as ugly as currency notes because they have passed through so many hands. The dirtiest thing in the world is the currency note; it carries all kinds of infections.

Wisdom is fresh. Wisdom is spontaneously arising in you; it is your own fountain. It is out of love, not out of logic; it is out of the heart, not out of the head. That is the meaning of your name: a loving wisdom.

Anand means bliss, pravino means skilful – skilful or artful in being blissful, the art of being blissful.

I have no doctrine to teach, no philosophy to offer, but only a kind of art that can make you blissful –

that is what my sannyas is – not a kind of indoctrination, because I have no doctrine. By becoming a sannyasin you don’t start belonging to a church, because I have none. By becoming a sannyasin you don’t start believing in something, because I don’t believe in anything; I don’t believe in belief.

The very word ’belief’ is against the whole spirit that I represent. The word ’belief means: believing others’ experiences as your own. It is made of two words: ’be’ and ’lief’, ’be for me’. You see and I will think I have seen; you taste and I will think I have tasted. The other has lived and you think you have lived... as if anybody can live on your behalf. Nobody can live on your behalf. You have to live it yourself. And that is the difference between belief and faith. Belief is a deception; I have seen god and you start believing my eyes – that is not going to help. At the most just look into my eyes, take up the challenge, be provoked, and start searching for your own experience. Then one day faith will arise; through your own experience it will come in.

So to be a sannyasin is simply entering into a kind of apprenticeship to learn the art of being blissful, and that is the meaning of your name.

Anand means blissful, garibo means inner poverty – a blissful inner poverty. And by poverty I mean egolessness. By poverty I mean a feeling of utter nobodiness, as if ’I exist not,’ because in that very absence the kingdom of god becomes available. When you are not, god is; when you are, god is not. So those who want to see god are never going to succeed, because while they are, god is not possible. Only one can be: either god or you.

The great Indian mystic Kabir has said ’The path of god is so narrow that it cannot contain two –

either ”I” or ”thou”.’ Again he says ’When I was, you were not, and now you have come, but where am l? You have come a little late. I waited so long for you. I cried and wept so much for you and you never came. Now you have come but I am no more. so what is the point?’

He is saying an immense truth – that the disciple has to disappear for the master to be, the devotee has to disappear for god to be. That is the meaning of ’garibo’: become so poor inside, utterly absent, and then you are spacious. In that very spaciousness god can become a guest.

People are so full of themselves that the host occupies the whole space and the guest cannot enter. Become emptiness and you can be the host. Become emptiness and you are the host, and immediately the guest comes. The guest has been waiting long – just outside you, knocking on the door – but you are so full of the noise of your own ego that you don’t hear that sound. Or even if you hear sometimes, you misinterpret. Sometimes you think it is the wind knocking on the door or sometimes you think it is the clouds and the thunder in the sky. But you never come out and you never see who is standing there. It is god. It is always god who is knocking on the door.

Once you are silent, absent, you will be able to hear the knock.

Prem means love, saralo means simplicity – a loveful simplicity. Love knows no complexity; it is very simple. The unloving person is very complex. The unloving person is in a kind of confusion and chaos. The loving person is innocent. Love makes one sincere, authentic, and the sincere and the authentic need not be complex. Only lies are complex; truth is simple. If you speak one lie, you will have to speak one thousand and one to protect it; there is no end to it.

But truth is very simple. It needs no protection, it needs no proof, it needs no hiding. It needs no cunning, no calculation. With truth one can be as open as the sky. And love is the greatest truth of life. Be loving and you will find simplicity coming of its own accord.

[A sannyasin asks about tension in her back]

I think acupuncture will be needed, so find some acupuncturist there, or when you come back here you can do it here, but acupuncture will immediately help. I can just see – your body electricity is not running in a harmony. Acupuncture will immediately help you, and once your body electricity starts running in harmony, falls in accord this pain will disappear. So find an acupuncturist there.

[A sannyasin says she doesn’t know what surrender is.]

Don’t be worried – just continue as you are and it will happen. It is happening; it just takes time.

The first surrender that one feels is almost a kind of excitement of the new; it is like a honeymoon.

Soon you settle down, mm? Then the honeymoon and the euphoria disappear; then the real work starts. And one day, if one continues to work, the real surrender happens; then it is not a honeymoon.

But it is natural: first it has to be like a honeymoon; it is a kind of love, falling in love. But when you are too excited and the euphoria is there, you feel that the surrender has happened. Soon you will have to take note of the reality and the hard facts of life, and there will be a thousand and one situations when you will say ’The ”yes” is not coming; the ”no” comes, the doubt comes. The trust is not total.’ And it is natural – nothing special about you; it happens to everybody.

This is how one grows: hesitating, doubting, saying yes, saying no, wavering. This is how one grows. But if one persists, if one remains patient enough, then one day all those noes disappear.

The ultimate victory is always of yes. But one has to wait. The impatient ones miss – the patient ones win. So just be patient.

Things are going perfectly well. You are moving on the right track. It may look very dark to you, but I can see: the morning is very close by. And then the real surrender happens. It is not something that you do – it simply happens. Any moment it can happen, and when it has happened then you know exactly what it is; you cannot know before it has happened. But then you will feel grateful for the first euphoria too, because without it the second would never have happened. So nothing to be worried about.

CHAPTER 21

Love is Madness with a Method

21 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, parijato is a flower, the name of a flower. Prem Parijato will mean a flower of love.

Man never blooms without love. Love is like spring: once you are in love, hidden possibilities start manifesting themselves, that which was latent before starts arising, surfacing. All the colours and all the fragrance that one contains are released. Love releases the potential. Without love a man is only a possibility; with love man becomes actual, real. Love is realization.

Prem means love, rupo means beauty. The full name will mean beautiful love... and love is beautiful.

Really the only beautiful thing in life is love. Without love a man remains ugly. With love everything is transformed.

To be a sannyasin means to become loving... and that makes one tremendously beautiful. Will it be easy to pronounce?...

Prem means love, and dipo means light. Love brings light and life; otherwise, all is dark. Without love there is only fear, because in darkness naturally one is afraid. With love all becomes light and fear disappears. And that disappearance of the fear is the greatest joy.

Deva means divine, ravi means the sun – divine sun. Let the sun become your meditation, and you will gain much from it. It will be very very deeply stirring for your being; it will make you awake. For a few people the sun can function as the great awakener; it depends on the type. For a few people the same sun can be very maddening. For you it will be a tremendously beautiful meditation, but you will have to find the right moments, because when the sun has risen too high in the sky you cannot look at it.

Early in the morning when the sun is just coming out – the baby sun; that’s what we call the early morning sun in India, the baby sun – soft, and you can look at it for a few moments and absorb as much energy as possible. Just drink, literally drink... become open to it, be soaked by its energy.

And at sunset, when the sun is going down again, you can again look at it.

Slowly slowly you will be able to close your eyes any moment and see the sun; then you can meditate inwardly on the sun. But first begin from the outside; it is always good to begin from the outside, from the objective, and then slowly slowly move to the subjective. Once you have become capable of seeing the sun with closed eyes, once you have become capable of the visualization, then there is no need to meditate on the outer sun, then the inner sun will function. Because whatsoever is outside is also inside; there is an immense correspondence between the outer and the inner.

Man is a very small phenomenon, but man contains the whole universe; he is a miniature universe.

Inside also there is a sun. It has to be provoked, challenged. Once it starts functioning you will see your life changing of its own accord. You will see great energy arising in you, and you will see that something inexhaustible is there. You can do as much as you want and still you cannot exhaust it.

And once the inexhaustible source is contacted, life is rich. Then it knows no poverty. Inwardly it is rich. Then nothing matters from the outside; then all conditions are almost equal. In success, in failure, in poverty, in affluence, one remains tranquil, undistracted, because one knows ’My basic energy is within me.’

...

One knows ’My basic treasure remains unaffected by outer circumstances.’

Those outer

circumstances are important only because we are not aware of the inner. Once we know the inner, the outer starts withering; its importance simply disappears. Then one can be a beggar and yet an emperor. One can fail in everything as far as the outer world is concerned, yet one has succeeded.

And there is no complaint, no scar left; one is utterly happy irrespective of the conditions. And that is something real.

That which depends on conditions is not real. It is contributed by the condition – it can be taken away any moment. People respect you, you feel good, but they can disrespect you any moment.

Your feeling of goodness, your well-being, is in their hands, and because it is in their hands you are a slave, and you will always remain afraid – they may change their opinion any day. You will have to fulfil their expectations, because nothing is without a cost. If you want their good opinion about you, you have to fulfil their expectations. You have to continuously consider them, and that consideration is a slavery. You cannot say what you want to say; you cannot be what you would like to be. You have to pretend, you have to be pseudo. You have to be smiling when really you want to cry. And you have to cry when tears are not coming.

This inauthentic existence becomes possible for only one single reason, and that is: we depend on others’ opinions. They become important, they have power over us. And the power is given by you because you depend on their opinion, because you feel good when they feel good about you. So you have to keep them feeling good about you. You have to go on feeding, nourishing them, so they don’t change their opinion. So you have to change yourself this way and that. You always have to look and see what they want – what your wife wants, what your children want, what your father wants, the mother, and the people and the government, and the society and the church. A thousand and one considerations have to be looked into. How can you be free? How can you be yourself?

One can be oneself only when one drops all these considerations.

Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples ’The first fundamental to become a man and not a machine is to drop consideration.’ And he is not saying to become rude to people; that is not the meaning. He is simply saying to let your happiness be your own. Find a source within, then you are independent.

And that is a real freedom. Political freedom is not real, economic freedom is not real; the real freedom has to be spiritual. And this is the meaning of spiritual freedom: when you remain unaffected. Somebody insults you and you remain as if nothing has happened. Somebody praises you and you remain as if nothing has happened.

[RAVI: Yes, like the state of high indifference.]

Not indifference... not indifference.

[RAVI: High indifference? I mean, caring, but not caring about the outcome of this or that. I call it

’high indifference’.]

No. The word ’indifference’ is not good in any way, because that again keeps you out of yourself.

One can learn indifference, one can practise it, and one can remain unaffected... I am not saying

’Become indifferent’; I am saying ’Find the inner treasure.’ Indifference is negative, it can be practised

– and on the surface both may look alike – but the person who remains indifferent to what people say may not have inner richness at all. He has just protected himself, he has created an armour around himself so he remains unaffected. Because he has a certain armour that screens off things and does not allow anything to go in, he remains in a kind of protectedness, guardedness; and that’s what indifference is. It is a pseudo phenomenon – it can be created easily. And always remember there is an absolute difference between what I am saying....

I am saying: you are so full of joy, you are so overflowing with joy, that nothing matters; because nothing adds to it, nothing takes anything out of it. It is not indifference; it is something immensely positive. And you will be very caring. Indifference is bound to become somehow uncaring.

... the quality and the intensity and the flavour of the groups here is totally different. It has to be different, because my concern is not with the psychological problems. Western psychotherapy in all its forms is concerned with how to solve your psychological problems. Problems are there and they have to be solved; that is the concern.

My concern is not your psychological problem but your spiritual health. And once you are spiritually healthy those problems simply disappear of their own accord.

The Western psychotherapy movement is like trying to fight with the darkness – pushing it, throwing it out, managing somehow. My effort is not to fight with darkness at all, because you cannot win over darkness. It is negative, and no negative thing can be destroyed directly. Rather, light a candle; forget about darkness; light a candle and the darkness disappears on its own.

And that is the difference between psychology and religion: psychology remains concerned about your problems what problems are there, they have to be solved. Religion says those problems are there because you are not aware of your inner reality. Those problems are only indicative, they are symptomatic. They are not really problems – they are only indications that deep down something is asleep. Bring it to a state of awareness, light the inner candle, and all problems disappear actually like darkness disappears when you light a candle.

One day or another Western psychology has to move to the positive polarity. Efforts have started

– holistic psychology and the humanistic growth movement are slowly slowly groping for something positive – but still it is a groping. Meditation has still not become part of the psychological movement, it is still something alien. And unless meditation becomes the very core of psychology it will remain half-hearted. It will help people to solve a few problems, but you solve a few and a few more are coming on the way; you solve one and another arises, because no problem can be solved permanently if your inner awareness has not come to rule your life. You can push from one side, it starts popping up from another side, unless you are full of light within.

I am not saying that then problems will not arise – problems will arise, but your clarity will be such, your light will be such, that whenever you look at any problem, immediately you will know the solution.

The problem itself contains its solution for those who know how to see into it. And the question carries its answer if one has enough silence to listen.

[Osho asks, What is the meaning of the word ’amir’?

AMIR: In my language? The top branches of the tree.]

Top branches of the tree? Very good! I will keep it. In India it means the rich. But that’s exactly what the meaning is of the top branches of the tree (chuckling).

This will be your name: Swami Prem Amir – love richness or love, the top branches of the tree; both will do.

Love is the only richness, lovelessness is only poverty, and nothing else. A loveless person has not yet been born – he is only pretending to be alive. His whole life is bogus because the soul is missing; he is at the most just the body. And life does not mean that you are capable of breathing so you are alive. Just breathing is not life. Life is much more! Unless you start sharing your being with existence you are not alive. To live like a parasite is not life. And the people who don’t know what love is live like parasites. They only exploit life and they don’t give anything in return.

The lover is one who returns a thousandfold. Love is a magical process. The lover takes much from life but gives much more back. And it is such a process that the lover is capable of giving more and of taking more, because the lover feels he belongs to existence and the existence belongs to him. He is not an outsider. He has claims over existence and he knows existence has claims over him. He is committed. So in both ways he is capable of taking more. He is capable of taking more because he knows he is capable of giving more, much more.

The non-lover is afraid to take. He is afraid that if he takes too much he will have to give back. He cannot take a deep breath, he cannot inhale deeply, because he is afraid that if he inhales deeply he will have to exhale deeply. He is so miserly – his breathing is shallow, his living is shallow, his loving is shallow. And they are always proportionate: the deeper you inhale, the deeper you will have to exhale; and the deeper you exhale, the deeper the next inhalation will go... and there is no end to this process. Love makes one rich.

And the other meaning I also liked – the top branches of a tree – because love brings one’s life to a peak, to the highest peak, to ecstasy. And it is the topmost branches of a tree that dance in the sun and whisper to the clouds and have a loving relationship with the stars. The desire of the roots is fulfilled in the highest branches of the tree. The seed has come to its total expression. That was the search of the seed: to become capable of dancing in the sun and in the wind, of dancing in the rains, of being in the company of the clouds. That was the desire, the longest, the deepest desire that the seed has carried. It is fulfilled.

And the deepest desire in the human heart is that of love. Love makes you capable of dancing in the sun and dancing in the wind and dancing in the rains. It helps you to bloom in all your colours...

it helps you to explode in all your songs. It is ecstasy..

Anand means bliss, hina means a perfume, a fragrance – a blissful fragrance.

Life passes through many phases – from the gross to the subtle, from the superficial to the profound, from the surface to the depth, from the circumference to the centre. Fragrance is the ultimate phenomenon because it is the subtlest. All that was gross has disappeared. The seed is very gross, the roots are gross, the tree is gross, even the flower – although not as gross as the seed, as the tree, as the foliage, it is still gross. Then out of the flower, the fragrance. That fragrance is utterly invisible. It is so weightless that it can rise upwards... it can ride on the winds. One can only feel it, one cannot see it.

Just like that a life also moves from the gross to the subtle. Prayer is the fragrance... or call it meditation. That is the ultimate transformation of life energies. Nobody can see it. Nobody has ever seen prayer. People have felt it. And it is not only that the person who prays feels it – the prayerful person is felt by others too.

If you come close to a prayerful person, like a great fragrance something surrounds you. You may not be able to understand what it actually is because you don’t have any experience of it, but one thing is certain, that something mysterious, something of the silent, of the unknown is there, very solidly there. One becomes silent when one is with someone who is silent. One feels a kind of meditativeness arising of its own accord when one is in close affinity with someone who is in meditation.

And so it is with prayer, love, bliss. There is no way to grasp these things but there is a way, almost telepathic – the vibe is felt.

So become a blissful fragrance, a blissful prayer.

[A sannyasin says she’s always very much afraid.... She’s afraid to talk to Osho also.]

Mm mm. There is a lighter side to this fear too.... People who are really afraid of coming closer to me are the people who can be immediately transformed if they come close to me. Hence the fear.

The mind is very very alert about its own death. It is not afraid if it sees that there is nothing which is going to happen. When its survival is at risk, only then is the mind afraid. And it is not only so with you – it is so with all the people who are really feeling me and feeling for me. All the people who are in deep love with me are afraid.

So don’t just see the dark side of it. The dark side is there because fear is dark, but the dark cloud of fear has a really beautiful silver lining to it. Pay attention to that silver lining... and you will not feel ashamed of the fear; you will really rejoice in it. Now there is no way to go back. Fear or no fear, you have to come close. You have been chosen... hence the fear. At the most the fear can delay, that’s all.

There are a few people who are not afraid to come close to me, but in fact they should be in misery –

they are unfortunate. Because they are stubborn and closed they can come close to me; they know nothing is going to happen to them. They are stonelike – you are not! You are vulnerable.

[She says: Because of this I very often feel frozen.]

That is possible, mm? because that fear can make you frozen, paralysed. So you have to come closer to me in spite of the fear. And the fear is not in you, it is only in the mechanism of the mind.

You will have to learn to separate yourself from the mechanism.

We become so identified with the mechanism that we have completely forgotten the distance. It is just the mind, and the mind is nothing but all the conditionings that have been given to you by others.

Just start observing a little bit. For example, you see a rose flower and immediately you say ’It is beautiful.’ Scrutinize it, observe: whose words are you repeating? Is this your experience right herenow, this moment, this assertion that the flower is beautiful? Is it really your experience right now or are you just repeating somebody’s words that you heard in your childhood or you read in a book? – a teacher, a parent, a friend. Just remember and you will be surprised to find: if you look deep you will be able to find ’Yes, it was some particular person who said for the first time ”Look, what a beautiful rose flower.”’ That has become part of your programme, and since then you have been repeating it; and the more you have repeated it, the more engrained it has become. Now it is almost like a gramophone record: you see the flower, the stimulus is there, and immediately the reaction from the gramophone record. The tape starts moving. It says ’It is beautiful.’ It is not you who are saying that it is beautiful. You have not even been allowed to see the flower because the programming is there.

This fear is not coming from your being either. Watch it, analyse it, go into it, and you will be surprised to discover who has taught you: it is somebody in your childhood who has made you afraid of love, afraid of strangers, afraid of the unknown – hence those voices. And you will be able to find whose voices they are: your mother’s, your father’s.... And I am not saying that they were wrong. At the time they were made they were relevant, but now they are irrelevant. You have grown up; now those programmes don’t fit. Those programmes are just hangovers from the past, but they continue because the mind knows no way of erasing them, unless you become very aware and erase them consciously. The mind cannot erase automatically. The mind only knows how to be programmed; it has no capacity to deprogramme itself.

That is one of the most fundamental problems to be encountered. And that’s what my work consists of: helping you to become aware of the programming so that you can become capable first of separating yourself and seeing that you are not the programme, and secondly you will be able, when the distance is enough, to erase many programmes which have become simply out of date, which make no sense any more. But they are carried and they will be carried to your death if you don’t separate yourself.

My own observation is that somewhere near the age of five a child becomes identified with his programmed mind. And that is the last time.... Only up to that time was the child alive because he was not yet programmed. After that he was just a mechanism.

From the age of five all real learning stops. One goes on repeating the programme in better and better ways, more skilful, more efficient but the same programme, till death... unless by chance you come across a situation, an energy field, where you can be made aware, almost forced against yourself to become aware of this whole nonsense that your mind is doing to you.

You want to come close... you in your essential being are longing to be close. Your mind says ’Wait!

This is very strange – you have never done it before.’ The mind says ’Whatsoever you have not done before, don’t do it; it is risky. Who knows what the outcome will be?’ The mind is always orthodox because it lives through programmes. It says ’Only do that which you have been doing because you are efficient in doing it, clever, it is safer, you know how to do it. Now moving with this strange man

– who knows? He may be mad! Who knows if what he is saying is right or not right? Who knows?

– he may be just deceiving! So beware!’ The mind says ’Follow the old programme – just live the way you have lived up to now. Go on moving in the same routine and there will be less possibility of error.’

The mind wants to avoid errors and life does not want to avoid errors. It wants to go through them so that much more can be learned, because we learn only by trial and error. If we stop making errors we stop learning too. And my experience is that people who stop learning become neurotic; neurosis is a kind of non-learning. One has become afraid of learning any more, so one goes on revolving in the same rut. One is tired, bored, but one still goes on revolving in the same rut because one has become accustomed to it; it is familiar, it is known. This is very unknown.

To be with me is to be with a tremendous abyss. To come close to me is to come close to your own death – it is suicidal. At least as far as the mind is concerned it is suicidal. The mind will have to die, and only then will your being have its freedom. And that’s what enlightenment is: to be free from all programmes.

So don’t be worried. It is simply indicative that something is going against the programme that you had been carrying up to now. You have come into a situation where you will have to start learning again. That means you will have to drop your neurosis. That means that whatsoever you have done from your childhood up to now, from the age of five up to now, has to be slowly slowly erased and dropped... so you become a child again and you start from where the learning process stopped –

you start again. It is going to happen, and it will be possible more and more.

CHAPTER 22

Meditation is the Path of Ecstasy

22 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, aikanto means aloneness – the bliss of being alone. There is a kind of bliss which arises in relationship, in love, with people. But there is also a blissfulness which arises when you are simply, utterly alone. The first bliss can only be momentary because it depends on the interaction of two persons. And two persons are two worlds apart; if they meet for a few moments, if really the meeting happens, it is a miracle. But it cannot be a constant state of your being; it will come and it will go. There will be ups and there will be downs, and the higher the ups, the lower will be the downs. And after each peak experience of bliss you will fall into a deep darkness, into a valley of darkness.

Love gives ecstasies but also agonies. Love gives a few moments of heaven but also in the same amount a few moments of hell too. Love has two aspects – heaven and hell both; it is a mixture. And it cannot be otherwise, because two persons are so different that even to meet for a single moment is more than one can expect or hope. And immediately the separation starts. You come closer and closer and there comes a moment when you start moving away from each other. Love is constantly in flux, waves come and go. It is ebb and flow.

But there is a higher kind of blissfulness which is attained only when one learns how to be alone. It arises from your very being, it wells up in you. And because it doesn’t depend on anybody else it can become a continuous process; you can be in that bliss forever and forever. And the search is for that bliss.

I am not against love, because love gives you the first glimpse of blissfulness. In fact love is the introduction to meditation. And those who stop at love have only read the introduction and have not gone into the book itself. Love is only an introduction to blissfulness. It gives you the first glimpses, a preview. It creates a desire, a longing. It gives you dreams of ’If it can happen for a few moments, why not forever?’

Through love one starts searching for meditation. Meditation means: bliss in being alone. That is the meaning of your name – search for it! One is really alive when one has become capable of it, when there is no dependence any more on anybody, on any situation, on any condition. And because it is one’s own, it can remain morning, evening, day, night, in youth or in old age, in health, in illness. In life, in death too, it can remain because it is not something that is happening to you from the outside.

It is something welling up in you. It is your very nature... it is self-nature.

[BLISS CONSCIOUSNESS – ANAND SUCHET.]

Consciousness and bliss are two aspects of one phenomenon: from one side it is consciousness, from the other side it is bliss. And exactly in the same way unconsciousness and misery are related, they are aspects of one phenomenon – from one side unconsciousness, from another side, misery.

It is impossible to be conscious and miserable, just as it is impossible to be unconscious and blissful.

Seek one and the other follows; there is no need to seek both.

And to you my suggestion is: seek consciousness, because that will be easier for you. Your involvement is with intelligence. Your involvement is not with feeling; your involvement is with thinking. You think too much.

The thinking person can easily become conscious; the feeling person can easily become blissful.

So for the feeling person the journey starts by being blissful; for the thinking type the journey starts by being conscious.

So transform your energy that is involved in thinking into consciousness. Rather than becoming identified with the thoughts that come to you, watch them; don’t become identified. Just see them as a procession... separate from you. They are separate. You are always a witness. Don’t get lost in the crowd of the thoughts. Remain aloof, standing by the side of the road, let the traffic pass, and slowly slowly become more and more detached, distant. The more detached you are, the more distant you are. Soon you will see that thoughts are still coming but the old rush is no more there.

Thoughts are still coming but their grip over you is lessening. They are still coming but they look pale, ill, not so healthy and strong as they used to be, because their health depends on your identification with them.

When you become identified with thought, the thought becomes very strong. It is your energy that the thought lives on. A thought is a parasite: it exploits you, can possess your whole being. The more detached, the more observing you are, the more you will see that thoughts are faraway, distant noises. Slowly slowly they lose all meaning, and the day they lose all meaning they disappear. When you don’t give them any importance they disappear. They come only because they are welcomed guests. When they become unwelcome, ignored, they stop coming. And the day that the no-thought moves in the mind, the whole energy is available to be conscious; and then consciousness rises in a vertical direction.

Thoughts move horizontally: one thought followed by another, followed by another. They move horizontally. Consciousness moves vertically: it goes higher and higher and higher. Thoughts move like a river... consciousness rises like a tree... but it can rise only if the energy is no more involved in thoughts.

So this is your work: you have to become more alert, conscious, aware of your thinking process, detached and distant. And as you become distant you will start feeling a great blissfulness arising in you for no reason at all. Just in the same gap that was occupied by thoughts, bliss arises. In the same emptiness in which thoughts were continuously gathering and crowding, bliss arises.

Nature abhors vacuum – it is true for the outer nature, it is also true for the inner nature. When you create an emptiness in your mind, immediately something that has always been there inside you, waiting for some space to spread, starts spreading. And that phenomenon is bliss.

Deva means divine, shesho means that which is always left behind. When all is gone, when all is dropped, when all that you can drop has been dropped but still something remains behind, that is god, that is divine. Thoughts are dropped, the body is dropped, the feelings are dropped. All that one can possibly drop has been dropped, but still something remains. That cannot be dropped –

that something is god!

That which can be dropped simply shows that it is not you, it is just property. My hand can be cut; that simply means that I am not it. The child disappears one day, becomes a young man; the body is no more there, the same body is no more there. Physiologists say that in seven years time the whole body completely changes – completely, not even an iota of the old remains in it. Each single cell has gone through change. If a man lives for seventy years he gets a new body ten times.

So that which changes you cannot be because you are the unchanging one. You were a child, you became a young man, you became old; you are continuum, but the body goes on continuously changing. The body is like a wheel that goes on moving, but you are something on which the wheel moves. You are unmoving. You are the centre of the cyclone. Thoughts are there all around you but you are not your thinking process, because you know when a thought passes by; you know this thought is passing, so the knower is separate, the thought is an object. And when you become full of emotion, a feeling takes possession, you know perfectly well that now you are in love, that now you are in anger. But you are not the anger; otherwise how would you be out of it? Then it would be impossible to be out of it.

People fall in love and fall out of it. That simply shows that love is just something that is happening to them but it is not their being – Something from the outside happening, an incident, an episode, but not their being.

In the East this process is called the process of elimination. One goes on eliminating: ’This I cannot be because this changes.’ Mm, you have a headache... how can you be the headache? – otherwise who would know it? And you are hungry... how can you be the hunger? – otherwise who would know it? You are in pain and you are in pleasure, but there is a separate entity – the knower, the witness.

When all is eliminated something remains which you cannot eliminate. You cannot eliminate this consciousness. You can drop everything but you cannot drop the witness.

That’s why it is impossible to imagine one’s death... impossible. There is no way to even imagine your death, because you will be a witness. You can think that your body is Lying dead like a corpse in the room, but you are seeing it so you are not dead. There is no way to imagine one’s death.

That’s why we see death happening every day, but still somewhere deep down we know we are not going to die. Some very unconscious understanding is there of ’I am not going to die’... although we know that death happens every day and we know those people were also thinking that they were not going to die and they are dead. We know that just like them we will disappear one day, but still somewhere deep down there is an understanding that knows ’I am not going to die.’ That is your reality. That reality is divine because it is immortal, formless, attributeless. So this name becomes your meditation. Let elimination be your method. Always think ’Can this be dropped or not? If it can be dropped then I am not it.’ Then don’t be too worried about it. It is good – a role, a play, an act. One has to perform so one is performing. For example: you can drop speaking but you cannot drop silence; that is impossible. So speaking is an acquired thing; silence is not acquired, it is part of you. You can drop your character – a sinner can become a saint, a saint can become a sinner

– so it is acquired They have just cultivated different kinds of habits, that’s all; the difference is not much. It can be dropped any moment: the saint can become a sinner; any moment the sinner can become the saint. It is so easy to change the role like one changes clothes. Then character is not of much value consciousness and only consciousness... because that is the only thing that cannot be dropped. There is no way to drop it. That is you.

The Upanishads say ’Tat twam asi – that art thou...’ that which cannot be dropped, which cannot be eliminated.

[He asks about his age... thirty-five years... in terms of coming into my next seven... and the relationship between you working through me or with me.]

That’s a good time, a really good time, because thirty-five is exactly the time when life changes, the time when life starts moving towards death. Up to thirty-five death is at your back. After thirty-five it confronts you, it is in front of you. So up to thirty-five a person can easily remain foolish. That’s why youth is foolish, because it is unaware of. the most important thing in life – that is death. It is almost unconscious of the only certainty in life – that is death. It is so certain of other things which are all uncertain: love, happiness, success, money, power. It is so certain about these things, which are all uncertain. Only of death is it not aware – which is absolutely certain. There is no way to avoid it; it is going to happen. In fact it already happened the day you were born. That day you started dying.

It will take seventy years to complete the course, but it started on the first day. The first breath is the beginning of the last.

Thirty-five is the most important time because that is the turning-point. If at the age of thirty-five one starts becoming interested in meditation, one has started preparing for death. Because meditation will make you aware of something which is not going to die, which cannot die, which will remain even after death. And to know it is to be fearless; to know it is to know real life, eternal life.

Psychologists are becoming aware slowly slowly that all the psychological problems that arise, arise after thirty-five, and by forty-two they become very prominent. By forty-seven they have encroached upon you from everywhere. Between thirty-five and forty-two people have heart attacks, ulcers, suicides, accidents, go mad. And these are all symptoms of one thing only: that they have not started preparing for death. These are symptoms, these are hints from your unconscious. ’Prepare for death. Look – ulcers have come; look – a heart attack has come.’ These are reminders to prepare for death. Now don’t go on clinging to the body; drop that old, foolish programme. It was good once but it is no more valid. It was good to live that way, but now you cannot live that way. Now something new is emerging in the future – the phenomenon of death – and you have to be ready for it.

In a really civilized world, just as we prepare children for life we will prepare people at thirty-five

– we will send them to monasteries, to ashramas, to retreats – to prepare for death. Just as life needs preparation – we send children to the kindergarten and to the school, to the college and to the university, to prepare for life and to get ready for life – in exactly the same way some preparation is needed for death.

To find a master is to find the place where you can slowly slowly get ready to face death; and that is the greatest adventure too. If one is ready to die knowing perfectly well that one is not dying, life has been lived well; one has not wasted it. Only death proves whether life has been lived well or foolishly. If in death a person is still hankering – hankering for life, desiring a few more days to live, asking for a few more desires to be fulfilled – that means his life has been really a wastage; he has not learned a thing.

So this is perfectly the right time to become a sannyasin.... And much is going to happen – just go on eliminating. And this will give you such tremendous insight. Somebody insults you, just see: how can he insult you? He cannot even see you – how can he insult you? He does not know even your name – how can he insult you? He is insulting his own idea of you. That is his idea – that is none of your business, so you can laugh... as if he is insulting somebody else. In fact he is insulting somebody else. There is no way for him to know you.

The more you go on eliminating, the more you will feel a great tranquillity settling. Insults don’t mean anything; praise also becomes meaningless. One succeeds, it is okay; one fails, it is perfectly okay.

People give attention to you, good; nobody gives any attention, good. It makes no difference at all.

When the opposites of life make no difference, you are settling, centring has started happening, and it brings such rejoicing. It makes you for the first time really alive. It is a rebirth. Sannyas is a rebirth.

Anand means bliss, rasen means god of the juice. The full name will mean: god of the juice of bliss.

Bliss is an inner juice, an inner nectar. It really starts flowing; one tastes it. It circulates in one’s being just as blood circulates in the body. It is a very very alive flow. Bliss is not just a thought – it is a reality. And bliss is not just a make-believe – it is a truth. It is not imagination, it is not dream.

In fact when all imagination and dreaming disappears, only then are you capable of knowing it. It is our ultimate truth beyond which nothing exists.

One has to go deeper and deeper into oneself, just as somebody digs a well in the earth and goes deeper and deeper and deeper and then one day the source of water is found. Exactly like that one has to go digging. There are layers and layers: thoughts, feelings, emotions, imaginations, memories. All these layers have to be broken; one has to go on digging. Meditations are nothing but digging methods, and if one goes on digging long enough, patiently, one day suddenly the life source bursts forth in an explosion like a fountain.

The juice of bliss starts flowing in your being and only then can you say ’God is.’ Only then can you feel grateful. Only then can you know what a gift life is.

But ordinarily we only live on the surface – thirsty, hungry. The treasure is there at the centre and we go on rushing hither and thither, in all directions, in all the ten directions. But the truth of bliss is in the eleventh direction – it is the inward direction.

Deva means god, lino means absorbed in – absorbed in god. One has to disappear, one has to die in god. Only then can god live in one. If you disappear in god, god will appear in you. That’s what is meant by the meeting; that’s what Christian mystics call ’unio mystica’. It is just as two lovers meet and dissolve into each other, but that is only momentary. With god it is eternal, hence god is the true beloved.

All other love relationships are just stepping stones. Nothing bad in them – they prepare you. They give you little bits of glimpses of what is possible... momentary unions but immensely enlightening.

They are just like the lightning in the dark night: for a moment everything becomes clear, then again there is darkness. But those lightning glimpses create a desire, an ambition, a longing, a thirst. That thirst slowly slowly helps one to move towards god.

God is the ultimate experience of love where two become one. And that oneness is not temporal, not in time, but in eternity. That is the longing of every being, and everybody is searching for it, groping in the dark. And it is not impossible it is possible; one just has to move with a little more method. That’s what meditation is: madness with a method. And if madness is with a method it opens the doors, it opens all the mysteries. I teach madness and I teach method....

CHAPTER 23

Bliss is a by-product of losing Yourself

23 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, saburo means waiting – waiting is love. And that’s really what meditation is: waiting for the unknown to happen. We cannot make it happen. Whatsoever we do will always be a repetition of the known, because we are the known. There is no way for us to make the unknown happen. Whatsoever we try to do will be a continuity of our knowledge, a projection of our past – it can’t be new. And god is new, utterly new. God is that which is still unknown.

So the only way to reach god or truth or tao is to let it happen. Man can only wait... but wait in love. One can wait in despair too, one can wait hopelessly too. One can wait in a kind of defeatism too, but that waiting won’t help because deep down one knows that he is not going to come, it is not going to happen. So you are waiting but giving yourself a deep suggestion of ’It is not going to happen. I know it is not going to happen.’ Your suggestion will be suicidal. Waiting in hope, in tremendous trust, in great love, is all that a man can do. And if this is done, god happens. God has always happened, but only to those who are patient enough to wait.

The modern mind is feeling very alienated from god for a simple reason – that never before in history was man in such a hurry as modern man is. Never was man so impatient as modern man is, and that is the barrier: modern man has forgotten how to wait. He wants things instantly, he wants them now. He cannot wait for the spring to come. He cannot wait for the seed to die and grow and become a tree. He has lost all patience. That is one of the characteristics of the modern man: he has no patience in his heart, and that is making him very ill. Constantly running, rushing and reaching nowhere, because all that the inner soul desires needs waiting, needs time, needs a relaxed stillness – no hurry, no speed, because we are not going anywhere.

We are just to be still and silent, herenow, and god comes. God has always been coming....

[A sannyasin asks: I have an idea to work with psychologists and do meditations. I think I can learn to teach the psychology of meditation. I’d like to make up courses.]

Mm mm. That’s a very good idea. It is possible – in fact psychology will never be complete unless it makes space, enough space, for meditation.

Meditation is the bridge between the mind and the soul. Psychology as it is now should not be called psychology. It is still not a science of the soul... and that is the meaning of the word ’psychology.’

It is not a science of the soul yet; it has to be. It is still concerned with the mind, it has not gone beyond the mind. It is moving in the vicious circle of the mind, and it can move on and on because the movement is circular.

Great psychologists are feeling frustrated. The whole edifice is crumbling. And those who have eyes to see can see that psychology has not been of much value. All the expectations have disappeared; man has become very disillusioned. The common masses will take time to know about it – at least a few more years – but those who are in the know of the inner situation of psychology are aware that something of immense value is missing. It is just a body without a soul, and only meditation can bridge the mind with the soul.

Psychology has to become acquainted... not only acquainted with, but it has to absorb meditative techniques into its structure. They have to become part of it, and the innermost part. Psychology can only be a temple... the deity in the temple has to be meditation.

That’s good – very valuable work. You start. Think on those lines, work. Good!

Veet means beyond, parajayo means defeat – beyond defeat, one who cannot be defeated. And who is that one who cannot be defeated? The one who surrenders cannot be defeated. One who fights can be defeated. One who tries to be victorious can be defeated, in fact will be defeated, because you cannot fight with existence and win. One can win small battles but finally, ultimately, one is defeated. There is no way for the part to win against the whole. It is as if a small wave is fighting against the ocean. How can it win? – it is simply ridiculous. Man too is ridiculous in trying to conquer nature, in trying to even conquer god. The very idea is stupid. We cannot win against the whole. We can only win with the whole, as part of it.

To surrender means to withdraw separation. To surrender means coming to see the point of ’I am not separate from the whole, so what is the fuss all about? Why am I struggling? Why am I pushing the river? For what? And in pushing the river I am being pushed by the river. The river is vast and I am constantly trembling – any moment I may be taken away, uprooted. There is going to be defeat and there is going to be death.’ Meanwhile there is continuous tension, anxiety, and one is planning this way and that how to win. The whole of life is wasted in a kind of conflict with nature, with reality.

In a thousand and one ways people go on fighting with life.

To be a sannyasin means to be surrendered, seeing ’I am part of the whole. It is ridiculous to fight, sol surrender.’ And in that very surrender you are victorious; now you cannot be defeated. There is no one to defeat you and there is no one inside you to be defeated: now only one exists. With the whole is victory and only victory. With the whole there is only joy. With the whole there is no possibility of misery.

My definition of hell is: fighting with the whole. And to be in the whole, surrendered, relaxed, at home, is heaven.

Prem means love, prabodhi means enlightenment – enlightenment through love. Enlightenment can happen through anything, but the most potential situation is love. Enlightenment is possible in any kind of situation, in any state of mind; sometimes it has happened in very absurd situations.

Lao Tzu became enlightened by seeing a dry leaf falling from the tree. He must have been in a very very silent state, ready... just somewhere near about ninety-nine point nine degrees, and that falling leaf added only the little bit that was missing, just a little weight. Slowly falling... the very slowness of the falling leaf, the utter surrender of the falling leaf, absolutely helpless.... Now, wherever the wind will take it, it will go, to the north or to the south; now it has no say of its own. Seeing that leaf falling, the idea of let-go arose in him. It was not a thought. Had it been a thought he would have missed. It was not a thought, it was an existential experience of let-go. He saw the leaf falling and he became the leaf. He saw his whole life just as a dry leaf in the wind, and that very moment... the awakening.

It has happened in strange situations.

It has happened always in such ways that they are

unpredictable. Sometimes the master hits the disciple and the disciple becomes awakened. Maybe he was just ready, just on the verge. A little push....

But love is the best climate for it to happen in, because love brings you closer and closer to a state of egolessness. It is almost like in spring when flowers naturally bloom; and love is the spring for enlightenment. So if one can remain loving, flowing, feeling for people, for existence itself – for rocks, for rivers, for animals, for trees – if one can go on continuously as if one is a song of love showering love all over, to those who need and to those who don’t need, to those who will accept it and to those who will reject it, to those who will welcome it and to those who will shut their doors in your face...

without any conditions one goes on showering it, on the worthy and on the unworthy. Love knows no distinction and love never gives itself with any condition attached to it. It simply enjoys giving.

Slowly slowly you need not even have an object to love: you become love itself. Even when you are alone, you are in that vibe, in that climate, in that state of love. It goes on pulsating; it becomes like breathing or the heartbeat. Even if you are fast asleep, it is there. That has been one of the most important things since ancient days, that a man can pretend while he is awake, but he cannot pretend while he is asleep.

If a Buddha is asleep in a room and you enter, you will suddenly feel the love energy – even if he is asleep, because now it is not a question of giving or not giving, giving in some situations and not giving in some situations. It is not a question at all of the object of love; it has become his subjectivity.

He is it. So even while he is asleep it goes on pulsating around him. A Buddha can be recognized even while he is asleep. Just the impact of love will be there, the fragrance of love will be there.

First start loving as much as you can, and then by and by the knack is learned. The more you love, the more blissful you feel. Then one day you recognize the fact ’Why not love continuously? Why not become love itself if it is so blissful?’ And if one is continuously in a state of love then enlightenment is going to happen any moment. One need not bother about it – it will come of its own accord.

Create love and it comes. Create love and you have created the situation in which it has to come.

You have created the vacuum; now it has to be filled by god.

Deva means god, prita means beloved – god’s beloved. And remember: god is searching for you as much as you are searching for god... or even more. Because our search is going to be very tiny. Our search is a kind of wavering: one moment we become interested, another moment we lose interest; one moment there is a decision to search, another moment it disappears. Moods come and go but god’s search for us is continuous.

It is not a one-way affair. If it is one-way it is meaningless. If it is one way that means that existence does not care. If it is one-way, even if you achieve god there will be no rejoicing. It will be as if you love somebody but he does not love you; it will create more anguish. It will not help, it will not bring bliss to you. It may bring more misery! But god loves us as much as we love god.

The moment we become aware of it, the search becomes very easy, because he is searching from his side and we are searching from our side. Then the possibility is more that somewhere we will meet. His hand is searching for us and our small hand is groping for him; the meeting is possible. If only we are searching then the meeting seems to be almost impossible. And if he is unconcerned, indifferent, does not care about man, even if we find him there will be no fulfilment. Love, to be meaningful, has to be from both sides.

And remember it, that existence is not careless about you or about anybody. There is immense care.

We have forgotten how to be grateful for the immense care that has been taken by the existence for us. We are not even grateful for how much has been given to us. If we become grateful, much more will be given, because it is given only to those who are in gratitude.

So rejoice for all that has been given to you, and much more will be coming. Feel thankful, and never demand in your prayers because all demand is complaint deep down. Just thank. Let every prayer be only that of thankfulness, a thanks-giving. Never ask, and you will be surprised: continuously gifts start coming – gifts that you had asked for and gifts that you never asked for. All kinds of insights, joys, celebrations, start happening of their own accord. Life takes a new turn. One is no more a beggar. One is at home, one belongs to existence. One is no more an outsider, a stranger. It is our home. To feel existence as our home is to be religious. To trust that god is searching for us is to be religious.

Philosophy enquires into god – philosophy is a search for truth, for god. Religion is just allowing god to find us. That is the difference between philosophy and religion. Philosophy is an active search:

’What is truth? What is god?’ – enquiry, questioning, quest. Religion is a kind of trustful, loving, waiting... waiting for god to come. It is just like a small child who is lost in a supermarket and waiting for the mother to come, crying maybe, tears rolling down; that is his prayer. It is just calling for his mother, but what else can he do? If he goes in search of his mother there is every possibility that the thing will become complex. It is better that he remains where the mother has left him. There is more possibility for the mother to find him easily if he remains where he has been left.

So religion simply says ’Whatever you are, wherever you are, wait, pray, cry, weep, dance, sing, and let god find you!’ That is the meaning of Deva Prita.

Veet means beyond, vivarto means illusion. The mind is a kind of illusion. It does not allow you to see the reality as it is; it distorts it. It gives its own colour to it. It projects its desires on it. It uses reality as a screen. It does not give you a clear picture of what the case is. Before it reaches you, it has already distorted it, coloured it, changed it; a few things have been dropped and a few things have been added to it. The mind is not just a passive window from which you look into reality. It is a very active, illusion-creating agent. To see reality one has to put the mind aside; one has to learn to see reality without the mind interfering.

And that’s what meditation is all about: a methodology to put the mind aside... even for a few moments. If there is no thought in you then the mind has been put aside, because the mind is nothing but the continuous process of thought, the chain of thought. If even for a few moments there is no thought in you, there is clarity. Thought is confusion; no-thought is clarity. And then the window is open. You are not doing anything to reality; you are simply allowing the reality as it is; and it is a totally different phenomenon.

To see reality as it is, is to see god. To see reality through the mind is to see the world. The world is a creation of the mind – god is an experience of no-mind.

[A sannyasin falls, sobbing, at his feet as Osho greets her. She had dropped sannyas while in the West]

Don’t feel sad. I know what you have been doing but don’t feel sad! Now it will disappear. Sometimes it happens nothing to be worried about, it is human. The mind is very clever and goes on playing so many games. But I knew you would be coming back and that these games could not be forever.

Just look at me.

... My feeling is that you simply rest – no need to worry, mm? Just rest and feel at home. And never do such things again.

Be alert! The mind is really very cunning and can find beautiful rationalizations and can hide itself behind good words. You were not wearing your mala and the mind was saying ’What is the need?

These are outer things and the real thing is inner.’ You were not wearing orange and the mind was saying ’What is the difference? All colours are good.’ But these are just tricks of the mind; this is how the mind makes you continuously waver. The mind will say ’Here in Germany it is better not to wear orange and you will be able to do Osho’s work better this way.’ But you become disconnected from me and you cannot work for me. If you don’t even have the guts and the courage to show people that you are associated with me....

And sometimes it is difficult, because all kinds of negative things are bound to happen against me all over the world, and my sannyasins will need courage to go through all those things. That will help them to become integrated. Challenges are always good because they are the fire. If you can pass through them you come out of them purer; you become pure gold. Avoid the fire and you never become pure gold. So my sannyasins will suffer, will have to suffer, but that suffering is a joy if you love me; it is not suffering at all. If you love me even death will be far more valuable than life itself.

Remember to listen to the heart and not to the mind. Sannyas is a great commitment, and it is only through commitment that you can be transformed; otherwise you will never be transformed. And you will never become part of my being. That’s why you are feeling exhausted, tired, divided. But once you decide, all that tiredness and all that exhaustion will disappear. So after counselling simply rest, meditate a little bit, dance and sing and just be here. You have to do much work, and you can. You have the capacity to do many things.

CHAPTER 24

Love has never failed

24 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, prapata means a waterfall. The waterfall is symbolic of many things. The first: it seeks depth, it is always moving towards the depth. And that should be the search. God is not there high in heaven but deep in you. Your consciousness has to become a waterfall, to seek the deepest valley in your being – and you will find god there.

Secondly: water is liquid, fluid, flowing. Life should never be rigid. Rigidity is death and fluidity is life. So when the waterfall is there, there are rocks also. The water is very soft and rocks are very hard, but sooner or later the rocks will be defeated. The feminine wins over the masculine. The soft wins over the strong. The fluid wins over the rigid. Life goes on winning over death. Death happens but life continues. Death has always been happening but it has not destroyed life; again the spring comes and again the flowers are there. Life asserts itself eternally.

So become a soft element like water and then all victory is yours.

Deva means god, pritama means beloved – god’s beloved. And it is one of the most important things to be remembered, that god is continuously showering his love on you. We may understand, we may not understand; we may be worthy, we may not be worthy – his love is constantly being showered on us. And it is not that we deserve it, it is not even that we have asked for it: it is god’s nature to shower in love. That’s what Jesus means when he says ’God is love.’ It is not something that he has to do; it is his very nature.

This existence is a very very loving existence, and if sometimes we don’t see love in existence that simply shows we are blind. That simply shows that we are misinterpreting. That simply shows that somehow our own idea of love is becoming a barrier.

The moment one opens one’s eyes with no idea, with no thought, with no prejudice, the first thing that one becomes aware of is a constant flow of love from all dimensions. From the stars, from the trees, from the earth, from people, from mountains, from every direction love is searching for and seeking you. Because we are closed and we have shut all the doors and all the windows, we remain unaware of this tremendous energy that is moving towards us.

The most basic fundamental of meditation is to become vulnerable, to become open, so that which is knocking on your door can enter, so that you can become aware of this great occasion, of this great festival that is continuously going on. And when love is understood there is joy; when love is recognized there is gratitude. When you see so much love flowing towards you for no reason, a great thankfulness arises in you. That thankfulness is prayer.

Deva means divine, pragito means a song – a divine song. Life is not prose, life is poetry, because it is not logic, it is love, because it is not matter, it is spirit, because it is not gross, it is subtle. It has immense depth and it has infinite possibilities. It is inexhaustible: one can go on becoming to no end. The adventure is an infinite pilgrimage.

The people who are sad and cannot sing miss it. It is not the sinners who miss, it is the serious who miss. In my vision to be serious is to be a sinner, and to become a song, to burst into song, is to become a saint. That’s what a sannyasin has to be.

Deva means divine, pratito means experience. God is not a theory – it is an experience. There is no proof for god, there cannot be. And all proofs are nothing but guesswork. There is no way of knowing god except through knowing. There is no other way, there is no short-cut. One has to know oneself; and by knowing I mean experiencing, not knowing through scripture, not knowing through some authority. My experience of god cannot become your experience of god; there is no way. It is untransferable.

All that can be transferred is the method, not the experience. Buddhas can show you the way, how they have travelled; they can give you a glimpse of the map that they have followed. But they cannot give you any taste of the experience that arises in one’s being when one has arrived. That remains private, utterly private. It can’t be made public; that’s its beauty.

And because it remains private, it always remains virgin; it is yours and nobody else’s. Millions of people have known god before you and millions will know after you, but your experience is authentically yours – nobody’s repetition, nobody’s carbon copy. It is unique.

Deva means divine, sangita means music – divine music. Music comes closest to god’s experience.

The most approximate language to express god is that of music because music has no language in it; hence it cannot be misinterpreted. Because there is no language in it, it cannot be misunderstood.

Because there is no language in it, there is no statement, either of truth or of god. It does not state anything – it simply creates a climate. That’s the beauty of music: without saying anything, it shows, it indicates; it is a finger pointing to the moon. In itself it is just a finger, but if you follow it, it takes you to your deepest being, and it takes you so easily, so relaxedly, so effortlessly, without any strain.

Music was born in the temples. It was the first approach towards god, and the ancient music has tremendous power in it. Just by the waves it can provoke something which is asleep in you.

Music can create anger – there is music which is used in war, for armies. It can create violence, it can make you a murderer. It can do just the opposite too: it can give you great silence and peace and it can create love in you. And the ultimate is that it can provoke the presence of god in you.

The master musician is one who can provoke god’s presence in you through his music. And what I am doing here is more like music than anything else.

Deva means god, svadesh means our country – god is our country, our real home. Without god we are orphans, without god we are homeless. Without god we are outsiders, strangers; hence all over the world the modern man feels alienated. This alienation is becoming almost chronic. It has never been so before. In no other age has man felt so uprooted. Why? – because every age has lived in the context of god. Man has always remained rooted in god. Through god his life has been meaningful. It is for the first time that man is not rooted in god and thinks he is sufficient unto himself; and that’s what is creating the whole trouble.

No tree is sufficient unto itself. It needs the soil, it needs the sun, it needs water, it needs air; it needs a thousand and one things. If it is cut off from everything else, soon it will wither away; it cannot live.

And that’s how man is withering away. Man is a dying tree. He can be rejuvenated if he can again be planted back in his natural element.

God is that element. God is not a person but just this experience of being rooted in existence – not alien, not separate, but one with it, part of it, involved in it, committed to the destiny of the whole.

That’s what the meaning of the word ’god’ is: it is an experience of not being alone, an experience of being in a togetherness with existence.

... the brotherhood of stars and planets, the brotherhood of trees and animals and birds and people.

God is the name of that feeling of brotherhood – that this whole universe is a family.

If you start feeling that this whole universe is your family, you will know what god is. It is an experiment of love... Love for all. And the moment you start growing roots in the universe, you start feeling at home. You have come back to your home, to your source. That is the meaning of Svadesh.

Deva means divine, nirava means profound silence – divine and profound silence. That is the essential part of all meditations – to be utterly silent, to be in a state where no thought stirs in you, no feeling arises, no emotion moves. When there is no emotion, no feeling, no thought, you are still, you are at rest. You are at your very centre, because there is no distraction.

In those moments man becomes aware of the reality of god not as something outside himself but as something within himself. Not that god is not outside you – he is outside too – but first you become aware of his presence inside. Only then, later on, is his presence on the outside felt, never otherwise. First god has to be experienced as your very ground, then slowly slowly you start seeing god everywhere. A moment comes when only god is, when all forms are his forms, all expressions are his expressions and all songs are his songs. The day it is felt, one is liberated from all misery, from all bondage, from all ego. And to be silent is the secret.

In the beginning it is very difficult because the mind has become so accustomed to noise. But if one persists, if you go on sitting silently in spite of all the noise of the mind, all the fuss of the mind and all the efforts of the mind to drag you, distract you, to take you away – if you persist.... And the mind will win many times and will take you on faraway journeys into your imagination into memory, into the past, into the future, but the moment you remember that you have been distracted, come back.

Don’t fight with the mind, simply come back. The mind will try again; slowly slowly you will become aware the moment the mind tries to take you away. Even before that moment you will start feeling that the mind is getting ready to take you away; then, in the very seed, the distraction can be destroyed.

First you will find yourself distracted again and again, but whenever you do, come back, again settle.

Even if for a few seconds you can be in the centre, it is a profound experience of great joy and of great peace.

So this is going to be your key: become as silent as possible and whenever you have time just sit silently, anywhere. Don’t do anything; just collect yourself, forget the world. The world continues there – you become aloof, you become distant, you are no more interested, you ignore it. Slowly slowly the art is learned, and once you have learned the art, any moment, anywhere you can go into silence. In the marketplace, standing just on the crossroads, you can go into silence. And then suddenly the marketplace is no more there for you; you have moved into another kind of space.

This is what is called the ’altered state of consciousness’. You have moved into a separate reality...

as if you have changed the station on the radio or the channel on the TV. The world simply disappears, recedes and disappears. Another world arises – very colourful, very psychedelic, very divine, where matter does not exist, where only consciousness throbs, dances. And that is the true world. This world is only a reflection of it. As if you have seen the moon reflected in the lake; that’s how this world is. When you see the moon then you will know that what you used to know before was not reality; it was just an image of reality, a mirror image.

[A sannyasin has just returned from France, he says and now it feels difficult being back.]

Just a few days and it will be okay. Mm? it always happens – that is because you are not a master of your mind. So it always happens: your mind gets involved in things in one place; you leave the place but the mind doesn’t leave. You arrive at a new place but the mind continues to think of the old. And you are not master enough to be able to just order the mind ’Be finished with the old – full stop. That chapter is closed and now this new chapter opens.’ You are not the master, that’s why this happens. Otherwise there is no problem. So it will take a few days, that’s all. For a few days the mind will linger with the old and will think this and that and will feel ’Why have you come? What is the point?’ and after three or four weeks it will settle. That is simply because the master is not yet awake and the slave is pretending to be the master.

So just do a few groups, meditate and within three weeks it will settle. It takes almost three weeks –

from three days to three weeks and it settles!

I hit only when somebody is ready for it. It is a reward! And the more one becomes ready, the more I will be demanding. So that has to always be remembered: the more you grow, the more my demands will be growing.

CHAPTER 25

Bliss is Prayer

25 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

This will be your new name... and remember that the change of name is not only a change of name but the getting out of the old, dropping out of the old continuum. It is only symbolic but it carries much meaning in it. If it is just a change of name it is not significant – then all names are the same; whether you have one name or another will not make any difference. If the old continues in the new name too, then you have only changed the label – the wine is old, the bottle is new – and that is not going to help at all.

The change of name has to be understood as being a discontinuity with the past. It has to be deeply felt as the old being dead and the new being born. Sannyas is significant only if it is a new birth.

If it remains a horizontal continuity with the past it is utterly meaningless. It has to be a change of direction, dimension. From being horizontal it has to become vertical. One has to stop being the old.

And this is one of the fundamentals to understand – that if you decide, it is immediately possible; all that is needed is a decisiveness.

It is not a question of time. Time never changes anything – it only gives the appearance of change; deep down things remain the same. Time only changes covers, clothes, but never the real essence.

It changes the personality but the personality is not you. Your essence remains untouched by time.

The essence changes only by a kind of absolute decision. It is a question of decision. If one decides, the change immediately happens. Because it is you who have decided to be identified with the personality, with the old name, with the old problems – misery, anger, sadness, and all that. It is you in the beginning who have decided to remain identified with all this continuity. It is you who can immediately break the cooperation.

And this I call a real drop-out. Dropping out of the society does not help, because the society has penetrated you so deeply. Your personality is a given thing from the society. One can have long hair, one can have orange clothes, one can become a hippie, one can become anything, but the society has penetrated one very very deeply. You have been drinking it from the first day, you have been made by it; you are a structure created by it. How can you drop it? Where are you going to drop it?

It will follow you like your shadow.

So deep down if you look into the hippie you will find the same man, the straight man. Nothing has happened – just on the surface new paint, a new whitewash, and sooner or later the hippie again becomes the straight man. Suddenly after thirty he disappears. You don’t find old hippies. Where do they go? It comes like a phase – underneath the same river flows. Sooner or later they go back to their old pattern.

Sannyas has to be a real break away. And all that is needed is your decisiveness – not a reaction against anything but a loving surrender to the new. Not that you are against the old;. if you are against the old you will react. I am not against the old – I am in love with the new. And the emphasis is very different. It is a search for the unknown. We have nothing to do – for or against – with the known. The known has been known, has been lived, we have e *cperienced it; now there is no point in going on repeating it. And there is no point in being against it either, because it has helped in its own way. It has brought you here; it has served its purpose.

So no need to feel angry about it. Never feel angry against the past; otherwise you will remain in a very hot relationship with the past. Anger is a hot, passionate relationship. Never be against the past, never feel guilty for it, never condemn it, because whatsoever it was, you have used it as a stepping-stone. Now it is no more relevant, that’s all, so you are searching for a new relevance.

That is the hidden meaning in changing the name. It is only symbolic, but if the symbol is understood well it goes really deep, cuts deep, like a sword. The old simply becomes history.

Deva means divine, kavyo means poetry – divine poetry

And that is my vision of religion. Religion is the ultimate in poetry. Poetry is just groping in darkness for religion. Religion is poetry arrived, poetry found, poetry realized. Poetry is religion on the way; religion is goal-arrived. Religion is the ultimate fragrance of poetry, and poetry is the beginning, the first step towards religion.

Poets come very close to the mystics. In their real moments of poetry they are mystics, but no poet is capable of remaining a poet twenty-four hours a day. There are only moments when he opens up, when suddenly his ego disappears, when he finds a kind of unity with existence, when he knows god is – in a flower, in a tree, in a song, in music, in a sunset. Suddenly he becomes aware of the presence of the divine, but it is only for a moment, and once the moment is gone the ego comes back, and with a revenge. That’s why poets are very egoistic too, and there is a very deep psychological reason in it.

All artists are egoistic people. You may sometimes find even a politician humble, but you will not find an artist humble. This looks very absurd. Why is the artist so egoistic? He goes on beating his own drum, he goes on shouting against the world, as if only he knows and nobody else, as if he is the first painter or the first poet or the first musician, and there is nobody to be compared with him.

I have heard about George Bernard Shaw that somebody asked him ’How are things going in literature nowadays?’

He looked very serious, sad, and he said ’You know, Dante is dead, Shakespeare is dead and I am also not feeling very well.’

He was joking, certainly, but that has been the approach, always the attitude of the artist. And the reason is that for a few moments he loses his ego, and the ego feels hurt, comes with a vengeance and claims him back, claims him too much in fact. The poetry is born when the artist disappears, but by the time the poetry is ready, the ego comes to claim it, to sign it, to make it a point that ’This is my work.’

The ancient poets have not signed their works. Nobody knows who wrote the Upanishads – some of the greatest poetry, each single statement condensed poetry; out of each single statement great works can arise, but nobody knows who wrote them. Those poets were not only poets, they were mystics. They knew that god had written it through them – they were only instrumental. That’s why Mohammed says ’It is not me who is writing the Koran; god has spoken into my ears. I am simply repeating it. If there are some faults, they are mine; if there is some beauty, it is his.’ This is the true form of a poet – he cannot claim – but in the true form, the poet becomes the mystic.

In the ordinary form for only a few moments, few and far between, does he take a jump, have an experience of the truth. Then he falls back on the ground into the valley and into the dark night, and claims ’This is my experience, my words, my poetry, my painting, my sculpture...’ brags about it. And the reason is: the ego has to compensate for its hurt feeling. It cannot forgive the poet so easily, because there was a moment when he had left it. It jumps upon the poet, possesses his whole being... but still, the poet reaches very close to the mystic, although only for a few moments.

In Sanskrit we have two words for ’poet’; no other language has two words for ’poet’. One is ’kavi’, out of which comes ’kavyo’. ’Kavi’ means the poet who is only in truth for moments and falls back.

Yes, he has flights into the unknown, but again and again comes back to the earth. Another word is

’rishi’; that too means poet, but a poet whose very state has become that of poetry. He never falls back from it. Buddha is a rishi, Mohammed is a rishi, so is Christ. They live poetry – they need not write it. They walk poetry. When they look there is poetry, when they listen too there is poetry, when they sleep there is poetry. Poetry is their very state. For the poet poetry is just an episode, but in the beginning one has to move that way. So move from being a poet towards being a mystic.

Deva means divine, navyo means new. Truth is always new. Truth has no past – truth is always present. You cannot say ’God was’; you cannot say ’God will be’. You can only say ’God is’. With god only one tense is possible: that is the present. And this is the beauty of existence – that it is continuously renewing itself. Each moment it dies to the past and is born again. And that has to be the way of a sannyasin: each moment die to the past. Drop it, let it disappear; don’t cling to its memory.

Remain constantly in the present. This moment is all, and this moment contains eternity. If one can be only in this moment then meditation has happened. And that brings benediction, because then one is always virgin, so fresh, as the dewdrops in the morning sun or newly opening flowers or a lotus in the pond. In that freshness is fragrance. In that fragrance is joy, because in that fragrance is life, utterly alive, throbbing, breathing.

My sannyasin has to be utterly alive alive, spontaneous, responsive to the moment. My sannyasin has to forget both the past and the future, because one is no more and the other is not yet. Then you are left only with this moment and the rain falling on the trees, and the sounds... and you and me.... And then there is blessing.

It is impossible to be miserable in the present. People are always miserable because of the past or the future. People are worried because they have done something in the past or something has been done to them, or they are worried about whether they will be able to do something right in the future or not. The present moment is utterly free of worry. It has a taste of the divine... the door to god opens through it.

Smell the rose, but this rose. Drink the water, but this water. Live the moment, but this moment.

And forget all. You will not miss anything in life. Life will go on showering a thousand and one joys on you. To be in the present is to be worthy, because to be in the present is to be receptive, open, unclouded.

Deva means divine, bhavyo means splendour. Life is full of divine splendour – it is just far-out! It is so beautiful that one cannot imagine a more beautiful existence. It is impossible to dream a more beautiful life. But we go on missing because we can see only that for which we are ready. The blind man cannot see the light and the deaf man cannot hear the music. And if we don’t see the beauty in life, the grandeur, that simply shows that we don’t yet have a receptive heart.

Sannyas is an alchemical process of creating a receptive heart so that you can have eyes in the heart and ears in the heart, so that the heart can start seeing and can start hearing... so that you don’t see only the outer form of life but you start penetrating into the inner core of it. It is such an immense gift to be alive, but people are very ungrateful; they have forgotten how to thank god. They never feel the awe of existence. They never feel so grateful that they need to bow down to the earth.

They are utterly stonelike, unfeeling, unseeing. And because of these people – and they are the majority – the whole of life has become ugly. It is because of these people that life has lost its joys, celebrations.

Remember: animals can play but only man can celebrate. It is man’s privilege and prerogative; no other animal can celebrate. Yes, they can play, but play is one thing and celebration is totally another. Celebration is a thankfulness; it is prayer out of gratitude. It is recognition of the gift that has been given to us... it is understanding. It is overflowing love for god who has done so much for us. Just to be alive is so festive. Even for a single moment to feel the rain and to see the sun and to be on the beach, even for a single moment to see the stars, is enough for a person to become religious.

Churches are not needed, priests are not needed, because if people cannot see the beauty of the trees they will not be able to see the beauty of the cross, because the cross is just a dead tree. And if people cannot see the beauty in rose flowers they will not be able to see the beauty of the eyes of Jesus, because those eyes are also rose flowers. If they don’t feel the wonder of the sky and the clouds and the sun, they will not feel the wonder of the presence of a Buddha.

This is my message for you on your sannyas birthday: start seeing the splendour – it is tremendous.

Feel more and more and love will arise of its own accord. One day suddenly you will be surprised –

you are praying. And then prayer has a beauty of its own when it has a surprise. A learned prayer is bogus. A learned prayer is Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. It is parrotlike, it is mechanical; you repeat it from the head. It does not arise out of your being; it does not come as a surprise.

Real prayer always comes as a surprise. Suddenly you feel one day an immense urge to bow down... not to anyone in particular but to this beautiful existence itself. And that’s how one bows down to god.

[A yoga teacher asks: sometimes when I listen to you speaking about yoga I get the feeling that I want to be flowing and I want not to be too tight... ]

Mm mm. You can be flowing even with yoga. Don’t be very rigid, help people to be flowing, and then you will come closer to the real yoga spirit. These rigid yoga teachers are not really yogis; they are just gymnasts. They themselves are rigid and they are trying to impose their rigidity on others too.

Help people to be alive, not rigid. Help people to be more flexible, flowing, adapting, human. Don’t make them into machines. It is not only a question of doing certain yoga postures. Those postures can be learned by any idiot easily; in fact if a person is an idiot he will learn faster. The question is not only of yoga postures; those yoga postures have to be used only for a certain life source inside, as a provocation. It should not become like an army drill; it should be more like a dance. Just keep that in mind and there will be no problem, and you will be of immense help.

Let yoga be a kind of dance; keep that quality in mind. Don’t be rigid and don’t try to force forms on people. Rather, help them to find their own dance. Each one has a different kind of body, and when you start forcing a certain form on everybody this is a regimentation. The form has to be used just as a jumping-board and then everybody has to find his own way to use it. Make your yoga more feminine and you will be of great help to people. That is a need that has to be fulfilled: yoga has to be taken from the rigid people.

In my new commune I am going to experiment with more flowing forms, with more freedom. Use Patanjali and his yoga postures as jumping-boards and then let everybody seek and search for his own form, his own being, for whatsoever he feels good with. The work of a yoga teacher is not to impose a certain discipline forcibly but to provoke the inner consciousness of the person so that he starts loving his body, so he starts playing with his body as if it is a musical instrument. It is!

Help the person to become aware of the mysteries of the body. There are infinite mysteries.

Somewhere in your body a Buddha is hidden – he has to be discovered. From the lowest to the highest, all is hidden in the body; the body is a ladder. You can find hell in it and you can find heaven in it. Help people to search, to seek, become more aware and alert about their bodies, about their health, their well-being, their wholeness. This is true yoga. Form is immaterial... form is only a formality. Start teaching from the form but soon help them to go beyond form. And when they transcend form they will have infinite joy and freedom available to them. They will be grateful to you and you will also enjoy the work, because then it will not be just a dead routine; it will be more poetic. And you will also be able to explore new things.

Patanjali has not exhausted yoga; nobody can exhaust anything ever. But the Indian mind is traditional. Since Patanjali they have not developed Yoga at all; they cling to the form. This is stupid. There is no need to cling to Patanjali. Pay homage to Patanjali, he is a great pioneer, but there is no need to remain stuck with him; we have to search further. Patanjali was never aware of these bodies that are available today. In Patanjali’s time a totally different body and a totally different body chemistry was available. Things have changed: man lives longer now, man has developed more capacities in these ages, more potential has become actual, man is more intelligent. Man is more loving, more aware, alert. Each new generation is more intelligent than the previous one. We have to take account of all these things. Patanjali is just a beginning and a rudimentary beginning; it has to be developed, it has to be constantly developed.

Just think: if traditional people had stopped at Newton and they hadn’t allowed Einstein because they said ’Enough is enough. Newton has done all’ – then what would the situation of physics be?

But they did not. We are not going to stop at Einstein either – we are growing and growing. If after three, four, centuries Einstein comes, he will be surprised! So should be the case with yoga.

I am very happy that yoga is getting out of this country, moving into new cultures. There it is bound to take new forms – less rigid, more exploratory. The West has much to contribute to yoga as yoga has much to contribute to the West. It is very good that many things that have remained stuck and dormant in India are moving out. It will be good, because new people will start trying new things.

New postures can be developed, new body rhythms, new breathing processes.

Think of it as an exploration. Don’t think in rigid terms. You are not just to be there like a school teacher. Then you will enjoy it. I will help you to be free of the rigidity and that will make you more and more in tune with truth.

[A sannyasin asks if his energy is negative.]

It is neither negative nor positive. It is in a kind of limbo, just on the borderline... very ambiguous.

It depends on you: you can choose to be negative very easily, you can choose to be positive very easily. You are sitting on the fence. So it depends on you – if you want to be positive you can immediately become positive.

But people who sit on the fence go on sitting on the fence; that becomes their habit. It seems to be less risky, and one can tolerate this kind of indifference...

[A couple ask about sex and love]

Mm mm. One thing: the animal side is as beautiful as the human side of love. You have some condemnation for the word ’animal’. And I can understand it because it has been taught again and again down the ages ’Don’t be like an animal’, as if to be an animal is something bad, something like a sin. Animals are beautiful, innocent, and the animal side is not necessarily the hard side. When we think of animals we think of ferocity, killing each other, blood. That is not the only side of animals.

They are very playful too and very loving too, and very soft, tender. Sex is bound to have something of the animal in it, but there is no condemnation. In fact the animal side makes it alive. The wilder the sex is, the more alive it is. You should be happy rather than creating a problem out of it. The softer side, the human side, is not against it. The animal side can become the foundation, and the love, the human love can become the temple on top of it.

Use it rather than fighting with it. There is no antagonism; the problem is just your mind-created problem. Enjoy both, and slowly slowly you will see a deep harmony between them. There is no disparity, they are not against each other. In fact, if the animal side is missing your love will not have colour, will not have passion, will not have intensity, will not be aflame, will be dull, insipid, pale. The animal side brings blood to it! The blood gives it redness and vitality.

Simply forget that it is a problem. Enjoy both, and soon they will start meeting and merging into each other and they will become complementaries; in fact, they are complementaries. But your interpretation is wrong. The animal has to play its part: it has to be absorbed by the human – not negated, not denied. And then both the human and the animal have to be absorbed into the divine.

It is a pyramid: as you go higher, it becomes smaller, but the peak depends on the base; the base has to be very big. The animal is the base of life, the human the middle of it, and the divine the peak of it. They support each other. They are in perfect harmony.

Just something that you have been told by the priests is disturbing you. Drop that – say goodbye to the priests and listen to your reality.

[A sannyasin asks: As far as I know I will be the first sannyasin in the town that I go to, where I live, and there is great publicity now and I feel insecure about dealing with the situation.]

I will make you capable – don’t be worried! All that bad publicity is going to help my work. Don’t be worried. (laughter) I am behind it – those people are doing my work! Just laugh and enjoy, and help people to understand me by your very being, your meditativeness, your love. My sannyasins will be enough to answer all that bad publicity. Seeing you they will see something of me, and that is the only proof that something beautiful is happening here. You will be the proof, so don’t be worried at all. Just be there and enjoy all that bad publicity about me!

[A sannyasin says that she’s been alone for the past month, travelling in Ceylon and visiting Buddhist monasteries. She’s begun to feel a rather lovely centring within her but she wonders if it’s really real.]

It is true you need not be worried; it is not imagination. And many more things will be happening, so allow them and enjoy them and never for a single moment doubt. Now it is time – the doubt can be dropped. Trust! Things have started happening.

In the beginning when nothing is happening doubt is a very good instrument – it prepares you. When things have started happening doubt can be put aside. Then trust helps; now you need trust. The days of doubt are over, that dark night of the soul is finished.

So trust in the morning sun and just go with those experiences. They are true and if you trust them, much more will be happening. I am going to be there with you!

[A sannyasin couple: the swami asks about jealousy and awareness]

Just remain aware and it will go. Nothing else has to be done about it. Jealousy can remain only if you are unconscious of it. The moment you become alert, it starts going. Just remain watchful.

Bring it completely to your awareness, and when it grips you just sit silently and see the whole cloud that surrounds. And don’t leave anything unseen. All the parts, the whole mechanism, has to be seen, and then it will disappear. Nothing to be worried about.

It is very human, mm? – because we have been made in such a way by the society that jealousy is the outcome of it. The whole life’s conditioning is to be jealous. The school, the college, the university, the parents, the society – everybody wants you to be jealous, because only out of jealousy can ambition be created, only out of jealousy can possessiveness be created, and only out of jealousy can you be made to become powerful, rich. If jealousy disappears this whole edifice of the society will fall. It is founded on jealousy; jealousy is the cornerstone of this society. It pervades everything, permeates everything.

So it is nothing to be worried about, mm? – this is just because you are born in a jealous society which depends on jealousy, lives on jealousy, so it has penetrated your blood, your bones. Just become aware and slowly slowly it will disappear.

[To the female partner who says she is not sure what to do about it.]

Just remain natural, as you feel. You need not think of changing yourself. Just be natural and relaxed, and whatsoever the moment brings, go into it. Sometimes it will bring suffering and agony and ecstasy – one has to pass through all those things.

It is too early for you to observe. It is good for Krishna Saraswati to observe. If you observe, it will become repression. For you it is better to get involved in things and suffer a little more...

... Let him observe because he is an old sannyasin, a very ancient seeker! But you are very new and American – just remember it! And he is pure Indian: he can observe easily. You will not be able to right now; it will create trouble. And if you observe and try to control, then you will take revenge on him. You will be angry with him. Rather than being loving you will hate him, because it is because of him that you are doing all these things; your freedom is lost.

And these words – freedom, love, awareness – have different connotations for different people.

When an Indian thinks of freedom he means one thing and when an American listens to the word

’freedom’ he thinks of something else. They are not the same words because they fall on different minds. And psychology is not growing because psychology goes on thinking as if there is only one mind in the world. It is not true – there are as many minds as there are conditioning systems; one psychology won’t do. There have to be as many psychologies as there are minds. You can do one experiment in psychology in America – it won’t be relevant when you work on an Indian mind.

That is my problem here, because so many people are here from so many different countries with different conditionings. It is really a great problem. In the new commune I will have to create different types of groups. All groups are not for all. For example, all the groups that are being run in the ashram are good for the Western mind. Japanese people come and the groups are irrelevant, absolutely irrelevant, because they have a totally different kind of psychology; they need a different kind of group.

So this is for him – he should observe – and for you, be involved in things and move moment to moment. Soon you will also become capable of observing, but a little more suffering is needed!

CHAPTER 26

Whenever you are Joyous you are in God

26 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[To an elderly sannyasin]

Because the last days of the life should be totally devoted to prayer, to meditation, to god. One has to prepare for death. And death is more important than life, because life is just superficial. Death will take you to the ultimate core of existence. It will reveal to you the eternal. Much has to be prepared; otherwise people die in a state of unconsciousness. They live unconscious – they were sleep-walkers in their lives – and they die unconscious. They miss all.

Death has to be explored, and with tremendous joy, because you are not going to die! You are the very principle of life – there is no possibility for it to be destroyed. Only the shell around you will die, only the body will be gone, not you, and when the body falls you become infinite, you become unbounded. So the preparation for life is very ordinary; any school, college, university can do it.

Now you have to be part of my university. We teach death – how to prepare for it and how to be able to celebrate it.

If one can die dancing one has overcome death. And that is the whole purpose of life: to overcome death, to know that death is false, to experience that life never begins, never ends, to come to an existential understanding of one’s own eternity, timelessness....

[A sannyasin asks: ”whether all my intellectual efforts to read and write about you and what you’re doing, the work, could complement my personal development or whether it was necessarily antagonistic to it.”]

There is no problem at all. It will be perfectly good for you; it will be complementary. You are not basically an intellectual person, so intellect is not a danger for you. Basically you are a heart person, and then the intellect can be used as a servant; there is no problem in it. The problem arises only when the intellect becomes the master and the heart is reduced to being a servant. When intellect starts controlling your feelings, your being, then the problem arises. The mind is one of the most beautiful servants and one of the most ugly masters. If it remains a servant it is a beautiful mechanism.

You can use it perfectly well – your energy is not there. Your energy is in the heart, in the body, and very flowing. You cannot be exploited by the head. You can use it, it cannot use you; hence there is no problem at all. You can go as deeply into intellectual work as you like; you will remain unaffected by it. In fact, you will feel more enriched by it.

The mind is not always wrong. Nothing is always wrong and nothing is always right; it depends on the context, it depends on the whole gestalt. Something may be a medicine to one person and to another person it may prove poison. So there are no general statements possible; all statements are personal. They refer to a particular person. What I am saying to you is only right in reference to you. Now there are so many people...

The statement is made personally to you; it is not made to anybody else. You are not a head person at all, and one who is not a head person can use the head and can remain unaffected, uninvolved.

Then the head is just a biocomputer. You can use a biocomputer, you can use any computer. You can use it, you can possess it, but you are not possessed by it; you can put it aside any moment.

The problem is when a person starts thinking that he is the computer; then he cannot put it aside, then he is identified. He has lost all distance between himself and the mechanism that surrounds him. He becomes the body or becomes the mind, but he always becomes something which he is not. And the moment you become identified with something you start leaving your inner centre and you start becoming focussed somewhere on the periphery.

When you become identified with something in your personality, you have forgotten all about your essence; and that is where you really are, that is really where you belong. Whenever he gets identified with the mind, the body, or anything, he has lost his soul – this is the meaning of ’losing the soul’ – and then his life becomes a pseudo life because he has become identified with a role. It is just as if you have been playing the role of Hamlet in a Shakespearean drama and you become identified with it. When the curtain falls and you come home you still remain Hamlet, and you talk to your wife as if you are Hamlet... then the problem. Then you are becoming neurotic. To be identified is the fundamental of neurosis; to remain unidentified is the fundamental of health, of wholeness.

When you are not identified with anything, you are whole. You use everything and yet you remain intact, detached, far away, a witness on the hills.

It will be perfectly beautiful you have to use all your intelligence for my work, because I am not going anywhere. I never write a single word. Many people have to help me and help the work to spread, because millions are in great need. And you can become a perfectly beautiful vehicle for me!

[A sannyasin describes a sense of constriction that she feels since two years...”I wake up sometimes drenched in sweat and a feeling of tremendous anxiety... The heat comes and goes the whole day

– I’m more aware of the anxiety that comes with it, and sometimes it wakes me up actually. When I feel myself begin to open and flower... then it’s almost as if something moves behind my eyes and they become really hard. I think it has something to do with this.”]

Just three things to be done....

The first thing to be understood is that it is not any block in you. It is not anything negative, rather, something growing that wants a way, something which wants to flow and cannot find an outlet. So the first thing to be understood is: cherish it, welcome it. Don’t think in terms of it being something wrong that has to be dropped; it is something that has to be helped. It is not a symptom of illness but a symptom of growing health.

It is just like a child starts growing and then the old clothes no longer fit. Your consciousness is growing and your old structure is small. It happens to every growing person: the structure always falls short That’s why millions of people have decided not to grow. It is convenient not to grow, because then you and your structure always fit perfectly well. Then you never feel any difficulty with the structure. Otherwise a growing person will have this difficulty continuously every day, because he will grow and the structure will belong to the yesterday. His today will become more and more expanding and all the yesterdays have to be broken, all the investments in the yesterdays have to be broken.

So it is a very beautiful growing phenomenon. You have to help it. You have to listen to the indication

– that your structure, your pattern, your gestalt, that you have lived up to now, is no more capable of containing the consciousness that is growing in you. The plant is becoming bigger and the pot is very small. It has to be planted, replanted, into a bigger pot or somewhere in the soil so it needs no pot at all. This understanding will help you tremendously. Once your perspective changes you start looking at things in a different way: you become more friendly.

Don’t be antagonistic to it. And never feel any antagonism towards the past, because the past has helped in its own way. It has brought you up to now; it has worked, it has been useful. This structure that is becoming painful today has been of immense value: it has protected you up to now; now it is no more needed. In dropping it never feel guilty either, because this structure was given by your parents, your society, your church, and to drop it looks as if you are betraying them.

That’s why people don’t want to drop it – they cling to it as if it is a gift. It is not. In a certain moment it was needed. A child needs all kinds of protections, but sooner or later the child no more needs those protections. But those protections become engrained and they continue, and sooner or later there is a conflict between the structure and the consciousness.

So only two ways are there. One is: don’t allow the consciousness to grow. Then you are perfectly at ease, but that ease is like death, and at a very great cost. The other possibility is: break the structure.

And it is easy to break it if you are friendly, understanding, loving, thankful to the structure, because it has helped you up to now, it protected you.

[She says: It made me very afraid of life.]

No, nothing – those fears create antagonism. Nothing has to be feared, it has only to be understood.

The whole of one’s life has to become just a story of understanding – no fear, no anger; nothing is needed. They are unnecessary hindrances to understanding. When you are afraid you cannot understand; when you are angry you cannot understand. Your eyes are so full of anger, fear, that you cannot see; the smoke of anger, fear, is so much, it is impossible to see through it. There is no need to get involved in these emotions. This is just to become a background.

You have to do two things which will be helpful. One is: every night before you go to sleep, sit in your bed, turn the light off. Become a small child, as small as you can conceive of, as you can remember

– maybe three years old, because that seems to be the last memory; beyond that we have forgotten, almost completely forgotten. Become a three-year-old child... all darkness and the child is alone.

Start crying, sway, start gibberish, any sounds, any nonsense words. No need to make any sense out of it, because whenever you start making sense, you start controlling, censuring. No need to make any sense – anything goes. Sway, cry, weep, laugh; be crazy and let things come, and you will be surprised: many sounds start coming, surfacing. Soon you will get into it, and it becomes a great, passionate meditation. If shouting comes, shout – to nobody at all, unaddressed; just enjoying for the sheer fun of it for ten to fifteen minutes.

Then go to sleep. With that simplicity and innocence of a child, go to sleep, and within a few weeks those nightmares in the night will disappear and in the morning you will not feel sweaty and you will not feel the constriction. This will be one of the most important things to melt the whole structure around your heart: become a child again. This is for the night.

And in the daytime whenever you find any possibility... if you are on the beach run like a child, start collecting seashells, coloured stones. Or if you are in the garden become a child again; start running after butterflies. Forget your age – play with the birds or with the animals. And whenever you can find children, mix with them; don’t remain adult. That is whenever possible – just Lying on the lawn, feeling like a small child under the sun. Whenever it is possible be nude so again you can feel like a child.

All that is needed is to connect yourself with your childhood again and then it will disappear, because it started there and you have to catch it back at the moment from where it started. You have to go back in time, in your memories. You have to go to the root, because things can only be changed if we catch hold of their roots, otherwise not. One can go on cutting the leaves of a tree – that is not going to help, pruning the branches, that is not going to help. In fact, pruning the branches will make the tree thicker; more foliage will come. Cut one leaf and three leaves will come. And that’s what people go on doing. This is symptomatic treatment.

Go to the roots, from where it started. It must have started somewhere when you were about three, because almost always all structures arise at that time – with boys when they are about four, with girls when they are near about three, because girls become intelligent one year earlier than boys.

So that difference... but somewhere near about three. If a child has been very precocious then maybe two and a half or two, but that is very rare. So just do these two things.

In the night, this has to become a meditation – every night – and you will be surprised how relaxation comes and how deep your sleep becomes, how restful. In the morning you will not feel that you have been going through some nightmares and are sweaty and have constriction. No, on the contrary: you will feel so utterly relaxed. Loose, again a small child with no rigidity. Then in the daytime whenever some possibility arises don’t miss any possibility to become a child. In the bathroom just standing before your mirror make faces like a child would. Sitting in your tub splash water just like a child would or have plastic ducks and things to play with; you can find thousand and one things.

The whole point is: start reliving your childhood. And this will be gone. And when it is gone you will feel real flowering. Something is there ready to bloom, mm? – but the space is not available; the space has to be created.

CHAPTER 27

Meditation has to be a Love Affair

27 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A mother with her child says she feels resistance and indecision.]

It is on the right track. It is how trust arises. Trust arises out of the dark night of doubt. One has to go deep into doubt to find trust. Trust is not something that you can find by dropping the doubt. If you drop the doubt forcibly your trust will always remain shaky. It will be at the most a belief, not a true faith – and belief is impotent. It appears to be like trust but it is not; deep down there is doubt. On the surface, belief; at the centre, doubt. It is better to have the doubt on the surface and trust at the centre – that is far better, and that’s what your situation is. At the centre there is trust; you are not aware of it because you are not aware of your centre either. On the circumference there is doubt.

You are aware only of doubt because you are aware only of your personality, not of your essence.

But I can see: the trust is there, the seed is there. It is trying to come out. Soon it will be available to your consciousness... just a little more waiting.

That’s why I am sending you back; otherwise I would have told you to stay. I say to stay only when I see that your circumference and centre have fallen in harmony, that you are one, because only then will being here be of any value; then only can you really be with me. Otherwise whether you are in England or in Poona will not make much difference.

I am sending you knowing that you will be sad, that you will be in a kind of suffering and agony. You would have liked me to tell you to stay but that will be against your own growth. One day you are going to be here and forever, but that day we have to wait for, and we cannot force it right now. A forced thing never works. A forced thing remains pseudo, creates a kind of hypocrisy. And because I can see that the possibility will soon become an actuality, I am ready to let you suffer a little bit.

This suffering is good.

If I say to you ’Stay, don’t go,’ then too you will suffer, and that suffering will be bad because half of you wants to go and half of you wants to be here. If you are here, the other half that wants to go will make all kinds of troubles for you, all kinds of interferences with your being here. It will find all the negatives that are possible. It will continuously argue with you: ’Look what you have done and I have always been saying to you ”Go back home.”’ It will make you more and more shaky and wavering. It will work on you with a vengeance. If you go back, just the opposite will be the case.

This is the inner alchemy. This has to be understood: if you go back then the part that wants to be here with me will suffer and will find all the positives, will find all the negatives there, and sooner or later will be able to defeat the negative part. And the positive ultimately wins; we just have to give it a right situation, a right space to happen.

So on the surface it looks as if I am sending you; deep down this is the only way for you to be here one day. This is the only way that you will come closer and closer to me; far away there you will think more of me. Far away you will see the utter uselessness of the part that says ’Be in England.’ There is nothing.... You have lived there, you have lived a certain kind of life – maybe it is convenient and comfortable, secure. Here life may not be so secure, may not be so comfortable, but here life will be growing and there you will only be dying. There you will be in a kind of stagnant stasis. You will live with the past but you will not have any future. You will live in a comfortable grave; that’s how people are living.

Here my whole work is to pull you out of your comfortable grave. To come out of the grave is risky.

To come out of the grave after a long time, into the sun, in the wind, in the rains, looks insecure. But that’s how life grows.

You can put a potted plant in the room: it may survive but it will lose lustre, it will lose joy, it will lose life. It may survive and comfortably – there will be no wind and no danger and no rain and no sun burning hot and showering fire, no fear of animals or anybody destroying it in a beautifully modern decorated drawing-room. The pot can be there, the plant can be there, it can survive but it will survive at the minimum.

Back in the garden, surrounded by all kinds of dangers, it is not only a survival, it is a celebration.

Then it will have the joy that happens when you accept challenges and the growth that happens when you fight with challenges, when you overcome them.

Life should be an adventure, and sannyas is nothing but an adventure into your inner world. I know your longing and I trust your longing and I will wait for the right moment when you can say with your total heart that this is the only place where you would like to be, whatsoever the cost. Then this is your home! But I will have to wait and you will have to wait for the total mind to say it. And that day is not far away, so don’t be worried.

[Her child asks: What is my meditation?... I don’t know what a meditation is.]

That’s good! Mm, but you want to know? Mm mm. Start dancing! Wild dance is your meditation.

[To the mother] Tell him to go to the music group in the night so he can start dancing there, [to the child] and when you are back home for at least twenty minutes, thirty minutes every night, dance.

Put on any music and dance, enjoy dancing, and that will be your meditation.

Anand means bliss, mandir means a temple – a temple of bliss. Man is born to be blissful. To miss it is our own responsibility. You cannot blame anybody else if you miss bliss in life. People go on blaming others. That is just an effort to save their own face, but it is foolish. And the more you blame others, the less is the possibility of your becoming blissful. To blame others means that your bliss depends on others; you have taken a very wrong standpoint from the very beginning.

Bliss does not depend on anybody else; it is independent. It is your self-nature: it is already there, just to be recognized, welcomed. It has to be accepted, not produced, because it is already the case. To blame others means you have moved in a wrong direction. Now you will always think that others are preventing you from being blissful, and you can always find a thousand and one causes for not being blissful. Not a single cause is valid.

Misery comes from outside, misery has causes outside; bliss does not come from outside. It is you, your very being. It is uncaused; it is not an effect of some cause. Once this is understood the blaming mind stops. And to stop the blaming mind is to take a tremendously significant turn. Then you start looking in a different direction. If you are not feeling blissful that means you are not being harmonious with your being, that’s all; that you are not in tune with your being, that’s all; that your mind is moving in a different way from your real nature; that there has come a disparity between you and your mind; that the mind is dragging you towards the south and your being is going towards the north – hence the problem. When the mind follows like a shadow, when you are the master and the mind is the slave and when it is always in tune with you, there is always bliss.

Respect the body because it is the temple. It is the most beautiful thing that has happened in nature. But people condemn the body too; those condemnors will find something or other. They will condemn the society, they will condemn the economic structure, they will condemn this and that –

education, parents, family. And when they cannot find anybody else to condemn, when they have moved alone into the forest, they will condemn their own body; the old habit persists. They will say

’It is because of the body, this wretched body, this enemy. It is driving me crazy and because of it I cannot feel peace and blissful. Sol have to get rid of the body.’ Then they start trying to get rid of the body, and in the name of spirituality many schools of suicide continue in the world; they are just suicidal. Then they start torturing the body, fasting, beating the body, making everything as uncomfortable, as inconvenient as possible. They devise new methods and means of masochism.

But this is not the way to be blissful. And when you destroy the temple, you are hurting the deity within.

The temple is a beautiful shelter for the deity. Use it, love it, and try to find out what is hidden in it.

God is hidden in it.

Deva means god, paro means transcendental.

God is another name of the beyond; god is

not a person. God is the unknowableness of existence... the mysteriousness of existence, the unfathomableness of existence. To reduce god to a person is to destroy the whole beauty of the idea. Then people start worshipping, because god becomes a person. What else is there to do? –

worship, praise, pray. This is how religion goes on the wrong track.

The moment god becomes the mysteriousness of life there is no question of worship but of enquiry, of adventure, of exploration. When god becomes the unknowableness of life then religion need not become worship. Then religion has to become wonder, awe... and then it is tremendously alive.

Worship is dead, wonder is alive. So I say wonder is real worship. To be in awe is to be in prayer.

Whenever you are in awe your mind stops of its own accord.

Seeing a beautiful sunset the mind stops, maybe only for a few seconds or just for a second, but in that very second there is prayer. In that vibrant, alive moment you are transported into another world. The beauty of the sunset has taken you into the mystery of mysteries, into the holy of holies.

For a moment you are not a mind but an expanded consciousness, unbounded. You are no more confined in the body – you are as vast as the sky itself. For a moment the observer becomes the observed: you are not there separate from the sunset looking at it, you are it... and that is the moment of prayer. Not a single word is uttered and the prayer is complete. You have not even bowed down and you are surrendered. You have not quoted the Bible or the Koran or the Geeta, but in that moment is contained all the Bibles and all the Korans and all the Geetas.

This is the meaning of the transcendental; and once you start thinking of the transcendental, you will find god, any moment, anywhere. A bud is becoming a flower and you will see the transcendental beauty of it. Suddenly in the silence of the night a bird starts calling and the silence becomes deepened... and there is the transcendental! Somebody looks towards you with great love and in those eyes, in that moment, in that contact, is the transcendental.

Once god is not a person you will come across him here and there and everywhere. Jesus says

’Cut the wood and you will find me there. Turn the stone, and look – I am there!’ Then each leaf has a beauty, each stone has a divineness and each moment becomes suffused, luminous, with the unknown and the unknowable.

To live in this utter grandeur of life is to be a sannyasin.

Deva means divine, hanso means a swan – it is a metaphor for the soul: the divine swan. In India the swans live deep in the Himalayas. They come only to the plains when it is too cold there; and when the season is over, the winter is over, they go back. When they are on the plains they suffer very much... nostalgia for the Himalayas, the virgin beauty of the Himalayas, the silence. And the lake Mansarovar where they live in the Himalayas has the purest water in the world. Man has not yet reached there to pollute it. I think it will be the last place in the world to be polluted. Rarely, once in a while, a traveller, a pilgrim, reaches there... very rarely.

Naturally the swans suffer very much because here they have to live in dirty ponds – muddy, polluted, poisoned, and the noise, the people, the ugliness – so they continuously dream of Mansarovar, of the lake in the Himalayas. They continuously think about how to go back. Even to wait for the few months of winter is too difficult; they feel homesick.

Because of this the metaphor arose that the human soul is a swan, a white swan. Its home is in god, hence on the earth, in the world, it suffers and it longs to go back to god. Religion is nothing but a return journey. It is a search for the home, a search for the source, a search for the original face.

Remember: man is an outsider in the world; hence the feeling of alienation. One cannot feel at home here. We do everything to make ourselves at home but still something deep down goes on saying ’This is not the place. Sooner or later we will have to leave; it is not more than a caravanserai, just an overnight’s stay and in the morning we will have to go.’ Deep down someone goes on saying

’Remain detached. Don’t get too entangled because soon you will have to leave and all those entanglements will become a very deep misery. Remain unattached, aloof. Just be a passer-by, a pilgrim who passes through many places but never makes any place his home.’

This world is a pilgrimage – don’t get lost in it. Even while you are in it, go on remembering god.

[Osho speaks in Hindi to an Indian sannyasin and then in English:]

No, nobody can succeed by trying. Trying to forget means that you are again remembering. Trying to forget means remembering and remembering. The very effort to forget will not allow you to forget.

That is not the way. Just the opposite will be the result if you try to forget something. Nobody can try to forget.

Have you not heard the famous story...? A politician was continuously going to see a saint and he was asking again and again ’Give me a mantra so that I can become the Prime Minister of the country. You are an enlightened one and you know all the secrets of life. Why not give me a little key? This is my only ambition.’

Tired of the politician, to be finished with him, the saint said one day ’Okay, now I will give you one

– this is the mantra, just a small mantra. Five minutes chanting of the mantra will do, but remember only one thing: while you are chanting it, don’t think of the monkey.’

The politician said ’This is so simple. I have never been thinking of the monkey. For my whole life I have never thought about the monkey. Why should I think about the monkey? What kind of condition is this?’

The saint said ’Then you can go. Just take a good bath, sit silently, repeat the mantra for five minutes, but remember: don’t remember the monkey, that’s all. That is the only condition to be fulfilled.’

The politician was awake the whole night. He would take a bath again, would sit for five minutes and would try, but the moment he tried, monkeys and monkeys – not one but many! He tried and tried to forget the monkeys and the more he tried to forget, the more they were there mocking him and shouting at him and making faces at him. By the morning he was almost mad!

He rushed to the saint and said ’What have you done? If you had not told me about this monkey I would have succeeded, but now it seems impossible – in this life. This mantra won’t be of any use, because that monkey I cannot forget. It is impossible and I have tried all that I can do to forget it.’

Now, this is a simple psychological process: if you want to forget you will never forget. That is not the right way. One thing – this has to be understood: never try to forget anything, otherwise you will never forget.

The second thing: people think that because they have loved so much, that’s why they cannot forget.

That is wrong, utterly wrong. You may feel hurt when I say that. People cannot forget because they have not loved enough; hence there is a guilt feeling. If you have really loved the woman then there is no problem. But the problem is that nobody loves enough. It is not only a question of you: nobody loves enough. And when the woman is there, who bothers? Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow – we will love tomorrow. Today let us fight then tomorrow we will love. And today there are small things, just small things and quarrels, and everything... jealousies and possessiveness and domination. We hope that tomorrow everything will settle. We will become wiser and she will become wiser and then there will be great love.

Now, the problem is that tomorrow will never come. The woman is dead, so you are feeling guilty.

It is not because of love. Love can forgive and forget. Love has that capacity to forgive and forget.

Love is immensely powerful.

The question is guilt. You are feeling guilty: you didn’t love the woman as you should have and now there is no opportunity left. Now you will not see her again, never meet her again; now that unfulfilled love haunts you. You would like to cry and weep and ask forgiveness of her and say ’While you were here I couldn’t do anything for you. Now you are gone and I cannot do anything because I don’t know where you are, or whether you are or not.’

This creates the problem, so this is the second thing to understand. If you go on thinking that you are remembering her because of your love, then you will never forget, because that gives you a great joy – that it is because of love. You are not like others: their woman dies and the next day they are ready to marry again, you are not like those people. You are taking a great ego interest in it, that you loved so much you cannot forget. Now the very idea of love will be an ego gratification. These are the tricks of the mind that have to be understood. It is nothing to do with love.

If you loved the woman, it is over. She is gone and you loved her as much as you could. What more could you have done? Even if she was alive your love would have been just a repetition, and all repetitions are boring, they are tedious. What else was there to do? All that you could do you have done. It is not because of love. But the mind is very cunning: it hides things behind beautiful names.

Guilt is there; the mind will label it love, and then it can protect it. Once you see it is guilt you will not protect it, you will not feel any ego satisfaction in it. The guilt has to be dropped.

The third thing to be understood is: our commitment is not towards persons, our commitment is towards love itself. If you are really ready to understand, that woman was only a personification of womanhood, one form of womanhood, and there are millions of women in the world, all forms of the same womanhood. Start loving again! My own understanding is this, that if you have enjoyed a woman’s love, you owe it to her to start loving somebody else. If love has been such a deep satisfaction then you will be committed to love.

The people who never get married again because the woman died or the man died go on bragging that because they loved so much they cannot get he married. All nonsense! In fact their love has been such a failure that they are afraid to go into it again. If love has really been a success, they will immediately be ready to go into another love experience, with another form of womanhood, with another form of manhood.

The commitment is to be towards love – and there is no betrayal in it; you are not betraying anybody.

Those ideas have to be dropped. In the Indian mind particularly those ideas are very deep – that if you get married, if you love another woman, you are betraying. That is nonsense! If you don’t go into love again, that is betrayal – betraying love, betraying the woman. It is an insult to the woman who died, because she could not make you so satisfied with love that you would like to have the experience again with somebody else. She made you so nauseated with love that you have become afraid of moving into another relationship again.

My approach is totally different: if you really loved that woman, love again; love again and again and again. And you will be surprised that when you are again in love with another woman you will feel tremendously grateful to the woman who has died. She has made you so in tune with love. She has given you the taste of love so that now you can love again, so that you can love somebody else too.

And if you love the other woman you will find the same energy again, because it is the same energy; only forms are different. Man and woman – there are only two lovers in the whole world. All else is just non-essential.

So become available to love again. Otherwise your love energy will remain stuck, and with nowhere to flow it will start moving in a vicious circle, remembering the woman again and again and making a wound inside. It will become ill. It will be like a psychological cancer. And the woman who has left you will not be happy; she will suffer because you will be suffering. Wherever she is she will suffer.

If she really loved you, she will be happy when you are again flowing, loving, enjoying. In those moments of enjoyment you will feel grateful to the woman, and that will be true love.

So my suggestion is: find another woman, and this time don’t get married. This time, fall in love and then get married. Let love be first and marriage second; this will be the right approach. Otherwise you will become pathological, unnecessarily ill and suffering. And there is no point in it. We all have to go; sooner or later you will die. Before you die, let your love flow; let somebody become happy through your love. Share it!

You have come to the right person! If you go anywhere else in this country you will find wrong suggestions given to you. This country carries a very very morbid mind. And they will help you –

they will say ’You are great!’ They will say ’This is how one should be. You are a true Indian; you represent the true image of India.’ You simply represent a kind of pathological tradition.

Drop all that nonsense!

Feel happy and start moving again. One should not be finished by so small a thing. Love is greater than persons. Persons come and go – love continues. And you are alive, you can breathe. Don’t feel any betrayal.

This country has even done that! In the past this country created the idea in women’s minds that if their husband is dead they don’t have the right to breathe, because that is betrayal. So they should jump in the funeral pyre with him, become a ’sati’, bury themselves alive. What ugliness – supporting suicide! And poor women have been killing themselves because the idea was planted in their minds

’When your husband is dead, how can you live? To live means you are betraying. Even in living you are betraying!’ Now we know that was nonsense.

In the same way sooner or later the country will have to understand that when you are alive you have to love too. Love is a function of life just as breathing is. If you can breathe, if you can eat, if you can take a bath, if you can sleep, then why not love? To destroy your love means to live half-heartedly, and then naturally you will think of the past. You will remain past-oriented because there is no future. You know now you are not going to love anybody, so all that you can do is to go again into those memories and make them more and more painted and colourful. They may not have been as beautiful as you are thinking, but a hungry mind will paint them very colourful and very beautiful.

Never get too attached to the past, because the past is gone and gone forever. Remain available to the present and to the future. That is the meaning of being alive: if you are alive you have to breathe, you have to love, you have to share. This has to be the change that you have to bring...

and with this sannyas, let the whole past disappear.

[A sannyasin says: I’ve been feeling, especially for the last week, that I’ve had tastes and experiences of bliss, ecstasy and the divine. In the last week I’ve been experiencing a lot of pain as I experience all my blocks and how asleep I am and how much my mind distracts. It’s very uncomfortable.]

I can feel everything. Mm mm.... It is something very meaningful – even this pain. It happens only when your energy starts moving into new spaces where it has never moved before. It is the beginning of something tremendously important, but because it is new the body will have to go through a few pains, because new paths have to be created for the energy.

And you need not be worried: the energy will create the paths itself because you have enough energy. The problem is when the energy is not enough and the path has to be created. When the river has enough water, no need to worry; the very amount of water creates its way. And so is the case with energy: you have more than you need, so it is going to break all those blocks in you. They are not to be removed, there is no need to remove them. They have to be removed when the energy is not enough to remove them; then outer processes have to be used.

For example, Rolfing can be helpful but only when the energy is not enough. Postural Integration is helpful but only when the energy is not enough. But when the energy is like a flood, no Rolfing, no Postural Integration is needed. The energy will come and take all the rocks away; it will make its own path. And you are fortunate to have more than you need. But it is clashing with the rocks so there will be pain, but accept this pain as a growth pain.

Don’t think of it as a disease. Feel joyous about it, that your energy is moving and creating new paths. And with those new paths you will start finding new places of being. These days that you have been here have been really significant. Something of immense value has started moving. Just do two things....

One is: continue to meditate every day – one meditation. But choose one and then insist on the same; don’t change it. You can choose any one that you like, but let it be something very active –

Dynamic, Kundalini, Nataraj – anything dynamic that will help the energy to move faster.

And the second thing that you have to do is: before you go to sleep in the night, just lie down, turn the lights off, lie down under your blanket, and feel your body is dying. Start from the toes and feel that they are dying and move slowly upwards: the legs are dying, the thighs are dying; go on moving upwards and let the whole body die. It will take at least five to seven minutes; slowly slowly you come to the head and all is dead. When you feel that all is dead, finished, that the body is a corpse, then do a small meditation which will be of immense help.

Start feeling that great light is entering from the head, golden light – as if suddenly a sun has risen and it is pouring all its gold into you. It is going in, going in, going in... the whole body has become a hollow bamboo and the light is falling in and passing through like a flood, and it goes out from the toes. For five minutes let this happen, then after five minutes – just approximately, you need not look at the watch, just approximately – after five minutes change the whole process. Now start thinking of a dark energy, negative – like a dark night with not a single star in it, a dark energy flow entering from the toes, moving upwards, filling the whole bamboo, the hollow body, and going out from the head. Five minutes of that, and then go to sleep.

This will synchronize the positive and negative energy inside your body. It will synchronize your man and woman inside the body, your yin and yang, your day and night, your life and death. First life, the golden light, then death, the darkness... and enjoy both, because both are beautiful. This for five and the first part for five minutes, and seven minutes first to have the body absolutely dead so it creates no hindrance.

This passing of the golden light and the darkness will help tremendously. Every day you will feel those blocks are disappearing for no other work is needed on them. And one meditation every day.

[The previous year a sannyasin, when he took sannyas, told Osho he felt negative about it. Now he says he will stay ”as long as I can stand it”.]

Good. Mm mm. (pause) Then it will not be very long! If it is a question of standing it, it is not going to be very long. But try – as long as you can stand. I was thinking that you would be a little less negative this time, but I don’t think....

This is up to you.... But if it is too much torture, why bother? If it is like something that you have to stand, why bother at all? Unless it is a joy there is no need to be in it. So decide about it: if it is a joy to be here, be here! I am the last person in the world to make somebody miserable, and misery is written so large on your face. But only you are responsible for it, because I am not in favour of misery. If you create it that is your responsibility....

So if you can do [groups], do. But if it becomes too much, unbearable, and you feel it difficult, then please forget all about it! Either be here in a joyous way.... Then only can you gain something, because it is only in joy that one gains; it is only in joy that one receives. My energy is not such that you can receive it when you are sad and serious and negative; you will not receive it at all. And it is not that I am not giving it to you – I may go on giving, but you will not be able to receive it.

Unless you are positive, welcoming and cooperating, nothing can be done. I am utterly helpless with people like you. And you will think that I have not been doing something. I am ready to do everything but if the other person remains completely closed – not only closed but having some investment in remaining closed – then it will be an infringement on your freedom if I force myself upon you. That will be a kind of rape.

I am available. Think for a few days: if you feel like being here playfully, joyously, then be here; otherwise be joyous anywhere else wherever you are! My work here is to help you to be happy.

If you can be happy somewhere else, more happy than here, then with all my blessings, be there; don’t be here. And this time make a decision. Otherwise this is a sheer wasting of your energy –

coming and going. Last time you missed and this time if you remain in that state – the very words that you utter are ’If I can stand it...’ – it makes things impossible.

[Osho suggests he do the Vipassana group.]

... If after Vipassana you can feel happy, then you can feel happy here, mm? because Vipassana is one of the most difficult processes...

... Mm, it is a difficult process, and I have given it knowingly to you: if you can stand it, then you can stand everything else! If you cannot stand it then it is not worth bothering about. It is very deep-going and very penetrating, but the first few days – five, seven days – it is difficult. Not that it has difficult processes to be done, but just sitting silently, doing nothing is the most difficult thing in the world. If there is something to do, one can do it; that is not difficult. But if nothing is to be done

– just sitting silently – then minutes appear as if they are hours, and hours appear as if they are weeks, and days appear as if they are years and it becomes so long. But I have deliberately given it to you...

... I am determined – something has to be done for you, but if you are determined not to let me, then it is your decision...

... You just have an old negative pattern... maybe from your upbringing in the childhood. Maybe you are still against your father, against your mother. Maybe you are seeing your father in me, maybe you have projected me as a father figure; something is there. So you want to say ’no’ – that which you have not said to your own father you want to say to me. Once you understand it, it will relax.

Once you see the point, that whatsoever you are thinking about me has nothing to do with me but has something to do with your childhood... I am completely out of it – I have not yet been a part of your life. You don’t allow me!

But this happens to a few people if their childhood has been such that they have been repressed deep down. They wanted to say ’no’ to the parents, they wanted to shout at the parents, they wanted to find fault with the parents. They weren’t allowed. They were helpless and they had to say yes when they wanted to say no. They had to hug when they wanted to say no! with their whole heart.

Those wounds have remained; they have become engrained in your personality. You are throwing all those projections on me, and I have nothing to do with them.

If you watch a little more, if you become a little more alert about what you are doing, you will see the point. Then you will relax and this whole commune can then be of immense value to you. By just passing through a few groups things will start becoming more and more clear.

[A sannyasin who has just completed the primal group asks about his homosexuality. The primal therapist says that he is very young emotionally; like a little boy.]

The first thing: don’t make it a problem. If you really want to solve it, don’t make it a problem. Once you make it a problem then there is no solution to it. It will look paradoxical but what I am saying is: accept it – nothing is wrong in it. It is just a social idea that something is wrong in it, but nothing is wrong in it. It is good at least that you feel attracted to somebody. So the first thing is to accept it; don’t reject it, otherwise you will never be able to solve it. Through acceptance there is a possibility of its disappearance. The more you reject it, the more you will become attracted to boys, because whatsoever is rejected creates attraction. Live it out and it will disappear.

Homosexuality is a necessary phase in the growth of a man or a woman.

[Osho went on to explain the four states of sexual growth, from auto-sexuality in a child, to homosexuality which naturally precedes heterosexuality, and then the last phase of going beyond sex – brahmacharya.]

Divya [the primal therapist] seems to be right: you got stuck in the second phase. Nothing is wrong in it. You can go beyond it but you can go only through it. So drop any attitudes about homosexuality; that is nothing but the propaganda of the ages. Nothing is wrong in it; it is not a sin. And if you can accept it, then naturally you will grow out of it and you will start being interested in women, but you have to pass through it.

It is possible that your mother was more dominating, as mothers are always. It is very rare to find a man who is not a henpecked husband – very rare. In fact, it doesn’t happen, and if sometimes you find one then the exception proves the rule and nothing else. There are reasons, psychological reasons for it.

The man continuously fights in the world so his male energy is exhausted. By the time he comes home, he wants to become feminine. He wants to rest from his male aggression. In the office, in the factory, in the marketplace, in the politics – everywhere he has been fighting and fighting. At home he does not want to fight; he wants to rest, because tomorrow again the world will start. So the moment he enters the house he becomes feminine. The whole day the woman has been feminine, not fighting at all; there was nobody to fight with. She is tired of being a woman... and the kitchen and everything and the children. She wants to enjoy a little bit of aggression and fight and nagging, and the poor husband is available. So she becomes male and the husband becomes female; that is the whole foundation of henpeckedness.

But children get into trouble: they see that the mother is dominating; they feel sorry for the father, and out of their feeling sympathy for the father they want to love him: But they cannot – they cannot go against the mother. Even the father cannot go against the mother; how can they? Deep down they resist the mother; the dominating mother becomes repulsive, and that is their first experience of womanhood. Later on, whenever they are with women they will be afraid; she is going to prove a mother again. She will dominate, she will nag, she will be powerful.

That is your fear, and you are still in sympathy with your father. The poor old man never had a say.

Because of that sympathy with the father you are more attracted to boys. But this thing is nothing to be thought of as a problem. You can go through it. Start enjoying it and don’t feel guilty about it. Soon you will be surprised – a great desire for women will arise in you. Because being attracted to a man is one thing, but to be fulfilled by a man is not possible. Fulfillment needs the opposite, because the opposite complements. You may feel good with a man but to feel good is one thing and to be in deep, intimate love is another. You may feel happy, but to feel happy is one thing and to be ecstatic is totally another.

Ecstasy is possible only when male and female energy meet, but ecstasy always brings in its shadow, agony. That’s the fear: you have seen the agony too much and you are afraid. But the ecstasy is so beautiful that it is worth all the agony – the fight, the conflict. Men are better friends, remember; man and woman are never friends. Lovers are enemies but never friends; in fact lovers and enemies, never friends. Men are very good friends; women don’t know how to be friendly. It is very difficult for women to love other women; they know each other too well – in fact they know too much about each other. But men are very friendly and homosexuals are really gay people, because there is no agony... but there is no ecstasy either. One has to risk and pay.

My suggestion is: accept this and soon you will pass beyond it. Then you will start exploring the opposite polarity: the woman. It has to be explored; it is part of growth. The man has to explore the woman, the woman has to explore the man. And the deeper you go into that exploration, the more ecstasy will arise, and the more possibility of agony will be there too. They go together, they balance each other.

A man-to-man relationship is more comfortable, convenient; more understanding is there. A man-woman relationship is always a turmoil, less understanding because they are such worlds apart.

How can they understand each other? No man understands the woman, no woman understands the man, and that is the beauty of their being together. That creates mystery... misunderstanding too.

But first accept it. Drop your resistance, and soon you will be able to go beyond it.

CHAPTER 28

Bliss is being in Orgasm with Existence

28 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, ashen means hope. Love and hope are the foundations of life and all its meaning.

The moment love and hope disappear, all that is left is despair, darkness, an utter meaninglessness.

And these two things are disappearing from the world. People are falling into a kind of hopelessness.

They are feeling that they are not needed, that they are almost unnecessary, that they are not fulfilling any purpose here, that life is just an accident... utter futility.

This has made man very heavy. He cannot fly any more. He creeps in sadness, in darkness. His heart is becoming like a rock. The fire of life is dying. That fire can be rekindled, and the two essential things are: one should be able to hope, because all meaning is through hope, but one can hope only if one is in love; hope is a shadow of love. When you love, you hope. Love necessarily, inevitably, creates hope. A thrill enters your being... you are delighted. It is not just useless to be here. Life starts taking a turn towards creativity, and that creativity brings meaning, music.

So remember these two words, and if you can fulfil these two words, all is fulfilled.

Anand means bliss, ashru means tears – tears of joy, tears of bliss. That is one of the greatest transformations in life – when even tears are no more tears of pain, sadness, sorrow, but of joy, bliss, benediction. The lowest form of tears is connected with sadness, and the highest form of tears is connected with bliss.

Ordinarily people know only one kind of tears – those that come out of sorrow, agony, suffering.

Because millions of people only know this one type of tears, tears have become symbols of pain.

This is not true. There is a higher dimension to tears too, just as there is a higher dimension to everything else. The body is the lowest dimension of your being, the soul, the highest; hate, the lowest, love, the highest. In the same way tears also have two planes; the lowest is of sadness, of suffering – those are tears of hell. One should try to know the other kind too. That is a transformation, an alchemical change.

And when you have transformed your tears into joy there is no suffering left. Then even the darkest night of life is bright and brilliant and full of light. Then even death is nothing but a door to life abundant: Then even curses prove to be blessings. One has what in the West they have been calling ’the philosopher’s stone’; in the East we call it ’paras’. You touch any lower, baser metal with the philosopher’s stone and immediately it is transformed into gold. That philosopher’s stone or

’paras’ does not exist anywhere in the outside world it is a secret of consciousness. The lower can be transformed into the higher because the lower contains the higher, the lower is only raw material for the higher. It is a raw diamond; it has to be cleaned, cut, polished.

So learn how to cry in joy, how to weep in utter blissfulness. Let your tears become your prayer...

and there is no other prayer which goes deeper. When you can cry out of prayer, when you can cry out of the experience of the beauty of existence – when you can see a rose bloom and you can cry and tears start rolling, when you see the sun and suddenly you feel like crying, you feel like bursting into a deep crying, your heart wants to melt – then you have known the highest form of tears.

And through that highest form of tears you will know the highest form of your love, your heart, your being.

[A sannyasin returning to her clients (she’s a psychotherapist) wonders how to share all that has happened to her here.]

Don’t be worried – whatsoever you have learned start sharing with your parents, and by sharing it you will be growing deeper and deeper in it. The basic fundamentals you have understood. The seed has fallen into the heart – now all else is only a question of time. And sharing is one of the best ways of growing. Never wait till you are perfect, because then you will have to wait for eternity.

Whatsoever little bits you have gathered, share, and you will be surprised: the moment you share it, you become aware of many things of which you were not aware.

Teaching is the best way of learning. When you start teaching people, sharing with people, many things that have been understood by the unconscious surface into your conscious. You never thought that you understood them, but when you make somebody else understand, immediately you have understood.

So never be worried about that. A thousand-mile journey can be completed only by two small feet, and at one time you take only one step, you cannot take many. If one sits and calculates ’This is a thousand-mile journey and I will be taking one step at a time. How am I going to finish it?’ one will be very burdened. One may start feeling desperate, the journey may look impossible: such a small capacity, mm? – just one step at a single time and such small legs and the journey is so long. One will become hopeless. In that hopelessness one will collapse.

Start moving... a thousand-mile journey begins in one step, in one single step, and ends in one single step. So just the little bit that has happened to you, start sharing and it will go on growing.

And never feel worried...

the worry comes from the ego.

The ego wants to be perfectly

knowledgeable; then it feels convenient for it to say something, to relate something. Then it is an expert. The ego is always trying to perform. Hence the ego is afraid, because you don’t know enough yet about whether you will be able to perform it rightly or not. Don’t be worried – say whatsoever you know, share whatsoever you know, and when you come to a point where you don’t know, simply say that you don’t know any more beyond this. And my own experience is that people love that person who does not pretend to know that which he does not know. People come closer to that person because he is authentic, sincere, true; they can depend on him. He will not say things which he does not know, he will not say things which he has not experienced. He is reliable.

The knowledgeable person is the one who goes on saying that he knows. Whether he knows or not, that is not the point; he has information. He pretends ’I am the knower’ And whenever such a person is with a patient or with a student or with a friend, he is always in the know and the other has to be proved ignorant. That is his joy.

But that is not the way of wisdom; the way of wisdom does not try to prove the other ignorant. The way of wisdom is that it says ’You are also wise, you are just not aware of it. I have become a little bit aware – I will share my little bit of awareness. It is just a little light, not much.’ But even a small candle is enough in a dark night. With a small candle you can search the whole palace. The light will be falling on only two, three feet around you, but that’s enough; as you move the light falls further ahead.

So don’t be worried – simply go. And that is one of the things my sannyasins can do, because they are not alone – I am with them. Whenever you feel that you are stuck at some point, just close your eyes, take the locket in your hand, remember me, and suddenly you will see a flow. The stuckness is gone, clarity has arisen, you become more perceptive. And the problem disappears in that perceptiveness, in that clarity....

[A sannyasin asks: ”I work in a school and I think they will not accept me in orange and mala right now... ]

There is some uniform in the school?

[She answers ”No”.]

Then they cannot do anything. Just don’t be worried – go laughing. Let them all worry... Let it be their problem! If they have no uniform they cannot insist. And even if you have to lose the job, don’t be worried. Sometimes it is good to lose a few things; in that way one learns how to love. One loves that way, because that is the only way to show your commitment and involvement. The only way to show your love is to sacrifice something. I don’t think that they can create any trouble for you, but if they do, don’t be worried.

Never compromise and you will become more and more integrated. Compromise kills, compromise is a poison. And once you start compromising for small things – salary, job, this and that, prestige, respect – then you are lost, because there is no end to it. That’s how millions of people have become just conformists, because they are afraid: they may lose the job, they may lose this, they may lose that.

Be ready to lose anything, because there is nothing much in this world to lose. Sooner or later we have to go, and the job will be gone, the salary will be gone and everything will be gone, so what difference does it make? And you will find another job, and who knows? – a better one! And one thing is certain: that you will be better; with the job or without the job you will be better.

Learn to love small sacrifices in life, and each sacrifice will briny you so much joy that you will be surprised: it is not a sacrifice; it is a way of blessing. When people become too afraid of sacrificing anything, they just live a mundane life. And to live a mundane life is not to live at all.

I am deliberately creating this trouble for you people. There is a purpose behind it: I want you to learn to fight, to rebel, to be non-conformist. I want you to be in some trouble, because it is only out of trouble that you will be born; it is only out of the fire that the gold will be purified. So that fire has to be welcomed.

Just go happily: laugh and dance and sing, and don’t take it seriously. Let them worry! Let them feel your energy. If you are sad, if you are afraid, if you are worried, they will jump upon you. People are always jumping on you when they see that you are worried, you are sad. Then you are weak! – you invite them to jump upon you. You may not know you are giving them the invitation, but you are.

Be laughing, be enjoying, be dancing. Go into the school cheerful almost dancing, laughing. Let them feel afraid of you – that something has gone crazy!

And it is not going to be easy to give a fight to you. Let them be afraid! And you will be surprised: when you are not afraid, people ordinarily don’t jump upon you. This is my experience, that whenever people see that you are weak then they don’t miss the opportunity. Why should they miss? They can prove themselves strong. When they see that you are strong, madly strong, then they are afraid of taking any step because it is not going to be an easy victory.

And rather than feeling afraid of the orange and the mala, rather than becoming concerned about it, behave in such a new way, with laughter, with dance, with singing, hug your own people – let them feel that you are absolutely new, that the old person is no more there. They will become more interested in your being rather than in your clothes. They will start enquiring ’What has happened?’

Just try my recipe!

[Another ma says: ”I’m a little bit scared of the situation in Germany to which I will return – in school, in my work.”]

Don’t be worried – I am with you. There is no need to be worried. Out of one hundred things that we worry about, ninety-nine never happen... and the one that happens is always good. It is a challenge.

Knowing this, one who understands life stops worrying, because ninety-nine per cent is pointless –

it never happens, and you suffer so much because of it. You think and you plan and you do this and that, and it never happens so the whole time is simply wasted. And the one thing that happens is always good; it gives you a challenge.

Life is a constant series of challenges, and the person who has no challenges to face goes dull, becomes stale. Life remains sharp if there are challenges continuously. And in the end one always feels good for all the challenges that happened, because only through them does one mature.

Just think of a life in which no storms ever come, no challenges, no problems – all is comfortable, convenient, secure. What kind of life will it be? The soul will never be born. The person will remain just clay. Challenges have to be welcomed. If they are not coming they have to be created. They have to be faced, encountered with joy, with trust that god is with you.

You are not doing anything wrong, you are not harming anybody so never be worried. You are not doing anything wicked. In being a sannyasin, in being meditative, in being with me, you are not doing any harm to anybody. So if somebody creates some trouble, he is committing a sin and he will have to answer for it, not you. When you are doing some harm to somebody then it is good to fear.

That fear is sane; it simply means that your inner being does not want to do harm and wants to pull you back from it. But when you are not doing any harm to anybody, and whatsoever you are doing, through it you are growing – becoming happier, more peaceful, more alert, more loving – then let the whole world be against you. God is with you! And you will be showered with more and more love, more and more grace.

This is how one becomes a beloved of god; and that is the name I have given to you. Just remain clear in your consciousness and in your conscience; don’t knowingly do any harm to anybody, that’s all, and god is with you. God leaves you only when you deliberately do some harm to somebody.

In that moment god cannot be with you; you become disconnected. Whenever you are happy, not doing any harm to anybody, and just by your happiness you are making happy vibes for others, god is with you. These are inner things to be taken care of and then there is no question of worry.

And this always happens; what is happening in Germany is going to happen all over the world.

Germany has just started a series of events that is going to spread all around the world; and it is going to help my work and my people. Now sannyas will be something valuable; you will have to pay for it. It will not be just a whim, it will not be just a fashionable thing to do – it will be a sacrifice.

When they really start persecuting my sannyasins I will be tremendously happy, because that is how my sannyasins will grow. Then you will not need to go into a therapy group – the whole world will become a therapy group. Wherever you are, it is a therapy group!That’s how it was for the early Christians, for the early Buddhists – it has always been so. Now again the drama has to be repeated. And these are the same people. After two, three years they will become positive. That’s how it always happens: first they are negative. If their negativity makes you afraid and you disappear, then they are victorious. But if some truth is there, their negativity only becomes a provocation; and if some truth is there, sooner or later the negativity has to disappear and positive responses start coming. But things always start with the negative because the vested interest, the status quo, the establishment, has to be negative.

What I am doing is going against them; they will have to be negative. Once they see that their negativity is helping me, then they will drop it. Once they have seen that their negativity does not make any change – on the contrary it enhances my work, makes my sannyasins richer and stronger, more integrated, more alert – they will drop the negativity. And just by being negative they will create a few positive people. Life is a balance. These things have to be understood. If somebody is against me, soon you will see that somebody else is for me. The person who was against has created the other person who may not have even known me. He came to know me because somebody was against me, and because somebody was so much against.... Already a few people have come; just because so many things are going against me, they want to know what actually is the reality. All that negativity and the propaganda is going to bring many people. It is going to create a longing in many people to see what is actually the case.

And life is a balance: create one thing negative, immediately the positive is created; that’s how life balances. One enemy is there, another friend immediately pops up from some unknown corner; and he may never have come if the enemy had not been there in the first place. This is how one finds one’s friends: the enemies become the provocation for the friends. When so much will be said against me, a few people will start defending, will start arguing for me. You will see all this happening.

So don’t be worried – simply go. And come back!

[Deva Binda asks the meaning of her name.]

Drop of god or the divine...

No man is an island. We are not separate, nothing is separate; all is joined together. It is a vast continent, it is an ocean. We are drops in this ocean. But the drop is not separate from the ocean, cannot be separate from the ocean. The drop is the ocean – the ocean is the drop. So think in terms of infinity. The drop contains the whole ocean; it is a miniature ocean.

Man is divine, and not only is man divine: the whole existence is divine. Existence and god are synonymous. God is the religious term; existence is a secular term for the same phenomenon. And sannyas is nothing but reminding you that you are divine, that god is within you... maybe asleep, dreaming, but the dreamer can be brought out of the dream and the sleeper can be awakened. And that’s my whole work here: to disturb your sleep. Once the sleep is disturbed. the drop disappears and there is only ocean and nothing else.

To be oceanic is to be orgasmic. To be oceanic is to be blissful, because to be in a limit is to be in misery. To be limited means to be in a prison. To be unlimited means to be free, and freedom is the goal.

CHAPTER 29

Love is the Seed, God is the Flower

29 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine nratyo means dance. Life is not static – it is a dance; it is dynamic, it is movement. Not even for a single moment does anything remain the same; everything goes on changing. Change is absolute. The mind wants things not to change, and that’s how the mind and life are in conflict. The mind wants things to be static, because only that which is unchanging can be controlled; that which remains the same can be controlled because you will be in the know about it.

The mind is very afraid of the new because with the new it is incapable; it is not ready to face the new. With the old it is very efficient. It knows what to do, how to do, but only with the old. The new simply makes it look utterly stupid. The mind can function only within the known; the unknown is beyond it. Hence the tendency of the mind is that everything should remain static. The mind is very orthodox and life is revolution, literally revolution, because it goes on revolving, changing, moving.

The movement is very fast; that’s why you cannot see it. Otherwise languages would not have any nouns, only verbs. You cannot say ’The tree is’, because the tree is never in a state of isness; it is always growing, becoming. You can only say ’The tree is tree-ing.’ There is no state in which it is; it is a river.

Heraclitus is right when he says ’You cannot step in the same river twice.’ And I say to you ’You cannot step in the same river even once because the river is changing and you are changing, the sun is changing, the wind is changing, the sky is changing, the earth is changing and all is constant change’. And that is the beauty of life. But the mind is very afraid of this change. Hence wherever the mind suspects change, it kills, dissects, destroys. It transforms love into marriage. Now, love is constantly flowing, changing. Marriage is a static institution – dull, dead, insipid. But the mind is very happy with marriage; with love it is very much afraid, apprehensive.

My approach to life is that whatsoever you do, change cannot be stopped. So the best way is to start loving this change, understanding this change. And it is a beautiful dance once you are not afraid of it. It is aliveness. And because something new is happening each moment life remains an adventure, a constant exploration.

Think of life as dance, as movement, and become more and more in tune with this moving existence.

Never hanker for anything static. Only death is static. The mind is a dead thing and to get out of the mind is to get into the open and under the sky and under the stars, in the rains, in the winds. And then the vastness is available to you – even the sky is not the limit.

Deva means god, guna means quality. God is not a person but a quality. There is no god as such, but godliness. The moment you start thinking about god as a person, you are missing –

from the very beginning. Then you will be looking in a wrong direction. That is the fallacy called

’anthropocentrism’. The Bible says ’God created man in his own image’, but the truth is just the reverse: man creates god in his own image.

So our concept of god is nothing but the projection of the personality of man. If horses have a god, it will be a horse – the most beautiful horse of course, the strongest horse of course, but a horse.

Horses cannot believe that god is like man, certainly not. Maybe the devil is like man, but not god, because whatsoever man has done to horses cannot be thought of as divine. When the Chinese think of god, the god has a Chinese nose, certainly, obviously. And when Negroes think of god, god is bound to have negroid hair. These are our projections, and because the man has been dominant in the past, god is male.

Once, near about five thousand years back, the world was dominated by women; the society was matriarchal. Then god was a woman. All the concepts of mother-goddess are very ancient, more ancient than god-the-father, but as woman became more and more submissive, mother goddesses disappeared from the world. God became a father. These are our ideas that we go on projecting; they have nothing to do with god as such.

God is really just a quality. It can be in a rose flower, it can be in the morning sun, it can be in the giggle of a girl, it can be in the kiss of lovers, it can be when you are utterly silent. It can be when you are loving, friendly, sharing. It can be when you are dancing in sheer joy... when you are intoxicated by beauty, by poetry, by music. It can be in thousands of ways. There is no end to its experience. It has millions of facets to it. It can be in a green leaf – if you can see it – and it can be in a star.

God is a quality, and we have to imbibe that quality... not to worship god as a person, but to imbibe the quality, to live the quality of beauty, of goodness, of bliss. The perspective changes when you start thinking of god as a quality. Then you need not wait for the judgement day – you will see god.

You can start seeing it right now, because god is the quality of existence, it is all over the place. All that you need is a way to look for it, a way to see it; all that you need is a kind of training, a tuning.

The music is already there being played; all that you need is musical ears so that you can hear the sound. The light is there; all that you need is to open your eyes.

My vision of god is that of quality, and quality can be imbibed. One can start living it from this very moment. Gradually, drop by drop, it can descend in you. The ocean is nothing but an accumulation, drop by drop... and one day, that which starts as a drop finally becomes the ocean.

So drop all concepts of god as a person, and start thinking of god more in terms of beauty, bliss, goodness, virtue, love – all the qualities. Then it becomes very easy to approach god. Then the temple is very close by. Because you can love, and whenever you love, you are in god. Because you can be joyous, and whenever you are joyous you are in god. You need not wait – god need not be postponed to tomorrow.

[A new sannyasin asks about his soulmate, a non-sannyasin, who is sitting a few rows away. ”I wish that she could also look into your eyes for just a few seconds, to receive your energy...”]

That is not possible without becoming a sannyasin... for certain reasons. Because unless you are a sannyasin you will not be able to receive it. Sannyas is not just a formality. From your side it is a readiness to receive, a gesture that you are open. A disciple has to be as open as a womb – a disciple has to be a womb. Only then can the energy be received. It is not only a question of my giving; it is more a question of your taking. And one who is not ready to be a sannyasin will not be able to take it. Then I am helpless. I would like to give...

To be a sannyasin simply means: it is raining – you just put your pot under the rain in the right position. It you put it upside-down, it will go on raining but you will not collect a single drop of water.

To be a disciple is to be in the right position: surrender is just a certain posture of receptivity, of trust, of love. And the orange and the mala are just outer expressions of it. Just as when you say to somebody ’I love you’ and you hold his hand. Holding hands is not love; saying ’I love you’ is not love. But saying ’I love you’, holding hands or hugging the person are ways, outer ways to express it. So is sannyas. It is just an outer way to express the inner, and if the inner is there, one is ready to express it outside.

There are cunning people who say ’Inwardly we are sannyasins.’

That is just cunningness,

rationalization. If you are inwardly ready then you will be outwardly ready too. Then why worry?

People will laugh at the orange or people will think you have gone crazy or something... so let them!

Love always knows how to sacrifice lovingly, how to sacrifice blissfully. Love is the way of the moth.

It knows how to jump into the flame and die.

So tell her: whenever she is ready to be a sannyasin... I am here for my sannyasins, my whole energy is for them. But she will have to gather courage to be a sannyasin; otherwise it will not be possible.

I have been working for years with many kinds of people. Finally I decided: unless somebody is really ready it is a wastage. Unless somebody is ready to pay for it, it will not be received. You can give but it will not be received. People receive only when they pay for it, and the higher the price, the deeper it goes.

George Gurdjieff used to ask fantastic prices for his books. He would not sell them at bookstalls.

Anything that came to his mind he would ask... and fantastic prices for his lectures. Those lectures would only be announced one hour before, and the person might be twenty miles away. He would be informed by phone ’The lecture is going to happen at eight o’clock – rush!’ It would happen that people would come from faraway places immediately, and when they arrived it would be announced that it was cancelled – tomorrow.

Once he did it for eight days continuously. At the eleventh hour people would be informed. They would come – and they had paid for it – and then it would be cancelled. On the first day four hundred people came; by the eighth day there were only four. He looked and he said ’Now, the right people are left. Now I can speak. These are the people,’ he said, ’who will understand. They are ready to pay: eight days continuously without complaining, ”What nonsense this is! Why do you harass us?”

Not even a single grudge, no complaint.’ This is surrender, this is trust: If he is doing this then there must be something in it.

I travelled all over India for years, and slowly slowly I saw the point – that I can go on giving but it only reaches people who pay for it.

So tell her that I would love to help her and she needs it, she is worthy to receive, and she is ready, on the verge of something, but then she has to gather courage. And if she is really on the Tantra path

– and she is – then there is no other place than this. Tantra has disappeared from the world, hence I am in such a difficulty – because all religions are anti-Tantra. The whole Indian mind is anti-Tantra.

Tantra was born in India, flourished, attained to the highest peaks possible, but was destroyed by the tradition, by the orthodoxy. People were butchered in millions – those who were following the Tantra path. Their temples were destroyed. Only rare pieces are left – Khajuraho, Konarak... rare pieces. They were all over the country and they had developed tremendously significant techniques.

There was a Tantra sect... something like that has never happened before, and never since. The couple used to live in one robe – not even two robes but one robe. They would walk together in a single robe so the energies were meeting and merging continuously in every possible way. They would sing and dance and sit and walk together. One hundred thousand couples were killed by one single king, and their whole tradition destroyed, their scriptures burnt.

I am in a difficulty.... This is the only place for people who really want to move on the path of Tantra.

So tell her that I am ready. Just a little bit of courage and much is possible. She should not miss this opportunity, otherwise she will repent. Help her – and that is your duty, to help her!

CHAPTER 30

Learn how to Weep in Blissfulness

30 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin says: I am scared and sad because I have to leave you.]

That’s natural, but no need to be sad. In fact this going away can be used as an opportunity to come closer spiritually rather than physically; and that is real closeness. Real closeness is what love is all about. Physically we can be close and we may not be close at all. That is what is happening all over the world: people are physically close but worlds apart; no communication, no meeting ever happens. People have become almost like parallel lines: running very close but never meeting anywhere. Even those with whom we think we are close – parents and children, husbands and wives, friends – even they are just parallel lines.

One needs to know that real closeness has nothing to do with space and nothing to do with time either. Real closeness is that of feeling. It is of intensity; it consists of intensity. If you can feel for me intensely there back in Germany, immediately you will be close.

So make it an opportunity. Always use all opportunities to grow. When you are here, enjoy that –

the physical closeness; when you are far away, start thinking of spiritual closeness. Make a rhythm

– and both are fulfilling. So just go. Sadness is natural but you can make it a stepping-stone and you will rise to a new vision of love, intimacy....

The relationship between a master and the disciple is the closest relationship. Even lovers are not that close, cannot be, because even lovers are limited through their egos, and egos are always in conflict, always in clash. Egos are always trying to dominate the other, and hence conflict is natural.

This is the only relationship of all the relationships that are possible in the world where a willing surrender happens, where you are not being dominated, but of your own accord have stopped fighting. Out of love and trust you have stopped defending yourself. Out of love and trust you have seen that the other is not the enemy so there is no need to fight, and when fight disappears the energy that was involved in fighting is released, and that energy gives food, nourishment, for the soul.

So just go and try it. Feel me intensely, as intensely as possible, at least once a day, and you will be suddenly surprised that all distance between you and me disappears. Then that experience will be of immense value to you.

Prem means love sampurno means total. The moment love is total, god is available. Partial love is human – total love is divine. Partial love is a mixed phenomenon of ecstasy and agony. Total love is pure ecstasy, just as total lovelessness is pure agony.

The old way of saying it is: ’Hell, heaven, and the earth just exactly between the two.’ Hell means no love, absolute absence of love, heaven means total love, and between the two is the human existence, the earth – a little bit of hell and a little bit of heaven. Hence the anguish of human life, because man has a double being. Man is not one; man is basically two, dual, torn apart between heaven and hell, between the animal and the divine, between the body and the soul. This anguish is not a curse – it is a blessing, because no animal suffers from it, only man. And not even all men, but only the highest quality.

Animals are at ease with a loveless world. Man is in a great unease. He aspires, he longs for something of the beyond. He tastes a few moments of joy. He knows how love tastes, although those moments are very fleeting. They come like lightning and they are gone but they leave the taste on the tongue. It is through love that man started searching for god, because love has given the taste. Now, man cannot remain as he is. Now he has to go into that state where love becomes a totality, where love is not just a momentary phenomenon but becomes a state, a continuity.

Love to me is the very soul of religion. If one can love then nothing else is needed. Through love one will come to know all the Bibles and all the Vedas... because they are nothing but by-products of love.

So this is the meaning of your name. Let this become your actuality too: aspire to the beyond, aspire to the whole, aspire to the total. Man is man only when he tries to surpass himself.

Deva means divine, kavito means poetry. Poetry comes closest to prayer, to reality, to god, because poetry has something of the intuitive in it. Prose is logical, poetry is illogical, or supra-logical. Prose is mundane, poetry is sacred. Poetry has something mysterious in it, something that can be felt but can never be really understood. Your heart is stirred by it but your head remains in wonder; it cannot figure it out. And the greater the poetry is, the less is the possibility to understand it.

Once it happened: A great poet was approached by a professor of literature. He was teaching the poet’s poetry in the university, and he came across a passage that looked absolutely absurd. He tried hard for many days to think what it could mean and he could not figure it out, so finally he decided ’Why should I not go to the poet? – the poet is in the same town.’

So he went to the poet and the poet said ’Yes, when I wrote that, two persons knew the meaning, but now only one knows.’

So the professor said ’Good. That one must be you.’ The poet said ’No. When I wrote the poem I and god knew the meaning – now only god knows.’

So what to say about others? Even the poet in his non-poetic moments will not be able to figure it out, what it is. And those poetic moments are few and far in between. They are visitations of the beyond. They come like a breeze – you cannot invite them – and they go like a breeze. You cannot catch hold of them.

The moment the poet dies, poetry is born. And as the poet comes back into existence, the poetry disappears. That’s why in the ancient days poets never used to sign their poetry. Great poetry exists in the Upanishads, but nobody knows who wrote those pieces of eternal beauty because the poets never claimed that those were their works. They knew one fact certainly, that when they were not, poetry flowed and when they came back, poetry stopped, so how could they claim it was theirs? It was not their possession. Something from the unknown flowed. And that is the meaning of prayer.

You cannot do prayer. If you are there prayer is not possible. You can only die, you can disappear, and in your very disappearance, prayer arises.

Prayer and poetry are synonymous. If poetry has no prayer in it, it is just a composition, not poetry, just a game with words. If poetry is really poetry it has the fragrance of prayer in it. You may not be able to catch hold of it where it is but it is there somewhere in the gaps – between the words and between the lines it is somewhere there. One has to be very meditative to understand poetry and one has to be very very ready to die as oneself to give birth to poetry.

All that is beautiful is contained in the word ’poetry’. Music is poetry in sound, painting is poetry in colour, sculpture is poetry in stone. Buddha is poetry walking, talking, sitting... an incarnation of poetry. So is Jesus, so is Krishna. The highest peaks of human consciousness have been nothing but pure poetry. They may not have written a single poem; that is not the point. Their whole being is poetic. The way they walk is poetry, they way they look is poetry.

Giving you this name is just an effort to provoke poetry in you. My whole work here consists of one thing: to provoke you into creativity, to provoke you into awareness, to provoke you to your potential.

[A sannyasin says: ”The distance between me and others, between me and you grows smaller so slowly.”]

No need to force it; everybody has to follow his own pace. Great patience is needed – don’t be in a hurry. These things are not like seasonal flowers; they are like cedars of Lebanon: they grow slowly, they take years. Because the roots have to go deep it takes time. Seasonal flowers come within weeks but within weeks they are gone too.

Never be in a hurry, because all that is beautiful and great takes time. The modern world has become very ugly for a single reason: everybody is in a hurry. Then nothing deep is possible. Everybody is so impatient. Love is not possible because love needs time. Intimacy grows very very slowly...

years of being together. My own observation is that unless two persons have lived many many years together, love does not bloom. In fact, by the time people are getting old, love blooms. What youth knows is not love; what youth knows is only chemistry, physiology, sex, but not love. These are not bad things because love grows in these things, but love needs deep roots first. It takes years. But the modern love is finished by the time the honeymoon is over or even before.

Everybody in such a hurry! People want things immediately, and if they think it is not going to happen, then: Change the partner, find somebody else. Maybe it is not going to happen here; this is not the woman. this is not the man. They have to look somewhere else and they have no time to waste. And this will go on happening with everybody, because they don’t know that love will take time. You will have to go through many things – ups and downs, positives and negatives, dark nights of the soul and joyous dance. You will have to pass through all these things; then something seasons. Love is a seasoning.

If you want to learn music it will take years. Pop music won’t take years, that’s why it is not very musical; it is more or less making noise. If you really want to go deep into music then years and years of waiting, patience, work... then something starts happening. But those who are not patient will never know.

This relationship that is growing between me and you cannot be hurried. All hurry will be disturbing.

Let it grow in its own way. Move slowly. Those slow movements are very solid; they crystallize you, and before you take a new step, the old step has to become absolutely solid so that it can function as a jumping-board for the new. If the old is still not settled and you take a jump, you will have to go back because something will remain lingering in the past.

The modern mind needs psychoanalysis for the single reason that people have not lived their past; they have been in such a hurry. When they were children they didn’t live their childhood; they wanted to become grown-up and they were in a hurry. Now many things have remained incomplete in the childhood. Psychoanalysis will take you back to the childhood; even drastic methods may be needed, for example, Primal Scream. These are for nothing but to complete some experiences that you have left incomplete in the past.

Now many people come to me and they ask why I don’t give therapy groups to Indians. It is not their need. They have been moving very slowly, in fact, too slowly; their whole being is lazy. If they are missing, they are missing on the other extreme. They are not missing through haste: they are missing through laziness, indolence. They have become almost stagnant; that is their misery. And the Western man’s misery is speed, haste; everybody is chasing after shadows. People are not worried very much about where they are going; their whole worry is whether they are going with speed or not. They may land in hell – that is not the point. The real thing is that they are going with speed.

I have heard that an aeroplane was in danger. The pilot came on the ’mike’ and told the passengers

’Don’t be worried. There are two pieces of news for you; one is good news, the other is bad news.

The good news is that we are moving with great speed. The bad news is that we are lost. We don’t know where we are moving to.’ This is the situation: we are moving with great speed but where we are moving to nobody knows... in fact, nobody cares. We go on improving upon the speed.

If the childhood is lived slowly there will be no need to go back through psychotherapy or Primal therapy. There will be no need to go back at all – it is finished! Remember one very fundamental thing, that any experience that is finished, completed, drops from the mind; it doesn’t hang around. It is not a cloud hanging around you any more. But if you are in a hurry then everything hangs around because nothing is ever complete. You are taking your breakfast but in such a hurry that you are simply stuffing. Mm? in your mind you are already moving – you may have reached the office. And when you are in the office you are not there – you may be already reaching home. You are always ahead of yourself. This is driving people crazy!

So they don’t enjoy the taste of the food, they don’t enjoy the beauty of their work or the creativity of their work; there is nobody to enjoy. They are always ahead, running faster than their present; they are always in the future. So everything remains incomplete and all that is incomplete demands completion; it gathers, it becomes accumulative. By and by you are so burdened that you don’t know what to do, how to sort it out, this whole mess. Either one goes mad – which is only a way to avoid this mess – or one commits suicide. But these things don’t help. You will be back again in the world in another womb, and you will continue the same nonsense again.

Use this time being with me. This opportunity has to be used. And the first thing I would like to tell you is: be very patient. You are moving, but you are growing like a cedar, not like a seasonal flower...

and it is good. Enjoy this slow movement. Something beautiful is going to grow. But it is just like the child takes nine months in the mother’s womb, mm? If the mother is in a hurry there will be a miscarriage and the child will be born dead. Wait!

There is an ancient story about Lao Tzu, a beautiful story – utterly false but of immense significance

– that he lived in his mother’s womb for sixty-two years. So slow! The mother must have been a woman of guts (laughter) obviously, otherwise she couldn’t give birth to a man like Lao Tzu. Sixty-two years – by the time he was born he was already old; all his hair was white. He was born wise, enlightened; nothing was left. He was born mature, absolutely mature.

What I take from this parable is the beauty of patience.

[To an art professor]

I like your paintings very much. Meditate and do a few groups. Something new will arise out of the meditations... because painting can come out of the mind, can be beautiful, but cannot have that depth which it will have if it comes through meditation, when it comes from no-mind. When it doesn’t come from you, when you are just a vehicle, a hollow bamboo, just an instrument in the hands of the divine or the whole, then painting has a totally different dimension to it.

Gurdjieff used to call it ’objective art’, because it will not have any impact from your mind, from your subjectivity; it will be free of you. It will not be a projection of your desires, memories, imagination, conditioning. It will be completely free of you, and then it has tremendous beauty.

There are still a few things in the world which belong to the dimension of the objective art. Just seeing the piece of objective art, whatsoever it is – sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry, a parable

– whatsoever it is, just by seeing it, listening to it, being with it, you start disappearing into the no-mind.

For example, the Taj Mahal is an example of objective art. When the moon is full just meditate on it. Just sit silently and look at it, and something starts disappearing in you. A moment comes soon when you are not and the observer has become the observed. It is a piece of Sufi art. Tourists will never understand it because they will not give time to it. The whole day people are passing in the Taj Mahal, coming and going – the whole day. If it was in my hands I would prevent these people entering the Taj Mahal unless they are prepared to meditate for a few hours. That should be the entry fee; otherwise they should not be allowed. It is profaning something sacred. It has to be approached in a certain attitude, in a prayerful attitude, at a certain time.

When the moon is full – the full-moon night is the night for the Taj Mahal – exactly in the middle of the night when the moon is just on the top of the Taj Mahal, sit for one hour looking at it and you will disappear, and you will never be the same person again.

So are the caves of Ajanta and Ellora, and the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak and the pyramids of Egypt. They were not just mind things; they were created by people for posterity to meditate on.

Music is perfect when the listener reaches the same state of mind or no-mind as was the state of the musician when he created it. Only then is it successful; otherwise it is not successful.

Much potential is in you. Much more is to come; what you have done is just a preface. And always remember that – that whatsoever one has done is always a preface, because there is no end to our potential; it is inexhaustible. And the more you share it with the world, the more you will be given.

[To a sannyasin who had been assaulted the previous night in the main street of Koregaon Park.]

I am happy with you. You remained undisturbed and thats very good. Your energy has remained absolutely undisturbed and that is very good; that’s why I called you, just to check.

We have to use every opportunity – good or bad – to grow. Just always remain a witness, whatsoever happens. And never be afraid of anything. You proved your mettle beautifully!

CHAPTER 31

The Boat to the other Shore is Love

31 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, shobhana means beauty – divine beauty. Existence is utterly beautiful. If we cannot see it that simply proves that we are blind. And to see beauty is to see god. The search for truth never goes so deep as the search for beauty, because the very word ’truth’ is of the head.

Beauty stirs the heart. And unless the heart starts becoming wakeful nothing is possible.

Only through the wakefulness of the heart does one arrive. And then each and everything, the total existence, takes on such radiance, such infinite grace, that no poetry has been able to depict it, no painter has been able to catch hold of it. It remains elusive, it remains mysterious. One can feel it, one can be it but one cannot say it. That is the meaning of the word ’shobhana’.

Deva means divine, geeto means a song – a divine song. It has yet to be sung. Many people die without singing their song, without bringing their lives to a conclusion, without knowing fulfilment.

Many people die without flowering at all; then their lives have been a sheer wastage. Each child that is born brings a song in the heart that has to be sung, a seed that has to reach ultimate flowering.

Birth is only a beginning, the beginning of an opportunity. One can use it, one can miss it – and unfortunately the majority miss it because they start thinking that this is all there is in life: just the mundane, the day-to-day. They get lost in the trivial, and the song remains unsung. That is the only sin there is – not to be that which you are born to be, not to manifest it, not to express your innermost core. That is the only sin. And the only virtue is to dance your dance, to sing your song, to be yourself.

And that’s what sannyas is all about. I don’t want to impose any pattern on you but just to help you so that whatsoever is hidden in you surfaces, whatsoever is unconscious becomes conscious, whatsoever is in darkness comes into light.

Deva means divine, prito means love. And the greatest method to transform oneself is hidden in love. There is no need to do anything else. If one can love then even the impossible becomes possible. Love is the fundamental secret of life. Because people miss love other things are needed.

Those are all substitutes, and no substitute comes close to love.

My suggestion to everybody is: if you can love then there is nothing else to be worried about. Just go on purifying your love more and more so it becomes less and less possessive, because the more possessive love is, the less love it is; the less possessive, the more love. And the golden flower blooms when there is love without any possession at all, with no idea of possessiveness. Then love is pure fragrance, and that brings liberation.

Liberate your love and you are liberated. Jesus says ’Truth liberates’; I say ’Love liberates’, because love certainly goes deeper than truth. Truth remains something logical, something of the thought.

Love is more total. Your head is involved in it but not only the head – your whole being is involved in it. And liberation is only possible of the total being, never of the part.

[To Anand Ganesh:]

And Ganesh is a mythological god symbolizing well-being, blessing. In India everything is started with the name of Ganesh – it is a good beginning. People get married with the invocation of the name Ganesh; the foundations of houses are put down with the name of Ganesh. Everything starts with the remembrance of Ganesh. It is just a symbolization of well-being, bliss, blessing.

And remember that life is bliss, life is a blessing. All that is needed is a tuning with life. If we are miserable that simply means we are not in tune, that’s all; we are not flowing with the flow of life. Misery is our creation; bliss is a natural quality. One need not create it, one cannot create it.

Whenever we are in tune with existence, bliss is the by-product; whenever we are not in tune with existence, misery is the by-product. Misery is an indicator. It is not bad in itself; it simply indicates that somehow you have fallen away from the harmony of existence and to come back. Misery is a call from nature: ’Where are you going? Come back!’

It is just to call your attention to the fact that somewhere you are out of tune, somewhere you are losing rhythm with existence. You are falling apart, you are becoming an island; and whenever one becomes an island, one is surrounded by the ocean of misery because then we are a small thing against this vast wholeness. And whenever we are with the whole there is joy.

So use all miseries as indications and search for the cause of how you are missing the point, where you are falling out of step. You will be able to find where it is happening, because consciousness is capable of finding out. If we don’t use it we never find out. Otherwise just become alert and search for where you are creating the misery and why, and you will be surprised that you have been given the instrument to know the why; you are capable of putting it right but you have not used it.

Meditation only makes you aware of your potential – what you can be, what you can do, what you have not done, what you have not used. Psychologists say that man is using only five per cent of his potential. What a waste! – five per cent only. Ninety-five per cent has gone down the drain with no use, and people want to live long. For what?

You can live so intensely in this small life if you use one hundred per cent of your potential. It will be better than living ten thousand years and using only five per cent of your potential. Just to live seventy years is enough if you use one hundred per cent of your potential – you will become a flame of joy!

[Ganesh says: It happens often that I don’t like myself, especially my body – I feel the misery in my body.]

Mm mm. It is not in the body – it is just in your idea. You have a certain idea about how the body should be, and if you have some idea you will be in misery. The body is as it should be. If you have some idea you will be in misery, so drop that idea.

This is the body that you have got; this is the body that god has given to you. Use it... enjoy it! And if you start loving it, you will find it is changing, because if a person loves his body he starts taking care, and care implies everything. Then you don’t stuff it with unnecessary food, because you care.

Then you don’t starve it, because you care. You listen to its demands, you listen to its hints – what it wants, when it wants. When you care, when you love, you become attuned to the body, and the body automatically becomes okay. If you don’t like the body, that will create the problem, mm? because then by and by you will become indifferent to the body, negligent of the body, because who cares about the enemy? You will not look at it; you will avoid it. You will stop listening to its messages, and then you will hate it more.

And you are creating the whole problem. The body never creates any problem; it is the mind that creates problems. Now, this is an idea of the mind. No animal suffers from any idea about the body, no animal... not even the hippopotamus! Nobody suffers – they are perfectly happy because no mind is there to create an idea; otherwise the hippopotamus will think ’Why am I like this?’

(laughter) There is no problem in it.

Just drop the ideal. Love your body – this is your body, this is a gift from god. You have to enjoy it and you have to take care of it. When you take care, you exercise, you eat, you sleep. You take every care because this is your instrument, just like your car that you clean, that you listen to, to every hum – to know whether something is going wrong – mm? You take care even if a scratch comes on the body. Just take care of the body and it will be perfectly beautiful – it is! It is such a beautiful mechanism, and so complex, and yet working so efficiently that for seventy years it goes on functioning. Whether you are asleep or awake, aware or unaware, it goes on functioning, and the functioning is so silent. Even without your caring it goes on functioning; it goes on doing service to you. One should be grateful to the body.

Just change your attitude and you will see that within six months your body has changed its form. It is almost like when you fall in love with a woman and you see: she immediately becomes beautiful.

She may not have cared about her body up to this moment but when a man falls in love with her, she starts taking care. She stands before the mirror for hours... because somebody loves her! The same happens: you love your body and you will see that your body has started changing. It is loved, it is taken care of, it is needed. It is a very delicate mechanism – people use it very crudely, violently.

Just change your attitude and see!

Deva means divine, pradip means a lamp – a divine lamp, a divine light. It is hidden inside; it has to be discovered. And it is not very far away either – just a turning, just a looking back, and one becomes full of light. Otherwise you can go on searching for lives together and you will remain in darkness, because the light is inside you; it is not outside you. And no outside light is going to help.

It may satisfy you for the moment but only for the moment, and soon darkness surrounds you. The inner light is eternal; once found it is forever. Even in death it will go with you. Nobody can take it away... not even death.

To know this light is to know deathlessness. To know this light is to know eternity.

Deva means divine, sangit means music – divine music. Music comes closest to meditation. Just beyond music is meditation: one step more and you are in meditation. And music is the most beautiful door. Listen to music so totally that the listener disappears in the listening, that there is only music and you are not, that you are an emptiness and the music fills you. There is no observer even, nobody to appreciate, to judge. Listen to music without judgement, without evaluation, and it will become your deepest meditation. Then any music will do.

Slowly slowly you will come to the knack of listening. Then any sound will do, mm? – just this sound of the train passing by is enough to create silence, because sound is one polarity; silence is the other polarity of the same energy. If you know how to listen rightly, each sound can create silence.

Just as light and darkness are together, sound and silence are together; they cannot be separate. It is one energy – they are two aspects of it.

So if somebody learns how to listen rightly, each sound provokes silence in you. That’s the beauty of music. In first listening to it you will become aware of this tremendous phenomenon, that in listening you become silent. Then you can try with other sounds slowly slowly, and then one day suddenly, standing in the marketplace, all the noise is around you and you are so silent – the centre of the cyclone.

And that is my message to my sannyasins: they have to be silent in the very storm of existence and life. They have to meditate in the marketplace; they have not to become escapists. They have to transform their lives, and transformation needs the challenge of the opposite.

[Osho gives him groups and then concludes... ]

Then I will give you something. Much has to be done. But your music has to be discovered, refined, brought to a climax. It is there! If you allow me it is going to explode. And all that is needed from the side of the disciple is a blank cheque so I am given total freedom and I can do whatsoever I feel like.

[A sannyasin asks about an energy block in her arm.]

Something has changed in your brain, that’s why it happened. It has nothing to do with the body at all – the body energy is perfectly okay. The brain is divided in two parts: the right part of the brain is connected with the left side and the left side is connected with the right side. Something has happened in the left side brain, something good, hence the right side started feeling numb.

You have been too much of an intellectual, a thinker-type – thinking too much, brooding too much

– and your energy has changed. You have moved from thought to emotion, so your energy has gone to the other hemisphere of the brain. The change has been so sudden that your whole right side started feeling numb, because the energy that has always been available to the right side has moved to the left side. But this is a good change. In fact it should happen to everybody, but because it happened too fast, you felt it. It happens to almost all sannyasins, but if it happens very gradually one never becomes aware of it. Sometimes it happens very suddenly, just like lightning. The whole energy has moved from one hemisphere to the other. That side has always been getting more energy and suddenly it is not getting energy. You became aware of the numbness.

But it will settle; nothing to be worried about. And you will come out of it better than you were before; because emotion is a deeper reality than thought, and to live in thought is to live on the surface. To live in emotions is to go deeper into your being. You will feel more feelings arising, more sentiments happening. You will feel more aesthetic than intellectual, more loving, less dominating, more sharing, less calculative. These things will happen... soon you will see all these things happening. But a great shift has happened, and it is nothing to be worried about but to be rejoiced in.

So you need not be worried about it – it will disappear on its own. The body will become adjusted to the new change. The whole government inside has changed: the governing centre has moved to the other hemisphere. But soon the settlement... the body is always infinitely capable of adjustment.

But just old habit and the new change, for a little bit in the interval it can be troublesome, but nothing to be worried about.

Deva means divine, nartan means dance... another door to the divine. Just as music is one beautiful door, so is dance. And dance will help you immensely. The only secret is to be lost in it, to be drowned in it. One has to dance in a kind of drunkenness. It is intoxicating, if you allow it. If you allow yourself to be possessed by it, then the very movements create some alchemical change in the inner energy. It intoxicates. Nothing intoxicates like a dance, and sometimes the intoxication is so much that even those who are looking at the dancer start feeling drunk. But that is nothing compared-to what happens to the dancer himself or herself.

But dance should not be a performance, otherwise the whole thing is missed. Then it is just acting on the outside – the dancer is never lost in it. And that is the whole point, the very crux of the matter: dance is divine when the dancer has disappeared into it. When the dancer dies in his dance and only dance remains, then you are in the hands of god. Then he is moving you, he is moving within you. Then for miles you cannot find yourself, and the moment when you cannot find yourself is the moment when god is found.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31