You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

Talks given from 1/3/79 to 31/3/79

Darshan Diary

CHAPTER 1

1 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Bliss is not a result of prayer, it is not a reward: it is prayer itself. It is not that prayerful people become blissful; just the contrary: blissful people are prayerful. There is no question of becoming; bliss and prayer are synonymous. And once this is understood then the whole of life can be a prayer.

If this is not understood then prayer remains a ritual and never becomes your whole life, and unless prayer becomes your whole life, your totality, it cannot transform you. It remains a duty, a formality, a good ritual – healthy in itself, but it takes you nowhere.

My whole teaching is that if a person remains blissful in ordinary day-to-day life, doing small things but blissfully, then prayer is spread all over his life. Then eating he is prayerfully eating because he is blissfully eating. Then walking he is prayerfully walking because he is blissfully walking. Then breathing, he is prayerfully breathing because he is blissfully breathing.

Prem means love, vinito means humbleness. Love brings humbleness. It is not cultivated, it comes on its own accord. A cultivated humbleness is nothing but the ego masquerading in a beautiful form.

If one practises humbleness one misses the whole point. It is one of those few things which cannot be practised. Something else has to be done: that is, the heart has to melt into love, and then humbleness comes as a shadow of love, as a natural consequence. Then it has tremendous beauty because one is not even aware that one is humble.

The true humbleness is not self conscious, because the true humbleness means that the self is no more there to be; it is the disappearance of the ego. One cannot brag about it, one cannot even claim. It is very silent. One feels it, one knows it, but there is no way to express it; it is ineffable.

Anand means bliss, viren means courageous, courage. It is one of the most significant things to understand in life that to be miserable needs no courage, any coward can afford it. But to be blissful needs courage. That’s why there are so few blissful people in the world: they don’t fulfil the first requirement. It really needs tremendous courage, because the society is against blissful persons.

The society is against the blissful person because the blissful person cannot be reduced to a thing, cannot be reduced to a machine. And the society is not interested in men; it is interested in machines

– efficient, skilful, but machines – not men. The society is very much afraid of real men, because the real man means freedom, the real man means the capacity to say no, the capacity to revolt, the capacity to be oneself. The real man means not to be just a part of the crowd; and bliss is part of individuation. When one becomes individual, one is blissful, when one remains part of the mob psychology one remains miserable.

The masses live on the lowest rung of the ladder. It is very dark there and very dismal, but they don’t have the courage to rise higher. They are afraid of climbing the mountains, they are afraid of the risks. It is secure where they are; even if they fall, it is not dangerous, they are on plain ground. But the man who is searching for peaks of bliss – and bliss is the greatest peak, it is the Everest of life –

has to be courageous. He has to be courageous to drop misery, he has to be courageous to drop all investment in misery, he has to be courageous to go into the unknown for the search of bliss. And once one has learned to take a few steps into the unknown. only the first steps are hesitant. There is a trembling. because one is moving beyond the boundaries of the known and the familiar. It is the same fear that the small child feels the first day he goes to the school, the same fear when the boy leaves home and goes to live in the hostel; that kind of thing is natural. It has to be accepted and transcended and then suddenly skies of bliss open up. There is no end. One cannot contain it, so much bliss is possible. One starts overflowing with it.

Deva means god, monika means an adviser – god is the only adviser. God is the guru in your heart.

The outer guru only reflects the inner guru. I can only say things to you which your own heart wants to say to you but which you are not capable of hearing. I can translate it into your language, but whatsoever I say to you is nothing but a translation from your unconscious to the conscious.

The conscious does not know the language of the unconscious, hence a gap has happened between your being. The master fulfils that gap; he simply bridges your unconscious with your conscious.

Once it is bridged, then god is the adviser. Then all that you ever need will be communicated to you from the holiest of the holies, from the very centre of existence. Once you have learned how to be silent and to listen, you can hear the still, small voice within.

Prem means love, antonio means priceless. Love is the only thing that cannot be purchased, the only thing that is not a commodity available in the market-place, the only thing for which you can never pay enough. But it is available, and it is available just for the asking or just for the taking.

All that is really valuable is available free. It is like the air that we breathe: without air there is no life, but it is available free, although man has polluted it now and is destroying the very source of life itself every day. The same has happened on a subtle level as far as love is concerned. Man has polluted love even more than he has polluted the air. The air pollution is a very recent thing. It happened only after automobiles were invented, it happened only because of scientific developments; it is only within one hundred years that it has happened.

But priests have been polluting love for ten thousand years at least. They have destroyed the whole energy of it, they have poisoned the very source of love. It has to be reclaimed, because just as the body cannot exist without air, the soul cannot exist without love. What air is to the body, love is to the soul: it is priceless but yet available free. Still, people are so stupid that they remain completely unaware of the great gift of god. The river goes on flowing by the side and they are thirsty.

One of the greatest Indian mystics, Kabir, has said: I laugh to no end because I see that the fish in the river is thirsty.

He is talking about man, the fish. He is talking about love, the river.

Anand means bliss, nirjana means aloneness – not loneliness mind you: aloneness. Loneliness is a negative state, empty. There is great urge for the other, you are missing the other; it is a state of misery. But aloneness is totally different. It is positive, full, too full. You are too full of yourself; there is no need of the other. You are overflowing with joy; the joy is welling up within you.

Loneliness is sad, aloneness is blissful. And unless one becomes capable of being alone, one is not mature. One remains immature, dependent, hankering for mummy or daddy or something or other –

this toy, that toy, money, power.... All those things are nothing but things to stuff your inner emptiness somehow, but that inner emptiness cannot be stuffed; it erupts again and again. It disappears only when you become alone; and the process of becoming alone is meditation.

It is the art of becoming alone, it is the art of finding one’s own inner juices. It is the very science of finding all that is needed within one’s own being; and once it is found, one is happy for no reason at all.

This does not mean that you will not relate with people; in fact only a person who is capable of being alone can relate, because he has something to share. The lonely person cannot relate, he can only exploit. The alone person is my definition of a sannyasin: he relates, he relates in many ways, in every possible way, he is not an escapist, but even in the crowd he is alone. His aloneness is such that nothing can destroy it, not even the market-place. That is the meaning of your name, and that has to become the meaning of your life too.

CHAPTER 2

2 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, francesco means free, freedom. Your full name will mean a loving freedom. One can be free in anger, but then freedom loses something tremendously beautiful, then freedom is more a reaction against something; and when you are against something you are never really free of it. It will haunt you, it will follow you like a dark shadow. It will become your unconscious. It will pursue you and persecute you. It never brings real freedom.

The real freedom is not out of anger, reaction the real freedom is out of love. It is not against something on the contrary it is for something, and there is a tremendous difference between the two. Freedom against is political; freedom for is religious – freedom to create, freedom to pray, freedom to seek the truth. Then freedom is positive, and positive freedom frees; negative freedom becomes a new bondage.

Prem means love, marta is a form of martha. It has become a symbol of hospitality because Martha served Jesus, she was a hostess to Jesus. She became the patron saint of all hostesses.

Your full name will mean loving hospitality. Man has to become a host for god. God comes as a guest. He knocks on our doors many times, but the host is absent, asleep, not alert, engaged, occupied, somewhere else. The host has to become very very alert, only then can the knock of the guest be heard. The knock is not loud and it cannot be, because god is not, and never is, aggressive.

He comes soundlessly, he comes as a whisper, he comes just like a small breeze. Unless one is very very alert, one goes on missing. A tremendous alertness and sensitivity is needed to hear the foot sounds of god reaching closer.

One has to become a host. By saying that I mean: one has to create inner space in the heart. Our hearts are too full of our own egos, hence we can’t be hosts to god. We have to empty ourselves of ourselves. When there is utter emptiness inside the heart, there is no barrier god enters immediately, god is immediately found.

People ask ’Where is god?’, they ask ’Where is the guest?’; they should really ask ’How should I become the host?’ Once the host is ready, the guest appears. It is inevitable, it is one of the fundamental laws of life. The ancient Egyptian teaching says: When the disciple is ready, the master appears....

Anand means blissful, christel means a follower of Christ. Christ can be followed only by being blissful. Christians have missed Christ by becoming very serious, sad. The cross has come between Christ, existence, and the Christian mind; the cross has become a very very long shadow. The cross really contaminated the whole source of Christian religion. Because of the cross, the Christian became sad, naturally, because Jesus died on the cross; how can you rejoice? – how can you sing and dance?

Although his teaching was ’Rejoice. rejoice...’, he says again and again to his disciples ’Rejoice’, because of this accident of history.... It has nothing to do with Christ-consciousness, it was a mere accident of history that he was crucified. There have been other Christs who have not been crucified.

For example, Krishna is a Christ; in fact the word ’Christ’ comes from the word ’Krishna’. But because he was not crucified, he is remembered as dancing, singing, playing on his flute. You can dance with Krishna. You can have a festive relationship with Krishna, but not with Christ, because the cross is too much. Between the Christian and Christ the cross is a barrier. Its shadow has turned temples into cemeteries.

So I would like you to be reminded: the only way to reach to Christ-consciousness is to be blissful.

Dance your way to god, because that is the only way; there is no other. God knows only the language of dance and song and love and celebration. He does not know anything about theology, he does not know anything about philosophy; he cannot have any contact with your mind but he can have every possible bridge with your heart.

The Christian heart is crushed under the cross, hence I call Christianity, crossianity. It has forgotten Christ completely; it only remembers the cross. And why did the cross become so important? –

because we are afraid of death.

We are obsessed with death. Death seems to be the most important thing in life, and because of death becoming the centre of the whole religion, thousands of monks and nuns became obsessed with only one thing – that is death. They lost contact with life. They started thinking only of what was going to happen in the after-life. This life became irrelevant; and this is the only life there is, there is no other life. This is the only existence there is, there is no other existence. We have always been here and we will always be here; we are eternal pilgrims.

And one thing more, remember: Christ has nothing to do with Jesus in particular. Jesus was only one of the Christs. Buddha is a Christ, Moses is a Christ, Abraham is a Christ, Zarathustra is a Christ – thousands of Christs have happened. And Christ has even said that.

Once somebody asked him: Why do you speak with such authority? From where is your authority?

And he said: I am before Abraham was. A very strange statement, one of the strangest ever made, because there is a gap of at least three thousand years between Abraham and Jesus; and he says: I am before Abraham ever was. For Abraham he uses the past tense; for himself he uses the present tense: I am. He is not talking about

Jesus at all he is talking about the eternal Christ-consciousness which is always in the present tense and which has always been before Abraham, after Abraham, in Abraham. Abrahams come and go, Jesuses come and go: Christ-consciousness remains.

Whenever one goes deeper into meditation, into prayer, one goes deeper into Christ-consciousness.

It has nothing to do with Christianity, it has nothing to do with the bible; it has something to do with the inner journey from the body to the mind, from the mind to no-mind. The day you experience no-mind, you have experienced Christ.

Christ is only a symbol of that utter innocence, that silence, that happens when all thoughts, desires, dreams, have disappeared, when one simply is. That suchness is Christ, that isness is Christ.

[A sannyasin asks about an orange cap, hat, she found in her letterbox.]

Keep it with you! It is beautiful.

And no need to analyse everything, no need to make everything a question. Learn from these small things that life is a mystery; and never try to demystify it. Demystify it: it becomes meaningless. The real artist is the person who goes on mystifying life. He creates great mystery around himself; he discovers the miraculous more and more. In each small incident he reads something of immense value. Naturally he lives in a richer world.

It all depends on you. If you analyse everything, if you want to find answers for everything, you will live in a very poor world. You will live in the world of knowledge, not of wonder and awe; and religion is nothing but the door into the wondering spirit, the spirit of awe. All is mysterious; nothing is answerable. All questions lead to more questions.

Let that become your fundamental approach. Forget about creating questions and slowly slowly you will be surprised: life becomes so colourful, so psychedelic, so immensely poetic. It is a splendour to be. Just to be is such a great benediction.

So good! Take it as a gift from god. because everything is a gift from god.

[A sannyasin, arriving, says he feels simultaneously very young and very old; and he feels to be alone.]

It is something to be understood. You have come across a very fundamental fact of life: the mind is old, always old, and the being is always new, fresh. You are wavering between the two, so simultaneously you will feel very old... the moment you become the mind or you lean towards the mind, you will feel very old.

The mind is very old. Your mind contains the whole past – not only yours: it contains the whole collective past, not only of human beings but of animals, birds and trees and rocks and everything that has ever happened. Your mind contains it; your mind is the whole past of existence. It is really ancient, very stale, dead, a corpse. And the being, your consciousness, is moment to moment fresh: as fresh as dew-drops in the early morning sun, as fresh as the newly-opening rose flower.

This moment comes to meditators when they hover between the mind and the being; one moment when they are leaning towards the being they feel like small children.

Jesus says: Only those who are like small children will be able to enter into my kingdom of god. He is talking about being. Christians have completely missed the point. He is talking about the state of no-mind, he is talking about innocence. He is not really talking about small children, because small children are not innocent. Sometimes they can be very cunning, very clever, very diplomatic, political and everything, and very mean too. Small children are not small really because they have the ancient mind with them. They are not tabula rasa, they are not clean slates; much is already written, they are already old. ’Small children’ is just a metaphor, a metaphor to show that you have both: you have inside you the oldest mind and the youngest being.

Slowly slowly you have to choose the fresh being against the stale, stagnant mind. Once you become settled in the fresh being this problem will disappear. Then the mind is there; you can use it. It is useful, because it carries all the information. It is a wonderful mechanism; no composer can compete with it yet.

But when you are not it, you are separate, and that separation is liberation. To know ’I am not the mind’ is to know ’I am god!’

[A sannyasin, leaving, says she loves Osho and even though she is speedy in the West she feels him with her.]

I am there with you. Love knows no distances. Love is not a phenomenon that happens in space or in time; it is beyond time and beyond space.

Wherever you are in love, I am there with you, I am there with you immediately. That is the miracle of love: it destroys all barriers of time and space.

Good! Just be here and enjoy....

CHAPTER 3

3 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, darshano means insight. They say that love is blind; I say that only love is not blind. The person who lives without love lives in blindness and in darkness. His ears hear not but only translate. His eyes don’t see but impose. His mind does not understand but only interprets.

His whole life is phoney. It is love that gives one authenticity. and to be authentic is to be worthy of receiving truth.

Love takes away all that is pseudo in you; and the Pseudo is hindering the insight, the pseudo is blocking the way. It is because of the pseudo that we cannot hear and we cannot see and we cannot feel. Once love arises in the heart the pseudo starts disappearing, just as when you bring light in the darkness disperses.

A man who has not lived in love, through love, for love, has not seen anything.

I am giving you this name just to remind you that the real is yet to be seen. You ain’t seen nothin’

yet!

Prem means love, hellmut means courage. Love needs only one thing, and that is courage –

courage, because love means surrender, courage, because love really means dying into the other, courage, because love means dropping your own identity, your own ego, your own personality.

Hence millions of people have decided not to love, but then life is misery, then life is hell. It is comfortable, convenient; hell is really very comfortable and very convenient. The latest news is that they have air-conditioned it.

If one really wants to live, one has to be ready for insecurity; and love brings the greatest insecurity in the world because love cannot promise for tomorrow. Love is of the moment, tor the moment, in the moment. Love cannot promise, because all promises are lies, and love cannot lie. Love can only say for this moment nothing for the next; the next remains open, vulnerable, insecure. Love may be, may not be. Nobody knows, there is no guarantee, and because of that, people choose something like marriage instead of love, something secure, safe. guaranteed by the law and the government and the society and the church – something that they can depend upon. But in that very choice they have committed suicide, they will never live.

Life itself is insecure. Life knows nothing of security. Death is very secure, so those who are cowardly, they choose death instead of life, they choose the false, the plastic, instead of the real.

And those who are courageous, they choose the real, they go with it, wherever it leads. They surrender to it, they are ready to go into the uncharted and the unknown and the unseen.

Prem means love, gary means a spear. Love hits the heart as if a spear has penetrated it. Love brings much pain; that is the price we pay for the rejoicing that is going to come out of the pain.

The pain is sweet, the pain is a blessing. Those who are afraid of the pain that love brings remain without love and without life and without truth and without god, because in the ultimate, existential sense, love, life, truth, god – they all mean one and the same thing. Love brings agony, but agony is the way of ecstasy coming to you. So when love brings pain, accept it, welcome it; don’t reject the guest. Just hidden behind the guest the great guest is coming.

Love is only a messenger... that somewhere close by is god. But pain is natural; it has to be understood, it has to be accepted. Because naturally we are afraid of pain, naturally we avoid it.

Hence many people have avoided the heart and are hung up in the head, they live in the head. The heart gives pain, true, but only because it can give pleasure – that’s why it gives pain. Pain is the way that pleasure arrives; agony, the door that ecstasy enters.

If one is aware of it, one accepts the pain as a blessing. Then suddenly the quality of the pain immediately starts changing; you are no more antagonistic to it, and because you are no more antagonistic to it, it is no more pain; it is a friend. It is a fire that is going to cleanse you. It is a transmutation, a process, in which the old will go and the new will arrive, in which the mind will disappear and the heart will function in its totality. Then life is a benediction.

Michael means one who is like god, godlike. Anando means bliss. Man becomes godlike only when he is in bliss. Bliss happens only when we start overlapping with god. When our boundaries are not separate. when that overlapping of boundaries happens with god, there is bliss. The ultimate bliss happens when our small circle has been completely absorbed by the infinite circle of god, when the drop has disappeared in the ocean, and in other words, when the ocean has disappeared in the drop. That is the moment of ultimate bliss – that’s what we have been searching for for lives and lives.

That search has brought you to me, to sannyas. It is not something new, it is not something accidental. It is a long, long journey, it is a very ancient pilgrimage. But now, at this moment, a turning point is possible, a door can open. You are very close to it; all that is needed from your side is a deep yes, a total yes, and in that very yea-saying the door will be found open.

Jesus says: Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you. I say there is no need to even knock; just say yes, amen, and you will find that the doors have always remained open; it is just that your eyes were covered with nos. Yes opens the heart, no closes it. The whole art of sannyas is the art of saying yes.

[Araguacy means a sky open to friends.] Deva means divine. A sky open to friends is a human sky.

Open it to the enemies too and it becomes a divine sky. It is human to love one’s friends; it is divine to love one’s enemies too. And the moment one can love one’s enemies, only then can one really love one’s friends. If one cannot love the enemy, one is always suspicious of the friend too, because the friend can turn into the enemy any moment.

Machiavelli says: Don’t say anything to your friends that you would not like to be known by your enemies, because today’s friend can become tomorrow’s enemy.

One who cannot love the enemy cannot totally love the friend either, hence the great statement of Jesus: Love thine enemies as thyself.

Anand means bliss, ursula is the name of a constellation of stars, Ursa Major. The full name will mean a blissful constellation of stars. That’s what every being is.

Man looks so small; he is not so small. He contains universes in him. He has an inner sky as big as the outer sky, and he has inner stars, a sun and a moon, as there are in the outer world. The inner and the outer are in an absolute balance: whatsoever is out is in the inner too.

The ancient saying of the mystics is: As above. so below. And I say to you: As outer, so inner.

Let sannyas be a search for the inner sky, a search for the inner light, a search for inner infinity, endlessness, eternity. It is possible, it is within our reach; all that is needed is a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn.

Deva means divine, ugo means intelligence. Intellect is human; intelligence is divine. Intellect is of the mind; intelligence is of the heart. Intellect can be cultivated. taught; intelligence can only be dug up from deep in your being. Nobody can make you intelligent, but everybody is born intelligent.

Then many layers of conditionings... and it remains hidden. It has to be rediscovered. Intelligence is an intrinsic quality of life. It need not be learned, it is already the case; by being alive we are intelligent. But the society has done great work in keeping our intelligence hidden.

Instead of helping the intelligence to arise it has enforced intellect upon us – which looks similar but which is not the same. Intelligence is wisdom; intellect is knowledge, information. Intellect is always borrowed, never original; intelligence cannot be borrowed. it is always original. It originates from our own inner core, it wells up within our being.

All that is needed is to remove the blocks; and that’s the function of a master. I cannot give you intelligence but I can remove a few rocks in the way. Once those rocks are not there, the intelligence starts flowing. Those rocks can be removed because they have been put there from the outside.

My definition of religion is: whatsoever the society has done, religion has to undo.

[A sannyasin says that Indian people tease him about his name, deva nirodh, as it can also mean divine birth control.]

They also call it nirodh – birth control devices their call nirodh! But it is a very ancient word; it means inner discipline. Patanjali has defined Yoga as ’chit vrutti nirodh’: the stopping of all the waves of the mind. He uses the word ’nirodh’ for the discipline that stops all the waves of the mind.

But all the old languages have many meanings for one word. It can be used as ’the discipline that stops the mind waves’; it can be used as ’that which stops the birth of a child.’ So one of the most famous devices in India for birth control has the name ’nirodh’; that must be why they laugh.

Next time they laugh, you laugh louder than them, and tell them ’You need nirodh!’ ’Nobody else in the world needs it so much!’ You tell them ’You need me’; just tell them.

[A sannyasin says: Since you gave me the name Nirmohi I feel so attached to everything.]

That’s good. You are becoming aware! You were not aware, that’s all.

People go on living without being aware that they are attached, that they are possessive, manipulative, dominating. Once they are made aware, then they become aware. The name is a device to make you aware. Your name means non-attachment. Now each time vou are moving into some attachment your name will remind you ’What are you doing? You are becoming attached again.’ Just that awareness is of tremendous import. If that awareness goes on deepening in you, soon you will find that attachment becomes impossible, because attachment brings only misery and nothing else; it brings bondage and nothing else.

It is very very stupid to be attached. The intelligent person will enjoy life without any attachment.

While anything is there, enjoy it. While the sun is shining, enjoy, but when the clouds have gathered then don’t start crying for the sun that is there no more. Instead of wasting your energy in crying, now enjoy the clouds. And when the clouds are gone – and they will be gone because in life nothing remains permanent – then don’t start crying for the clouds that have gone. Then whatsoever is available, dance with it, sing it!

This is the intelligent way to live life: whatsoever is, is, and whatsoever is not, is not. And don’t cry over spilled milk; that is the whole meaning of non-attachment.

CHAPTER 4

4 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, jurgen means a farmer.

Life is an opportunity, just a seed. One can miss it, one can remain a seed; that will be the missing of the opportunity. One has to seek the right soil. One has to be a farmer; One has to learn how to grow.

All that is needed in farming is needed in inner growth too: the right soil, the right season, protection for the new sprouts, the right quantity of water and sun and air, and not too much protection; that is the most important thing, because too much protection will not be helpful, it will be harmful. If one is protected too much, one becomes spineless; one never becomes strong enough, one is never on one’s own feet.

So just as the plants need protection and yet insecurity too, safety and openness to danger, vulnerability, too, in the same way the inner growth needs both. One has to be exactly in the middle of the polar opposites. The moment you lean too much towards one extreme, growth is stifled.

Growth needs the golden mean: neither too much security nor too much insecurity. One has to learn it by ones own efforts, slowly slowly; it is a delicate affair.

No farmer can teach his son farming except by taking him to the farm day in, day out, year in, year out, so that he learns the knack of it.

Thomas is the name of a disciple of Jesus. To be a disciple is one of the greatest moments in life; neither birth nor death is so important. It is the moment of disciplehood which is of supreme importance, because the real birth happens when one becomes a disciple, and the real death too. In a way one dies, in a way one is reborn. Disciplehood is a paradox, birth. death together.

simultaneously; and if one allows this, god is not far away.

Narayana is a name of god. If one is a disciple, god is not far away. That is the meaning of your name: be a disciple and god is very close by, just by the comer. Be a disciple totally and you have arrived.

Prem means love, uri means light of god. Love is the light of god. God comes in no other way, in no other form. God showers as love, reaches to the deepest recesses of your being as rays of love.

Once it is felt that the whole existence is full of love, god is experienced. The experience that the existence is made of the stuff called love is the experience of god. God is not a person: it is like beauty, an experience.

Love is the greatest experience possible – the highest and the deepest both. One touches the peaks of the Himalayas and one also reaches to the depths of the Pacific, and simultaneously. Love gives you that expansion. The moment you are in love you are huge, enormous. The lover starts feeling that the body cannot contain him; the body feels to be too small, a confinement. And as love grows, even the whole sky cannot contain it.

When all is felt as love one has known what god is. God is not in the temples, not in the churches, not in the synagogues; god is in the experience of love, god is the experience of love, god is love.

Forget god, remember love.

Deva means divine, and the sound of eenee is beautiful, so I will keep it. The meaning doesn’t matter; what matters is the music, the melody of a word, the music of a word, the rhythm. All meaning is arbitrary. We have given a certain meaning to a certain word, hence it has that meaning.

It is not anything natural; it is arbitrary, invented. But sound is natural; it is not given by us.

Mm? – these insects and their sound.... If you listen and if you want to find ’eenee’ in this sound it will be found. Sound is a natural phenomenon.

Think more of nature and less of the arbitrary, the artificial, because the natural is the door to the divine. Language is not the door to the divine, but music. If one can start hearing the music of existence which is all over – it is just that we are deaf – then god is heard. Or these sounds... and god is trying to approach you. Bu our senses have become dull, and we have started living n the man-created world too much.

Only the man-created world has meaning. Remove men, the world will be there in its utter beauty, but there will be no meaning to it. The sun will rise and the birds will sing; the trees will grow, the roses will bloom; the spring will come. Everything will continue but with new meaning, with no purpose, with no goal – utterly beautiful but utterly nude of meaning; that’s what existence is.

To fall into this meaningless, purposeless existence is meditation; to drown oneself in this beautiful existence for no other reason, for no goal, is to become divine.

’God’ also is a meaningless word, the most meaningless of all words, but tremendously significant: the significance consists in its meaninglessness.

Deva means divine, paul means very little, very small, just like a dew-drop. But the small only appears small. The dew-drop contains all the oceans there are, it has the secret of all the oceans in it. It is only quantitatively small, qualitatively not. In the ordinary mathematics the part is smaller than the whole, obviously, but in the higher mathematics the part is not smaller than the whole; it is equal to the whole, because the part is the whole.

Quantitatively the dew-drop is very small; qualitatively it has the same quality as all oceans have.

Man is also very small. Qualitatively it is not so, only quantitatively. Quantitatively man is divine, man is god.

Jesus refers to himself in two ways. Sometimes he says ’son of man’ and sometimes he says ’son of god’. It is very significant. When he says ’son of man’ he refers to his smallness, to his being just a dew-drop; he refers to the quantitative. When he says ’son of god’ he refers to the qualitative; he refers to his infinity, his eternity.

Know yourself as the smallest of the small, and yet remember that you are the eternal, the infinite.

Remembering your smallness will help you to become egoless, and remembering your greatness will help you to come closer and closer to truth, to god, to reality.

Deva means divine. Think of yourself as divine and think of everybody else also as divine. It is not a fiction, it is the reality. Except for god, all are fictions, except for god, everything else is a dream of the mind; only god is. Hence, if we follow the mind, we are never contented, because dreams cannot nourish. They are beautiful when you are far away; when you come closer, disappointment and nothing else is in your hands.

Dreams are like rainbows in the sky: from far away so beautiful, but if you come close and you want to hold the rainbow in your hand, you will find nothing but the vapour. That happens to everybody every day: the dreams, sooner or later, are found to be nothing but vapour.

Once this is understood, that all that mind creates, desires, dreams, is a kind of mirage, then the turning point comes, the converting point comes. Then one starts thinking how to transcend the mind, how to have a state where no thought is, no dream is, no desire is? We have lived through dreams and desires and found nothing; now let us try the other way round.

That’s what meditation is: looking into reality without anything between you and reality. Just a pure look... and suddenly, all is revealed. That revelation makes you aware that everything, every particle of dust, is divine. Then to live in the same world is a totally different experience. Then you are at home, at ease; then there is no death, there cannot be any death. Then there are no limitations of time and space. Then you have simply gone beyond all limitations. You have freedom, and freedom is joy!

[The new sannyasin says she has never done groups and does not want to.]

Then something has to be experimented with. It is always good to try something new. Who knows?

– something may happen out of it. Try at least two groups, and if you feel that they are not for you, you can drop out; but try! Mm?

I will give you two groups – try! The first group you try is Centering – it starts tomorrow – and the second is Intensive Enlightenment. Try two; if you feel that you would like to go deeper, enquire; I will give you a few more. They can be of immense help.

And never close your doors before you have experimented with anything – never, never. Otherwise many things remain unlived, unknown. They were available, and you would have gone through something beautiful; you would have been enriched by them. Always say yes to the new. No has to be used for the old. That which you have seen many times, say no to it. It is pointless, you have seen it; now there is no more in it. But never say no to the new. Even if the effort seems to be meaningless later on – later on it may be felt that it would have been better if you had not gone into it – then too I say, say yes to the new. Even doing something right, efficiently, if it is old, it is meaningless. Doing something which may be a mistake, erroneous, if it is new, it is worth doing, because one grows with the new. It is not a question of right and wrong; the question is between the old and the new. For me the old is sin and the new is virtue.

Deva means god, david means beloved one – god’s beloved one. Always remind yourself of that.

that god loves you. You may have forgotten him, he has not forgotten you; he cannot. You may have gone far away from him but he is always close by. Any moment if you turn towards him he is available. It is like: a man can go running far and far away from the sun, -keeping his back to the sun, but any moment that he turns back. the sun is there as much as before. Those many many miles that he has been running make no sense, no difference.

God is always there; we can keep our backs to him or we can confront him. Sannyas is a confrontation with god, it is an encounter, and it needs courage to encounter god. But if you go on feeling and remembering that god loves you, that courage arises; then there is no fear. If god loves you, then there is no problem. Even if you are not worthy it doesn’t matter – god loves you, his compassion is greater than your worthlessness. Your sins cannot be greater than his compassion.

This is the attitude of the religious mind: I may have gone astray, I may have made many mistakes.

but his quality is to forgive. And in his vision, my sins and my errors and my mistakes can’t be very important. He may not ever be able to see such minute details. they may not be of any relevance in his vision. Man can confront god only if this remembering slowly slowly sinks deep into the heart that ’God loves me’.

Names like David were given in the old days as part of meditation. All over the world almost all the old names are somehow related with god, for a certain reason: those names were given to remind yoU again and again that you are David – that god loves you, that you are a beloved one. Don’t feel unworthy and don’t feel worthless. His love gives you worth, significance. splendour.

That very understanding is nourishing. It helps you to stand erect. It helps you to be strong enough to go into the unknown; it helps you to seek and search and enquire. It helps you to become a pilgrim of the ultimate.

Zahira is one of the Sufi names for god. Sufis have a hundred names for god; ninety-nine are pronounced, the hundredth is kept unpronounced. Zahira is one of those ninety-nine names; its literal meaning is the manifest one.

God has two aspects: one, the manifest – that is the universe: the sun, the moon, the stars, the people, the trees, the birds, the animals. This multi-dimensional universe, that is his manifest form, that is zahira. Hidden behind it is the unmanifest form. Those who remain with the manifest and think that this is all are the worldly people. Those who think that the manifest one is only a finger pointing to the moon and who start searching for the unmanifest one, they are the religious people.

This whole existence points towards god; eyes are just needed to see that all arrows are pointing towards god. Each experience of life goes on pushing you towards god. It is really unbelievable how people can go on missing god, because each day a thousand and one opportunities are given, and each day we go on missing. Each day he knocks on our doors and so many many times; and we don’t hear.

Think of the whole existence as fingers pointing to the unmanifest. Then the beautiful rose suddenly becomes a manifestation of god. The man you love or the woman you love suddenly becomes a manifestation of god. If we can constantly live with this awareness – that all is god – life becomes a benediction.

This will be the name for your centre: Joshua. Joshua is the original name of Jesus; in Aramaic it is Joshua. The literal meaning is Jehovah saves, Jehovah is salvation. Only god saves – not our efforts, but his grace. Our efforts do something, certainly – they make us capable to receive his grace, that’s all – but what really saves is his grace.

Our efforts do a negative part: they remove the hindrances so that his grace can reach to us, but our efforts don’t create it.

So this thing has to be constantly remembered: our efforts are needed, yet their function is only negative. They are needed, yet they are not the sole cause of the ultimate happening. They help in removing the hindrances, but the grace was always coming – it was just that the hindrances were there. Now there are no hindrances, the grace reaches you and saves you.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I feel my distrust is still stronger in my than my trust in people... a certain point comes where it is very much hurting to go into a relationship.]

Next time something much more will have to be done. Distrust is there in everybody, more or less; you may be having a little more, that’s all. But it can be dropped; in fact one cannot carry it very long. It is such an unnecessary burden, it is so destructive. It does not give you any joy, it does not give you anything at all. In fact it destroys so many beautiful things in your being: it destroys your love, it destroys your friendship; it destroys every possibility in which you can grow. So how long can you carry it and for what?

And if you really know how to distrust, then the first thing to be distrusted is distrust itself! Why do you trust your distrust? For what? What is it going to give you? It is your life: you have to be alert about what you are doing to your life. If your distrust is paying you well, continue; there is no problem in it, don’t create a problem out of it. Distrust, distrust more intensely, more totally. But if it is not giving you anything and simply destroying all that is beautiful in your life, then this is the first thing to distrust.

I think a little more learning about how much it is destroying you will help. So be a little alert. just watch what it is doing to you and to your life. And the next time you come the first thing to remind me about is your distrust, so we will start working on it. Good!

Prem means love, raj means the secret. Love is the secret, the secret of all secrets, the golden key, the master key, that opens all the locks of all the mysteries. Love, and love for no other reason but just for the sheer joy of it. Don’t try to find out reasons to love, because then love becomes shallow.

When love is for no reason at all it has tremendous depth. Love unconditionally. The moment you make a condition love becomes a bargain, mundane; without any condition, it is sacred.

Love to give, not to get. Much comes; but that is another matter. Your whole approach should be that of giving; and the more you give, the more you have to give; the more you pour yourself, the more you are overwhelmed from some unknown sources. Once that is known you have come to know the secret of love.

CHAPTER 5

5 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, ariel means a lion of god... and each sannyasin has to become a lion. There are two many sheep in the world, and the world needs individuals. It needs really free people, because only out of freedom do flowers of love, bliss, arise.

Prem means love, janaina means god’s gift. Love is the gift of god, the greatest gift. Each child is capable of love, we are born with that inner capacity. To become a sannyasin means to become a lover – a lover of god, a lover of beauty, a lover of music.

Anand means blissful, david means a friend. Become a blissful friend to the whole of existence: to people, to animals, to birds, to trees, to all that is. In every possible way create more and more friendship and less and less enmity.

If one can become a friend to all that exists, one has attained to the greatest prayer. Then one need not go to the church or to the temple. Then wherever one is there is the temple, because friendship is the highest form of love; it is the fragrance of the flower called love. Learn the ways of being friendly.

Veet means beyond, Gudrun is the name of a mythological heroine who represents revenge. Your name will mean: go beyond revenge. There is nobody else than god. To be revengeful towards anybody is to be revengeful towards god. To think of someone as your enemy is to make god your enemy. Hence Jesus says ’Love your enemies’, because they are not enemies. We are members of each other, we are one whole.

And remember: one who forgives is forgiven. The quality and the capacity to forgive is one of the most beautiful flowers of the human soul. Revenge is ugly. mean; it is falling to the lowest. To forgive is to rise so high. The more one becomes capable of forgiving, the more one’s heart expands, one’s consciousness grows bigger. The day one can forgive all and everything is the day when god meets man, man meets god.

So let this quality of forgiveness become your very centre. Don’t forgive in the sense that you are obliging. Don’t forgive as a duty, because then it creates the ego, and a very subtle ego, which is dangerous. more dangerous than revenge itself. The holy ego is the worst possible ego in the world.

So don’t be righteous. Take it with ease; to forgive should become natural, and then it is really a benediction.

Veet means going beyond, transcending; marco means god of war. Your name will mean going beyond all possibilities of war, going beyond the god of war. In fact the god of war is not a god but the devil.

The world has suffered too much from war; it is time we stopped. It is time we started the ways of love and friendship. It is the right time for nations to disappear and the world to become one. Then this very earth can become the lotus paradise.

Anand means bliss, georg means a farmer. Now cultivate bliss, sow seeds of bliss so that one day we can reap the crop of god. It is only by becoming more and more blissful that one comes closer to god. Bliss is both the means and the end. By becoming blissful you come closer to god; by coming closer to god you become blissful. It is the way and the goal both.

The goal is spread all over the day. Even with the first step you have entered into the goal – it is just a little bit, but you have entered all the same. Bliss is the first step and the last too.

Anand means blissful, chris means a follower of Christ. But the language that Christ spoke has been forgotten by the Christians. He was not a sad, ascetic person: he was full of zestfulness, he was very alive. In fact that was his crime: it was for his being too alive that he was crucified. He loved people, he loved eating, he loved drinking. He was not a man whom Christians would think of as a saint. He was very earthly, and yet divine. He was a meeting point of the sky and the earth. And that’s how every Christ, every Buddha is – a paradox. where the visible and the invisible meet and mingle and merge; in sense, very earthly, in another sense, not of this world at all.

But Christianity has taken only part of Christ, the other-worldly part, and has completely forgotten the this-worldly part. Hence it became a pseudo religion; it lost contact with the reality, it became an empty ritual. But it is nothing special about Christianity; this has happened with all the religions of the world. It almost always happens: when the master is gone, everything is misinterpreted. When the master is gone, the learned people come in and they start interpretations of their own.

And the problem, I can understand, is that the master is always paradoxical and the followers want to be consistent; this is the basic, fundamental problem. The master is consistently inconsistent, and the follower tries to make something logical out of him because he has to fight with the world and he has not that insight which can enjoy being paradoxical. He himself is afraid of the paradox, he is worried about contradictions, so he has to choose: he has to drop one part which contradicts the other part, to be consistent; and that’s how every religion is falsified.

I would like you to be this-worldly and that-worldly together. Be blissful; there is no need to be sad, there is no need to be serious at all. It is through playfulness that one learns how to pray. Playfulness is prayer and to be cheerful is to be holy.

Veet means going beyond, maria in Hebrew means bitterness. Going beyond all bitterness – that is the meaning of your name.

Man is born bitter but has an innate capacity to be sweet. Bitterness is like a hard shell that surrounds a seed: it is protective, it protects the inner sweetness. It is an armour, it has to be dropped one day. The day the seed drops its hard shell it starts growing into a sprout.

The same happens with human consciousness. Drop all kinds of bitternesses – anger, greed.

jealousy, domination – and then suddenly there is an explosion of sweetness. That sweetness is love, that sweetness is compassion, that sweetness is prayer; and to taste it is to have tasted god himself.

It is beautiful that Maria is the name of Jesus’ mother. The sweetest man was born out of Maria; and Maria means bitterness. Let your bitterness become the mother so that sweetness can be born out of it. The bitterness can become the womb for the Christ child to be born out of.

Those who have known the truth of life, this is their fundamental understanding: that poison can be transformed into nectar, that we need not throw anything, that everything can be transformed. The lower is the way to the higher, the dark night is the womb for the morning, and the darker the night, the closer is the morning.

Nothing has to be renounced but everything has to be transformed.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says she has a burning desire to be total, and at the same time is so overwhelmed with her energy she doesn’t know what to do.]

This is the problem for everybody. This is not only your problem.

The mind allows nobody to be total; and everybody is burning for totality. It is good that you have become aware of it, because this burning, this pain, sooner or later will help you to attain to totality; there is no other I way. The whole way is full of pain. Only in the end when you have achieved totality does the whole pain disappear, and then you are thankful to the pain, because without it you would have never reached. So this is perfectly good!

Remember two things. One: the desire for totality is good, it is a blessing, because in other words that is the desire for god. The second thing to remember: meanwhile don’t stop yourself because you are not total; that is not going to help. If you stop even being partial how are you going to be total one day?

So meanwhile go on as much as possible bringing totality into your acts, into your love-making, into everything that you do. It will not be absolute; you have to accept that it will remain something short, never reaching the peak. That has to be accepted and one has to go on working on oneself. One day one reaches to the peak.

Many times the mountaineer finds himself stuck; he has to change his route, he has to change his direction. But if one goes on and on.... Fifty years it took to reach Everest, and in fifty years hundreds of mountaineers tried and failed. But finally one day, one man succeeded.

And that’s how life is: you will fail many times, and each time the failure will give you great frustration and great agony. In failure you may even start thinking ’What is the point of it all? Why make love when it is not total?’ But that is not going to help; not making love is not going to help. Why see the sunset if the experience is not total? Why listen to music if the experience is not total? Still, knowing that it is not total and burning for totality, go on accepting whatsoever is available today; and whatsoever is possible today, go on doing. It is only by doing it that slowly slowly you will become m re and more capable. One day it is going to happen. It happens – I am a witness to it!

[A sannyasin, leaving, says she is pregnant.]

Good. Enjoy pregnancy! Be more and more meditative; it will help the child. Sit more in silence, listen to soft music. Be with the trees, in the sun, in the ocean, on the beach. Let the child experience more of nature from the very beginning. Because whatsoever you experience becomes the child’s experience. So start teaching him meditation, joy, beauty.

And for all these days that the child is within you, drop a few things completely: don’t be angry, don’t be greedy, don’t be possessive.

To be a mother is a great art!

CHAPTER 6

6 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Rick Atmo. Rick means a powerful ruler, atmo means your own self. One can rule others or one can rule oneself. To rule others is a poor substitute, because the real ruler is one who rules himself.

Because it is arduous to rule oneself, people have chosen the cheaper thing; the cheaper thing is to rule others. The lowest thing in the world is power politics; and by power politics I mean every effort in which you are trying to possess, to dominate, to rule, the other. The highest thing in the world is religion; and by religion I mean the effort to rule oneself, to become a master of oneself.

If you rule others you remain a slave. Your being a ruler is only a facade; deep down you are a slave, maybe a slave of your own slaves. Ruling others does not bring freedom. But when one is able to rule oneself, when one is centred, rooted in one’s own being – when one is not dominated by desires, dreams, thoughts, when one is not just a crowd of many, many minds inside but has become a master who can direct his body, mind, soul, into a particular rhythm, in a particular harmony, who can start moving as a togetherness, not like a multiplicity, not like a crowd, but like a unity, who has created inside a cosmos instead of a chaos – then one has become a real king. And that’s what sannyas is all about.

The kingdom is within and the king is asleep: the king has to be awakened!

Prem means love, ken means beautiful. Love is beautiful, and not only that, love beautifies too.

Without love beauty is artificial, formal; with love it becomes substantial, central, essential. Without love a man can only pretend that he is beautiful, because deep down lovelessness creates ugliness.

One can hide one’s ugliness in many ways: the body can have a beautiful form, the body can be proportionate, but that doesn’t matter ultimately. What matters is your inner core, whether it is beautiful or not. A body which is beautiful and without the light of love is a beautiful house with no light.

Once love arises a kind of luminosity starts happening. The body becomes transparent. The eyes are no more one way: they don’t only take something from the outside in, they start pouring out also; they become two-way. And all the senses change in the same way. The beautiful person is one who is pouring out his heart into the world in all possible ways, so whatsoever he touches turns into gold and wherever he moves the place becomes sacred.

To be beautiful with the arousing of love gives tremendous contentment. If one can share one’s life and love with people, with existence, then all is attained; there is nothing more!

Peter means rock, divyo means divine – become a rock for the divine. People are living in dreams.

And to live in dreams is to make your house in the air. At the most it can be a sandcastle. It is perfectly okay if you are just playing on the beach for the sheer joy of it, but people are very seriously playing the game, too seriously in fact. They are ready to kill, they are ready to die for it; and it is just a sandcastle!

Unless a man starts moving beyond dreams and desires and thoughts. he cannot find the rock on which the true temple can be built. The rock is there, we are made of it. Our essential core is eternal; it is not temporal. Time makes no difference to it. It is never born and never dies. But we don’t look inwards, we look outwards; and outwards you will find just sand and sand. It is a desert, and whatsoever you build there will be destroyed by death. Any wind and the castle is gone, and with it all your efforts, your energies, you yourself.

Let sannyas be the beginning of the search for the rock. It is there, it is our very life: it just has to be discovered, or rather rediscovered.

Deva means god, alex means a helper of mankind. It is the short form of Alexander, Alexandra.

Your name will mean god is the only helper of mankind. Nothing else can help. Man tries in many ways to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. The effort is bound to fail. Every human effort done without the help of god is absolutely certain to fail. Man cannot succeed alone: man can succeed only with god, through god. To say it in a more correct way will be: it is always god who succeeds through man; man can only become a vehicle, a medium.

My teaching essentially is based on this idea, that you have to become a medium so that god can flow through you unhindered. Then you will help yourself and you will help everybody else who comes in contact with you. Then you will be blessed and you will be able to bless the whole of humanity.

Deva means god, ralf means protector – god is the protector. But this century has completely forgotten this fact. This century is the first in the whole of history which is suffering from great anxiety; man has never suffered so much with anxiety. Because god was the protector, with god, man was safe. Just at the beginning of this century Fredrich Nietzsche declared: God is dead. And it was not only an individual’s opinion; it became the very foundation of this century. And if god is dead, then man is left alone in the immense infinite darkness of the universe, unprotected. Then there is nobody to look to, then there is nobody to pray to. There is nobody; the whole universe is just an eternal darkness, not even a small star to hope by, to live by.

Naturally man started feeling very anxious, a great trembling arose in man; such anguish as this century has known has never been known before. And the only reason is that we have forgotten a certain truth – that we are protected. Even while we are suffering so much anxiety we are protected; our anxiety is unnecessary. It can be dropped, but it can be dropped only if the vision of god arises again in your life, if yoU again start living with the idea that god is.

My effort here is to help you feel that god is. My effort is not to teach you: my effort is to make you feel My effort is not to give you a belief but an experience By becoming a sannyasin you are opening your heart to me. Sannyas is a gesture from your side that ’I am available’, that ’I will not resist’, that ’I will not keep my doors closed’, that ’My doors are open and if some breeze from the unknown comes in, it is welcome!’

Prem means love, Maria is the mother of Jesus, and the message of Jesus is love. Jesus means love; just as Moses means law, Jesus means love.

Become a Maria and give birth to Christ-consciousness, to the consciousness that is full of love.

Everybody has to become Maria. It is easy to give birth to a child; the real problem is how to give birth to yourself, how to become a womb to yourself. Certainly, that birth will be out of a virgin mother.

That is the meaning of the virgin Maria giving birth to Christ; it is a parable. You cannot give birth to a real child by remaining a virgin, but you can give birth to Christ-consciousness only if you remain virgin. But then virginity has nothing to do with your body or your biology; then it has something to do with your inner purity, innocence. Only an innocent consciousness can become the womb for Christ-consciousness to arrive.

We can invite Christ-consciousness. In the East we call it Buddha-consciousness; it is the same. All that it means is that something from the sky can penetrate into the earth, that something immaterial can penetrate into matter and the material, that something can be pulled forth from the beyond.

Then our darkness is no more darkness, then we have a light. That light is Christ, and that light has the quality of love.

[A sannyasin, leaving, who is writing his autobiography, says: Thank you! My whole life has changed.]

Yes, it has changed and I am very happy. It is really beautiful to see anybody changing so fast and so easily. Whenever any sannyasin goes through such a change I feel as happy as a gardener when he sees a new flower bloom.

But this is just the beginning: much more, much deeper, much higher, is going to happen. So don’t settle with it. Be happy, thankful, grateful; but this is only the beginning, remember it, just the tip of the iceberg.

Man has unlimited potential to grow. Man is absolutely unaware of who he is, of what he can do, of what he can be.

My basic approach is to slowly slowly make you aware that you are not an island but a vast continent.

There are still many dark parts of your own world where you have never penetrated, never travelled.

There are peaks which have to be climbed and there are depths which have to be fathomed, and it is a non-ending process.

Religion is a pilgrimage, a non-ending pilgrimage; one is always arriving but one never arrives. The day you understand it, then the sheer beauty of it is so ecstatic that you are always arriving and never arrive, that life goes on expanding just as the universe goes on expanding....

But the seed has sprouted; protect it, help it. You have to finish your autobiography, because now your autobiography is my autobiography; now I am part of you. It will be of immense help to people in understanding me. So now it is not only your work, it will be a great help to my work, because what is happening to people here, many people would like to happen to them. But they have to be made aware that something is happening somewhere, that a door has opened somewhere, that a new hope has arisen somewhere, that god is not dead, that yet somewhere something can make you feel the existence of god, that there still exists a field of energy which is the need of everyone.

So write it, and pour your whole heart and all that has changed in you and all that will be changing in the coming months, into it. Think of it as my work!

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I just feel discouraged, Osho. I feel my heart loves everything that you say and I try to move in the direction that you give me, but I feel I go through a lot of changes and...

no transformation.]

What is the need of transformation?

The mind just goes on creating new desires, new ambitions. And what I go on saying every day is: try to understand the tricks and the strategies of the mind. Now transformation becomes the goal. If it is not money, if it is not power, it is transformation, enlightenment, this and that. I am not saying that the transformation does not happen: I am saying that it cannot happen if you desire it; then only frustration happens.

This has to be understood, there is no way to escape from this understanding. Sooner or later, and it is better if you do it sooner, one day you have to come to this understanding, that the mind and its desires are all futile, all desires – transformation included. Then one simply lives! Then if transformation happens, it happens; if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Then one does not care a bit this way or that. That moment, when you don’t care a bit for enlightenment, suddenly it is there.

If you run after it, you will never never reach it.

You have to forget it. You are too anxious about it, and creating unnecessary misery. When the anxiety is for transformation it is heart-rending; nothing else can give you so much pain as this desire. Money can be achieved. it is not so difficult; millions of stupid people are able to have so much money. So you can have it – that’s not a problem at all, not much intelligence is needed.

Power is possible; you can become the president of a country or the prime minister of a country; so many stupid people already are, that is not a big problem. But when the idea of transformation becomes the desire then you are hankering for the impossible. And you will suffer unnecessarily, you will create a hell for yourself.

So don’t be an enlightenment-seeker. Forget all about it – it is all nonsense!

[The sannyasin answers: It feels more that I just can’t even stop my mind, I can’t even be present –

never mind transformation.]

You will have to, sooner or later, that’s all. A little more suffering, a little more pain... how long can you go on?

There is a limit beyond which one simply gives up; and that is the moment of liberation. One day you will fall on the ground and you will say ’I give up.’ That very moment you are no more the same, because in that giving up the mind disappears. The mind can remain only if there is a desire; any desire will do for it to survive.

I can only go on telling you that this is the fact. And I understand your trouble also; that has been my trouble also for many lives, so I am in all sympathy with you.

I am not ridiculing it, but it is ridiculous. I have suffered from it, everybody has to suffer it, and it is really very difficult to drop it. It drop on its own accord one day, when enough is enough. Maybe that day is coming closer. You are becoming more and more worried about it and more and more tense; soon you will reach to that point beyond which there is no hope. When hopelessness is absolute, one gives up; and to give up is to be enlightened.

[You are] capable of giving up, because what else?... how long can you carry this burden? One day or other you have to simply drop it or it drops with its own weight!

CHAPTER 7

7 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means beyond, andy means manly. The past has been very male chauvinistic, so anything manly was praised very much. The woman was thought to be not really human. In China, one could kill one’s wife and it was not a crime. No court would take any note of it; it was a private affair.

Man has dominated the past and messed up everything. The future belongs to the feminine qualities, not to the manly qualities. The male quality is basically that of aggression, and the female quality basically is that of receptivity. It is because of man that there have been so many wars. It is because of man that there has been so much destruction. Man has to learn to be a little more feminine.

The feminine has to be freed from the past and its domination, man has to learn to become a little more feminine, and we can create a better future than the past, we can create a more peaceful earth, more loving. There is no future for manly qualities; they are finished, man is spent. Woman has to be explored – for new visions, for new perspectives, for new possibilities.

Deva means divine, nellie means light – divine light. We are born with it. It is already there, in the depths of your being. The darkness is only outside, but because we go on looking on the outside, we remain in darkness. The moment one takes a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn and just looks within oneself, all is light.

And it is eternal light: it needs no fuel, it simply is there. It is our very being, we are it. It is not that the light is seen by us; there is no seen and no seer. One feels oneself as light, and that is the moment of great delight. Then no darkness can ever make you afraid. Then for you there is no death. Death happens only in darkness: once the inner light is experienced, one has experienced immortality.

[The new sannyasin asks: How should I use my energy?]

Just wait a little – feel it more. The first thing is to feel one’s energy. The first thing is not the question

’How to use it?’. The first thing is: how to feel it and how to feel it intensely, passionately, totally.

And the beauty is that once you have felt your energy, out of that very feeling the insight arises: how to use it. The energy starts directing you. It is not that you direct the energy: on the contrary, the energy starts moving on its own accord and you simply follow it. Then there is spontaneity and then there is freedom.

If you try to use the energy, two things are going to happen: one, from the very beginning you have taken a standpoint of duality, that you are separate from the energy – which is wrong, which creates a split, which is the base of all schizophrenia. From the very beginning you have started controlling your energy, manipulating your energy; and this can be done only through the head. The head is the head-manipulator, and it is always trying to control everything. And if the head controls the energy it can allow it only so far, only so far; it has a certain limitation. Beyond that it will not allow the energy to move. And what is the limit beyond which the head never allows? The limit is: where energy becomes orgasmic, then the head becomes afraid, because the head starts melting and losing its control. Now it is beyond it; now something is happening which is not controllable. So just one step before it starts happening, the head starts pulling it back.

The head is very non-orgasmic; it does not allow any orgasmic experience. It may be sex, it may be love, beauty, music, dance, anything, but it never allows any orgasmic experience. It simply holds back, because to be orgasmic means to be out of your head. The head is blown; and it is very afraid of that, naturally – it is a kind of death, losing control.

So if you think about how to use it, from the very beginning the head is taking the position of the controller, the director.

And the second thing: if the head tries to control, the whole of your energy will never become available to you, because the head can function only on the surface; it cannot move to the centre.

Thought cannot move to the centre of your being; your centre of being is utterly thoughtless. It is silence, no word has ever penetrated it. It is virgin silence; the mind cannot interfere there.

So if the head is in control then you will be using only the superficial energies which are available on the circumference. Then energies are very limited. Then one feels very easily tired, exhausted.

One is not connected, not plugged into the real source of energies.

So these two problems arise if you ask the question ’how to use’. My approach is: experience what this energy is. Then two things will happen again. One: you will see that you are it. That brings a deep unity, integration; the split disappears. For the first time you are really normal. And the second thing: you can be orgasmic; now there is nobody to control. You are energy, so you can go with the energy wherever it goes, in deep trust. Then the whole of life becomes orgasmic.

Sexual orgasm is the lowest orgasm, biological. but there are thousands of other, higher orgasms.

Listening to music somebody who is really in love with music goes orgasmic. This is a higher phenomenon: something deeper is stirred. Dancing, one goes into orgasm. It has nothing to do with the biological, with the physical; it is something inner. Or when seeing beauty, just the sunset, the sheer joy of seeing the colourful clouds, the mystery of it all... and one stop breathing, the heart misses a beat and there is great joy.

Energy has to be felt. This is the work that we are doing here: energy has to be felt in its totality, and then it takes possession of you and then it leads you; and wherever it leads is good. Wherever it leads is god.

Michael means godlike, karuno means compassion.

Sex is animal-like, love is manlike, and

compassion is godlike. From sex to compassion is the whole pilgrimage of life. The sexual energy has to be transformed first into love and then into compassion.

The sexual state is that of exploiting the other, using the other; the other is reduced to a thing. It is an I-it relationship. Sex only wants to take; it does not know how to give.

Love moves a little higher. It becomes an I-thou relationship. The other is no more a thing to be used and thrown away. The other is as divine as you are; the other is a person. Love gives dignity to the other, sex takes away all dignity.

Love knows how to give and how to take. Sex knows only how to take, hence the sexual relationship remains that of conflict. Love is more harmonious; it is a give-take relationship: one gives, one takes. There is more friendship in it than in a sexual relationship, less antagonism, more accord.

Compassion is the highest form of energy, where I-thou disappear. There is no I, there is no thou

– just one pure energy. The lover and the beloved have disappeared, melted, into it. Something higher has taken possession; there is no separation. There is nothing to take and nothing to give, because all is given and all is taken: there is no separation.

Sex remains very small; love expands; compassion becomes as infinite as the sky.

Anand means bliss, blissful, keith means a wood-dweller, one who lives in a forest – a blissful wood-dweller. I am not talking about the forest that exists without; I am talking of the forest that exists within.

There is a place within you which is absolutely silent – no woods are so silent – and which is utterly beautiful; no forests are so green and so full of fragrance. The inner forest is so close that any moment you close your eyes you are there; you need not travel. In fact people feel very good when they go into the woods because somehow it stirs a nostalgia for, a memory of, the experience that you had when you were a child of your inner silence, of your inner innocence, purity, of your inner aliveness. Going to the mountains one remembers that there are mountains within.

One who has found the inner mountains and inner forests need not go anywhere: he can simply close his eyes and disappear into the inner world; and the inner is far vaster than the outer.

Anand means bliss, jurg means a farmer. Gautam the Buddha used to say: I am a farmer. I cultivate bliss, love, compassion, samadhi.

In fact every seeker of truth has to become a farmer. It is a kind of inner agriculture. All is ready: the soil is ready, the seed is ready, the climate is ready – it is just that the farmer is fast asleep. The farmer has to be awakened and the work starts. Once the farmer is awake he can see that the soil is ready. The seed is ready. The climate has come; the right moment has arrived. Once the farmer is awake, your life starts taking on a new duality. You are no more poor; you start growing inner crops of richness. And once the inner crops have been reaped, one is fulfilled: one has been fruitful.

Then life is not a complaint. Then great gratitude arises on its own accord; that gratitude is prayer.

Others who pray, pray in vain. Their prayer is false and pseudo, their gratitude just a formality.

The real gratitude is possible only when you start feeling an inner fulfilment. And sannyas is the beginning, the beginning of waking up the farmer!

Prem means love; in Greek mythology Doris is the name of the goddess of the sea. Your name will mean: a goddess of the sea of love, a goddess of the ocean of love. Love is oceanic; it knows no boundaries, it is shoreless. Love is also wild, as wild as the ocean. Love has depth, just as the ocean has depth.

The person who has not known love has lived really very superficially. He will not understand the dimension of depth at all. He has lived a flat life, two dimensional; and without the third dimension there is no depth. Millions of people are living flat lives, hence they look bored. And once a person starts feeling tired, he starts committing suicide because he loses the zest to live. Deep down in the unconscious he starts feeling ’It would be better not to be, because now there is no point in being’.

It is love that gives you depth, meaning, significance. It is love that destroys all boredom and keeps you ever-fresh, alive, and surprised too, because love brings so many gifts, and unasked for.

The ultimate gift of love is god. If one goes on and on, loving and loving and loving, the ultimate gift of love is god himself. Love reaches, ends, culminates, in god.

[A sannyasin, leaving, asks: I!d like to know if you can help me to understand how I’m missing you and my centre.]

Drop this idea that you should not be missing, simply drop that idea. When you feel, it is good; when you don’t feel, that too is good. One has to become more accepting of all the ups and downs.

There is a rhythm: sometimes you will feel that you are in tune, sometimes you will feel that you are missing; that is natural. It is like day and night, summer and winter. One has to learn the shadow part of everything. If you cannot accept the shadow part you become unnecessarily disturbed, and that disturbance will make things more complicated.

So my suggestion is: when something beautiful happens, accept, feel grateful; when it doesn’t happen, accept that too and continue to feel grateful, knowing that this is just a resting period. For the whole day you have worked and in the night you fall asleep: you don’t feel miserable because you will not be able to work and you will not be able to earn and you will not be able to do a thousand and one things and there are so many things to do; you don’t worry about it.

There are people who worry. Then they start losing their sleep, and they are not benefited by it. The person who has not been able to sleep in the night feels exhausted in the morning, more tired than he was when he went to bed. The person who forgets the whole day and accepts night as a rest part and goes into deep relaxation by the morning will be able to live again with new eyes and new being, will be able to accept the new day and welcome it, will be glad to breathe the air again and to see the sun and people. Remember always that everything has its rest period; and the rest period is not against it, the rest period gives it energy, vitality.

So when you are feeling attuned with me, it is beautiful; when you miss that, don’t become disturbed.

That is a rest period: it will make you able to be attuned on a higher plane soon. But if you get disturbed about missing, that will create trouble. Then it may take a longer period for you to be attuned again.

Once the natural rhythm is accepted it comes on and off on its own and one enjoys both. Try this!

[A sannyasin is leaving and wants to start a meditation centre.]

Good. Remember that this is your home – finally you have to come forever. Just keep it somewhere in your heart, and the seed will grow and will bring you back!

And are you going to start a center there?... Start a center there....

People will come – just start. Just start, don’t wait, and you will be surprised how many people were just waiting to come. Your place will grow soon – just start it. That’s what is happening to all the centres. People are in a great need and they are searching.

And I will be there to help you – you are not alone!

[A sannyasin arriving says: I don’t feel very blissful.]

I can see it, that’s why I am saying to just do a few groups, be here and when you are going, then remind me; then things will b e on a different plane. Right now I can see that you are a little low. It is better to talk about you when you are not so low, otherwise you will not be able to understand.

It is one of the fundamentals that people can understand things more easily when they are flowing

’! higher. They are more open, vulnerable, receptive, more intelligent, and higher truths can be told to them. When they are very low, in a dark, dismal mood, you can tell them but they will be deaf.

So do a few groups – those groups w ill remove the wax from your ears – and then I will say!

CHAPTER 8

8 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho gives sannyas to two small children]

Prem means love, dylan means sea, ocean. Prem Dylan will mean ocean of love. Create such huge love... as the ocean, boundless, without any shore.

Prem means love, emmet means work. Let your work be your love; do everything very lovingly.

Work is worship.

[The father of the children says he is a bit upset because his wife was unable to enter the darshan due to a fragrance.]

These are just excuses. Even if that was not the case, the mind would find something else so it is not here. The mind does not allow anybody to be here, the mind always exists somewhere else. It finds excuses, and it is very clever in finding excuses; any excuse will do. And when you have the excuse then you think ’What can be done? The problem is there; that’s why I am not here.’ No, it is not so.

You are not here because you are not yet aware of the cunning strategies of the mind. Everything else is irrelevant. Everybody else’s wives are not in the same situation but they also are not here.

Even if sometimes it happens that the mind cannot find any excuse, then too a person is not here.

Then a great restlessness arises; the mind starts feeling suffocated. The moment you want to be now and here, the mind starts dying; that is the death of the mind.

So don’t allow the mind to give you excuses. And just your not being here is not going to help anybody. What can you do? – you are here, so why not be here totally? Even if you are not mentally here, you are here. It is better to be together; the mind and body should function together. In that functioning is great melody, in that functioning is great music: in fact that functioning is another name of joy. When your mind and body function in such harmony they hum together; that humming brings you closer and closer to god. My whole emphasis is: wherever you are, be there totally.

So don’t listen to the excuses of the mind!

Prem means love, jolande is the flower, violet.

In ancient mythology it represents modesty,

humbleness. Love is always humble, love is always modest. The flower, violet, has the tendency to hide – behind bushes, trees. It is very non-exhibitionistic, very shy about declaring itself. And that is the intrinsic quality of love: it is very shy. It is constantly aware that nothing should be done which can be offensive in any way.

Love, rather than taking the initiative, would like to wait – with hope, patience, expectancy; and that is something immensely spiritual about love. The moment it becomes aggressive, the moment it starts encroaching upon the other, it starts falling from the heights, it starts becoming gross.

Man’s love is a little gross; woman’s love is far superior, far more delicate. Man’s love has something of activity in it; the woman’s love is inactive. The woman’s love is passive, receptive.

So become a receptivity, a humble receptivity, a loving expectancy for god. God knocks only on the doors of those who are modest, humble. Where the ego exists there is a wall between you and god; when the ego is not there there is no wall, there is a bridge. Humbleness becomes the bridge.

Prem means love, maddalena means elevated. There is nothing higher than love; it is the most elevated experience of life. God is nothing but the ultimate peak of love, the experience of total orgasm – not the sexual, but the inner and the spiritual. The sexual orgasm also gives a glimpse of the inner, it triggers the process of the inner. Any moment of deep love is the moment of god.

Whenever you are deep in love with something. in that moment you are in prayer.

The name comes from Mary Magdalene. She loved Jesus as nobody else loved him. Her love must have been of tremendous importance in Jesus’ life; it must have kept him tethered to the earth.

Otherwise these type of people find it very difficult to even remain in the body. There was no other disciple around Jesus who had such depth, intensity, and totality of love as Magdalene.

Because Magdalene is elevated through her love for Jesus, the very word has become... has taken the meaning of elevated. The word itself did not have that meaning in the beginning. It was the name of the town from where Magdalene came, the name of the town was Magda. Magdalene simply means: the woman from Magda. But her love was such that the very name, the very word, has taken on the meaning; a new meaning entered into the world. Now it means the elevated, the magnificent, the splendorous; and those are all the qualities of love.

Prem means love, nicola means victory. Love is victory, Love is success, Love is fulfilment. A life without love is an utter failure. No other victory can become a substitute for it. One can be the president of the country and it is futile if there is not love in the heart. One can have all the riches in the world, but if love is not in the heart one is poor, a beggar.

The only treasure worth searching for is love, because hidden at the very core of love is god. Search for love and you will find god. Nobody finds god by searching for god himself; because there is no possibility of directly enquiring into god. The mystery is very elusive: you have to approach it very indirectly, you cannot enter like an arrow. The path is very zig-zag, it moves like a footpath in the hills; and the name of the hills is love!

The footpath is not already there; everybody has to make it just by walking. It is not ready-made, it is not like a road. You walk and you create it; you create it and you walk. And the moment you have walked, it goes on disappearing behind you; nobody else can follow you.

Buddha is reported to have said that the way to truth is like the birds flying in the sky: they don’t leave footprints behind, so there is no possibility of following. Search, yes; follow, no.

The master is not to be followed; the master has to be understood so that you can create your own path towards god.

Anand means bliss, andrea means brave. Bliss is only for those who are brave. It needs guts to be blissful. Any coward can have as much misery as he wants, to his heart’s content. It needs no courage to be miserable, it needs no intelligence to be miserable; in fact it needs nothing to be miserable. But to be blissful, great intelligence is needed. Courage is needed, bravery is needed, because to be blissful means to learn the ways of the unknown; to be blissful means to move into the uncharted. Bliss is always in the movement from the known to the unknown; just in the gap between the known and the unknown is the moment of bliss. When the unknown becomes known, bliss disappears again, it moves into the unknown again. Just between the two, the known and the unknown, in that delicate moment, bliss arises. Once the unknown becomes known, again bliss disappears, remember.

So one has to be constantly moving, riverlike; one should never become stagnant, otherwise misery settles. Misery is a pool; bliss is a river. Misery is very very comfortable, convenient, safe, secure; bliss is a totally different affair. To move from the known to the unknown is always risky because you don’t know what is going to happen; it is unpredictable. You are going into something of which you know nothing. You may be a loser; it is a gamble, hence bliss is only for the brave ones. But bliss is life, otherwise one is dead.

There are millions of people who are dead and walking on the streets and working in the offices and in the factories; the whole world is full of dead people. There are two kinds of dead people – a few live in the cities and a few live in the cemeteries – but of the really alive there are very few.

I would like my sannyasins to be really alive, whatsoever the risk. I teach you to be gamblers, to be non-calculators, to be illogically in love with the unknown, to keep the flame burning, to never settle.

not even to the last moment of life. Then your whole life will be a blissful song. It will have the quality of poetry and the fragrance of flowers and the light of stars.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I can’t find the words. Words are difficult to find! When you really have something to say then words are difficult. When you have nothing to say you have so many words available! The meaningful can never be said.... ]

CHAPTER 9

9 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, Laila is from a symbolic Sufi story. Sufis believe that god is the beloved, that god is the woman, and that the seeker is the lover.

The story of Laila and Majnu represents the seeker and the sought. Majnu is the seeker, Laila is the beloved; Laila represents god. It is one of the most beautiful stories, but it has lost its message.

People read it as an ordinary love story; it is not. It is a Sufi parable, a device for teaching.

[The new sannyasin says: I feel that I jump outside myself, I feel I live outside myself. I’d like you to help me to come back into my body.]

I think: drop it as a problem; rather, use it as a stepping stone. If you make a problem oUt of it you will be unnecessarily worried, and the worry is not going to help at all. The more you worry, the bigger is the gap between you and the body. It does not matter about what you worry. You may be worrying about how to get into the body; that worrying will keep you separate from it.

The first thing is: drop it as a problem. Start enjoying it, because it has its own beauties, it is not just without any utility. In fact there are methods in the East which are used to create the situation so that the person becomes separate from the body.

There are only two ways to reach to the ultimate truth: either you become the body – that is the way of Tantra – or you become separate from the body, utterly separate – that is the way of Yoga.

The whole effort of Yoga is that you become just a witness, a transcendental witness of everything, unidentified with everything that happens to you, around you. Your body, your mind, your heart, everything is separate from you. On the Yoga path you have to continuously remember neti-neti: neither this nor that; ’I am neither this nor that, I am just a witness.’ If the witnessing becomes absolute, the ultimate is attained. This is one of the main ways to god.

The other main way is: become more and more lost in the body, so much so that there is not even a slight difference left. You are totally one with the body, not identified, but one, not having an idea of unity, but being one, existentially one. Then too the ultimate happens. The first is the way of awareness, the second is the way of love.

So my suggestion is: don’t make it a problem. Who knows? – it may become the key for you. So just wait. Enjoy it, enjoy it more and more. It is possible that that is going to be your path. If it is going to be your path, by enjoying it, it will deepen; it will become more and more clear, crystal-clear. If it is not your path, if it doesn’t fit with you, then the more you enjoy it, the more it will disappear.

Slowly slowly you will suddenly find one day that it is not there, and you are one with the body. Not by trying to be one with the body; any effort in that direction will keep you away, effort as such will become the barrier. So forget about it. Live it. This experience has been happening to you; maybe in past lives you have been practising something of Yoga, and that still persists in the collective unconscious and still keeps affecting you and your consciousness. So if it is so, we will use it! My approach is: use everything possible as a stepping stone.

God is like a mountain and you can reach to the peak from many many sides. Each side has its own view, its own beauty, its own blessings; the other side has its own. But the point is not from where you reach to the peak; the point is that you reach the peak. So just enjoy it more and more. Drop looking at it with the idea that it is a problem and has to be solved.

In India, if a person feels ’I am the body’ he comes to me saying that ’This is a problem. How to drop it?’. To feel oneself as the body is the worst space one can be in because Yoga has been so dominant; it has influenced all the religions of India. It has crushed the whole tradition of Tantra, has almost effaced it. So the Indian feels very .much in trouble when he finds himself identified with the body; he wants to be disidentified.

Now in the West a new vision of being in the body. of being the body, of being more sensuous, sensitive, has taken possession of the modern mind. This is a reaction against the Christian tradition; that was the tradition of Yoga. It is a revolt. It always happens: once one tradition becomes too much then a revolt is bound to happen. So all sensitivity programmes are against the Christian attitude of thinking oneself as separate from the body, higher than the body, holier than the body. Having the feeling that ’I possess the body and I am not it’. A great rebellion has happened, and it was bound to happen, because whenever one thing goes to the extreme, the pendulum starts moving to the other extreme.

So whenever this happens in the West – that you start feeling as if you are not in the body – this modern climate makes you feel that you are missing something; a kind of anxiety arises. But for me both are valid. If one comes to me identified with the body I say ’Get lost completely’. The whole thing is totality: be totally it. If somebody like you comes – feeling separate – I say ’Be totally separate and enjoy it’; and that will be decisive. Within three to six months it will settle of its own accord without any effort from your side. Either it will grow to such deep awareness that you are really separate from the body.... That has a beauty, great coolness, great silence and utter tranquillity. But if it is not your path, if something has gone wrong in your childhood, by enjoying it, it will be resolved; by enjoying it, it will not be a problem any more.

If you think of it as a problem you feed it; you feed it by your anxiety, anxiety becomes its food.

When you enjoy it you don’t feed it, you starve it. If it is really your nature, then it will continue; if it is just accidental it will die. And when something dies of its own accord it is beautiful, because then it leaves you in the space that yoU were hankering for: suddenly you are in the body.

So just enjoy and wait. Good!

Prem means love, rick means rule – rule of love, discipline of love, power of love. Let love become the very centre of your life; be ruled by it. Let everything be coloured by it. If love can become your climate then all is possible.

Then miracles are possible, because love brings with it magic. Love is magic: it is the greatest force in existence.

Very few people are aware of it, and they go on collecting rubbish when they could have become immensely rich by just being loving, immensely blissful just by being loveful.

Love is my message and love is my method. Love is the path and love is the goal.

Anand means bliss. Lynne means an image, an idol – an image of bliss. My sannyasin has to become an image of bliss. To me, to be blissful is to be moral, because the person who is blissful cannot hurt, cannot harm; it is impossible, it is intrinsically impossible.

The blissful person naturally helps others to be blissful. His very presence starts ripples of bliss around him, because whatsoever we are, we are constantly broadcasting it by subtle waves, by vibes. The miserable person creates misery in the world, because we can give to people only that which we have. Miserable people are trying to make others happy; they cannot, and because they cannot, they become more miserable. Their intention is good hut it is impotent. How can you give to others what you don’t have yourself?

The husband who is miserable is trying to make his wife happy, and the wife is miserable and is trying to make the husband happy. Both end up in making each other a thousandfold more miserable, that’s all.

The most fundamental thing is to be blissful; that is the first principle of morality, of religiousness. If the first is there, then everything else comes of its own accord. The blissful person will be loving, will be compassionate; the blissful person will be kind, understanding, accepting. The blissful person will be non-possessive, non-dominating, non-manipulating. The blissful person will not interfere in anybody’s freedom in any way, because he knows the value of freedom. He experiences the value of freedom.

Religions have been teaching many things; I teach only one single thing: be blissful. And all the ten commandments will be fulfilled, no need to bother about them.

Anand Daena: blissful fairy. Anand means blissful. It is only a question of deciding whether to remain miserable or to become blissful. And it is not dependent on others at all. We go on finding excuses – that we are miserable because of this, because of that. There is no because; we are miserable simply because we have decided to be miserable. We are miserable simply because from the very beginning we have been taught to be miserable. We are miserable because for centuries we have been conditioned and told again and again that the world is a suffering, that life is misery.

It has become such a deep-rooted thing that we take it for granted. The world is not a misery and life is not a suffering. It all depends on you: life can be a blessing and the world can be a benediction.

It is what we make out of it, it is our own creation.

By becoming a sannyasin one starts taking responsibility on oneself, one stops finding excuses.

That is very essential to understand. Never think in terms of somebody else causing you suffering, because if you think in those terms then you can never be free. What can you do? – if the whole world is causing misery you have to be miserable. It is a good excuse to remain miserable.

The moment you say ’Nobody can cause my misery unless I choose to be miserable’ a great change starts happening, the gestalt changes. Slowly slowly you stop your investment in misery and you start pouring your energies more and more into things which make life a bliss. You become more creative, you become more sensitive, you become more loving. You simply don’t go on waiting for some miracle to happen that will make you happy; you start creating space for it, yoU start creating a context for it. Miracles don’t happen unless we create the space for them.

God happens only when you have created the context of utter blissfulness in you. In that moment of sheer joy – when yoU are shivering with joy and your whole energy is dancing at the maximum –

suddenly the door opens. Existence is no more material: it is transformed into consciousness. That vision is what god is all about.

So from this very moment start taking responsibility more and more and start pouring your energies into blissful things. Whenever you catch hold of yourself red-handed, creating some misery for yourself, immediately disconnect yourself, unplug yourself from it. It takes a little time to catch oneself again and again and not to get caught, but slowly slowly the knack arrives.

Life is an art, and only one who learns the art of how to be blissful lives; others only carry their weight, they drag. From the cradle to the grave their story is sheer stupidity, it is much ado about nothing. It is empty; it contains no treasures, it culminates in no contentment.

Deva means divine, karl means man – divine man.

Jesus talks about himself in two ways; sometimes he calls himself ’son of man’ and other times he calls himself ’son of god.’ It has puzzled the theologians down the ages; it is so contradictory. Either you are son of man or you are son of god. How can you be both? But it is not a contradiction, it is a simple statement about humanity: man is both. That is the dignity of man and the anguish too, because he is two. He is the meeting of the earth and the sky, he is the meeting of the material and the spiritual, he is the meeting point where one world ends and another begins.

Man is man but not only man; he is god too. And unless the god part is fulfilled, man remains half –

hungry, thirsty, starved. The god part has to be fulfilled, because only then can man bloom in totality.

in wholeness.

Don’t be against man and don’t be against god. Both types of people have existed on the earth.

There have been people who were against man – all the so-called saints and priests. And there have been men who were against god – Charvaka, Epicurus, Karl Marx – all the materialists and atheists down the ages. But because of this division nobody has been able to give a wholly fulfilling philosophy to humanity. The saints have failed, and so have the atheists. Both were similar in a way because both had chosen half.

I accept the whole man. His humanity is beautiful; without humanity he will be just a ghost. His divinity is beautiful, because without divinity he will be just dirt. Man is divine dust.

That is the meaning of your name: divine dust, divine man. We have to live both, in deep harmony, with no conflict. That’s what my work through neo-sannyas is: creating a harmony in your being, bringing both the halves together so that you can become a perfect circle.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: Part of me doesn’t want to participate – I keep holding back. I don’t know how to be one hundred percent.]

In fact that desire to be one hundred percent is also an unnecessary desire, and it creates conflicts.

It is a new kind of perfectionism. From the back door a new ideal enters: you have to be one hundred percent. Why do you have to be one hundred percent? Why can’t you be as you are?

The beauty is that if you can accept yourself as you are, you will be one hundred percent. If you want to be one hundred percent you will never be, because the very desiring creates a conflict. You start fighting with yourself; you are immediately divided into two. One part starts resisting, one part starts pulling and manipulating: you have created a civil war. Create any ideal, any, and you will be in a kind of civil war. That’s how people go on being miserable for no reason at all. unnecessarily creating misery.

Accept! This is how you are. A part of you holds back – so what? A part of you allows – good!

Accept this situation and then see what happens. If acceptance is there and you are not against the part that holds back, it will start relaxing, because what is the point of remaining tense when you are not against it? When you are no more trying to manipulate it, it is bound to relax. If you are not fighting with it, it stops fighting with you. Then one day suddenly, one is surprised that something has happened: one is one hundred percent. Those non-conflicting parts will come closer and closer of their own accord. They come only when you are relaxed; and the secret of relaxation is acceptance.

People don’t accept; then they create the trouble. Now this is a new trouble that you want to create for yourself: you have to be one hundred percent.

Be whatsoever you are, and it is good. The most beautiful thing said in the bible is that god created the world in six days, then he looked at the world and said ’Good!’ It doesn’t seem to be so good –

thousands of problems are there, any stupid person can find as many flaws in existence as he wants

– but god said ’Good’. It is something tremendously beautiful: he accepted! In that acceptance is the whole secret.

Learn to accept, learn to say to yourself that as you are, you are good, perfectly good; you are happy with yourself. Yes, one part holds back, so what? – one part holds back. Maybe there is some inner mystery in it. We don’t know our own whole mystery; maybe it is just that your inner being wants to remain a little secure. It holds back a little bit, so that if something goes wrong you can fall back. If something happens, in case it does, you will not be lost, you will have some shelter. Maybe this is just an instinctive safety measure, nothing else. Don’t create a problem out of it. It’s perfectly good and natural and human.

Don’t desire impossibles, because they bring misery and nothing else. And let me repeat again: if you accept, some day you will find you have become one hundred percent in everything that you do, but it is not going to be cultivated by you; it will come as a revelation. It is a revelation... just a gift from god for a person who is relaxed.

CHAPTER 10

10 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Atmo means the self, and volker means the master – master not of the people but master of one’s self.

That is true mastery; to be master of others is really a poor substitute. People try to be masters of others because they are not masters of themselves. Once the self-mastery has happened, all desire to dominate, all desire to possess, all desire to be superior, simply disappears. That disappearance takes away the whole burden of life, as if a mountain was being carried on the head and it is no more there. One feels so light that one can almost fly.

So be a master of your own self!

[The new sannyasin explains the meaning of his son’s name: It means going straight to the light. It’s the name of one of the oldest angels, Serafin.]

But I have found a better meaning! Serafin means the burning one. Prem means love and serafin, burning one – burning love, the fire of love. Love is fire; it consumes the ego, and then only the pure self is left behind. It consumes all that is foreign and leaves only the natural, and that naturalness is what god is. To be utterly innocent and natural is to be divine. One has to go through the fire of love to be purified.

Prem means love, sarah means princess – princess of love. Love makes everybody a prince or a princess. Love bestows great riches, the inner wealth. It opens the doors of the inner kingdom of god. Everybody is meant to be a prince or a princess, and if people are not, it is their own decision.

Out of their own stupid decisions they have become beggars.

Search outside and you will remain a beggar; search within and immediately you are a king, an emperor.

Michael means godlike, premanando means love and bliss. those two dualities are godlike, they make a man divine: bliss within and love flowing towards the whole existence. Bliss is the experience when you penetrate your own centre, and love is the sharing of that experience with others. Love is the shadow of bliss, a by-product of bliss. Only the blissful person can be loving; vice versa is not possible.

People try that: they think that by loving they will become blissful; they are hoping in vain. Yes, there will be great expectation, excitement, but in the end all that is left is a great frustration. Love cannot bring bliss. but bliss always. automatically, brings love. It is like I cannot invite your shadow to be a guest with me, but I can invite you, and the shadow comes of its own accord.

Bliss is the thing to be searched for; love happens of its own accord. The more you become blissful, the more you become loving. These two dualities take you beyond the human, they take you to the plane of the divine. They are godlike dualities: god is absolute bliss and absolute love.

Anand means bliss. albert means noble. Bliss always makes a person noble; it is misery that makes a person mean. Misery is a sin; all other sins are born out of misery. Bliss is virtue, the basic virtue, and all that is noble arises out of it. People try to cultivate noble dualities; they cannot be cultivated unless bliss happens. You can cultivate them but they will remain phoney, just masks.

Deep down you will remain the same – the same animal instinctive, mean attitudes towards life, just white-washed.

I don’t teach the cultivation of any other virtue except bliss; and bliss cannot be cultivated. It has to be discovered, it is already there. It is not something that you have to bring into existence. You are born with it, it is inborn, it is innate; it has simply to be discovered. It has got lost in social conditionings. It is hiding behind much rubbish. One just has to search and find the diamond again, and once the diamond is there, one is noble.

The blissful person is noble simply for no other reason than that he cannot be otherwise.

Deva means divine, henk means the ruler of the home. Your full name will mean the divine ruler of the home. By the home I don’t literally mean the home. but metaphorically. Your body is your home, your inner space is your home. We can exist there as a slave or as a master. If we are asleep, we exist as a slave; if we are awake, we become the master. Hence all the religions are basically nothing but methodologies to awaken consciousness.

Our real being is fast asleep. And because the real being is fast asleep, the mind which is just a servant has become a ruler. It is very good as a servant and very bad as a ruler. Unless this sleeping consciousness awakens one remains miserable, because one starts living a life which one is not meant to. Everything is upside-down: the servant is the master and the master is asleep.

The servant knows nothing and goes on pretending that it does. And the problem becomes more complicated because there is not one mind in you but many, so there is not one servant but many servants pretending to be masters, a crowd. So one becomes a victim of a crowd – each desire pulling one in its own direction and each thought trying to dominate one. There is great competition and a conflict inside.

This is the situation of the ordinary man, a very maddening state. But a miracle happens once the awareness comes back: once you wake up, immediately all the servants fall in line, they are immediately ready to follow. Once the master arrives, there is no need for any other discipline: discipline happens of its own accord. The very presence of awareness is enough and the miracle happens.

Prabhu means god, claus means victory – god’s victory, not yours. Let god be victorious over yoU; surrender! Let this be your only prayer: Thy will be done. thy kingdom come.

Let this be your only longing that ’I should be defeated utterly. absolutely’, that ’I should become anonymous, that ’I should be just an emptiness to receive god, an open door; that’s all that I should be.’

Once this becomes possible one attains to things which look impossible to the mind. Yes, even the impossible becomes possible if you can efface yourself totally. If you can put yourself aside, if you can say ’I am not’, you are! This is what prayer is all about, what meditation is all about: I am not; you are.

A great mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi, has written a poem: A lover knocks on the door of his beloved and the beloved asks ’Who are you?’ He says ’I am your lover – open the door!’ There is great silence and the beloved says ’This house is too small, it cannot contain two. So first prepare, be ready, then come.’

The lover goes, prepares himself. Years pass, and when he is ready he comes back and knocks again. The same question: ’Who are you?’ He says ’Now only you are’, and the doors are immediately opened.

This should be your prayer, this should be your way: I am not, you are, because love’s house is too small, it cannot contain two.

Anand Verena... will mean a garden of bliss.

Man has immense potentialities. Many flowers can bloom in his being – marigolds and roses and lotuses. Man is multi-dimensional; but we live without any awareness of all these possibilities. We go on crawling in the mud without being aware at all that we have wings and we can fly to the stars.

It is good to be rooted in the earth, but to forget the sky is a calamity.

Be rooted in the earth and go on reaching for the stars. In that very reaching one becomes a garden.

In that very longing flowers start blooming. That very effort to reach to the stars creates the context for growth, and when the longing is pure the fragrance is immense, infinite.

[A sannyasin said that his mother died last year and it was a very intense experience for him.]

It is always an intense thing when a mother dies, because there is such a bond with the mother. It may be of love or hate, but either way it is the strongest bond there is. But don’t be obsessed with it too much, otherwise it can be destructive.

One should be able to say good-bye; because many people will leave. Your mother has left, then some others will leave, and sooner or later everybody has to leave, so we have to learn to say good-bye. Yes, it is sad, it leaves wounds, but there is no need to take any pride in those wounds, otherwise you will never allow them to heal. They have to be allowed, helped, to heal.

So this is an opportunity to grow. When your mother dies you are really free from the past. Make it an opportunity to grow. Now there is nobody to hold you back. Feel thankful, grateful, but don’t start living in memories. Once a person starts living in memories too much he loses contact with reality, and that is dangerous.

[A sannyasin, arriving, says: Sometimes everything becomes very transparent and fear arises. It’s you who helps me to handle it. Thank you.]

It will disappear by and by; nothing to be worried about.

Whenever anything negative – fear, anger, sadness. anything negative – arises, remember only one thing: ’I am not it’; and the second thing, that it will pass away, it is only for the moment. So don’t become overwhelmed by it too much, remain detached. See that it is there and accept that it is there. Don’t repress it, there is no need to: it goes on its own. And don’t fight with it either; just accept it. It is there, leave it, knowing perfectly well that it will go. Remain centred in the feeling that

’I am not it’, and soon negative things will disappear; and when negative things disappear then the positive arises. The positive is not the opposite of the negative; the positive is the absence of the negative.

CHAPTER 11

11 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Samagra means total, catherine comes from a Greek root, catheros; from the same root comes catharsis. It means the process of purification. Your full name will mean total process of purification.

And this is what sannyas is all about: a process of cleansing.

The old religions used to repress. My approach is: instead of repressing, cathart, throw it out.

Repressed, it enters into your unconscious being. Repressed anger will become a wound inside you, it will create poison. Thrown out of the system it leaves a beautiful clean space within. Of course there is no need to cathart it on a somebody in particular; one can simply cathart in vacuum.

If you cathart your anger on somebody it creates anger in the other person; it starts a chain which is harmful to both. But yoU can close your room; alone you can go into deep anger. You can dance in anger, you can beat the pillow, you can shout, you can scream. Slowly slowly you will see that all the energy that was involved in anger is released, and it leaves behind a silence, the silence that comes after the storm. It has immense beauty and value.

Anand means bliss, pratimo means an image – an image of bliss. Man is born to become an image of bliss. Man has that innate capacity to just be a festival... from the cradle to the grave, a pure celebration. Very few people have achieved it, that is true, but everybody can achieve it. just a little understanding, a little search into one’s own misery, a little investigation into the causes of why one goes on missing – just a little effort, just a little intelligence, not much is needed – and one can change the whole gestalt. One can simply get out of all kinds of miseries into a totally different world of bliss and benediction.

And unless this is attained, one goes on feeling that ’I am not that which I am meant to be’. One goes on suspecting that something is missing. One knows perfectly well, deep down in the heart

’I have not fulfilled my own self’,’I have remained a seed; the season is passing and I could have bloomed’.

My teaching consists of only one word: become more and more blissful, cheerful, festive, celebrating. Don’t miss a single opportunity to celebrate, because whatsoever we do, we become capable of doing more.

Deva means god, ina means praise – god’s praise. That is the intrinsic meaning of prayer: praising existence, feeling grateful – for life, for the beauty of nature, for the splendour of the stars, feeling grateful for all that is and praising it. It is not a question of words; it is a gut feeling.

There are people who are continuously complaining; that is their gut feeling. They are searching for excuses to complain; in every situation they will find something wrong. I know one person who has changed the famous proverb: Every dark cloud has a silver lining. He has changed it; he says: Every silver lining has a dark cloud. There are people who go on looking for the negative; and if you look you will find it.

This is the mystery of life: whatsoever you look for, you are bound to find, because life is both –

thorns and roses. If you are looking for thorns you will get them. and the more you become skilful in finding them. the more you will get them. It is better to start searching for roses. The only kind of intelligence is that which searches for roses.

Then, naturally, great praise arises. The heart starts throbbing with praise, the body vibrates with prayer Words or no words, that is not the question; whether it is said or not, that is not the question, but if it is there. it is heard: it reaches to the ultimate.

Jivan means life, andrea means courage. Life needs great courage. The cowardly only exist, they don’t live, because their whole life remains fear-oriented; and the fear-oriented life is worse than death. They live in a kind of paranoia, they are afraid of everything; and not only of real things, they are afraid of unreal things too. They are afraid of hell, they are afraid of ghosts, they are afraid of god. They are afraid of a thousand and one things which they have imagined themselves, or others like them. Fear becomes so much that it becomes impossible to live.

Only the courageous can live. The first step to be learned is courage. In spite of all fears, one should start living. And why is courage needed to live? – because life is insecurity. If you become too conscious of safety, security, then you will remain confined to a very small corner, almost in a prison made by yourself. It will be safe but it will not be alive. It will be secure but it will have no adventure and no ecstasy.

Life consists in exploring, going into the unknown, reaching for the stars! Be courageous, and sacrifice everything at the feet of life; nothing is more valuable. Don’t sacrifice your life for small things – money, security, safety; nothing is valuable. One has to live one’s life as totally as possible, then only does joy arise, then only does the overflowing bliss become possible. And unless you start overflowing, you will remain poor. The moment you overflow, you are an emperor. Then life is not beggarly, then you have the kingdom of g available to you, it is yours.

So learn the first lesson and start moving bit by bit into more and more courageous and dangerous ways.

Deva means divine, lino means lost in, drowned in – drowned in the divine, drunk with the divine.

And that is the only thing worth learning – how to become a divine drunkard, how to live so intensely and so passionately that each moment is transformed into eternity. It is possible, it is not impossible.

In fact it is not even difficult, because it is our intrinsic nature. The difficulty is not natural; the difficulty is created by the society, by the culture, by the conditioning. Rocks have been put around you so that your natural life energy cannot flow.

All that is needed is removing of the rocks, hence it is not difficult. Those rocks are foreign; they can be removed and thrown away. They are not part of you; it does not hurt to remove them. It hurts only if you think that those rocks are very valuable, it hurts only if you become identified with those rocks. But that’s what my work here is: to make you aware that you are not those rocks. Once this is understood, felt, the removal of the rocks is very easy.

It is just like one is ill and needs medicine to remove the illness. No medicine can give you health: the medicine only removes illness and then health wells up. Exactly like that, misery is in the rocks that have been put around you. Once those rocks are removed, blissfulness simply starts flowing. It does not come from anywhere else: it comes from your innermost core.

Anand means bliss, rupam means beauty. Bliss brings beauty, a totally different kind of beauty: not of the physical, not of the formal, but of the inner; not of the body but of that which lives in the body

– the beauty of the soul. It starts affecting the body immediately, it also makes the body beautiful.

It starts changing the very quality of the body: it makes the body soft, it makes the body graceful, it makes the body more and more tranquil, silent, relaxed. But those are by-products. The real thing happens inside; the circumference only radiates it.

Because of this a great misunderstanding has prevailed. Whenever the inner is beautiful the outer automatically becomes beautiful. But we cannot see the inner of the other, we can only see the outer, hence the fallacy: whenever we see a person beautiful from the outside we conclude that the person must be beautiful inside too. That is not necessarily so. When the inner is beautiful the outer reflects it, necessarily, but vice versa is not true: the outer can be beautiful and the inner may be very ugly. This creates great problems in life because we can see only the outer of the other person.

We fall in love with the outer and sooner or later the inner ugliness starts surfacing.

But there is some relationship between beauty and inner bliss. It is impossible to be ugly if the inner bliss happens. The ugliest person will also start reflecting something of the inner beauty. Even the ugliest house, if the lamp is inside, the light is inside, will start radiating light outside in the darkness of the night. Bliss inside becomes luminous and the body starts diffusing it into the world.

But the beginning should be from the inner. One can paint, one can go into plastic surgery and can somehow make it look beautiful, but it is just a facade, it is pseudo it is utterly meaningless. The real beauty happens only through meditation, because bliss happens through meditation.

Anand means blissful; donna sounds beautiful so I will keep it, although it means lady! To be a woman is enough, to be a natural woman is enough. A lady is something artificial, cultured. In the past the lady has been praised very much, because in the past artificial qualities. arbitrary qualities, were thought to be very very valuable. Because of those artificial qualities the natural was repressed.

Woman has suffered more from unnatural qualities that were taught to her than from anything else.

Every girl was taught to be ladylike: Don’t do it, it is not ladylike. For thousands of years women have lived unnaturally, and because of that they missed much. They became so arbitrary, their whole life became just a long long tragedy. They were not really living, authentic persons. They were just playing a role that was taught to them, they were just acting it. Of course if you go on acting something for a long period it becomes second nature, but second nature is not nature. It keeps you away from your reality.

I respect the natural woman, the natural man. To be natural is the greatest need today, otherwise humanity is going to disappear. We have to learn how to be raw again, we have to learn how to be a little wild again. We have to learn again to love, to live, to be, as nature means us to be, not as the society demands.

Woman can never be free unless she drops artificial conditionings. It is difficult to drop them because the society respects you for those qualities. It is very ego-fulfilling, so to drop them seems to be very difficult. But I hope that my sannyasins slowly slowly will be able to drop all that is artificial and will start living as naturally as possible. And with nature joy arises. The joy of the trees and the birds and the animals becomes available to us too, and that joy is the first ray of god’s experience.

Shanta means peace, ananda means bliss. Shantananda means bliss that comes out of peace.

Mind is constantly in turmoil; thousands of thoughts, desires, dreams, constantly go on passing. The screen is never empty, something or other is continuously there. The traffic is constant; even when you are asleep the traffic continues, and the noise is deafening. Because of this noisy mind and this continuous noise, one loses the sensitivity to feel one’s being, one’s inner voice, one’s inner sound.

One is cut off from oneself.

The first thing for a sannyasin to learn is how to be a little still, silent, peaceful; and the way is to watch the mind. Fight is not going to help; just watch the mind. Let the traffic pass. Just sit by the side of the road and watch the traffic, with no judgment, with no evaluation, with no choice. Just go on watching, aloof, distant. Just be a witness, and as the witnessing deepens, the traffic lessens.

Then a few moments start coming when the traffic is not there; you are simply there watching and there is nothing to watch. In those moments for the first time you will know the meaning of the word

’peace’ – not the meaning that is given in the dictionary but the existential meaning, the experiential meaning of what peace is. And from that door of peace a new phenomenon starts coming: bliss.

Once you are peaceful, bliss starts showering on you.

CHAPTER 12

12 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin explains her son’s name, Jolon: valley of the dead oak trees.]

Prem means love. Love and death are very deeply related. Love is a kind of death: it is the death of the ego. Those who are not capable of dying cannot be capable of love either, because it is the same phenomenon looked at from different angles. Those who know how to love will know how to die too. Their death will be a grace, a beauty. Their death will not be an end, but a beginning, a beginning of something which we cannot visualise because it is invisible, a beginning of something which can only be experienced and cannot be described. Those who are capable of love, for them death is transformed; it becomes a door into the divine. Those who have missed love, they will miss their death too. They will not be able to willingly disappear into death, and because of their unwillingness they will go unconscious. Because of their resistance they will be dragged into death; they will not go dancing into it.

One who knows how to live, how to love and how to die, knows all that is worth knowing; everything else is of no significance. These three things: life, love and death – this is the trinity I teach.

Prem means love, ria means the origin of a river. Love is a river. Love is not really love unless it is a river. It is energy moving, dancing, flowing. Love cannot be stagnant; if it is, it dies. Its existence depends on flow, on movement. For it to be means to be flowing. Love can never be reduced to a noun, it remains a verb, but this is one of the problems with our languages: we have reduced everything to a noun, even things which cannot be reduced.

Love is loving. Love is not a noun, it is the activity of loving. It is not something complete and finished. It is something on the way, always on the way, a movement to the very far-away, distant star, a hope, a dream, but never a thing. You cannot manipulate it, you cannot transfer it, you cannot manage it, because when it is there you are drowned in its flood.

But we have done the same with everything. The word ’faith’ is wrong because it has become a noun; faithing will be right; it will be a verb. Man has changed his experiences into nouns for a certain reason. They become definable, there is a beginning and an end, you can draw a boundary around them. Then the mind can create a concept of what it is, then the mind can label it. But once something is flowing and one never knows what is going to happen next moment, when it is changing moment to moment, when it is a flux. the mind is at a loss. It cannot be labelled, it cannot be defined, it cannot become a concept; and the mind feels very much embarrassed by anything that is so mysterious.

The mind is constantly trying to demystify everything in life, and it has succeeded in many ways. It has demystified all that is beautiful and all that is valuable, and now man is bored. It is because of the mind that the whole humanity is bored. It has demystified everything, now there is no excitement left, no ecstasy left.

My work here consists in changing nouns back into verbs: love into loving, faith into faithing. even river into rivering. And once this becomes clear, your life starts taking on a totally different colour, a different flavour. A great joy arises, because now each moment is going to be a surprise. Each moment is going to be unexpected and unpredictable, and when life is unpredictable there is ecstasy, there is thrill. Instead of boredom there is zestfulness. One is overflowing and one is constantly in contact with the existence that is.

Anand means bliss, Ingrid is a mythological name for the god of fertility, prosperity, peace. The full name will mean goddess of fertility, prosperity, peace and bliss. They all come together, they are all different facets of the same phenomenon. The creative person is fertile, the creative person is blissful. The creative person is rich and the creative person is at ease with existence.

To be creative is to be a sannyasin. I teach creativity because it is only through creativity that man comes closer to the creator, obviously; there can’t be any other way. If god is the creator, then to be creative must be the only way to be closer to him, and when one is lost in creativity, utterly lost. one is in god.

Poets are far closer than the priests, painters far closer than the theologians. A dancer, a singer, is far closer than your so-called saints, because they are unfertile. In the past religion has been very uncreative and unfertile, that’s why slowly slowly it died. Now it exists only as a corpse – venerable, respectable, but a corpse all the same. Now churches are nothing but cemeteries, and the reason is that in the past religion never tried to be creative, it never respected creativity. On the contrary it respected the person who renounced everything and became utterly inactive, passive. He started living a kind of slow death. He moved in a monastery and slowly slowly faded out.

My approach is just the opposite: create, be fertile. Life is an opportunity to be creative, and only the creative person knows what joy is. When something is created there is a great exhilaration, ecstasy.

Only the creative person is rich; he may be a beggar but he is rich. And the uncreative person may be an emperor but he is poor. The creative person constantly finds himself in deep harmony with existence. In fact only because of that harmony can he create. If you are in harmony with the sunset you may be able to paint it; if you are in harmony with a rose flower you may be able to sing a song of it.

Creativity brings harmony, harmony brings more creativity, and so on and so forth. Just as there are vicious circles, there are virtuous circles too. One thing leads to another, and it goes on and on, moving towards a crescendo. At the ultimate peak is god.

Deva means divine, herman means a warrior – a divine warrior. Life is not only a struggle on the mundane plane; it is also a struggle on higher planes. In fact the higher the plane, the greater is the struggle. Life is easy if you remain on the lowest rung of the ladder because you don’t really live, you only vegetate. The higher you climb on the ladder, the more and more the gravitation of the earth pulls you downwards. The higher you move on the ladder, you have to learn how to live with pure air, more and more pure, and you have to learn how to live with the infinity of the sky.

All boundaries disappear, there seems to be no shelter. All that was familiar is no more there, one is utterly in the unknown. Where to go? – no direction, no milestones, no arrows pointing the way, all maps gone and one is in the uncharted sea and... the small boat of life. Yes, one has to be a warrior, one has to have great courage. Only then does one reach to god.

But the struggle is very sweet. When you fight for small things the struggle is mean. It demoralises you, it destroys your dignity. When the struggle is for the higher it gives you dignity, it glorifies you.

One starts respecting oneself, a great reverence for oneself arises. When the struggle is for money one is bound to become mean, and when the struggle is for meditation one is bound to become very very compassionate, very large-hearted, big-hearted, open, available, sharing.

Fight for the higher and go on seeking newer and newer, higher goals to fight for. One has to reach to the ultimate, and unless the ultimate is reached, one can rest for a while, but it has to be only an overnight’s stay. Remember that in the morning one has to continue the pilgrimage.

It becomes difficult as you move higher but it also becomes more and more ecstatic. It becomes dangerous but at the same time it becomes immensely blissful too.

Anand means bliss, bob means bright – a blissful brightness. Blissfulness automatically brings a tremendous rush of intelligence. Blissfulness is luminous, it is very bright, shining. You cannot hide it, there is no way to hide it. If people don’t see it, that simply means that they are blind – not that you are capable of hiding it. If they don’t recognise Jesus it simply shows that they are blind, not that Jesus can hide himself; there is no way.

Those who had eyes immediately recognised him; the simple people – the farmers, the gardeners, the fishermen.

The simple people recognised him because their eyes were not covered by knowledge – knowledge functions like a blindfold. The rabbis could not recognise him; they had to destroy him. He appeared to them as if he were a mischief-monger, dangerous. They could not see that he was a messiah; they could only see that he was a mischief, dangerous to the public morality.

Whenever there is bliss there is no way to hide it; but this is unfortunate, that even Buddhas remain unrecognised by the millions.

Jesus says again and again to his disciples If you have eyes to see, see. If you have ears to hear, hear. He is not talking about the ordinary eyes and ears; he is talking about the inner insight. At the last moment on the cross he had to pray to god: Forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing. They are blind, they are deaf; they have not seen me, they have not heard me.

And bliss is not something that you have to get from somebody else. It is not something that you have to purchase, cultivate, earn; it is already the case. It is your innermost, innate quality. It has to be discovered, rather, rediscovered. Just a little garbage that is surrounding it has to be pushed aside, and then the diamond of your inner being is so luminous, so bright. that the mystics say even the sun is not so bright!

CHAPTER 13

13 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, yuuichi means strength – divine strength. Man in himself is impotent. All that is alive in him comes from god, all that is power in him is divine: man is only a vehicle. If one functions simply as a vehicle of god then one’s life is religious. And if one starts interfering in the flow of the energy and is no more just a vehicle but becomes a controller, then one’s life is irreligious.

So be just an open door for god to come in, just a passage for him to flow into the world. That’s what sannyas is all about.

Deva means divine and nobuyuki means trust – trust in the divine. We trust in the material – in money, in power, in respectability – and that trust is the cause of all our miseries. We trust too much in the world and it goes on disappointing us, yet we don’t learn. Our trust is wrongly placed. Trust has to be in the innermost core of your being. Trust has to be in consciousness, not in matter. And once trust takes that turn, life starts changing, transforming. Then the spring has come, then the desert has disappeared, then life is an oasis of tremendous beauty and of great joy.

Trust in matter and you will live in hell. Trust in consciousness and you have the key to open the doors of the kingdom of god.

Veet Masatoshi. Veet means going beyond – going beyond righteousness, because righteousness is a very egoistic attitude. To feel oneself right automatically means that one is thinking of others as wrong. To feel oneself holy certainly means that others are not holy. To think of oneself as saintly is a sin, because one is condemning others. The really right person is never aware of his righteousness.

The real saint has no idea of who is the saint and who is a sinner.

One has to learn to live beyond dualities. The duality of right and wrong, the duality of life and death, the duality of this world and that, etcetera, etcetera – all kinds of dualities have to be transcended.

One has to become so innocent that one does not know what is what. In that innocence god comes in. That innocence is the invitation to god.

Anand means bliss. jane means a gracious gift of god. Bliss is a gift of god. We cannot manufacture it, it is beyond our capacities to create it. Whatsoever we create is going to be false, and the false cannot satisfy. The false will remain a facade. Maybe others will be deceived by it, but how can you be deceived by yourself? You will know deep down in your heart that there is sadness, there is misery, that there is hell. It is just that you have a painted face, the smile is not true It is not coming from the heart, it is not born in you. It has nothing to do with the beyond; it is not a gift. You are pretending. And the life of pretending is the most ugly thing in the world; that’s what hypocrisy is. But because of the idea that we can create bliss, the whole world has gone hypocritical. It is something which cannot be done in the very nature of things. We can only be at the receiving end.

Bliss has to be received. One has to learn how to be open to receive it, that’s all; one has not to create it. It is already showering; one just has to become a little more vulnerable.

And that’s my work here with my sannyasins: to make them more vulnerable, to make a few openings in them. a few windows, a few doors open, so that the sun and the wind and the moon and the stars, they can all come in. There is tremendous possibility of being blissful, but one has to learn how to be passive to receive it, how to be feminine to receive it. And each of my sannyasin has to become feminine, because that is the whole art of being blissful, the art of being in communion with god.

In the Indian mythology there is a beautiful metaphor that god is the only male and everybody else in the world is a female. That is a really significant idea. That means that only god is active and everybody has to be receptive. Become receptive and you will be surprised how much starts simply coming from nowhere. It becomes almost impossible even to thank god, because so much, unasked for, comes, that all words become inadequate; one simply starts living in gratitude. I call that the life of prayer.

Deva means divine, henry means home. God abides in man just as god abides in everything else –

in the animals, in the birds, in the trees, in the rocks – but in man, much more so, because something of tremendous value has happened in man: self-consciousness has arisen. In the rock god lives fast asleep; in man, there is a little awakening, and because of that little awakening, much more awakening is possible. Because of that little possibility, the whole transformation is possible: man can become total awareness; and when man becomes total awareness, he is god.

Remember it constantly, that our body is a temple of god, that it is a home of god. Respect the body, love the body, take care of the body, don’t be antagonistic to it. And the same is true about the world.

Because god abides in it, be respectful to it. I teach: rejoice in the world, don’t renounce anything, because to renounce anything is basically to renounce god, because he is everywhere. he is all.

Once this understanding starts settling in the heart new visions arise, the perspective changes. You live in the same world and yet it is no more the same world. It has a different taste, a different flavour

– the flavour of the divine. And each small thing becomes so extraordinary, then the ordinary life is no more ordinary life.

Once we start thinking in terms of god everything becomes extraordinary. Forget god and everything becomes very ordinary. Without god life has no meaning; with god, everything, the smallest, is so pregnant with meaning, with inexhaustible meaning.

Prem means love, yolande is the name of a flower. The full name will mean a flower of love.

Man blooms only in love. Without love man simply remains a possibility. One becomes actual only in love. Without love man is a personality only, a mask; with love man is a presence. Love gives integration. Love gives centering, love gives grounding. With love suddenly one is at ease with existence. Without love one is a stranger in the world, an outsider. With love, one starts participating in the mysteries of existence. With love one is welcome, and in that very welcome, one blooms.

And unless one has become a flower, one remains unfulfilled. In flowering is paradise.

Deva means divine, louis means glory – divine glory. Man is born to be a divine glory. Man is born to manifest god, to be a song echoing the divine, to be a dance allowing the divine to flow into the world. Man is not born just to be an efficient clerk in a office, man is not just born to be an efficient machine; man has something more to fulfil.

Jesus is right when he says: Man cannot live by bread alone. Not that man can live without bread, that is not the point – man needs bread, he has to earn it, he has to do something or other – but it is a means only, it is not the end. And unless the end is there, life remains very very futile.

The end is to manifest god, to come to such an explosion of light and love that you become proof of god. In that moment when you become proof of god, yoU have arrived home. That is the peak beyond which there are no more any peaks. That is the climax of contentment, of fulfilment.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I have many doubts about whether to leave or to stay. When I make a decision many doubts arise and I get really confused.]

If you want to stay.... Why create unnecessary trouble? – stay longer. The longer you stay, the less doubts you will have!

Mm? if you stay a little longer, slowly slowly your mind is taken away... then there is nobody to be confused! Because the mind is confusion. It is not that the mind can be in a state of no-confusion, that is impossible; the mind itself is confusion. Unless the mind ceases, confusion continues. The mind is doubt. They are not separable; you cannot separate doubt from the mind, you cannot save the mind and drop doubt, that is not possible. They are the same thing, with different names only.

Hence, stay a little longer; give me a little more time so I can take the mind away, and with it, confusion, doubt, everything will disappear. Then you are just a Rajneesh freak! Just wait a little!

And even if you go you will have to come back, because I will haunt you! I don’t leave people easily.

[A sannyasin says: You say that if one can look at the problem and see the root of the problem, it disappears. How to look at the problem? I don’t understand.]

Have you done Vipassana here?...

Just continue Vipassana and within six months yoU will be able to see the problem and the root and yoU will also see it disappearing. Vipassana is the method.

Just continue Vipassana every day for at least one hour, and within six months there will be no problem, you will understand, because these are things which have to be experienced. Vipassana will cut the root.

CHAPTER 14

14 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means blissful, helga has three meanings. The first is holy, the second is pious, and the third is religious. They look alike, they are not; they look synonymous, they are not. There is a great difference between them, and the difference is of immense import.

The religious is always a formal person, a pretender – a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. He is religious because he follows the rules prescribed by the society. He has no inner understanding; he believes, and to believe is to remain blind. Less beliefs and one has more eyes; no beliefs and one has clarity of vision.

So I will not make it mean religious.

The pious, the righteous, has a moralistic tone to it, that ’Whatever I am doing is good, is right, is virtuous’. It gives a very subtle ego, the pious ego is created. and the pious ego is more poisonous than any other ego. Because it is pious, you cannot see it, and when you cannot see the enemy it is more dangerous. So my preference is ’holy’, because holy really comes from the word ’whole’.

To be whole is to be holy. It has nothing to do with religion and it has nothing to do with piousness.

In fact a religious person can never be holy because already in being religious he has denied the world; he will remain partial. And the pious person can also never be holy because he has chosen what is right and he will have to repress, deny, and cut, whatsoever he thinks is wrong.

The holy person is possible only when consciousness transcends duality, when one does not think in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, sacred and profane, this world and that world, god and devil, when one drops all dualities and one lives moment to moment with no idea of how to live but trusts life – that whatsoever is spontaneous and natural is holy. One is responsible but not righteous, not pious. One responds to the situation that is present, not according to some old ideology, not according to some conditioning, not as a Christian or as a Hindu. One simply responds as a consciousness, fully herenow, and in that space of being fully herenow, one becomes whole, one becomes holy.

So this will be the meaning of your name: blissful wholeness, blissful totality.

Deva means divine, valerie means strength. Man is not strong and cannot be. Unless god is allowed to flow l, through, man remains weak. The part is always weak unless it functions in tune with the whole. The strength of the part is functioning in tune with the whole, and the weakness is going against the whole. Man has become tremendously weak, and the reason is that we have been taught to fight with existence. That is the greatest stupid idea that has dominated humanity down the ages: to conquer nature.

In conquering nature we have destroyed nature and we have destroyed ourselves. Strength is possible, victory too, but it is going to be with the whole, not against the whole. And that is the Eastern insight into things: go with the wind, not against it. Don’t push the river, float with it; and don’t go upstream otherwise you will be destroying your own energies in unnecessary conflict, in friction. And the part can never win. The part is doomed if it is against the whole. The part can be victorious only in the whole, with the whole, at the whole.

If this is understood then we have understood the very fundamental law of life, tao. Then we know logos, then we know how to be more and more strong and more and more victorious. That means we have to surrender to conquer. That means we have to disappear to be. That means that unless we are crucified there is no resurrection.

Prem means love, gisela means promise – the promise of love. What is the promise of love? It promises the ultimate – it promises god; and not only does it promise, it fulfils its promise. The world also promises many things, but never, never, are they fulfilled. Each time one is disillusioned.

Life becomes slowly slowly a long chain of disappointments. Each time you believe in the outer you start moving with a great hope. By the time you reach, everything proves to be a mirage. It is like a rainbow: from far away it looks so beautiful, so colourful, so psychedelic. The closer you come, the rainbow starts disappearing; and when you have really arrived. there is nothing... maybe a little mist in your hands. All those colours are gone. They existed from a certain angle, from a certain distance; they can only exist from a certain angle and from a certain distance.

All worldly hopes are like that: when you don’t have, there is great hope; when you have, all hope disappears. Hence the richest man proves to be the poorest. The richer one gets, the more hopeless one becomes. The world promises much but it never delivers the goods. There is only one thing in the whole existence – love – that promises and also fulfils it.

But to be in love with existence, with life, really needs nerve, it needs guts. It is a tremendous leap of courage. It is not a gradual thing; it is a jump, a quantum jump.

Very few, courageous people are able to love, to love and to be loved, because one is so afraid of one’s emptiness. To love means to open oneself – and one is embarrassed by the inner emptiness and the darkness – to allow somebody to love you. Again the problem, that you are allowing somebody to come very close to you and the fear arises: sooner or later he will discover your emptiness. It is better to keep at a safe distance. Hence people have decided to play games in the name of love, never really allowing love to happen.

But if one allows love to happen, one allows god to happen. Love fulfils the promise, and the promise is god!

Veet means going beyond; rolf has two meanings: one is fame, the other is wolf. One has to go beyond all ambition. and the greatest ambition is that of becoming famous, of being somebody, of not being anonymous, of leaving one’s footprints on the sands of time, to do something so that one is remembered when one is gone, to be in the eyes of people. The desire for fame is the desire for attention so that everybody looks up to you. And when many people look at you their attention functions almost like an intoxicant. It is a very subtle drug, and man has lived under its impact for centuries.

The whole idea is basically ill, pathological, because to follow it means to be continuously in conflict with others. The ambitious mind is always at war, and the ambitious mind is always trying to reach to the top by right means or wrong means. For the ambitious mind, means don’t matter, one has to reach to the top; and time is short, so it creates great stress.

The whole idea is stupid. Even when you have reached to the top, you will not find anything there.

You will simply look silly, although you will not accept it and you will not confess it; you will pretend that you are very contented, that you have reached. But ask the Buddha, ask those who have come down from the top, and you will know the true story – that by becoming famous nothing is achieved.

because by becoming famous you don’t gain anything in your being. The whole desire arises out of an inferiority complex.

The other meaning is also beautiful, related to it. The ambitious mind is animalistic; it is the mind of the wolf, it is a violent mind.

Go beyond it, go beyond the mind of a wolf, and go beyond violent ambition. Rest in yourself. You are good as yoU are; relax into yourself. Enjoy yourself, celebrate yourself. Rather than wasting time in becoming somebody, be a nobody. Then all stress disappears. Then tension is not possible, then anxiety cannot grow, because you have cut the very root of anguish. Then one can live moment to moment in a kind of dance. Then life is as beautiful as roses and as luminous as the stars.

That’s what sannyas is all about: accepting the truth that we are nobodies, and not only accepting it in a kind of despair but enjoying it, the beauty of it, the grandeur of it, the freedom of it.

The person who is not ambitious is free from the crowds. He need not compromise. He can live on his own, he can be his own self; he need not sell his soUl in the market-place, he need not become a commodity.

[A sannyasin couple are leaving and too overwhelmed to speak.]

No need for words – just close your eyes and be with me for a few moments silent....

Good. Silence is my message. Silence is the only word that I go on repeating continuously. In a thousand and one ways I say only one thing: be silent, because all that is needed happens in silence. Love happens in silence, bliss happens in silence, truth happens in silence. Silence is the door of the temple to god.

So whenever you need me just put the box on your heart... and be silent. And come back. Help my people there!

Anand means bliss. garimo means splendour, glory – the splendour of bliss. A man who is not blissful has not known the glory of life, has lived in vain, has not really lived but only existed. Only the man who knows what bliss is becomes acquainted with the tremendous splendour of existence.

It is unbelievably beautiful. Nothing is ordinary, because everything is so full, so overflowing with god, that it cannot be ordinary. The whole existence is such a celebration; but we miss, because we are not in celebration ourselves. Only a celebrating soul can feel the celebration of existence. So become more cheerful, more blissful; and it is a question of choice, remember.

It is not a question of circumstances. A man can choose to be unhappy in any circumstance. He may be the Alexander, he may possess the whole world and he can be unhappy. Alexander was unhappy; he died an unhappy man, he died utterly empty. And vice versa: a man can choose to be blissful in any kind of circumstance, even in hell. It all depends on how you look at life, it is a question of attitude. A man can be free in the prison and a man may not be free outside; it is a question of the inner soul.

So one has to learn how to choose more blissful moments. They are available, they are as available as misery is. One has to learn the knack of choosing the blissful; slowly slowly the art is learned.

That’s what sannyas is all about: an education in choosing the blissful moments. And once you have started experiencing a few moments, more will be coming because you will become more capable. One day it happens that one is simply bliss. Then the blissful moments don’t come and go; it becomes just a state, one is bliss. And then one comes to know the glory of existence, the meaning, the significance of it.

[A sannyasin, arriving, says: I’ve read one book about Rumic exercises and I began to do them. I’m not very sure about the impact, if it’s good for my body, my behaviour... I was very much in my will.]

That’s the problem that is possible.

Because if you feel strong, somehow you will be strengthening your ego and will. You will lose contact with the relaxed flow of life, you will become tense. In fact what is needed is to become more and more vulnerable rather than strong. There are many exercises which can make you strong; in fact the whole world has existed following those kinds of exercises because power has been worshipped. But the way to go is not through power; it is through humbleness, it is by becoming more feminine.

So my feeling is right now stop those exercises. For two, three months flow with the things as they are here, otherwise there will be a contradiction, and that can create a split in you. After three months, if you feel that you would like to continue them again, remind me.

But right now stop, because here the whole work is just the opposite: it makes you more soft, it makes you more capable of surrender, not of will. It is towards egolessness. So they will be in conflict.

For three months give a chance to this relaxed atmosphere, and after three months remind me again about how you are feeling. Then we can decide what will be the right thing.

CHAPTER 15

15 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Etyan: strong and stable.]

Veet Etyan. Veet means going beyond, transcending – transcending the desire to be strong and stable. Man has always desired to be strong because he feels weak; the desire simply proves that man feels weak. Man is weak, because the part can never be strong; only the whole is strong.

God is strong. God means the whole. How can the part be strong? The very desire simply proves the opposite. Man wants to be stable, and life is a flux; everything is changing, nothing is stable.

Because we desire stability, we are disappointed, disillusioned, at each step.

Look at people’s faces: such disappointment. such utter hopelessness. And why is it there? – in the first place they asked for the impossible. Nobody is at fault except themselves. Had they looked at reality, had they accepted it as it is, there would have been no disappointment, no disillusionment.

Disillusionment follows only when you create an illusion; then disillusionment is natural, inevitable.

But you are the creator of it. Everything is moving like a river and everything is fragile, like a rose.

Only the total is strong and stable.

And the paradox is: till you leave the desire to be strong and stable you will never be one with the total. The desire to be strong and stable keeps you separate, creates a boundary around you, gives you an ego, which is false.

Be fragile and accept the changing flow of life. Know perfectly well that nothing is safe and nothing is secure. This is how it is, and nothing is wrong in it; this is the way existence exists. When we start accepting it, slowly slowly the ego dies of its own accord. Because its demands are not fulfilled, it is not fed; and when there is no ego, one is one with the whole. Then when you are not, there is strength, but that is not yours. And when you are not, there is stability, but that is not yours. The waves are fragile, the ocean is strong. The waves are changing, the ocean is stable.

So go beyond the desire of the ego to be separate, to be strong, to be somebody, to be stable, to be forever. All those are wrong beginnings and they lead you into more and more disillusionments and make your life nothing but a long series of misery.

Life is bliss if one accepts things as they are. And that’s what sannyas is all about: a tremendous acceptance of things as they are, with no desire for something else, for things to be otherwise. In that acceptance something starts blooming in your being, a fragrance arises....

[Satoshi: It means heading home.]

That’s really what is happening!

Heading home? Mm! That’s a beautiful name!

I loved your name! It is really beautiful, and tremendously significant too. That’s what man is: a search for the home. Somewhere we have lost paradise. It has to be regained. Deep down in our hearts there is a nostalgia, some vague memories of the home, of the true land, to which we belong.

So everybody is searching in his own way, everybody is a seeker. One may be seeking wrongly, one may be seeking in a wrong direction – that’s another matter – but as far as seeking is concerned, everybody is seeking.

Meditation puts your direction towards god. It helps you to move towards the right centre of existence. Meditation helps you only to drop that which is wrong. It does not teach you to renounce; it simply helps you to see, and once you have seen the false as the false, it drops of its own accord.

To see the false as the false is the beginning of seeing the truth as truth.

So this will remain your name: Swami Deva Satoshi. Deva means god – headed towards the home called god.

Deva Soumei. Deva means divine, soumei means intelligence. Intellect is human; intelligence is divine. To be an intellectual is just rubbish, but to be intelligent is tremendously beautiful.

Intellectuality is a false coin, it is a pretender. It deceives because it looks like intelligence. It is just the opposite; not only different but opposite. The so-called intellectuals are really very unintelligent people because all that they have is borrowed, all that they have is not their own experience. It is certainly knowledge but not wisdom. It may have happened to others, it has not happened to them; and truth cannot be borrowed, it cannot be purchased, it cannot be sold. It is absolutely untransferrable. It cannot even be expressed, so whatsoever one gathers remains just arbitrary guesswork. One can gather great information and one can start having great knowledge, but all that knowledgability will be only a cover-up of one’s inner ignorance.

Then what is intelligence? Intelligence is dropping the borrowed and searching for your own treasure. Even a small quantity of intelligence is far more meaningful than the whole Himalayas of intellect, because intelligence transforms you. It kindles a light in your heart, it makes you luminous.

It gives you a taste of god, and that taste is transformation. It is only possible to be intelligent through meditation.

Deva means divine, ralph means wolf – divine wolf, divine animal. That’s what is special in man: all animals are simply animals; man has a deep yearning to reach beyond himself. He is the divine animal. He is discontented with himself. He wants to surpass, transcend. He wants to be infinite, eternal. Those are the qualities of god. Man is a desire to be god.

The animal has not to be killed; that’s what has been done in the past. The religious people have been killing and destroying the animal, thinking that by killing the animal they will attain to god. The whole logic is based on a fallacy, because the animal is our energy. If you destroy it you destroy all possibility of your ever being divine. The animal has to be transformed, not destroyed. The animal has to be loved, respected. The animal has to be understood. It has many secrets to reveal and many mysteries to open to you, but those mysteries and secrets can be opened only when the animal is respected, loved, when you befriend it.

That’s my whole process: befriend the animal. There is no need to fight with it, because it is you.

It has to be transformed, certainly, because it has the potential of being more and more and more.

The poison can become nectar; one only needs a little wisdom to transform it. One needs to know the art of alchemy – of changing the animal into the divine.

Religion in the past has functioned in a very artless way, except of course for a few people – a Jesus here, a Buddha there. Otherwise millions of people who have tried to search for god have fallen into the trap of destroying the animal, and once the animal is destroyed or crippled it becomes impossible to transcend. The animal has to be kept healthy and whole, then it can take you, you can ride on it.

It can take you to the beyond.

Prem means love, jule means young, youthful. Love is always young, it never grows old. Love is always young because love always lives in the present; it carries no past. Unburdened by the past, it remains young, fresh. Love is young because it has no idea of the future – the present is enough unto itself – and when there is no future, there is no anxiety. It is anxiety that makes a person old.

I am not talking about the oldness of the body; that is natural. The body will be young, the body will be old, the body will die one day – that is all natural – but the spirit is neither born nor ever dies. But only the person who knows what love is comes to know this reality, that the spirit is never born and never dies, because only love opens the door of eternity, because it is only love that creates soul in you.

Without love a man is just a body, an empty temple without the deity. With love the deity arrives, the temple is no more empty. That’s why love gives such fullness, such deep contentment, such tremendously overflowing joy. Remain in love and let love be the door to the divine.

Prem means love, mieko means beautiful and lucky. Love gives you both: it brings beauty to the soul and a great benediction to your life. It is the greatest blessing that can happen to anyone. The person who is capable of love is the luckiest person in the world, because he has the key of the kingdom of god.

Jesus says: God is love. I even say: Love is god. Love is far more important than god himself, because without love there is no god, without love there is no possibility of any connection with god.

Without love there is no bridge. It is only love that becomes the proof of the existence of god. It certainly gives you beauty. it certainly is the greatest fortune possible.

[A sannyasin, arriving, says: I want to have deeper relationships with people.]

The very expectation creates trouble. If you want deeper relationships you will never be natural. The hankering for the deeper will disturb your spontaneity. You will be trying and making every effort to make it deep. and it cannot be made deep by effort; efforts keep everything shallow.

You have to drop the very desire for deepening it. Enjoy it as it is, and then it deepens – not by desiring but by enjoying. So whatsoever is available in the moment, enjoy it! Even though it is not deeper, what is wrong in a shallow relationship?

It has its own beauty, it has its own freedom. A deeper relationship has its own problems, remember.

One becomes more entangled, and to escape becomes more and more difficult; with a shallow relationship you can always escape!

So enjoy – when it is shallow, swim; and when it is deep, dive!

CHAPTER 16

16 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, robbie means bright, shining one. God is the shining one. He shines through everything – through the flowers and through the stars and through the eyes of people. That which shines is divine, and the person is blind who cannot see it. Not to see god is the greatest calamity that can happen to a person, and that has happened to millions of people: people have become utterly incapable of seeing god. They can see the flower but they cannot feel the fragrance; they can see matter but they cannot taste consciousness. They can see only the gross and they go on missing the subtle; the subtle is the truer reality, the gross is only the cover. The whole search is: how to uncover the hidden one; and it is not difficult, because he is not only without, he is also within.

Right now it is he who is listening to me, right now it is he who is talking through me. When I look into your eyes he is looking into his own eyes, because god is the only reality and it is a very shining reality. It is simply unbelievable how people go on missing him.

Meditation helps to open your eyes. Sannyas becomes a commitment, a decisive act, that ’I am not going this time without knowing god’. Once this commitment is there, miracles start happening; once this decisiveness is there, direction arises out of it.

Anand means bliss. patrice means noble. It is bliss that makes a person noble. The miserable person becomes automatically mean. The more miserable a person is, the more cunning, the more deceiving he becomes. It is natural; he wants to take revenge on life. He cannot be noble, he cannot allow himself to be noble. What has life given to him? Why should he feel good with life? He can’t have compassion.

My whole effort is first to make you more and more blissful so that you can be noble. The old system of thought that prevailed all over the world was: make people noble. But then nobility is just a facade, a cultivated screen around you; deep down you remain mean.

Nobility cannot be created. It is an overflow of inner bliss, it is a sharing of bliss, that makes a person noble. And bliss has some inbuilt tendency to be shared; you cannot hold it, there is no way. Bliss expands, it starts flowing; you cannot control it. That is one of the reasons why many people have chosen not to be blissful – because it cannot be controlled, you will never be in control of it; on the contrary it will possess you. Misery is good: you can control it, you are always in power with misery.

With bliss you are gone, you disappear. Bliss takes possession of you so totally that the ego cannot have any space in it.

When bliss is there, it is not something static. It is like a river, flowing: it starts moving towards the ocean. And whenever bliss arises in the heart, it starts moving towards the universe, towards the ultimate; and that’s what makes a person noble.

Prem means love, diego means may god protect you. The full name will mean may god protect your love. Because love is your very soul. If love is saved, the soul is saved; if love is lost, all is lost. The whole thing hangs on the single phenomenon of love. With love you are in paradise; without it you are in hell. Hence sannyas is nothing but initiation into love.

Love and allow yourself to be loved. Let love become your very style of life. Let love be the suprememost value. Everything can be sacrificed for it, but it cannot be sacrificed for anything.

Even if life has to be sacrificed, sacrifice it, because without love, life has no meaning; but never sacrifice love. In sacrificing it for anything you are destroying your own soul.

Millions of people are there who are walking on the streets without any soul. Just like zombies they go on moving through life, dragging themselves somehow. With love arising in your heart you are no more a zombie. Love brings its own intelligence, the intelligence of the heart; love brings its own joy, its own celebration, its own religion.

So let that small word ’love’ become your whole bible, and all else shall follow.

Deva means god, maureen has two meanings, on the surface looking very different, even diametrically opposite to each other, but deep down related, deeply related, aspects of one phenomenon. One meaning is darkness, another meaning is greatness. On the surface one cannot find any relationship between the two, but deep down there is a relationship.

Light is always limited; darkness is unlimited. Light always has a boundary to it; darkness is unbounded, infinite. Light comes and goes; darkness abides. Light is temporal; darkness is eternal.

Light is caused by something: you need fuel, you need something to cause it. Darkness is uncaused, it needs no fuel. It is like god, uncaused, and it is like god. always abiding.

Light is shallow; darkness has depth. Light demystifies things. Darkness is a mystery, hence it is great; it is immensely mysterious. God is more like darkness than like light, although all the scriptures say that god is light. They are not saying so because god is light but because people are afraid of darkness. And my feeling is: the person who is afraid of darkness will remain afraid of god too.

Scriptures say that god is light just to console people. People are very afraid of depth, darkness.

death – and god is all these things. God is a death. The resurrection follows, but in the beginning is death. And god is eternal darkness; impossible to demystify it. And god has abysmal depth; once you start falling into god there never comes a moment when the fall stops; there is nothing to stop.

It is abysmal, infinite, and people are afraid of it.

Scriptures are written for people who are rooted in fear. All scriptures are somehow wish-fulfillments for the ordinary mind. They don’t state the truth; they only state the lie that is comfortable, consoling, cosy.

You have a beautiful name. God is darkness and god is great in his darkness; that is the meaning.

Deva means divine, susanne means white lily – a divine white lily. The white lily symbolises two things: one, whiteness has always been, in all the cultures, in all the civilisations, the symbol of innocence, purity; and secondly, the lily is a poor flower, it grows very easily, anywhere. It is a very humble flower, hence it represents humbleness.

So the white lily represents innocence and humbleness. They are aspects of the same coin. If one is innocent, one is automatically humble, and vice versa. And if one is innocent and humble, one is open to god; then god is not far away.

Be a white lily and god will find you; you need not go in search of him. Be innocent and be humble; that’s enough. Then you need not go in any search: he comes, it is always he that comes.

CHAPTER 17

17 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, julian means youthful – divine youthfulness. To remain young forever is of immense importance. It is the past that makes one old. If one can go on dying to the past every day, one remains young. If one lives moment to moment then one never becomes old. The body will become old, certainly, but the body is not the question; the spirit is the question. And if the spirit remains young you are in contact with god constantly.

Blessed are those who can remain young for theirs is the kingdom of god. And the secret is simple: don’t accumulate the past and don’t project the future – this moment is enough unto itself – and you will remain fresh, flowing, alive, young. All those qualities are the basic qualities of the religious mind.

Veet means going beyond, transcending, william means will. God cannot be conquered; it is not a question of will power. One has to surrender, one has to disappear, for god to be. The whole idea of will power is rooted in the ego, but we have been taught, we have been conditioned, we have been prepared to fight, to conquer, to compete. Our whole ideology is centered on a single phenomenon: the phenomenon of the ego. It supports it, feeds it, nourishes it, it keeps it alive. The ego is the barrier, and will is nothing but the shadow of the ego. The ego has to go and will has to disappear.

In that state of utter will-lessness, egolessness, the beyond penetrates you, you become available to god. You become available only when you are not. Your being is a disturbance, your non-being is silence, harmony.

So go beyond will and go beyond the ego, because the ego and will only create hell, misery. Going beyond is the greatest experience of life because it brings benediction: it brings god to your door.

Prem means love, steven means the crowned one. Love makes one an emperor, it crowns one. It opens the doors of the kingdom of god. You are no more ordinary. As love arises in the heart it makes everything extraordinary, unique, just unbelievably blissful. Love makes one a king. Without love a man is a beggar. Without love man is not yet; he is just waiting for something to happen.

Without love man is just an emptiness – and not the emptiness that Buddhas talk about but a negative emptiness, a hollowness, a kind of darkness.

The emptiness that Buddhas talk about is very full, too full really, overflowing. It is very positive. It is empty of the ego but full of god. The ordinary emptiness that people feel is simply empty; there is nothing else. Only love can transform it. Only love can crown you.

But why are people afraid of love when love makes people kings? People are afraid because love not only crowns you, it also crucifies you. First it crucifies you, then it crowns you, and people are not courageous enough to take that challenge. First it kills you and then it resurrects you. You have to be abolished as you are; you have to be utterly effaced so that the space can be created in which the king can be born. Because of that crucifixion people remain unloving, or at the most they pretend to love, but they never really go into it whole-heartedly.

Only the courageous person can go whole-heartedly in love, because it is a kind of death. although it brings eternal life, life abundant. but that is only later on. Who knows? What is the guarantee?

The coward asks for the guarantee. There is no guarantee, there is only risk.

Sannyas is a risk. It is a jump into a love affair with existence. It certainly crowns you, but before it crowns you it crucifies you. Be ready for both!

Anand means bliss, virendra means god of courage. The full name will mean god of bliss and courage. Bliss and courage are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Only the courageous can be blissful and only the blissful are courageous. It looks strange that only the courageous can be blissful, but it is not so, it is not strange: there is an inner logic in it.

Misery needs no courage, misery needs no intelligence. Misery needs no creative talents, misery needs no risk. Everybody is miserable, so when you are miserable you are part of the crowd. And the crowd feels comfortable, cosy; you are surrounded by people, you are sheltered. To be blissful means you will be alone.- To be blissful means you will not be a part of the crowd any more; and the crowd is very revengeful with blissful people. Naturally, it feels offended. It kills a Jesus or a Socrates for the simple reason that these people are really joyous.

Jesus says again and again to his disciples: Rejoice, rejoice, I say again and again, rejoice! He must have been a man of great love, of great dance and song. I don’t believe the picture that Christians have painted of him. He must have been a man of laughter, humour; that’s how all the Buddhas have always been. But that is their crime, the sin that the society cannot forgive them for.

Hence to be blissful one needs to be courageous. And it needs creative talents; one cannot just be blissful. Blissfulness is a by-product of creativity; when you create something you taste bliss. In those rare moments of creativity when you are lost in the act – painting, singing, dancing, making love or whatsoever it is – when you are utterly lost in it, when you are no more separate from the act, when the door and the doing are one, in that moment, that rare moment of oneness, bliss arises.

Bliss is another name of falling into orgasmic unity with existence.

It needs great intelligence. Any stupid person can believe in any philosophy, ideology, that is being taught to him by the society. Only the intelligent person revolts, because he wants truth first-hand, and truth can only be first-hand; second-hand it is a lie.

Be courageous – be blissful.

Deva means divine, alice means truthfulness; and that is one of the most fundamental qualities.

Once a man has it, everything else follows. It becomes the beginning of a new life, it triggers a new birth. To be truthful means to be authentic, to be simply what one is – with no pretensions, having no persona, no personality, having no mask – utterly naked in the sun, simply open, howsoever one is, with no fear. And that is the moment of conversion: when one starts dropping all the coverings.

There are layers upon layers of coverings and there are masks behind masks, and the real face is lost behind thousands of false faces. When one starts dropping these faces, one is simply surprised how much weight one had been carrying unnecessarily.

And unless one attains to one’s original face, one has no real life, one has no real love, and one cannot find any bliss anywhere.

Be authentic and then you need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; you are religious.

In your authenticity you are religious.

Anand means bliss, mireille means of wondrous beauty. Bliss brings a beauty of its own, and it is not ordinary beauty; it is wondrous, it is unbelievable, because it is not of the body, not of the form.

In fact one cannot locate from where it is arising. That is the wonder: one cannot find the source of it, from where it is welling up. That is the wonder.

In bliss one is in deep communion with god – that’s what bliss is all about – and then from the unknown sources of existence beauty starts flowing through you. A grace comes from the beyond, from the unknown.

It is simply a wonder to see a Buddha. It does not seem to be a fact, it seems to be a fiction. That’s why down the ages people have continuously doubted whether Jesus ever existed, whether he was really a historical person, whether Buddha is just a myth, a story, a parable, a metaphor; was he really a person?

Millions have asked these questions; and the reason is that even if you encounter a Buddha you cannot believe that such grace is possible in such an ugly world, that such beauty can exist in such a world which is so blind, whose heart has gone utterly stony. Even if you encounter one it looks like a dream.

Bliss brings a beauty which is not of this world. Bliss becomes the door to some other dimension of existence. It takes you into the realm of the mysterious.

I teach bliss. That is my simple, single message: be blissful, be cheerful, be full of love. There is no need to worry about god and there is no need to worry about prayer. Those things will arise of their own accord, they always arise. The blissful heart starts praying without words. The blissful heart starts remembering god without words. It is a feel, it is not a thought.

Devapriya means beloved of god. Life is a gift, a gift of love. It is utterly precious, nothing can be more valuable, but because it has no price we forget that it is a gift of great value.

Price and value are not synonymous. Price reduces everything to a commodity; then it can be sold and purchased. But there are things which cannot be sold and cannot be purchased, so they can’t have any price. For example, life can have no price, love can have no price, meditation can have no price, joy can have no price; they have value but no price.

God valued you, that’s why he created you. He loved you, otherwise you would not be here. Your very presence is a proof that existence needed you; and to feel needed is tremendously satisfying, to feel loved by existence is to feel at home.

My sannyas is not against the world, it is not a renunciation; on the contrary, it is a rejoicing in the world – rejoicing in everything, from the smallest to the greatest, from the morning tea to the night prayer. Life is so precious, each moment of it is so precious, that once you start understanding it, feeling it, you will feel so grateful that that very gratefulness becomes prayer.

Anand means bliss, christine means to follow Christ. But to follow Christ does not mean to be a Christian. In fact by being a Christian one avoids Christ. By following the organised religion one starts avoiding the true. To be part of the vatican is to be against Christ. This is a great calamity, but it has happened all over the world, that the followers are not really followers but have turned into enemies: they do exactly what should not be done.

Jesus’ message is that of love, and down the centuries Christians have killed so many people. In the name of love they have been fighting great wars, holy wars, crusades. And not only have they been killing non-Christians, they have even been killing Christians. Such hatred, such violence has followed the man whose message was of love that it is unbelievable.

To be really a follower of Christ means not to be a Christian, and to follow Buddha means not to be a Buddhist, because all ideologies, once they are organised, systematised, start destroying truth.

Truth cannot be systematised. Truth cannot be reduced to a dogma, it cannot be changed into a belief. It is an experience, it has to be lived.

And the second thing: Christ has nothing to do with esus in particular. Christ is not a personal name, it is a state of consciousness, just as Buddha is a state of consciousness. Jesus is only one of the Christs; many have existed before him, many have existed after him. Any one who blooms into total consciousness becomes a Christ.

Follow Christ-consciousness so that one day you also can become the same. It is everybody’s possibility and everybody’s birthright.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I felt the whole time here that I have no chance in anything.]

That is just your own projection, otherwise every door is open, and every door is god’s door: knock anywhere and it is his door. But if you stand aloof, if you don’t participate, if you remain a spectator, then there is no chance. You are missing it yourself, otherwise every moment there are chances and chances. Opportunity never comes, never goes; it is always there. Use it! Jump, risk, stake all that you have, and immediately the door opens.

Next time you come, remember it from the very beginning: participate in everything; don’t remain....

You are keeping a distance, you go only so far; you are being clever, calculating. Then there is no chance, because the chance exists only for those who jump in with totality.

You can go on standing on the bank of the river and you can remain thirsty. You will have to bow down, you will have to cup your hands, yoU will have to drink! The river is there, the river is available.

but still you have to do something so that it can quench your thirst.

I am just a river, absolutely at your disposal, but if you don’t drink, then nothing can be done. You can show the horse the water but you cannot make him drink.

So next time you come, take a plunge!

CHAPTER 18

18 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, karin means rejoice – rejoice in the divine. The world is full of god, each particle is overflowing with his existence, but we cannot see him unless we rejoice, because when we rejoice we function at the optimum. When we rejoice we become total, when we rejoice then we are not holding anything back. Because of that optimum energy – holding nothing back – the contact with the divine is possible. God is there. we are here, but the bridge is missing. Rejoice and you make the bridge: rejoicing is the bridge.

Prem means love, mari means rebellion, angela means message or messenger. Love is the rebellion and love is the message. Love is the rebellion because society is very much against it.

The society is centred around the concept of war; its whole structure has arisen out of violence, hence it cannot be for love. If love comes into the world all the societies will simply collapse, because basically they are all war-oriented. rooted in conflict, rooted in competition, rooted in jealousy. How can they allow love to happen? So instead of love they supply plastic substitutes

– marriage, etcetera.

Love is also the greatest revolution because in love you have to drop your ego, otherwise love remains a dream and never becomes a reality. One has to sacrifice the ego at the altar of love.

That’s the only way to bring it down from the beyond into the heart.

The ego is like a rock: remove the ego and you become available to love. God is nothing but the most intense experience of love, another name for the orgasmic experience of love. All the Buddhas, all the awakened ones, have been giving this simple message. But it has not been heard yet; man is deaf and blind.

By becoming a sannyasin you are taking a vow against deafness and blindness, that now you will try to be open to reality, vulnerable to existence, available to god.

Deva means divine. Sabine does not have a very significant meaning – it is the name of an ancient Italian tribe but the sound is beautiful, hence I will keep it; and it is really the sound that matters, not the meaning.

So remember that language is not significant, but music. That which can be said is not important, but only that which cannot be said. But that which cannot be said can be shown. And your energy is ready to see it. Your energy is already in a divine dance.

I am waiting for people like you. You have come in the right time. Anywhere else you will be thought mad – here, voU will become holy! It is rare to see such a liquid German!...

In fact you don’t need much; just being here is going to do the miracle!

Anand means bliss. narayan means god. Bliss is god, and to be blissful is to be godly. To be miserable is to isolate yourself from god and his existence. Misery is a by-product of isolation, disconnection. You are unplugged from the divine source, then you are in misery. Misery exists only when you become an island; and we are taught to become islands, we are taught to become egos, small islands, hence there is so much misery in the world.

We are not meant to be islands, we are continents. We are not separate; nothing is separate from anything else. This whole existence is an interdependence, everything is interconnected. To see that interconnection is to see god. To see that interdependence is to drop the idea of the ego, and in that very dropping bliss arises. To be blissful is to be godly. And the ultimate peak is that you are not blissful, you are simply bliss; then you are god.

That is the meaning of your name; let it become the meaning of your life too! It is a long journey, arduous. hazardous, but not impossible.

CHAPTER 19

19 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means going beyond, transcending, andre means manly strength. There are two possibilities open to man: either he can move in search of manly strength or he can move in search of womanly strength. The manly strength is gross, aggressive, violent; the feminine strength is subtle, non-aggressive, non-violent. Politics remains in the first, religion moves into the second.

To be strong is good, but in the feminine way. The rock is strong in the masculine way, the water is strong in the feminine way, and ultimately the water wins over the rock. Hence Lao Tzu says: My message is, follow the watercourse way. In the beginning the rock seems to be so unconquerable and the water so humble, so polite, so liquid. But in the end, the rock will be gone, it will turn into sand, and the water will still be there.

There is a strength in a big, strong cedar; that is manly strength. And there is also strength in the grass; that is feminine strength. When the strong wind comes the Cedar will resist and the grass will bow down. The Cedar can fall because of its resistance, and once it falls there is no way of getting up, but the grass will be back again when the wind is gone. The wind has not done any harm to it, on the contrary, it has been a blessing because it has taken all its dust.

Again, Lao Tzu says: Be like the grass – don’t be like a proud cedar – bending, surrendering, liquid.

Prem means love, geraldine means a spear – love’s spear. Love penetrates the heart like a spear, it goes to the very core of your being. And only love goes to the core of your being; everything else remains on the circumference. Money, power, prestige, ideologies, philosophies, systems of thought

– they all remain on the surface. They cannot move in your depth, they can exist only in shallow water.

Only love has the courage to dive deep into the very core of your being, hence love is the door to the divine. Once the spear of love has penetrated into the heart the door opens. k is painful, yet the pain is very sweet. It is painful, yet it brings great blessings with it. The pain is not to be thought of as a pain at all. It has a totally different flavour to it; it is very joyful. To be pained by love is a joy, it is a blessing.

Deva means divine. christine means one who follows Christ – a divine follower of Christ. But the follower has not to be an imitator. Following is totally different from imitation – not only different but diametrically opposite too. The imitator has no understanding; he simply acts, pretends. He is ritualistic, formal. You will find those people in all the churches, in all the temples, of the world; the so-called saints are almost all imitators.

To follow Christ is dangerous; to imitate is very comfortable, secure, safe. The Christian priest is respected, has respectability. Christ was not respected; he was condemned, condemned to death!

He was not a conformist; he was a rebel, the greatest the world has ever known.

The imitator is not really in love with Christ; he is using Christ. He is imposing his own idea upon Christ. He is clever, calculating and cunning.

But to follow is totally different. To follow means, the first thing, to understand, because following can come only out of understanding. Following does not mean clinging. It means understanding the very spirit of a Christ or of a Buddha. And one who understands the spirit of Christ will understand the spirit of Krishna, the spirit of Buddha, naturally, because at that level of understanding there is no difference between Krishna and Christ, no difference between Christ and Buddha, no difference between Christ and Lao Tzu. At that ultimate peak all the awakened ones meet, they become one.

Understand, don’t believe! Try to enquire with great trust but without clinging to any belief, and slowly slowly you become a light unto yourself. When a person has become a light unto himself, Christ is born in him.

[The new sannyasin says she has had pain and tension in her body for two years, and what attitude to take to it? Osho suggests body work... ]

And then take some Acupuncture and three sessions of Samadhi (tank).

It will go. No problem, nothing to be worried about. You will not need any attitude towards it; it will go!

Anand means bliss, victor means victorious. Bliss has to be conquered, but the way to conquer bliss is very paradoxical; it is that of surrender. Only those who surrender to it are capable of conquering it. It is absurd, it is not logical, but that’s the way it is: if you try to conquer it you will go on missing.

You cannot directly attack it. It is not available in that way; that is not its mode of being available.

One has to go indirectly: rather than attacking it, one has to invite it. Rather than being aggressive, one has to be receptive. Then it comes, and it comes like a flood. It drowns you and it crowns you!

Victory is possible but it is possible only through surrender.

Dhyana means meditation, michael means one who is godlike. It is only in meditation that one comes to know that one is godlike. Meditation means a state of no mind, a state of no thought, a state of no desire. When thinking, dreaming, desiring, all have ceased and you simply are, not even a ripple of mind left, your pool of consciousness is completely silent, calm. In that utterly timeless moment, in that undisturbed space, one understands one’s inner nature, and that is godlike.

Our innermost core is divine: we are gods in disguise. To know it is to know all, and to miss it is to miss all.

Prem means love. Love is the essential core of religion. The word ’religion’ means, in the root, to be connected. Man has become disconnected from god. Religion means to be connected again, and the only way to be connected is love. the only bridge.

Thinking cannot connect, even great philosophy is useless. The whole of theological speculation is utter nonsense: one can be lost in the jungles of words but they cannot help. The only hope is the possibility of love; love immediately becomes a bridge. Wherever love is, there is connection, and wherever connection is, there is religion. The word ’religion’ is really beautiful. We are missing god, not by miles, just by inches.

Let your heart expand a little and you start touching god. Let your heart sing a song and suddenly you are in tune with god. Let your heart he full of love and suddenly it is full of god too.

I teach only one thing: be blissful. Wherever bliss is, god is. Remain surrounded by bliss, carry bliss as an air around you, a climate, and then you are always walking on holy ground and you are always surrounded by the celestial, by the divine.

The so-called saints have become too sad and religion has fallen into wrong hands. It has fallen into pathological hands that are basically afraid. Their god is a by-product of their fear, their prayer is full of paranoia. Their god is not out of their blissfulness, out of their love; and the real god is always born through love, through blissfulness, through gratefulness, never out of fear. Fear is a barrier; love is a bridge. And only the blissful person can love, because only the blissful person has something to give and share.

People want to love but they have nothing to share, hence their love efforts turn into great failures; they end in frustration. Before one wants to be in love, something is needed, absolutely needed, so that one can give it as a gift. And what can be given as a gift except bliss? Everything else is mundane.

So my concept of religion is that of bliss, celebration, rejoicing.

[A sannyasin leaving for the West asks where to draw the line between being understanding and making concessions that would hurt him. Don’t be worried about the West, Osho says.... ]

I am in your heart and I will take care. Just go without worry and any fear. Once the East has settled in the heart the West cannot disturb. And it has happened; you need not worry!

Just go happily and help my people there!

[A sannyasin asks about her parents and their acceptance of her leaving them to be here forever....

]

Don’t be worried about your parents! They will be happy, very happy. Just go and dance and sing and let them know how crazy you have become!

[A sannyasin says: I had a strange two weeks in Germany and I don’t know what happened to me.

I really felt ’Oh, I’m going to be mad; I can’t control myself.’]

You have come to the right place! You’re going mad – nothing to be worried about! But here we do madness with a method. Don’t be worried: madness is the highest form of sanity; just wait and experience!

CHAPTER 20

20 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, kerry is a name of a place. Bliss is a place within you, it is a space within you.

It is not something that happens to you: it is already there. It has just to be allowed to overflow, to overwhelm you.

We have created many hindrances for it, we have blocked all its ways. The society has existed in a repressive way. Repression has been the religion up to now, and because of repression, religion has gone pathological.

Real religion can only be of expression, not of repression. All the blocks have to be removed, all the inhibitions, taboos, have to be removed. One has to become again innocent, and suddenly it is there and it starts flowing, it wells up.

It is a place within you, it does not come from the without.

Prem means love, renate means reborn. Sannyas is love reborn. It is a rebirth, the birth of the soul.

The first birth is only physical, and those who are contented with it are simply befooling themselves.

The first birth is significant only if the second happens. The first is only a means, the second is the end: the second birth is the birth of the real you.

Jesus says to Nicodemus: Unless you are born again you will not be able to enter into my kingdom of god.

That’s exactly the meaning of renate: unless you are born again.... And the only way to be born again, to be twice born, is through love. If you love, you are constantly renewing yourself; if you love totally, each moment you are born again. Then the whole of life becomes just a sequence of rebirths and then each moment is a surprise and each moment is a joy.

That’s how one comes to the temple of immortality. By being reborn again and again and again one comes to know the innermost core, which is beyond birth, beyond death.

Veet means going beyond, noriyuki means ritual – going beyond the ritual. Then one encounters the real. Reality is not a ritual. Ritual is man-made; it is an invention, a consolation, a poor substitute for the real. And one who wants to know the real has to drop all rituals, all formalities. One has to become natural, informal, spontaneous.

Religion is in being natural. Whenever a religion becomes a ritual it is a corpse of the religion.

Whenever a religion is alive it has no rituals, it lives moment to moment; and that’s how a sannyasin has to be.

Live moment to moment, not according to any prefabricated ritual, not according to any schedule, not according to any ready-made answers but responding to the real, in the present. Out of the present one comes to realise oneself, and that realisation becomes the door of the divine.

Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, all have become rituals; that calamity befalls all great religions.

When Buddha is alive religion is not a ritual; when Buddha dies people make rituals. They simply learn how to repeat, how to imitate. All significance is lost. The centre is simply forgotten, only the circumference remains. Hence one has to seek a living Buddha as a master, where religion is still breathing and pulsating – and that’s what sannyas is all about.

Deva means god, and kosuke means cultivation – cultivation of god.

Once Buddha was passing through a village; he came across an old farmer. The old man asked him ’What do you do?’ Buddha said ’First you answer me: What do you do?’ The man said ’I am a cultivator.’ Buddha laughed and said ’I am also a cultivator.’

Now it was the turn of the old man to laugh; he said ’You are joking. You, a cultivator? What do you cultivate?’ Buddha said ’I cultivate truth, I cultivate god, I cultivate meditation. I sow the seeds of the divine!’

So become a cultivator of god.

[Shuichi means to master one thing.]

Atma Shuichi. Atma means the supreme self. Master only one thing: your own self, because that is the greatest mastery, in fact the only mastery. To master others is just an effort to cover up one’s own inner slavery. To master oneself is to enter into the kingdom of god. It is difficult, arduous, but not impossible. And because it is difficult and arduous, it is a great challenge. It is a challenge which has to be accepted and overcome.

Sannyas is a challenge to master yourself, and the way towards this mastery is by becoming more and more aware, alert, understanding.

Knowledge is power. It is power in the world of science, it is also power in the world of religion. One can master oneself only if one knows oneself. Hence ’Know thyself is the key towards self-mastery.

Deva means divine, edgar means richness – divine richness. Man is poor without god. One may have all the riches of the world but one remains poor without god. In fact the more you possess in the world, the poorer you start feeling in contrast. The outer becomes richer and richer and the inner is empty. Hence the paradox: the richest man in the world is the poorest.

Alexander the Great suffered very much in his last days because he became aware of his poverty, his utter poverty. He was just a few miles away from his capitol and wanted to reach the capitol because he had promised his mother that he would come back – that after he conquered the East he would come back. There was just one day’s journey more, but his physician said ’It is not possible, you cannot survive twenty-four hours. And it is risky, the journey cannot be taken.’

He cried: he said ’Then what use are all of my riches? I am ready to give anything – just save me for twenty-four hours. I promised my mother.’

But the physician said ’What can we do? Life is disappearing. At the most you can survive two, three hours, not more than that. Even if you give your whole empire, it cannot purchase even a single moment of life.’

Just see how poor he must have felt in those moments! When he died, the last thing he said was

’When you take my coffin, let my hands hang out of it.’ ’Why?’ the people asked. He said ’So that everybody can see that even Alexander the Great is going empty-handed, a poor man, a beggar.’

There is only one kind of richness, and that is when you become harmonious with the whole, when you start feeling in tune with existence. That tuning is god, that harmony is god. God is not a person, god is a principle – the principle of harmony, the principle of being in accord with nature.

God cannot be worshipped, god can only be lived. If you live in harmony, you live god. All churches and all temples are false because god is not a person so there is no point in worshipping: either you live him or you don’t live him.

Live god and become rich!

Anand means bliss, gerda means garden – a bliss garden. That’s exactly the meaning of the word

’paradise’: a walled garden of bliss. Paradise is not somewhere else, it is not geographical. It has something to do with your psychology, with your soul; it is an inner space.

People are like deserts in their inner world, nothing grows there; and unless something starts growing in your inner world, you cannot grow. So people only age, they don’t grow: they become older but they never become grown-ups. They remain deserts. dry; their life is utterly juiceless. But down the ages we have worshipped these people as saints.

My effort here is just the opposite. I would like my sannyasins to be gardens, not deserts – green with all the green of the trees and all the red of the trees and all the gold of the trees, and full of sap and juice. Then life has a different flavour, a different dance. Then it has a fragrance, and that fragrance becomes the proof that god exists.

God is not a conclusion of syllogistic thought: god is an experience of inner flowering. It is possible.

and to miss it is really to miss all. The whole of life is then a sheer wastage. And it is not far away either – very close by. Just a little effort and you can transform your desert into a garden – just a little effort; and that little effort is what I call meditation.

Call it meditation, call it prayer, call it silence, any name will do, but the essential point is: start dropping the mind with all its noisy thoughts. Become more silent, more a no-mind, and then from a desert you are transformed into a garden.

Prem means love, makoto means truth. Truth is not available through the mind, it is not a conclusion of logic. Truth can only be reached through the heart; it is the flowering of love. Only the lovers know what is. Love is the only way of knowing the truth, hence science can never know it. Science can only know the fact but never the truth. Fact is only the circumference; truth is the centre. It is only the arrow of love that can penetrate to the very centre of it.

There are two ways of knowing. One is through logic: through logic you can know about others but never about yourself. You can know about objects but never anything about the subject; the knower remains unknown. There is the other way of knowing: the way of love. Through it you cannot know the objective world but you can know the knower. And that should be the first step of any intelligent person: to know oneself should be the base of one’s life. Everything else is secondary.

Self-knowledge is the goal. Use everything as a means towards it.

CHAPTER 21

22 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[March 21st was the Enlightenment Day celebration with singing and dancing in Osho’s presence.]

Yogadeva. Yoga means union, deva means god. To be in a union with existence is to know god.

That union, that very union, is god. God is not a person; it is a principle – the principle of unity, the principle that makes the universe a universe and not a multi-verse. the principle that makes the universe a cosmos and not a chaos. The innermost harmony of existence, the running current of harmony in the whole – that’s what god is all about. God cannot be worshipped, god can only be lived. Only you can become the temple of him; no other temple will do.

And that is what a sannyasin is meant to be: a temple of god. Live god, forget worship. By worship man has not reached anywhere. Now we have to change the whole old pattern, the whole gestalt.

Instead of worshipping, we have to move towards living.

Dharmadeva. Dharma means religion, deva means god. God is not separate from religion. God is the principle and religion is the life lived according to that principle. Religion is not theology, it is not a philosophy: it is a way of life.

Man can live in two ways. One is to live as if there is nothing more than that which is visible; that is an irreligious life. It is a meaningless life, because meaning always comes from the beyond. When you start reaching for the stars your life has significance. If there is nothing beyond, you live in darkness and you live in a futile way, and knowing that futility brings misery.

To live life focused on the beyond is the religious life. Religion means a constant surpassing of yourself, because you are more than you know, because you are more than you are and each day can reveal many more territories of your being. The inner space is infinite: one never comes to know the whole of it. One is always knowing and knowing and knowing but the mystery remains. That’s why life is so beautiful – because it cannot be reduced into a theory, into a hypothesis.

Prem means love. Lee is Chinese; it means a very precious gem or a pearl or a diamond. Love is the most precious diamond. Nothing is more precious than love, and one who misses love remains poor. And remember, love is not in getting love; love is in giving love. Everybody hankers to get, and everybody misses it because from the very beginning they have taken a wrong step. Give and you will never miss; give and you will be getting more and more. Give for the sheer joy of giving it, with no conditions attached, with no expectations, and feel grateful to the person who receives your love, because he could have rejected. Never think that you have obliged; always think that you have been obliged because your love has been accepted.

Don’t make love an investment. It is not part of the business world but we have made it a part of the business world. We have made it a commodity, a bargain. We have brought it from the sky to the muddy earth. and when it is part of the muddy earth it does not satisfy. Then a very insane hankering arises in the mind, that ’Change from this person, move to another person, because this has not been satisfying, so some other relationship may be satisfying.’ People are rushing, running from one person to another.

It is not a question of changing persons: it is a changing of something in you. It is a change of perspective, not of the person, not of the object of love, but of the subjectivity that loves, of the interiority that loves.

That’s my whole teaching: how to be more loving. And love comes a thousandfold. That comes according to a certain ultimate law; there is no exception to it. If it doesn’t come that means you must have put some condition – conscious, unconscious. You must have created a barrier. Rather than creating a bridge you must have made a wall.

So learn to love unconditionally and the whole existence pours love into you; it responds, it responds tremendously. In that pouring of love from every nook and comer of existence, one comes to know what god is – that experience of love pouring from everywhere towards you, that experience that you are intrinsically needed, that without you existence will miss something, that you are not an accident, that you are part and parcel, warp and woof, of the totality, that existence needs you as much as you need existence, that it is an interdependence.

That word ’interdependence’ is synonymous with god. To know that interdependence not as a theory but as an experience changes one’s whole life. One starts living on a different plane – of course in the same world, but it is no more the same world because you are no more the same.

You have suffered long; it is time to get out of the old gestalt. And you are going to get out of it, because enough is enough! And even that suffering is not suffering, is not negative; it has prepared you for this jump into a new way of life. It has matured you to be a sannyasin. So one feels grateful for it too, for whatsoever life has been one feels grateful.

Deva means divine, cathy means pure – divine purity. There is a purity which can be called human –

if it is cultivated, if it is imposed, if it is just a habit, a conditioning. That’s what the behaviourists are saying to the world: that people can be changed just by reconditioning their behaviour. But it will be a change only on the circumference. Behaviour is not the soul. One can be pure in one’s character and may not be pure in one’s consciousness.

Character is human; consciousness is divine. When purity arises out of your consciousness, not out of your character, then it has something of the beyond in it. Then it has tremendous beauty and power; it has grace and splendour.

The human purity can be possessed by you. The divine purity can only possess you; you cannot possess it. Fortunate is the man who is possessed by something divine, something bigger than himself. It is possible; we just have to allow it to happen, we have to learn how to be in a let-go.

Character has to be cultivated; consciousness has to be allowed to grow. Character needs effort; consciousness is an effortless spontaneous flowering of being.

Narayandeva. It is a name of god. All names are god’s names, because except for god nothing exists. All forms are god’s forms, and to realise this is to live in a totally different world. That’s what it means to enter into the kingdom of god: the world remains the same, but your attitude. your vision, your perspective, is no more the same.

You see the same rose flower: it was just a rose flower, something ordinary a moment before, and now suddenly god has appeared in it, it is an expression of his beauty. It is the same rose flower, nothing has changed chemically. physically, materially – all is exactly the same, but nothing is the same any more. Now you can have a dialogue with the rose. You can fall into prayer. You can dance around the bush. It is a temple now! Your perspective has hallowed it, has made it holy.

Once you start seeing god in the trees, in the mountains, in the people, in the animals, in the birds you are living in a totally different world. It is no more material, it is divine. To be in that world is to be in bliss and to be in that world is to be in eternity. It has no beginning and no end. It is neither in time nor in space; it is a transcendence. But first the transcendence has to happen within you – a one hundred-and-eighty-degree turn of your vision. Eyes which are focused on the outside have to turn withinwards.

The objective vision has to become totally subjective. Then prose becomes poetry. then matter disappears and there is only consciousness. This ocean of consciousness – and we are nothing but waves in it – is what god is all about.

CHAPTER 22

24 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means god, ray means a wise protector – god, the wise protector. We are protected each and every moment of our lives. We may not be aware of it, but the protection is always there. We are not strangers to existence, we are part of it; and we are not unnecessary, not accidental, we are intrinsically necessary. Without us there will be no existence, just as without existence we will not be there; we are inter-dependent. And the whole automatically protects the part, and protects it with tremendous wisdom.

Once you become aware of it great gratitude arises. Then even while you are in suffering you know that it must be a blessing in disguise. Then even suffering is no more suffering; by the change of your attitude you have changed the very quality of the thing. The world remains the same; our attitudes change, and the change of the attitude is a change of the whole world in which you had lived before.

It disappears; a new world starts appearing.

So always think in terms of being protected, loved, secure. There is no need to worry about it, there is no need to think of safety all is safe in god’s hands. And by ’god’ I don’t mean a person but simply a principle: the principle that connects the whole, the thread that connects the whole, the thread that makes it a garland and not a heap of flowers, a thread that makes it a cosmos and not a chaos.

Bodhigyan.

Bodhi means enlightenment, gyan means wisdom – wisdom that comes through enlightenment. That is the only kind of wisdom there is; all else is mere knowledge. Knowledge comes from without, wisdom comes from within.

Knowledge is borrowed.

wisdom is yours,

authentically yours. Knowledge makes you a parrot. Wisdom gives you total freedom from all kinds of imitation. For the first time you are just your own being. and to be just your own being is the greatest achievement because it is freedom, because it gives you wings, because it makes available to you the whole sky of existence and its mysteries.

Knowledge destroys mysteries, it demystifies existence. Wisdom mystifies it, it makes it more and more mysterious. The deeper your wisdom, the more wise you are, the less you know. When one has reached to the ultimate peak of wisdom, one knows nothing or one knows only nothing. That is ultimate innocence: knowing nothing. The purity of it and the beauty of it are immeasurable.

Prem means love, johannes means god is gracious. Love, god’s grace – that will be the full meaning of your name. God and his grace come in the form of love. Love is the first ray that penetrates the heart and starts a process of transformation. It is the first experience of grace, and slowly slowly as the experience becomes more and more profound one starts feeling the invisible hands of god behind it. So the first experience is of love, the second experience is of grace, and the third experience is of god.

It is possible when love arises that you may not think of grace; then you are stuck at love. Then you are missing an opportunity. When love arises, if you think this is all, an end in itself, then you became satisfied too early. It was just a beginning, just a stirring. Much more was to come; it was just the opening of the door. One need not cling to it. One has to go deeper and deeper, and the only way to go deeper is to go beyond.

One has to be alert of something more that comes always like an aroma, a fragrance. Love is very visible like a flower; grace is more subtle, like a fragrance.

Unless you are very alert you will miss it. Millions of people in the world miss love; they can be forgiven. But there are a few who attain to love but miss grace; they cannot be forgiven.

Once you start feeling grace then love is no more a doing of your own; it is a happening. It is something that is beyond you, that overwhelms you, that is bigger than you. You start having a new context to your life, and significance arises out of it. But to stop at grace is again missing the point –

although it is more difficult to stop at grace than it was to get stuck at love.

It is more difficult to stop at grace because grace is already half the journey: one starts having an inkling of the divine hand behind. But one can get stuck there too. That’s why there are religions that accept grace but deny god. They are stuck at grace and they think this is enough. Peace has descended, compassion has been found, wisdom has arisen, what more can there be? There is still more, there is always more; it is unending.

So when grace happens, start searching god must be very close by. It is so subtle that we cannot even call it a fragrance. It is so subtle that we can only call it an absence, not even a presence. It exists in a very non-existential way. It exists as the empty sky. That’s why Buddha calls it nirvana

– utter cessation of all. Just a pure emptiness is left behind; nobody as an observer, nobody as an observed. That’s god!

So start by love, move to grace, and go on moving into god. Unless you disappear completely never believe in any stoppage, never believe that any stop is a destination. Unless you disappear completely the journey has to be continued. When you are gone, gone forever, then the goal is achieved. When the achiever is no more, the goal is achieved. That is the paradox.

Anand Jan-France. Anand means blissful, jan means god’s grace, france means freedom – god’s grace as blissful freedom. There is nothing more blissful than freedom. That is the deepest desire in the human heart: to be free of it all, just to be without any limitation, just to be without any circumference, because each circumference becomes a confinement, each definition limits, and one starts feeling encaged, imprisoned. So one may not be aware, very few are aware of it, that our deepest desire is to be ultimately free.

God can come with a blissful gift of freedom, we just have to allow him. We hinder, we create all kinds of obstructions. Man is really so foolish that he is the greatest enemy of himself. He creates misery with great effort, and he goes on missing all blissful moments which were just there for the asking or just there for the taking. No effort was needed, because bliss is our nature. It needs no other condition to be fulfilled to attain it: it is already there, it is already the case.

Misery needs much effort, much planning, much thinking, but man is so stupid that he strives hard to be miserable. When he is miserable he starts thinking how to get out of it, and in the first place there is no need to get into it.

The really intelligent person is not one who knows how to get out of misery; the really intelligent person is one who knows how not to get into it. Getting out of it is more difficult, very difficult, because one thing leads to another. But not to get into it is very simple: a little alertness, a little witnessing, a little watchfulness, that’s all.

Be a little on guard and you will be surprised: ninety-nine percent of miseries simply disappear.

and the one percent that will not disappear you will be able to accept because it will be part of your growth. It will be a pain that is not painful but sweet.

CHAPTER 23

26 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, anneke means grace. Love is the only experience in life which makes you aware of the presence of god. And to be aware of the presence of god is to be full of grace; suddenly one is overflowing with grace. The benediction is such, the blessing is such, that one becomes a blessing to existence through it.

Love is the only proof for god, because it is not a question of argumentation, syllogism, inference.

It is a question of a totally different kind of approach to life – not logical, not calculative, not even that of an observer. But when one participates in existence, melts. merges, in those rare moments when one becomes one with existence, the presence is felt. And to feel that presence is to be full of grace, full of beauty. full of blessing.

Seek god in love because he is found only in love and nowhere else.

Anand means bliss, sugit means a beautiful song – a beautiful song of bliss. Man is born to be that.

Man is a hidden music, and the music is trying hard to explode, but we have created such a hard crust around ourselves that neither the music of existence can enter into us nor our music can have a meeting with the music of the without. We have created a wall between the without and the within; that wall is the ego. That wall is the idea of separation, that ’I am separate from existence.’ We are not.

The only illusion that man has to drop is the illusion of separation. Then suddenly the inner song bursts forth and meets with the outer. The inner and the outer are no more inner and the outer; they become one... a pulsation, a rhythm. That experience of the within and without becoming one is the peak of joy, of ecstasy. Only through that ecstasy does one come to know the significance of life, the utter beauty of it.

So remember, the idea of separation has to be dropped slowly slowly. Seek and search for moments when you can feel more in tune with existence so that the layer of separation becomes thinner and thinner: in love, listening to music, in meditation, seeing a beautiful sunset or the starry night, or just sitting silently doing nothing, merging, melting, disappearing. Allow more and more moments of that kind. It is a rare kind, because we are so occupied that we never allow those moments to erupt, or even if sometimes they happen, we are in such a hurry that we never take any note of them.

Start taking note of those beautiful moments because they are windows into god.

Anand means bliss, nitsan means the bud of a flower. We are born as buds. It very rarely happens that one becomes a flower. We die as buds; that is the misery of life, the agony of life, the hell of it. If the bud blooms, the Buddha arises in you: you become an awakened soul. The bud means consciousness asleep, the flower means consciousness awake.

Every effort has to be made to break this sleep, to come out of it, to be more alert, to be more attentive. to be more watchful, more observant. From every comer the sleep has to be attacked. It is a long long sleep. It is not easy to enter into it, to penetrate into it, but it is not impossible either.

The task is difficult, the greatest challenge that a man can ever accept, and the greatest adventure too, because once the bud opens you will enter into a totally different kind of existence. Everything remains the same and yet everything totally changes.

So this is going to be your meditation: awareness.

Deva means divine, uli means a ruler, a king – a divine king. We are living as beggars because we have fallen asleep and we are in a dream, otherwise we are kings; the whole kingdom of god is ours.

Awake we are kings, asleep we are beggars; it is a dream, a nightmare.

When we are beggars, desire is all that we have. Desires and desires and desires – that is the begging bowl. And we cannot satisfy those desires: they go on increasing. You fulfil one and ten more arise; you are just reaching the verge of fulfilling one and ten more have come. Unless the dream is broken man remains a beggar, and once the dream is broken the whole thing seems to be so ridiculous.

Mm? – you must have seen sometimes when you had a nightmare how much you suffered in it.

When you were back and you knew that it was just a nightmare, it looked so ridiculous; how could you have believed in it? But it was so real when you were asleep.

So there are two kinds of realities: the reality that is created by sleep and the reality that is revealed by wakefulness. The whole effort of sannyas is to change sleep into wakefulness, to shock you, to shake you, into awareness. Then the kingdom is yours. because the kingdom is within you. It has not to be achieved. We are already rulers of it: it is inborn.

Anand means bliss, Inge is from a Norse mythology; Inge is the name of the god of creativity, fertility, peace, prosperity. So your full name will mean goddess of bliss, creativity, peace, prosperity. And all those things come together, they are not separate things – aspects of one phenomenon. One who is blissful is naturally peaceful. One who is peaceful and blissful is naturally creative, because the peace and the bliss are bound to overflow you; they cannot be contained. It is too much, it has to be shared; and sharing is what creativity is all about. One has to do something with the released energy. And when one is creative, one prospers; prosperity comes automatically.

It is a beautiful name. Think of these things: bliss, peace, creativity, prosperity.

And they are possible. Whatsoever we start working upon becomes possible. Man’s capacity is immense. Man is limited only by his beliefs. There are people who think they cannot be happy, hence they are not happy. They won’t allow themselves to be happy; their belief is there and they have invested in the belief for so long and they have believed in it for so long that it has become a settled phenomenon. Even if happiness comes they will close their doors. They know they can’t be happy. Happiness must have come for somebody else, it must have knocked on the wrong door; they cannot be happy.

Our beliefs become our limitations. Drop all beliefs. Man’s capacity is infinite. That is the meaning when we say that man is divine: he has infinite capacities, nothing is impossible. Bliss certainly is not impossible; and that seems to be the most impossible thing in the world. In fact it is so natural and spontaneous that when it happens one is simply surprised how simple it was; but we had not allowed it. Allow it to happen!

Sannyas means allowing god and existence to happen to you, withdrawing all barriers, dropping all armour. defence arrangements. We are not in an alien existence, the universe is not our enemy, so we need not continuously defend and shield ourselves. Put the shields and all defence aside and suddenly things start happening; and one thing brings another and so on, so forth. Life becomes a continuous surprise; each moment brings new joys, new experiences, new ecstasies. One just has to be open and vulnerable.

Deva means divine, frederick means peace – divine peace. There is a peace which can be cultivated by us, but it remains only a veneer, a facade, just a mask; it is not more than skin-deep or not even that deep. Anybody can scratch it and the animal will come out immediately. People call it character.

It is a kind of pseudo life, pseudo because deep-down you are one person and on the surface pretending to be somebody else. It creates a split too, you are never one whole, and there is constant conflict between the real and the false. The false is appreciated by the society, valued, respected, and the real is condemned, but the real has power and the false has no power. So one has to learn ways to always be two persons and one has to be constantly on-guard. That creates hypocrisy, and one cannot forgive oneself; one feels guilty.

There is another kind of peace that is not cultivated by you but that is only allowed to happen. That peace happens through meditation. It is not character, it is just an opening. You cannot practise it, you can only let it happen. In a state of receptivity it comes from the beyond like a ray, penetrates your heart, transforms you. Then you are one. Then your smile is true; it is rooted in the heart. Then you don’t need any masks; your original face is beautiful. Then you have grace because all conflict is gone, and when there is no inner conflict, no inner war, there is tremendous grace. Even others start feeling your coolness, your calmness, your centredness, your groundedness.

So never cultivate peace. All that is needed on our part is negative, not positive. We are not to cultivate peace positively; we have just to withdraw all the barriers between us and the whole. Once the barriers are withdrawn when the windows are open and the doors are open, the sun comes in, the wind comes in, the rain comes in. You are not to create the wind, you are not to create the rain, you are not to create the sun. If you create it it is going to remain false, arbitrary, artificial. And that’s what ugliness is: to be artificial. Then one lives like a zombie; one goes through all the movements of life but never really lives.

My sannyasins have to live, truly live, and whatsoever it costs has to be paid, but live truly.

Be authentic to your very core. On that point never compromise, because to compromise on that point is to sell your soul. Then all is lost.

[Hiroko is the name of a great ninth century master, and means wide and vast.]

Anand Hiroko. Anand means bliss, and you say that hiroko means wide and vast, so it will mean wide and vast bliss.

Misery is very small. Misery is a kind of shrinking of the soul. In misery one shrinks; when one is blissful one expands. In misery one is alone; in bliss one joins with others. When the ultimate bliss has happened one has become part of the whole. Then one is as wide and vast as the sky itself.

And this is good that the name belongs to a Zen master. Zen is wide and vast. It contains all that is beautiful in all the religions. It is the essential-most religion, the very essence of all the lotuses. To understand Zen is to understand the very soul of existence.

And forget about the ninth century; you have come to Hiroko again! Look into my eyes and you will see the same wideness and the same vastness. So for you, I am Hiroko!

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I’ve been very happy, but I’ve been very lonely as well, sometimes.]

Nothing to be worried about, nothing to be worried about. If happiness is there then loneliness slowly slowly becomes aloneness. Happiness is the real thing. It transforms the loneliness into aloneness; and aloneness is beautiful. If happiness is not there and one is sad, then loneliness becomes more and more lonely, and then it is dark and dismal.

You have really been happy; I have been watching you. So it is not a question to be worried about.

Happiness has its own alchemy: it changes the whole chemistry of your being slowly slowly. It makes one capable of enjoying one’s aloneness – which is really needed, because we are alone.

Whatsoever we do to hide the fact, sooner or later we are disillusioned: we are alone. Nothing can be done about it, and there is no need to do anything about it because in our aloneness is our freedom. Just go and come back!

[A sannyasin on his first visit, says he had a seizure three years ago and another last year; he lost control and blacked out for forty-five minutes, and afterwards he felt drained.]

Just wait, and after two months remind me. Go through a few groups; things will become clear.

I think that there is something deep down in your unconscious which wants to surface and your conscious does not allow it to surface. It represses it so hard... that can create the seizure. But I don’t think that there is much to be worried about; it will disappear. But after two months remind me again, so if needed, we will bring on a seizure and see how it is. Good!

CHAPTER 24

27 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, heinz means home – home of bliss; and that’s what you have to create in your being. Bliss is always ready to come in; it is just that we are not prepared to receive it, to welcome it, even to recognise it. We have forgotten all language that can recognise it. We immediately recognise misery. We are so accustomed to it, it is so familiar; we have lived in it for so many lives.

Bliss has become alien, unacquainted; it has to be re-introduced. Once you start learning the language of bliss, it is so close by that you are surprised at how long you have missed and for what; it was always within your grasp. It is not far away: we just have to make an opening for it. It goes on knocking on your door, but you are so full of the noise of your own mind that you cannot hear the still, small voice.

So learn the ways of being blissful. Don’t miss a single opportunity, and they are coming every moment. Miss as many opportunities as possible for being miserable, ignore misery, neglect misery.

Don’t take any note of it, don’t befriend it. And whenever you see a ray of bliss. jump into it, merge into it. Slowly slowly the art is learned.

Deva means god, stephane means the crowned one – crowned by god. Everybody is born crowned by god, everybody is born as a king or a queen. Nobody is born as a beggar, but everybody becomes a beggar. We forget all about our kingdom, the kingdom of the within, and the moment we forget the within, in the without we are beggars. Then we can become even emperors, Alexanders, still the begging remains, because on the outside man has to live in desires. And it is desiring that creates begging, it is desire that makes a person a beggar. One can become the richest person in the world and still one remains a beggar. One goes on asking for more and more and more, and there is no end to it.

The king is one whose crazy desire for more has disappeared, who is utterly contented with whatsoever is.

One Indian mystic in the beginning of this century travelled in America; his name was Ramateertha.

He used to call himself ’Emperor Ram’, and people would laugh because he had nothing! They would ask again and again: Why do you call yourself an emperor? He would say: Because I am utterly contented, because I don’t need anything, because there is no desire left, and it is desire that makes one a beggar. It is contentment that makes one crowned.

We come as kings, we live as beggars; it is our decision to be beggars. It can be dropped, and sannyas has to be a dropping of it. It is a re-entry into your inner world where you are a king. It is becoming reborn. it is dropping that constant, neurotic desire for more. It is becoming utterly contented with the ordinary, with the available. with that which is.

Prem means love, and ’christian’ is a very significant word. Ordinarily it means a christian but that is not the true meaning of it. Really it means one who has attained to Christ-consciousness. A Christian is a believer; he knows nothing. A man who has attained to Christ-consciousness knows; he believes nothing. The Christian is a follower; the man of Christ-consciousness has arrived, he is a light unto himself.

Christ-consciousness is the ultimate state of consciousness.

In the East we call it Buddha-

consciousness; it is the same. It has nothing to do with Jesus Christ as such. Buddha is a Christ and Krishna is a Christ and Lao Tzu is a Christ. Everybody is potentially a Christ and can actually become a Christ. Jesus is one of those who became one; who came to know himself, who became actualised, who was not contented to remain as a seed, who became a fruit. a flower, who bloomed, who came from the unmanifest state to the manifest state.

And the way to attain Christ-consciousness is the way of love. The more you love, the more you become Christlike; and when you it become love, you are a Christ.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I am really afraid to go back... I’m alone in the town... there are no sannyasins there.]

I will be with you, don’t be worried. None of my sannyasins is alone! That’s the whole point of being a sannyasin – that I will be with you. Even if you want to be alone, I will not leave you! Don’t be worried!

And soon a few sannyasins will start gathering around you. Just go there happily and people are going to gather around you, and a centre will arise soon. That’s how my centres arise: one sannyasin happens and then others start happening; it is a chain reaction!

CHAPTER 25

28 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, david means god’s, the lord’s – one who belongs to god, bliss that is god’s.

There is a bliss which is not ours, which cannot be ours; we cannot claim it as a possession. It comes on its own and goes on its own; it is a visitor.

The moment we try to possess it, we destroy it. To possess it is to lose it. One has to learn the way of non possessiveness for it to remain. One has to learn to be just a passive receptivity for it, just a host, taking every care but in no way dominating it, in no way manipulating it.

It is a hard task because when bliss comes one wants to grab it. One becomes so afraid that one may lose it; it may be gone, it may not come again. One wants to reduce it to a certainty; and in that very longing we destroy it, it is lost forever. If we do it again and again it may stop happening to us, because it is a happening. it is not a doing – and doing is just contrary to happening. Doing has to cease for the happening to be.

All that is really valuable – bliss love, truth, prayer – they all come from the beyond, they belong to god. They are gifts, and we should not claim that they belong to us; on the contrary we should allow ourselves to be possessed by them. Then they become an abiding factor. Then the guest slowly slowly merges into the host and becomes one.

Prem means love, helga means holy – holy love. Love can be very earthly, love can also be very holy. Love is a ladder between this and that, between the material and the spiritual, between this world and that world. One end of the ladder is rooted in the earth; the other end reaches beyond into the sky.

But millions never become aware of the holiness of love. They know its sensuality, its sexuality, they know its physicalness, but that’s all they know. They never become aware that something tremendously valuable is hidden behind it, that love contains prayer, that at the innermost core love contains god himself, that love is a seed. If given the right soil and the right climate and the right gardener, the seed can bring something that is not of the earth: a lotus that descends from the beyond. Something very unearthly is hidden in the earthly love.

People have been doing two things with love. There are people who think that love ends with physics, physiology, chemistry, hormones, etcetera. And there is the polar opposite of these people who think that because love is so physical one has to deny it, fight with it, condemn it as a sin, only then can one reach to god. Both are wrong, utterly wrong.

Love is a paradox. It is matter on the surface, it is soul at the centre. If you live only on the surface you will miss the soul; if you deny love totally then too you will miss the soul. This has been one of the greatest calamities: the worldly have missed and the so-called other-worldly – the pious, the religious, the monks – they have also missed, because nobody has yet been able to accept love in its totality.

I accept love in its totality – in all its sensuousness and all its spirituality; they are two aspects of the same coin. Love in a multi-dimensional way. Love the whole spectrum. Love all the possibilities, exhaust all the possibilitites of love. That’s what brings richness, that’s what brings treasures, inexhaustible treasures, immeasurable treasures.

[The new sannyasin asks: My energy is very slow. What can I do?]

Nothing to be done. Just allow it and accept it. One has to learn to love oneself as one is. The moment you start doing something with yourself you naturally divide yourself in two: your energy and you are separate. It is slow, and there is a condemnation inside; it should not be so. So you become split, and all splits are dangerous.

My first approach is to help you not to be split. So forget all about it; if it is slow, it is slow. Then god wants you to be slow. He needs a few slow people! And slow people are good people; they have their beauty and grace. All trees don’t grow in the same way: a few grow very slowly, a few grow very fast. That brings variety into existence. A few are very tall and a few are very small. Both are needed, otherwise life would be monotonous.

So the first thing: accept yourself in absolute trust and totality, as you are. In that very acceptance you will start finding surprises waiting for you; things will start changing. Acceptance triggers change, but that change is something different from the change that you can bring about. If you bring it about it will be forced, violent. If something changes out of acceptance, that means that it was needed, your body was waiting for the right moment.

So accept. If that changes your energy, good; if it does not change then it is perfectly right as it is.

One has to learn to love oneself, to live with oneself. And never compare. Comparison brings great misery, and the whole world lives in hell because of comparison. Comparison is the door to hell.

You are unique, you are yourself. You are the way you are, and you are meant to be the way you are.

So accept, and if something happens out of it, good; if nothing happens, then too it is good. It is always good!

Anand means bliss, svarupa means inner nature. Bliss is our inner nature. It has not to be created, it has not to be brought in; it is. It has only to be uncovered. We are it. To be miserable is really a miracle, because we are not it. It is something impossible that man makes possible.

Bliss is very simple. The trees are in bliss because they are not so clever as man to create misery, they are not so intelligent to devise ways for misery. The birds are in bliss because they are not so cunning as man. They don’t know how to become miserable, that’s why they are blissful.

Man is the only animal who has invented ways of creating misery. So all that is needed is to unlearn the ways that create misery. Once those ways are unlearned, suddenly bliss wells up. It does not come from the outside; it comes from your innermost core. And that’s what meditation is all about: unlearning the ways of misery so that hindrances, obstacles, can be removed, and the spring of bliss can start flowing again.

Anand Jantien... will mean bliss, the gift of god. God is always ready to give it; we go on rejecting.

He is very persistent, he goes on knocking at our door. but we are deaf. His hand comes searching for you each moment, day in, day out, year in, year out, life in, life out; his search for you is untiring.

But we go on avoiding.

Man is really a very strange animal: he searches for the negative, he is always ready to welcome misery, depression, despair, anguish, but he is never welcoming bliss. He mistrusts bliss, he doubts anything that comes from the beyond, but he is a great believer in all that is wrong. The reason is there; the reason is simple: the ego can exist only with the negative. The negative feeds the ego and the positive destroys it. If you are miserable you can be, but if you are blissful, you disappear.

Bliss remains but you are no more, and that is the fear.

A sannyasin has to learn the art of disappearing, of dissolving, then the gifts start pouring in. They have always been pouring in; it is just that we were closed, we were not receptive.

Life is sheer majesty. It is such a joy to be; just to breathe is enough celebration. But we have to do one thing, one thing is absolutely required: we have to dissolve the idea of separation, that ’I am’: ’I am not, god is.’ Then all the gifts are yours.

Deva means divine, alessandro means a helper of mankind. The full name will mean a divine helper of mankind. But the only way to help mankind is first to know thyself. Without knowing oneself no one can be of any help to anybody else.

Many people try to help others; they simply create more misery, more mischief. They have good intentions, but good intentions are not enough. A luminous being is needed. Unless your inner light is burning bright you cannot be of help to anybody, and whatsoever you do will he harmful. You may like to give happiness to others but you will succeed only in making them more miserable. That’s what is happening all over the world: the husband wants to make his wife happy but he makes her more miserable, and vice versa; the parents want the children to be happy but simply make them miserable, and vice versa. This goes on and on, and nobody looks at a simple fact.... Maybe because it is simple nobody looks at it, maybe it is so obvious that it is taken for granted.

The simple fact is: you can light an unlit candle only if you are already lit. You can give to others only that which you have. Intentions are irrelevant; your reality is the only relevance.

Know thyself, be thyself. In knowing and being thyself you will become so full of light and bliss that it will start radiating around you; it will become infectious. Then one really becomes a great help; and mankind needs many helpers.

Prem means love, domenico means belonging to the lord. Love comes from the beyond. It is a ray of heaven penetrating the darkness of the earth. That’s why it is always a happening, not a doing.

You cannot make love because it cannot be manufactured. If you try to make it, it will be false; at the most, a pretension, an acting, a deception, but it can’t be for real.

The real love only happens. Something from the beyond possesses you, overwhelms you. You are taken away by a flood, taken off your feet. Hence people are afraid of true love, because it almost looks like going mad. You cannot control it, you are afraid of it. Because the mind will not be able to discipline it, the mind wants to avoid it; the mind will not be a master in it any more.

When love comes, Love becomes the master and everything else starts serving it. Love is the lord.

It belongs to the lord and when it comes it comes like a lord. The very presence of it and your body.

your mind, your soul – all fall in tune, all fall in service to it.

So naturally the mind is afraid of such a great earthquake. The mind wants to remain in control, hence it creates plastic love, synthetic kinds, artificial, arbitrary. With them it is perfectly happy; with those dummies it remains the master.

Let this become a deep understanding in your heart – that we have to provoke, invoke. something from the beyond, and we have to be ready to surrender to it, because in that very surrender is victory.

When you are effaced, utterly effaced, you have come home.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says he finds it really difficult to surrender in the ashram.]

It is always difficult, it is not an easy thing. If it were easy the whole world would be in paradise.

People are in hell because they cannot surrender. It is difficult, it is arduous; it is one of the greatest things in life to be able to do. But if you are aware that it is difficult it is a good sign that you are trying. You are aware that it is difficult; you are not pretending, you are not deceiving yourself. If you remain alert, slowly slowly it will disappear.

The ego is like a rock, and surrendering is like water: if the water goes on falling on the rock sooner or later the rock will be gone. In the beginning is very hard, and even to conceive of the soft water being able to destroy it seems improbable; but it happens. Lao Tzu calls it the watercourse way –

the power of the feminine, the power of the soft. Surrender is a feminine phenomenon, the ego is a masculine phenomenon. But the ego is like a rock: on the surface very hard, but it cannot win against the waterfall.

So go on making all efforts that you can to surrender. It is going to be hard, but one day it happens.

and the day it happens is a day of great rejoicing. That is your real birth. From that moment you start living; before that you were only a living dead.

Anand means bliss, suvir means courageous, brave. Bliss needs you to be courageous, it needs guts. Any coward can be miserable. Cowardice needs no talents. Misery can be chosen very easily; it is available everywhere. And all people are miserable, so one feels at home when one is miserable.

When you become blissful you start feeling like a stranger. an outsider, and nobody likes a blissful person. People feel jealous, people feel revengeful. hence it needs great courage to decide that

’From now on I am going to be blissful, whatsoever it costs.’

Misery is a compromise with the society. Because everybody is miserable, it is a compromise to be like everybody else so that one can remain anonymous. The blissful person becomes so extraordinary that he cannot be anonymous. Either people think that he is a tool, otherwise how can he be so blissful? – or he is mad, otherwise how can he be so blissful? – or he is a pretender... and things like that.

One has to be ready to accept all these condemnations from the society, then only can one live a blissful Life. So be courageous if you want to be blissful....

CHAPTER 26

29 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, larry is from laurel, a symbol of victory – bliss is the symbol of victory. Unless bliss is achieved a man has lived in vain, his life has been nothillg but a failure. He may have all the riches of the world – that will not make any difference: if his heart is not overflowing with bliss nothing is going to make any difference. Life remains a tale told by an idiot, much ado about nothing.

One has to be very alert from the very beginning; each moment has to be devoted to the search for bliss. Only when it becomes your focus of whatever you do, of whatever you think, when everything starts moving towards the one centre, one target – that life has to attain to blissfulness – then only is it attained.

It is really the intensity of the search that breaks the ice, and things start happening. It is the intensity that creates the fire. In that fire all that is not needed is burned and all that is needed blooms.

Veet means going beyond, mariette literally means bitterness. It is a form of Mary, but the literal meaning is bitterness. Your full name will mean going beyond all bitterness. There are a thousand and one things which make one bitter, and there is only one thing that makes one sweet. That one thing is love, and everything else – anger, jealousy, greed – they all make one bitter. The only hope is love. Love is the only sweetener, and with love is the beginning, the beginning of god in your life.

Be alert and drop all that is bitter. And everybody knows the taste: when one is angry one knows it is bitter; it is so self-evident. When one is jealous, one knows; when one is full of revenge, one knows. One cannot miss; one can deceive others but one cannot deceive oneself.

So make it a criterion: whatever feels bitter has to be dropped. You are not to go on giving more energy to it; you are to drop your co operation, you are to withdraw. And the energy that is saved has to be poured into Love. It is the same energy that becomes anger, greed, jealousy; it can become love. It is the same energy that can grow thorns in your being. It can also grow flowers in your being; it all depends on you, what is going to happen. Man is free to grow in either of the directions

– bitterness, sweetness.

To be sweet is to be religious, and to be sweet is to be capable of receiving god. God can only be received when the heart is full of sweetness and fragrance. And this is the alchemy from bitter to sweet: a constant awareness so that old patterns and habits don’t go on repeating on their own, a constant alertness so that slowly slowly you can change your energies towards the right direction.

Anand means bliss. hans means a gracious gift of god. Bliss cannot be created out of our efforts; efforts are totally irrelevant. In that dimension doing does not work; in that dimension doing becomes undoing. There is a world where effort works – the world of the without; and there is a world where only grace works – the world of the within.

If in the world of the without you go on sitting and just waiting for something to happen, nothing is going to happen; you will have to do it. Just the contrary is the case in the inner: if you try to do you will miss; if you can simply wait, silently wait, totally in trust, expectant but with no effort, it happens.

Religion is the world of grace, effortless happenings. You don’t need to be a doer, there you don’t need to be very active; on the contrary, your passivity. receptivity, is required.

But remember one thing, receptivity or passivity is not a negative state. It is not a kind of dullness.

sleep, slumber. The passivity I am talking about is very alert, very brilliant. very intelligent, luminous, expectant. That’s how I use the word: with no expectations, but just expectant that something is going to happen, not that it should happen. There is no desire to force something to happen, there is no demand, but there is an urgent feeling that it is going to happen, that it is very close by. One is pregnant and alert, and watching, and waiting, not asleep.

Passivity can be of two kinds. It can be lethargy; then it is futile, it won’t work. If it is utterly alert, alive, then it creates the space in which gifts from god start falling, descending; and bliss is the ultimate gift.

Deva means divine, ted means blessed – blessed by the divine, blessed by god. Just to be is enough. If one knows how to be. then just to be alive is more than enough; just to breathe in and out is such a blessing if one knows. Otherwise nothing is a blessing. everything is a misery. And the way to know is to be utterly present to the present.

The mind wanders into the past, into the future. It never comes to the point where reality and we can meet, where reality and we are meeting; it never comes to that point. It is always somewhere else, either in memories or in dreams but never in that which is. And to be in that which is, is to be blessed; to live moment to moment is to live a life of tremendous significance, of immense meaning.

Out of that significance the heart starts singing songs never heard before, songs unheard.

If it doesn’t happen, if that significance is not available and the mind goes on wandering into the past and into the future, into the unreal... that’s what in India we call maya: the unreal. the illusory; the past and the future. The world is not illusory, the mind is illusory. The world is very real but we are not in it. If one has not become capable of living moment to moment, then life is a sentence to be served, not a song to be sung.

To get in tune with the present is to enter into the door of the divine. Then each experience is a blessing; then one is rich. One may not have anything and one is rich; one may be a beggar but one is an emperor. Then there will be no visible sign of any success and victory but one is victorious, one has arrived. And when that feeling settles in you, that you have arrived, there is great joy, great serenity, great stillness. That’s what meditation is all about.

Prem means love, isabel comes from a Hebrew root ’el’; el means god. Your full name will mean goddess of love.

It is only love that transforms a human being into a god or a goddess. Love is the alchemy of transforming the lower into the higher. the base metal into gold. Love is the secret key that opens the innermost treasures of our being. that makes us aware of who we are.

Ordinarily we are absolutely unaware of who we are. We have been told ’You are a Christian, you are a Hindu; a man, a woman, this and that’, but these things have been told by others. We have collected these opinions, and out of that collection we have created a kind of identity, which is false because that is not our experience of our own being; it is borrowed. And what can others say?

They don’t know themselves. These are just opinions, paper clippings that you can collect, and you can make an identity. That identity is the ego. It is false, it is put together. It is not our own inner experience, it is not our own encounter with ourselves.

It is only through love that one becomes aware of who one is. In the eyes of love one starts seeing one’s real reflection. That’s why love beautifies everybody. Love changes ordinary things into the extraordinary. Wherever love touches anything it starts breathing; and the ultimate gift of love is to make you aware of your inner godliness. The day it happens, one has fulfilled the pilgrimage of life, one has learned the lesson.

Life is a school to know who you are, and all identities that are gathered from the outside have to be dropped. Only love can give you the true taste of your being, hence love is the greatest transforming force in the world.

Miracles are possible through it. It is magic!

Satyam means truth, evan means a gift of god – truth, the gift of god. Truth is not a logical conclusion; you cannot arrive at it by thinking. Thinking can give you at the most a hypothesis, a workable hypothesis, but never truth itself. Thinking cannot take you beyond inference, and inference is not truth. Truth to be true has to be an experience. Philosophy thinks; religion experiences. Philosophy is speculative; religion is existential. Philosophy uses logic to come closer and closer to truth; religion drops all logical processes. In fact it drops all thoughts; it becomes utterly quiet and silent, and in that silence the gift arrives. In fact to say that the gift arrives is not right: the gift is already there; when we are silent we know it.

Truth is not something that is going to happen to you in the future: truth has already happened. You are a form of truth. All that is needed is a silent space in which you can feel who you are. The mind is very noisy and it does not allow you that space.

So the whole work here consists of how to help you to unburden all the garbage that the mind is carrying, how to cleanse it and how to unlearn the ways of constant inner chattering, how to stop the inner talk. In those gaps when inner talk stops, truth simply surfaces, it wells up within you. And only that truth which wells up within you can be a liberating force.

Jesus says ’Truth liberates’, but not the truth borrowed from others. Jesus’ truth cannot liberate you, my truth cannot liberate you; only your own truth is your liberation. Be a light unto yourself; there is no other salvation.

Satyam means truth, andrew means I rave, manly, courageous. Truth needs great courage because one has to drop so many cherished dreams. One has to drop so many things that one has always carried, thinking that they were precious. One has to drop one’s whole identity for which one has lived up to now. One has to become discontinuous from the past. That needs the greatest courage in the world. Only very few people are able to do it, that’s why only very few people are able to attain to god, to truth, to liberation; but everybody is capable of it. One just needs to gather oneself together, one just needs to be a little madly in love with truth so that one can risk.

And it is a real risk. You will be leaving the shelter of the shore; the other shore is unknown. Your boat is small and the ocean is wide and the ocean is uncharted, no maps are available.... If the desire to know the unknown grips your heart so totally that it becomes a question of life and death, only then and only then can one go into the darkness, into the wilderness, into the unknown. But those who go, only they are the salt of the earth. The others are only cowards, clinging to the shore and the safety and the security. They cling and they go on clinging and they die; they never have any taste of life and its adventure.

Life is an adventure. Invite constant adventures, and whenever a call comes from the unknown, listen to it. Risk all and go into the unknown, because this is the only way to live at the maximum. To live dangerously is the only way to live, and at the highest peak of life one comes to have glimpses of god. People who live in a lukewarm way may believe in god but they don’t know that god exists.

Their belief is just a social formality; it is just a belief and nothing else. It works as a cover-up for their ignorance but it is not transforming.

CHAPTER 27

30 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, brita means strength. Love is strength, the strongest phenomenon in existence, yet it is the most delicate one too. It is very fragile, vulnerable, soft, gentle, yet it is the strongest force in the world. It conquers everything, it is undefeatable. It is a paradox, and all that is true is always a paradox; truth exists in paradox. On the one hand it looks so soft, like a lotus petal; on the other it is as strong as a sword. And it is both together: its strength is part of its fragility; its fragility is part of its strength.

Once this is understood life starts having a different duality. Then one can trust love, one can go with it, one knows that love is going to be victorious. Maybe small battles are lost, but the war is won. Once this understanding deepens in the heart, that love is strong, one need not be violent, one need not be rude, rough. One need not be aggressive, one need not be egoistic, one need not be always on guard. One can become available to existence because one knows that love is fragile and strong both. It is receptive, totally receptive, feminine, and yet there is no power which is higher than it.

When Jesus says ’God is love’ that’s what he means – that god is a feminine energy, god is more she than he.

Deva means divine; ’fernando’ is a beautiful word; it means journey, venture, adventure. A divine adventure – that will be the full meaning of your name.

Life is not something static and given. Life is a pilgrimage. Life is in the seeking and searching.

Those who think that just by being alive they have arrived will miss the whole point. Birth is only a beginning. and just a beginning. One can remain stuck there, millions are stuck there. They die exactly at the same spot where they were born; they don’t move at all. They are too concerned with safety and security. Safety and security is in being stuck at a certain point, because that place is familiar to you.

It is dangerous to go into the unknown, but life belongs only to those who are constantly taking the challenge of the unknown, who are constantly alert and on the go. Then life is not static, then it has a dynamic quality to it: it is an exploration. And in that very exploration one becomes religious, because one comes across so many surprises and so many mysteries that it is impossible to miss the presence of god.

Satyam means the ultimate truth, lars is a form of laurence, the laurel; it is a symbol of victory. The full name will mean the ultimate victory of truth. Truth finally wins. It may be defeated many times but it cannot be ultimately defeated.

Lies can win many times but ultimately they can’t be victorious. In fact the lie can win only to the extent that it can pretend to be true. It has no legs of its own; it moves on borrowed legs. It creates the appearance of being true. Then it can succeed a little bit, but that too is really the success of the appearance of truth. not of the lie itself.

Truth is so tremendously beautiful that even its appearance can bring victory; what to say about its substance? Even its shadow sometimes brings victory.

The lie always pretends to be true. As far as the pretension continues it can win. The moment it is exposed. the moment it is known that it is a lie, it collapses, and with it collapses all the investment, all the energy, all the time, that was devoted to it. People live in lies, their whole life is invested in lies, and when death comes they stand naked before death, exposed to the very core. They have not known a single moment of victory, of fulfilment, of ripening, of richness. of contentment; because they are all parts of being victorious.

Remember it – not to invest in any lie. They are very promising and they are cheap. Truth is difficult to attain, but once attained it is yours. Even death cannot take it away from you; it cannot be stolen.

you cannot be robbed of it.

Put your total energy into being true, authentic. Just be that which you are and risk everything for it.

And don’t put any energy into any lie, because that is a sheer wastage, it is stupid.

This is what sannyas is all about: changing the gestalt. In ordinary life we go on pretending. We go on creating more and more masks; we go on becoming more and more artificial, arbitrary.

Whatsoever is needed in the moment, we pretend to be that; we go on compromising. We never look far ahead; we are very short-sighted. We live just for this moment without having any vision of what life should mean to us. So We go on reacting. Our reactions are haphazard and the ultimate result is a mess. People end in a mess, that is the misery, and the reason is simple: they invest in lies.

A sannyasin is one who has decided not to invest in lies any more. The decision to live an authentic life is the fundamental of sannyas. It will be difficult because you will be living with people who are all inauthentic. If you try to be authentic you will be constantly in conflict; but that conflict is beautiful.

That conflict is not destructive, remember; it is creative. it is a challenge. In fact it creates fire in you.

It makes you more alive, it makes you more intense; and the more intense and the more alive you are, the more integrated you become.

Truth integrates, truth consolidates. and ultimately truth wins. If one wants to be victorious in life

– and who does not want it? – then one should befriend the truth and disconnect oneself from all kinds of lies. In the beginning it is difficult, but as you start moving with the truth it becomes more and more easy. Life becomes really simple finally because truth is simple; lies are complex. In the beginning only is it arduous but the end is very sweet.

Buddha used to say to his disciples: The lie is sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end; the truth is bitter in the beginning and sweet in the end.

So don’t go for the beginning; think of the end, think of the ultimate, the final result, the final outcome.

of your life. Once you start meditating on the ultimate outcome of your life, you will become truthful, authentic. And that’s a great revolution, the only revolution there is.

Prem means love, doug is a form of douglas; it means a dark stream or a dweller by the side of a dark stream.

Your full name will mean Love, the dark stream; or love, the dweller by the side of a dark stream.

When water is deep it becomes dark; when love is deep it also becomes dark. Darkness has a depth; that depth is missing in light. Light is shallow; darkness is deep. And all that is mysterious happens in the dark because it happens in the dimension of depth.

The seed has to go deep into the dark soil, then only can it disappear and a tree can be born. The child has to grow in the darkness of the womb of the mother. A poem is born in the deep, dark heart of the poet; so is the painting or music. All that is great is born out of darkness.

And love is the most mysterious experience of life. Those who are afraid of dark will be afraid of love too; those who are afraid of dark will be afraid of death too.

Love and death are almost synonymous because one who knows how to die can love, and one who knows how to love can die joyously.

Let your love become deeper and deeper, darker and darker, because that darkness has a light of its own. That darkness is not just darkness, it is not empty: it is luminous.

CHAPTER 28

31 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, jen means a white wave – a white wave of bliss. White is not a single colour: white is all colours together, all colours in a symphony. That’s what creates white – all colours in such deep harmony that they lose their individuality in something total and higher. White is multi-dimensional. And it is the colour of bliss.

Bliss is also multi-dimensional. Bliss has a physical dimension, it has a psychological dimension, it has a spiritual dimension, and so on, so forth. If man can be divided into seven centres, as he has been divided by Yoga. and very logically, scientifically, then bliss has seven layers. From the lowest sex centre to the highest sahastrar, the lotus centre, bliss can exist at any point. Bliss can manifest itself from any centre, and it can manifest from all the centres simultaneously too.

And that’s my effort here. All the old religions have chosen particular dimensions of bliss. denying other dimensions; they have not accepted the total spectrum of it. I accept the total spectrum from the lowest to the highest.

Man has to live in wholeness, and wholeness has the colour of white.

Anand means bliss, monju is the Japanese form of Manjushree. Manjushree was one of the greatest disciples of Buddha, the rarest – incomparable. There were many disciples of unique qualities, but Manjushree is like Everest’s peak.

Literally manju means soft, utterly soft; shree means glory – the glory of being soft, the glory of being feminine, the glory of being vulnerable like a rose flower; and bliss happens only when you are so open, so feminine, so vulnerable. When all defences have been dropped, when one is no more on guard, when all armour is destroyed and one is standing utterly naked before existence, unprotected, undefended, in that moment, in that moment of insecurity, the ego disappears; and the disappearance of the ego is the appearance of Buddhahood, of godhood.

[The new sannyasin says: I feel myself still rejecting you, resisting.]

That I can see, mm? – that is very apparent!

Just go on watching it. It will go, because it is stupid! By resisting me you will be the loser. I don’t lose anything by your resistance; you simply miss the opportunity. So go on watching: the moment you see the stupidity of it, it will disappear.

It is not a sin – it is simply foolish. So don’t try to drop it and don’t make something serious out of it; it is the natural stupidity of the human mind. Just be here, meditate, watch and wait. It will go.

Prem means love, joshua means god is salvation. Your full name will mean god of love is salvation.

Man cannot attain salvation of his own accord; his capacity is too limited. He does not have that much capacity to fly, his wings are small. But man can have salvation through god, through surrendering to god, then man is not small. Once man is together with god, man’s capacities are infinite. Alone man is very small; with god man is infinite, hence god is salvation.

One should seek salvation through surrender; not by effort but by prayer. Ride on the energy of god.

You need not make any effort; you can simply allow him to possess you, and that is enough.

The word ’joshua’ is of tremendous importance. That is the real name of Jesus; Jesus is a form of Joshua. Meditate over it. It means prayer, it means surrender. It means ’Alone I am nobody; with you I am all.’

Deva Satoshi. It will mean direct blessings from god. Only god can be the source of direct blessings.

Only from god can we get something without any conditions. He gives us life with no strings attached to it. A thousand and one are his gifts... with no motiVation behind them. He simply gives, he cannot resist giving. God is nothing but existence pouring its blessings on you. Become aware of it, feel it more and more, and feel thankful for all that has happened to you; that is happening and that will happen.

If gratitude for existence arises in the heart then religion has happened. Gratitude is the essential taste of religion, the innermost core of prayer; nothing else is needed. If gratitude is there, all is fulfilled.

Deva means divine, anne is part of hannah. It has many meanings: grace, mercy, prayer, but I would like you to rememher prayer – divine prayer. A prayer is human if it is formal, if you are doing it because you have been taught to, if you are doing it because you have been conditioned for it. A Christian prayer, a Hindu prayer, a Mohammedan prayer, these are human prayers. Prayer is divine when you are not doing it formally; when it is informal, an informal communication; communion with existence, not ready-made, not planned, not rehearsed.

Just looking at the stars something arises in you, from the deepest core of your being something surfaces. You would like to say ’Hello’ to the stars: that is divine prayer. Or you may not like to say anything; you may just be silent, in utter awe: that is divine prayer. When seeing a rose you would like to have a little talk. a little chitchat with a rose: that is divine prayer.

It has to be spontaneous, then it is divine. Anything spontaneous is divine and anything rehearsed, prepared, becomes artificial, arbitrary. It loses all beauty, it becomes mechanical.

Learn the way of divine prayer and then one need not go to the church or to the temple, because the whole existence is his temple; wherever you turn, he is. You open your eyes, he is; you close your eyes, he is. Awake, he is; asleep, he is, because nothing else exists other than god.

So one can talk to the river, to the mountains, to the trees, to the stars; any communion with existence is prayer. And if it is spontaneous, it has tremendous beauty and power. It uplifts, it takes you higher and higher; it makes you soar towards the sky. It defies gravitation.

[Keiji means the receiver of the blessings.]

Prem means love – the receiver of the blessing of love. Love is the greatest blessing that is possible.

Nothing can be more precious and nothing is higher. Love is the very peak of life. Beyond love there is nothing, hence to know love is to know god. And the gift is already given; we are carrying it in our hearts. All that is needed is not to seek and search for it but to open the heart. We have neglected the heart, we have ignored our own treasure.

Meditation is nothing but a remembrance – a remembrance of a treasure that is ours and is with us and has always been with us.

[A sannyasin says that while meditating he often feels fear to go deeper. He feels very stuck.]

Accept it. It will disappear. Don’t repress it, don’t try to avoid it. Let it be there, take note of it.

Nothing to be worried about – it is natural, it comes to every meditator. The deeper you go, the more intense it will become, and a moment comes of great depth of meditation when fear is so much that one thinks that one is almost dying. But that is the moment of transformation. If you can accept that too, then the fear will disappear forever, and with the disappearance of fear, death disappears; fear is nothing but the shadow of death.

So go on; you are on the right track.

[A sannyasin, arriving, says he has already done several groups and wants to just float now.]

A few groups will be good. You can wait if you are not feeling to right now, mm?

Float! Mm? But if you are wise then don’t tell me later on... that nothing is happening (a pause), because you will be floating according to your mind, and your mind will continue to remain the same.

Float for a few days. When you start thinking that this floating is not going to help, enquire.

Deva means divine, lothar means glory – divine glory. Man lives almost in darkness. not knowing that he is made of light. Man lives in ignorance, not knowing that he carries in him the seed of ultimate awareness. Man lives like a beggar, completely oblivious of the fact that he is an emperor.

Man is god’s glory, because man is god’s highest creation.

Flowers are beautiful and mountains are high and stars are full of light, but man is incomparable.

He has something of the flowers in him and something of the rivers and something of the mountains and something of the stars. He has all that is beautiful in existence in him. hidden. It has to become manifest, and the moment it becomes manifest there is a Christ or a Buddha. They are proofs of what we call be.

Never be contented until and unless you have attained to Christ-consciousness; less than that is worthless. Only that ultimate peak of experience, of awareness, of love, of compassion, of godliness, can really satisfy. Everything else sooner or later proves to be a toy, to be occupied with for a few days and then thrown away.

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