1/08/07

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding

Yourself

Talks given from 1/2/80 to 29/2/80

Darshan Diary

9 Chapters

Year published: None

Unpublished

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #1

Chapter title: None

1 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002015

ShortTitle: WITHME01

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

We have chosen the colour of the morning for sannyas to symbolize that each sannyasin is nothing but the birth of a new sun. This is only the beginning of a long long journey. If you allow, then much can happen, but it all depends on you, on how much you allow.

It is very difficult to allow because it needs trust, the same trust which is needed by a child to come out of the womb of the mother. The child has lived for nine months in the womb. It was absolutely comfortable, cosy and now suddenly he is being thrown out of his home. but he takes the risk. It appears to be death in the beginning. It is bound to appear as death because whatsoever the child has known as life is disappearing.

He is moving from the known into the unknown. He does not know anything about where he is going and what is going to happen to him. all is in the dark, but still he takes the courageous jump.

That's what is needed by a sannyasin, because it is a new birth and you are moving in an unknown territory. To leave the ego aside is to leave all your strategies of self-defence, security. It is to leave your mind, your knowledge, your experience. It is to leave the shore on which you have lived for so long and to get into a small boat. The ocean is vast and there is every kind of danger and the other shore is invisible.

There is more possibility that you will be drowned than reach the other shore.

1/08/07

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Query:-

But if one takes the risk then in that very moment the other shore is reached -- instantly, immediately.

There is no time gap, because in the very taking of that risk the ego is dropped. and with the ego the old disappears totally, leaving no trace behind.

So be ready for this unknown journey, this pilgrimage to the ultimate. and rise like a sun, unafraid, fearless, in absolute trust.

The moon represents two things which are very significant for a sannyasin. One is coolness. A sannyasin has to become more and more cool -- not cold, mind you, but cool. Coldness is death. To be hot is one extreme, to be cold is another extreme. Passion is hot, death is cold. Exactly between the two, in the middle, is a point which can be called cool if you compare it with the coldness of death. It can be compared with the heat of passion, then it can be called warmth -- but it is the same point. From one side it will look warm from the other side it will look cool. At that point, in the middle, the opposites meet. Coolness and warmth are both there -- warmth because one is alive and cool because one is not mad. That is one of the qualities of the moon.

And the second quality is that it has light but not its own. It simply reflects the sun, it is just a mirror.

A sannyasin has to reflect God. He has just to be a mirror. His light is not his own because he has no ego. He lives as a vehicle for God. He is totally surrendered to God. God's will is his only will, he has no other will.

So these two qualities have to be remembered: coolness and a mirrorlike quality. Surrender so that you can reflect that which is. If these two things are achieved life is fulfilled, one has come back home.

Life is divine. In fact life and God are synonymous. There is no God except life, and there is no life except God; they are two terms for the same mystery. But for centuries religious people have been against life. They were living with the idea that if you want to choose God you have to renounce life, you have to sacrifice life in order to be with God. That is utter nonsense, but because of that nonsense millions of people could not be religious because they could not renounce life. It is so unnatural to renounce it. It is your very being -- how can you renounce it? So only very few people, who were pathological, neurotic, became religious. The healthy person remained unreligious, he had to remain unreligious. The religious people created such barriers for the healthy that only the ill, the mentally perverted could get in. Health was something unspiritual.

My whole effort here is to destroy that whole nonsense and to help you to love life. Sannyas is not renunciation of life but a tremendous love affair with life. The deeper you live, the closer you come to God.

The more passionately you live, the more divine you are. The intensity of your life, your liveliness is the only way to reach God.

Nothing has to be renounced. Everything has to be lived with deep awareness, with totality, with understanding, because escape is not a way of growth; hence all the so-called saints who have escaped from life remain psychologically immature.

Maturity is in life, in all its bitterness and sweetness, in all its misery and joy, in its nights and days. One has to learn through these polarities to move alert, conscious, so that one can remain balanced between the two, exactly in the middle.

That's what sannyas is. It is not renunciation. It is rejoicing in life, of course with a different quality than ordinary people live it. Ordinary people live unconsciously -- a sannyasin tries to live consciously. That's the only difference, otherwise both live the same life.

Denis has two meanings from two different languages; both are beautiful.

The first is from Assyrian. In the assyrian language it means wise, a buddha, one who is awakened, one who knows. but even better than that is the Greek meaning; in Greek it means God of wine... one who is utterly drunk, drunk with the divine. Both meanings become two aspects of the same phenomenon: the moment you become wise and awakened you also become drunk, you also become a God of wine, so drunk that there is no way to come back. Once gone into it one is gone forever. One is so drunk with the divine that there is no possibility of becoming sober again. and then life is a dance, a song, a celebration.

It is a beautiful name because it joins two aspects of spirituality together.

That's my whole effort here: to make you wise and yet drunk, to make you drunk, yet wise. I don't want to separate these two things.

1/08/07

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Barbara literally means a stranger, an outsider. But symbolically it means coming with joy. On the surface the literal meaning and the symbolic meaning don't seem to be joined together, but deep down they are joined.

The world is in such misery that whenever somebody comes with joy he appears to be a stranger, an outsider. He does not belong to the world. He lives with people but the people are living in misery and he lives in joy. He looks exactly like the others but he is not like the others. A Jesus, a Buddha, a Zarathustra --

these are strangers, utter strangers. They speak a different language, they behave in a different way. They are a different kind of being: awakened, alert, blissful. Hence the symbolic meaning: coming with joy.

A sannyasin has to both a stranger in the world of misery and yet he has not to escape from it. Rather than escaping from the world of misery he brings joy to the world, he shares his joy.

Sannyas is initiation into that space where one starts belonging to God, where one no more thinks of oneself in egoistic terms, where one starts thinking in terms of the whole. When you start feeling yourself in harmony with the whole great joy arises in the heart. Harmony is joy and disharmony is misery. Whenever we are not in tune with the whole there is misery. Whenever we are attuned to the whole suddenly clouds disappear and it is all sunshine. Suddenly flowers start blooming in your heart, you are full of the fragrance of the unknown, of the beyond. But it happens only in those moments when you are in harmony.

And everybody knows those moments once in a while. Of course they happen accidentally. Just watching a sunset you may feel you are falling into a subtle harmony. Something inside you may become quiet, as the sun goes down your inner turmoil may settle for a moment. The tremendous beauty of the sunset may overwhelm you, may possess you so deeply and so totally that for a moment you forget that you are separate, the observer becomes the observed. And then you feel great joy and great beauty and great silence. This happens, but it happens only accidentally, once in a while.

To be a sannyasin means to learn the art of creating situations where it starts happening more and more and more, to learn the secret art of creating the right space for it so that one day it happens but never leaves you again. That is the day of enlightenment, one becomes a Buddha or a Christ. The day the harmony has become so engrained in you that now there is no more any possibility of separation, you cannot fall back.

You have gone beyond the point of no-return.

Sannyas is a birthday, and it is the birthday of Christ in you. But remember, Christ has nothing to do with Christianity. Christ is synonymous with Buddha. It simply means the ultimate state of consciousness.

The birth of Jesus is not the birth of Christ, they are two different phenomena. The birth of Jesus is one thing -- it is very ordinary, everybody is born like Jesus -- but the birth of Christ is something extraordinary.

The birth of Christ means that Jesus disappears, evaporates and allows God to take possession of his soul totally. The moment Jesus says 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,' Christ is born. The birth of Christ means the death of the ego. Here the ego dies and immediately, instantly, something is born in you which has been ready to be born for many many lives, but was hindered because of the ego.

Let sannyas be the death of the ego and the birth of Christ in you.

Real nobility arises through surrendering to God. Real nobility has nothing to do with birth, with heredity. It has nothing to do with blood. It has something to do with a deep surrender to the whole. That is true birth, you are reborn. As an ego you die. Ego is ignoble, egolessness is noble. The moment you die as an ego you are born as egolessness, and egolessness is tremendously beautiful. It has grace, it has something of the beyond in it. It reflects something divine, it becomes a mirror for God and in that very reflecting you attain to nobility.

Only a sannyasin can be noble, because only a sannyasin can be reborn. It is a spiritual birth. But before it can be a birth, it has to be a death. Birth is possible only through death. First crucifixion, then resurrection

-- that's the whole process of sannyas.

The law of inner victory is very strange. In the outer world if you want to be victorious you have to be violent, aggressive, you have to be ready to fight. In the inner world just the opposite is the case: if you want to be victorious you have to forget fighting, you have to drop the very idea of fight. You are not to be violent, you have to be loving, non-violent, compassionate. In a single word, if one is capable of surrendering then only does one become victorious in the inward journey. Victory comes through surrender, 1/08/07

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Query:-

through a deep let-go.

That's what sannyas is all about: a deep let-go, dropping all struggle, fight, aggression, ambition. And when you drop all these things suddenly you become aware that the ego has evaporated, because the ego needs all these things as supports, as nourishment.

The outer victory is nothing but an ego trip. The inner victory is the victory of egolessness.

Man appears to be a mortal -- he is not. Death is the most false phenomenon in existence, because nobody has ever died. Nobody can die in the very nature of things. Nothing ever dies, death is not possible at all. Life is eternal, beginningless, endless. But this can be known only through the grace of God. You cannot know it through your own efforts, your efforts will be small. You cannot know it by your own mind, your mind's reach is small. But if God is gracious it can happen.

So what is needed on your part is to be worthy of receiving God's grace. And that's what my whole teaching is, to be receptive, to be grateful, to be open, to be vulnerable, so that when God knocks on your door the doors are not closed, so that when he comes your eyes are not closed, so that when he comes in your heart he finds you waiting, expectant.

Man's efforts are small. They are good as far as the world is concerned, man can do many things in the world. But as far as the beyond is concerned, man's efforts are absolutely irrelevant.

We can only allow God to take possession of us, we can allow him to do whatsoever he wants to do. We can be in a let-go. That surrender is sannyas, that trust is sannyas, that infinite love is sannyas. One can surrender only and love only if there is infinite love.

I don't say to believe in God. I say experience. Any belief not rooted in your own experience is false. It is dangerous. It hinders your true experience; it prevents your search. It does not allow you to be open to the truth, because you are already carrying many conclusions.

So let this birth of sannyas in you be a discontinuation with the past. Unlearn all that you have learned up to now. Forget your past, disconnect yourself, don't look back. Look in the moment, in the present, and be in a totally relaxed state, available. That availability makes you worthy. God comes only to those who are available to him.

To be available is to be prayerful. To be open and receptive is to be really religious.

Praise is one of the most difficult things to do because it goes against the ego.

The ego wants to condemn, the ego is always negative, it always looks at the darker side of things. It counts the thorns in a rose bush, it ignores the roses -- and if you ignore them then they don't exist for you.

Praise is difficult because of this, the ego finds it almost impossible to praise. It can't look at the positive side of things.

Life has both, the negative and the positive. They can exist only in a togetherness, they are interdependent. Now, it is up to you what to choose. If you choose the negative you become irreligious.

Then your life is a condemnation, a condemnation of everything, and that creates misery. You are surrounded by a condemned existence. And nobody else is responsible for it, it is your own doing. You could have chosen the positive, you could have counted the roses, you could have ignored the thorns. Then naturally praise arises. If you can see the beauty, the joy of existence, the sheer poetry of existence, the music of it all, it is impossible not to praise. But the first barrier has to be dropped.

So my message for you is: if you choose to be with me you will have to risk finding yourself, you must risk finding yourself. And the only way to find oneself is to risk the ego. It is painful, it hurts. You have lived with the ego for so long, you have become almost one with it. But being a sannyasin means that you are choosing the path of egolessness. You will have to drop all that is implied in the ego: all kinds of jealousies, possessiveness, hatred, anger, all that is negative and dark, all that creates hell in you. The ego is the source of all hell. Once ego disappears you are in paradise again.

And by being a sannyasin you are choosing me. So remember it, if you choose to be with me you must risk finding yourself.

But only in the beginning does it look as if you are risking something, because the ego is a false entity.

The master asks only that the false should be surrendered so that the real can take possession of you. The moment you drop the false you become the real. The real is repressed by the false. The false is sitting on the chest of the real, almost killing it. The real is suffocated inside you, it needs to be released. The false has become the prison, the prison has to be broken, demolished. Howsoever painful the process is it is tremendously paying, ultimately.

1/08/07

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

A sannyasin should not look for the close, nearby result. He should have a longer vision, we should see things in the ultimate sense. Then life starts going through a radical transformation.

If you have a very short vision non-essential things seem to very essential. If you have longer vision, a deeper insight, then the case is just the opposite: the essential becomes important, the intrinsic becomes important. The non-essential and the accidental become almost so unimportant that they disappear, they wither away by themselves.

How long will you be here?

(The reply is audible only to Osho)

-- That's good, be here as long as possible... and risk as much as possible!

Curtis has two meanings. One is, fit for the court life.

The Sufis call the assembly of fellow travellers, a court. It is really a court. The courts of the kings are nothing compared to it, this is a court. The Sufi word for court is "darbar." And one needs to learn to be very gracious to be in the presence of a master. Where people are praising God, communing with God, one has to be very soft, vulnerable, feminine.

And the second meaning is one who is gracious. Both are connected. In the courts of the kings a formal grace is needed, mannerism, etiquette. But they are superficial. In the court of a master inner grace is needed, an inner silence, a prayerful heart. One has to become a temple. So sacred is the inner silence that it makes you a temple. One has to make a cave in one's heart for the master to dwell in.

Real grace is needed, authentic grace is needed. A sannyasin has to live the life of inner grace.

To be a disciple is something revolutionary, because it is getting out of the prison of your ego, it is surrender. It is a transformation because it is the ultimate in love.

You can surrender yourself only when there is total love. It is only through love that trust arises, and only when there is trust and the climate of trust, is surrender possible.

Sannyas is initiation into being a disciple. The word "disciple" means the capacity to learn. The egoist never learns; he cannot, he is closed. One learns only in egolessness. That's the whole secret of disciplehood.

Malcolm literally means a disciple of Saint Colomba, a sixteenth century saint. Malcolm was his closest disciple, but he never called himself Colomba's disciple, only a servant. He was happy just to serve the master, it was enough. He learned everything from the master just by being close to him, serving him, never asking a question, never needing any answer. He was absolutely blissful just to be allowed to be close, to serve.

Hence symbolically the name Malcolm has taken on a very significant meaning. Symbolically it means one who is capable of learning without being taught. That's exactly the definition of a real sannyasin, a real disciple: the capacity to learn without being taught.

If you are taught then you are a student. If you learn without being taught then you are a disciple. If somebody teaches you he is only a teacher, a professor. But if somebody's presence is a teaching then he is a master.

So become a Malcolm again. By entering into sannyas enter into that space where being close is enough.

Just to be in the presence is enough. If there is no argument inside you, no doubt, if there is love and trust, then just serving the master, just following the instructions, whatsoever he says, just being obedient is enough. One becomes awakened by this simple process.

One day the disciple disappears and at the very core of your being you find the master, the master of all masters.

Man appears very small -- he is not. That is only an appearance. He is as vast as the sky itself, he contains the sky in him. But we have become too attached to the illusion of being small. We have become identified with the body. The body is perfectly good as far as it goes, but we are not it. We are in it as much as we are out of it.

The sky is not confined to your courtyard; it is in your courtyard certainly, but it is outside the courtyard too. In reality the sky is not in the courtyard but the courtyard is in the sky. And so is the case with man.

The soul is not within you, you are within the soul The body is in God, not vice versa. It appears so because we are not very aware, alert. We have not looked minutely enough.

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Query:-

Meditation simply means to watch your identification with the body and mind very closely. And as you watch you become aware. What I am saying is simply a fact, it is not a theory. I don't believe in theories. I have all respect for the facts but no respect for any hypothesis.

So watch, and come to realise on your own, not because I say that it is so. Experience that you are not in the body but that the body is in you, the mind is in you, and you are the whole sky. And not only is this body within you, but the stars and the sun and the moon are all within you. To experience this is liberation because one is liberated from all boundaries, all confinements, all prisons, all limits.

To be limited is to be miserable. Misery means limitation. Whenever we feel the limit misery arises.

Bliss means feeling unlimited. No limits, that's the definition of bliss. And that is our true nature, so it is not difficult to attain it. All that is needed is a little awakening. We are asleep.

Sannyas means initiation into a certain path where awakening is possible, where methods and devices are used to wake you up, where other awakened people are trying to wake the sleeping ones. And remember, only one who is awakened can help you to wake up.

No sleeping person can wake another sleep person, that is impossible: he himself is asleep. Hence, unless you can find an awakened person there is no possibility of your being awakened. But there are always awakened people available. Just a little search, a little authentic thirst and you are bound to find one.

Now you are entering into a world, a totally different world. You are not acquainted with it. You are moving from the sleeping world to the world of awakening. That is initiation: your desire to wake up and the presence of somebody awakened who can fulfil your desire.

The whole process of sannyas is that of awakening. We are asleep, not in the ordinary sense but in a metaphysical sense. We don't know who we are, how can we be called awake? We don't know from where we are coming, how can we be called awake? We don't know where we are going, how can we be called awake? We don't know anything that is essential. We know much that is rubbish -- we know everything about the moon and the sun and the earth and we know history and geography -- but we know nothing about ourselves. We know nothing about the knower -- and that should be the primary concern of any real education.

Sannyas is the beginning of a real education. The fundamental is that you have to become aware of yourself, of who you are. And only you can do that.

I indicate the way, I can call you forth. You must have heard the story... Lazarus died but his sisters, Mary and Martha, waited for Jesus to come. They had great trust that he would come and he would call Lazarus forth from death, back to life. The whole village was laughing at their stupidity: how can you revive a man who is dead? But they waited.

Jesus came... Lazarus' dead body was kept in a cave. Jesus went close to the cave and from outside he shouted loudly "Lazarus, come out!" The story is beautiful. The whole village had gathered to see; they saw Lazarus coming out from the cave, almost dazed, as if he had been fast asleep for four days, as if he had been drunk. He was shaky, trembling, but he came out.

The most significant thing about the story is not that a dead man becomes alive. that is only a parable, not a fact. The significant thing is that Jesus calls forth "Lazarus, come out!" Lazarus has to come out, Jesus can only call forth. He can only shout, you have to listen.

My whole effort here is to call forth Lazaruses. Everybody is dead and asleep, and everybody is lying dead in a cave. The cave of your heart, that is where you are lying dead.

I can call you forth but you will have to come out, you will have to gather enough courage to come out of the darkness, out of centuries-old habits, out of a long long sleep.

And when you are awake, life is a dance, a song, a bliss, a benediction.

The ultimate goal of sannyas is to become a god of peace, to attain the kingdom of peace. Peace means transcending dualities.

Mind lives in dualities -- pain -pleasure, love-hate, success-failure, richness-poverty, birth-death, and so on, so forth. Mind lives in dualities. Mind exists only between two poles as a tension. Mind is a tension between two polarities.

When you see the point, that mind is a tension between two polarities, you stop choosing, because to choose one is to choose the other also; the other comes in the bargain, you cannot avoid it. Although everybody is trying to do that. Everybody wants to choose one out of the two polarities and avoid the other.

That is impossible. It is like my choosing you and avoiding your shadow. That cannot be done. If I invite 1/08/07

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you, your shadow is automatically invited, it is bound to come with you.

When you invite pleasure you invite pain, when you invite success you invite failure. Whatsoever you invite the opposite comes. In fact they cannot exist separately. It is impossible to separate them, no divorce is possible. They are really married, and married in a very old-fashioned way, when divorce was not in existence anywhere. They don't know how to divorce.

Seeing this one stops inviting. One becomes choicelessly aware, one stops choosing. Still things will come, but one simply watches them. One is neither clinging to them nor pushing them away. One says nothing, neither yes nor no. One is neither a friend nor a foe. You simply look unconcerned, as if it has nothing to do with you. That cool awareness brings peace. Slowly slowly it deepens, it becomes so deep that even the Pacific is not so deep.

In those depths, unfathomable depths, God is found. God is not available on the surface. God is such a treasure, it can't be available on the surface. It is hidden in the deepest core of your being -- and only peace can lead you there. And the miracle is: when the seeker comes to know God, he becomes God. The knower becomes the known, the observer becomes the observed, the seer becomes the seen. The separation disappears. Then you and God are one. It is in such moments that the seers of Upanishads declared "Aham Brahmasmi" -- I am God. Al Hillaj Mansoor declared "Ana'l Haq" -- I am truth. Jesus says "I and my father in heaven are one."

All the mystics of all the countries and of all the ages have been saying the same thing, that in your profoundest depth you are a god. On the surface you are just a beggar, on the circumference you are a beggar; at the centre you are a god. but to go to the centre means you will have to learn the art of being aware, choicelessly aware. That's what meditation is all about, that's the essential core of sannyas.

Living in freedom -- that's exactly the definition of sannyas.

Now remember to break all the chains, destroy all the walls that surround you. Come out of the prison of your mind, come under the open sky of the heart.

Mind knows only slavery. It can't taste freedom. It is a prisoner, it loves dark holes, the darker the better, the smaller the better. It feels more protected, more safe. To the mind the dark black hole seems to be cosy.

It is the heart that is capable of knowing freedom. To be really free one has to move from the mind to the heart, from thought to feeling. There is one still higher plane, higher than feeling -- and that is the plane of being.

Mind knows slavery -- one lives in slavery. The heart knows freedom -- one lives in freedom. But going beyond the heart, the ultimate is not being free but being freedom That is totally different dimension. But one cannot take the jump from the mind to the being directly. One has to go through the heart. The heart functions as a bridge.

Living in the heart you start learning the ABC of freedom, you start enjoying freedom, you open your wings. You go a little beyond the boundaries and you will come back again and you go a little further.

Slowly slowly you become accustomed to the beauty of freedom. Then the ultimate quantum leap can be taken. Then you simply become one with freedom. Then you are not free -- even that separation is no more there, then you are simply freedom. Buddha calls it nirvana, total freedom.

That is the goal of sannyas.

Sannyas is the beginning of freedom: freedom from politics, freedom from religion, freedom from all kind of bondages. It is entering into universality, it is dropping the local boundaries. A sannyasin is neither an Indian nor an American nor a Greek, he is simply human. He is neither white nor black because he is not the body, and he is not a christian or a Hindu because these ideologies exist only in the mind and sannyas means disidentification from the mind.

The moment you know "I am neither the body nor the mind," you have become free. And freedom brings peace, bliss and ultimately God.

Only the rebellious spirit comes to release its fragrance. The non-rebellious remains in bondage, and in bondage there is no fragrance. Bondage stinks, freedom has fragrance. Bondage is ugly, freedom has beauty. And only the rebellious spirit can be free.

All the social forces are against individual freedom. Society exists by destroying individuals So one who knows this strategy, this situation, has to find ways and means to escape from the prison that the society and the church and the state conspire to build for everyone.

1/08/07

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

There are loopholes and the function of the master is to show you the loopholes from which you can escape. There are a few doors which you have not seen, which are unguarded. There are a few guards who can be bribed, there are a few guards who are absolutely drunk, and if you escape they will not even be able to see you. There are means and methods to cross over the wall. There are people outside the prison -- those people are the masters, the Buddhas -- and one can contact them.

Being initiated into sannyas means that you are trying to communicate with someone who is outside the prison, because only somebody who is outside the prison can help you to come out. He may supply a rope and a ladder, he may show you the way he has escaped. But one has to learn the language of rebellion.

Revolution is social, rebellion is individual. Revolution is political, rebellion is spiritual. Revolution intends to change the social structures on the outside; it is extrovert. Rebellion changes your consciousness, it changes your subjectivity, your way of looking at things. It changes you in your very fundamentals, at your very roots. And when you are free, you start blooming -- the spring has come! And the fragrance that has always been there within you is released.

That is the contribution of an enlightened person to existence: the fragrance that he releases into the world.

Andreas means courageous.

This is the first disciple of Jesus, Andreas. He called Andreas his first disciple. And this is significant, because only a courageous person can follow a man like Jesus. Great courage is needed to follow an enlightened man. It is moving into danger, insecurity. It is moving beyond the boundaries created by the society, the church, the state. It is a transcendence of all limits.

Within limits one can function easily, without any danger, because one is familiar with it, one has been educated for it, conditioned for it, trained for it. When you move into the new you are again a child and you have to learn from ABC. Only very courageous people, who are ready to learn and who are always ready to learn, can be initiates.

Sannyas is initiation into the beyond... which is not visible, which is not tangible, which cannot be proved, which can only be felt by a loving heart. It cannot be argued about, no proofs can be proposed for it because it is not a question of mind at all. It is a question of going beyond mind. Mind creates limits -- and it is going beyond all the limits created by the mind.

Mind is part of the society. Mind is an agent of the society within you. It functions for the society. It is like an electrode which has been implanted in you.

One scientist, Delgado, has done many experiments with electrodes, very dangerous experiments.

Sooner or later they are going to be used on human beings. In fact society has been using these ideas for thousands of years in a different way -- not so crude, very subtle, but they have been used. Delgado brought it to a very clear-cut focus and now some decision has to be taken. It is far more dangerous than what Albert Einstein and Rutherford and others did in creating the atom bomb. What Delgado has done is far more dangerous, but we recognise dangers only when they have done their wrong.

Albert Einstein was very unhappy and repentant when he died. He had not thought that he would become the cause of such murder as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But once a certain truth is known it is bound to be exploited by the politicians: they immediately jump upon it. It becomes their possession.

Delgado has done an experiment... the mind has different centres for different things. You put an electrode in a particular centre and the mind immediately functions from that centre. For example if he touched your brain centre at a certain point you may start remembering your childhood immediately. The moment the electrode is taken out the memory stops. Put the electrodes on the same point again and the same memory starts up again from the beginning, as if it were just a gramophone record -- with only one difference, that it has an automatic mechanism to go back to the beginning. You take the electrode out, the memory immediately goes back to the beginning. Put the electrode on again; the memory doesn't start from where you stopped it, it starts again from ABC, from the very beginning.

Now these electrodes can be put in the mind without your knowing it. Each child in the hospital can be operated on -- a small operation -- and an electrode can be put there. That electrode can be manipulated from far away, through radio waves. Now the whole army could be ordered to do anything It would follow immediately; everybody would think that he was choosing to do it but it would be just the order given to the electrode through radio waves.

Delgado showed his experiment in a public exhibition. In Spain he fixed the electrode inside the head of a bull and then he showed a red flag to the bull. The bull rushed towards him, mad. Thousands of people 1/08/07

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had gathered to see the experiment, and he was standing there without any arms or anything, just a small mechanism in his hand, nobody could even see it, there were just two or three buttons on it. Just as the bull was reaching him, he was just one foot away, Delgado pushed the button and the bull stopped there, almost frozen. Now this is something tremendously significant for the future of humanity. In Soviet Russia, in China, in communist countries they may have already started fixing electrodes inside small children's heads.

You will grow with those electrodes, you will never know that you are carrying them, and from the Kremlin they can be manipulated by remote control.

But this has been done for centuries. society calls it conscience. It is a long process that the society has been involved in, because it was not aware that short-cuts could be found through the brain centres.

Children have to be conditioned for years, then they become Jews and Hindus and Mohammedans and Communists.

The mind is nothing but an agent of the society inside you. One has to go beyond the mind, then only does one become oneself and is no more part of the crowd, one goes beyond the mob psychology. The only possibility is of getting out of the mind, moving deeper into s state of no-mind, into meditation.

Yes, great courage is needed. And is significant that Jesus called Andreas to be his first disciple. That means that courage is being called. So prove yourself true to the name!

Allen is a beautiful name. It has three meanings. The most fundamental meaning is the harmonious one.

That's the whole definition of god, existence, love, meditation. All that is valuable has harmony in it as its very core. Without harmony there is no god. The harmony in existence proves that something keeps it together, something invisible. Without harmony there is no love. But it is an invisible thread, nobody can see it.

Everybody can feel it. Love makes one aware of the fact that all that is seen may not be all, there may be more than you can see. Reality is not finished with seeing. There is a different plane of feeling too which is far deeper, far more basic.

Without harmony there is no joy; hence the other two meanings. One is cheerful; that is a by-product of the harmonious being. when you are in harmony cheerfulness radiates from you naturally, spontaneously. It becomes your vibe.

And the second meaning is handsome, beautiful. A harmonious person is bond to be cheerful and bound to be beautiful. That is inevitable, because there is nothing more beautiful than cheerfulness, there is nothing more graceful than harmony.

Sannyas is nothing but an effort to bring harmony to your being. The society has divided it into many parts, it has cut you into fragments. But cutting you into fragments it destroys your integrity, it makes you impotent so that it can rule over you. That is the basic political strategy. It has been followed by society for centuries: cut every individual into segments. When he is not whole he cannot stand on his own, he cannot be rebellious, he cannot have any individuality. He is reduced to a slave. He becomes dependent, always fearful. He forgets all about freedom, he forgets all about truth, he forgets all about himself. His whole life becomes just a part of the blind crowd. the politicians and the priests can easily exploit you when you are in fragments.

Integrate a person and he becomes a free individual, nobody can exploit him. Neither nation nor race, nor church -- nobody can dominate him. He starts living from his own inner centre, his life starts functioning in freedom. That's what sannyas is, it is synonymous with freedom.

Sannyas needs courage. Courage is the most fundamental quality for religious enquiry. It is easy to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. You need not be courageous, in fact you only need to be a coward.

But to be religious you will need courage, great courage -- courage to destroy all the prisons that we have become accustomed to living in, courage to drop all the beliefs, because every belief is a bondage.

If you don't know yet you believe, you are deceiving yourself. Belief is irrelevant from both sides: if you don't know, belief is irrelevant; if you know it is irrelevant. If you don't know, how can you believe? And if you know, there is no need to believe, you know it already. Belief is a very cunning device, but because the whole of humanity suffers from great cowardice, priests have been successful in exploiting.

My effort here is to make you aware that your intrinsic nature is courage. Express it, live it, risk everything for it, and you will not be a loser. Even if life has to be lost, be ready to lose it -- you will gain God. That's the only way to gain God. One has to lose everything. God demands total commitment.

Unless you disappear like a river in the ocean you will not become the ocean.

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Courage means only one thing basically. It means trusting the unknown against the known, trusting no-mind against the mind. The mind is known. Ald that is known becomes your mind and all that remains unknown is your heart. The heart never becomes a known phenomenon. It remains mysterious, it remains vague. You cannot define it, it remains definable.

The mind is definable. The mind consists of the past and the memories of the past. It is like dust gathering on a mirror. If you want to use the mirror you have to remove the dust. But the dust seems to be very valuable, it seems golden, because it is your experience, your knowledge, all that you have learned.

Courage means going beyond that which you know. Courage means to be a child again and again, to be innocent again and again, to cross the boundary of knowledge -- which is a safe place to be because you know it, you are familiar with it. Always dying to the past, every moment dying to the past and being born into the new, into the present -- that is courage.

Buddha says; When a man becomes a sannyasin, that is a lion's roar. He means exactly what I am saying, It is a quantum leap, a jump from the familiar into the unfamiliar. Get ready for it!

Sannyas is only a device to push you beyond the boundaries, beyond that which you have always believed to be safe: It is pushing you into the insecure, because life is insecurity. Death is secure, safe; life by its very nature, is intrinsically insecure.

So only those who are courageous enough can know life. Others only vegetate, they don't live.

Courage can be of two types. The first type is the most prevalent one. The first type is cultivated. You repress your fear and you go on repressing your fear, so much so that it disappears from your consciousness and becomes part of your unconscious. You are no more aware of it and you start thinking that there is no fear in you.

In ordinary situations it will work, but in any extraordinary situation in which real courage is needed you will have a breakdown. The fear will surface again. It was only on the surface that you were courageous. It had not become your soul.

The second type, the second category of courage is spontaneous, natural, uncultivated. It does not come by repressing fear. It comes by understanding fear, by seeing deeply into your fear. And the moment you start looking into fear, the fear starts evaporating because suddenly you become aware that you are not it. It is just an idea in the mind and you are the witness of it. One thing becomes absolutely certain, that you are beyond it, that it does not constitute you or your being. In that very moment courage springs up, wells up.

And that is a totally different thing. In no situation will it leave you. Even death cannot destroy it.

I teach the second type of courage. The first type is needed by all kinds of soldiers all around the world.

The second type is needed by the sannyasin. The sannyasin has to live an uncultivated life, natural, spontaneous, alert, aware, but absolutely non-repressive. Neither fear has to be repressed nor greed, nor sex

-- nothing has to be repressed. Everything has to be understood. And the miracle is that through understanding comes transcendence, through understanding comes transformation.

Sannyas is a death and a birth: the death of the old, of the past, of all that you have been up to now, and the beginning of something absolutely new. Sannyas means that you are becoming discontinuous from your own past, you are dropping the old identity, you are entering into an uncharted territory with no map.

The master can only give you hints. Maps are not possible because the territory is constantly changing.

By the time a map is made it is already out of date; hence all the scriptures are out of date. No map can ever be in tune with reality, because to make a map of the unknown takes time. In the first place it is very difficult to bring the unknown into the language of the known.

It is as if you reach an island where people have never seen any flowers and you want to convey to them the beauty of roses, marigolds, lotuses. How are you going to convey it? Whatsoever you do will not be enough, they will not understand. You will have to find a few metaphors. For example, on the sea beach of the island there may be coloured stones. You can show those coloured stones and you can say "The flowers have such colours," but you will be misunderstood because those people will think that flowers are like stones.

It is next to impossible to convey accurately. That is the first difficulty, how to make a map of the unknown.

The second difficulty is that if you try and you succeed somehow in making something approximate, by 1/08/07

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the time it is ready the territory has changed, it will not fit it, and the people who follow that map will never reach. But they will worship the map. That's what people are doing, worshipping the Bible, the Vedas, the Gita, the Koran. These are all old maps. They are beautiful efforts, the people who made those maps did it out of great compassion and love, but humanity only worships them.

And remember, the map is not the territory. You can hang the map of India on your wall -- it is not India. On the map everything is shown, the Himalayas, the Ganges... but seeing the Himalayas on the map is one thing, you are not seeing the Himalayas at all. To go to the Himalayas and to see the Himalayas is totally different.

The master can only give you hints, not even guidelines, just hints, subtle indications, fingers pointing to the moon. But the moon is rushing, changing every moment, so only a master who is still alive in the body can be of any help, because he can go on changing his finger as the moon changes. Once the master is dead you make a statue of him; now the finger is still pointing somewhere but it is a stone finger. One thing is certain, it is not pointing towards the moon at all.

Once Jesus is gone Christianity is of no use. While he is alive it its of tremendous value. Once Buddha is gone Buddhism is futile. But people are so stupid. For centuries they go on talking about Buddhism and Christianity arguing for and against.

Sannyas means to be with a living master. It needs guts because it is going to change you. It is not child's play. It is risky, it is not a game. But I can trust you -- I always trust Germans. (laughter) I love Germans! they have guts. They can do some things which others hesitate to do.

Sannyas is the process of always remaining new, never gathering the old, never accumulating, never accumulating the past. We go on accumulating memories. The more memories we have, the older we are.

Consciousness becomes burdened with memories. Then we go on dragging. We lose the lightness of childhood, the innocence of childhood, the beauty of childhood.

The child is beautiful for the simple reason that he has no past, no burden; hence he is so light, he is not heavy. And because he has no past he has no knowledge -- past becomes knowledge -- hence he is always full of wonder. Knowledge prevents wondering. It makes you feel that you already know -- what is there to wonder about? The child never feels that he knows; hence he is always questioning, enquiring.

To be a sannyasin means to be child again but on a higher plane, in a different way, not physically, but psychologically. and the way to be a child again psychologically is to get out of the past, to disconnect from the past. Each moment die to the past so that you can be born anew.

Be new. Don't gather any dust on the mirror of your consciousness and you will be able to see that which is. God is another name for that which is. God is available to those who are mirrorlike, clean, without any dust. And we have so much that the mirrors have been completely lost. We don't remember where we have put them. There is dust and dust, layer upon layer.

Meditation is discovering your lost mirror. It is digging deep into the mud that you have accumulated around yourself in the hope that it is gold. It is nothing, it is simply mud. All memories are worthless. And when I say that I don't mean to forget your phone number (laughter)... or to forget who your husband is and who your child is and who is who. I don't mean that. I don't mean the ordinary, factual memories, I mean the psychological garbage.

Somebody insulted you twenty years before and the memory is still there; when you see the person it is revived again. I mean that kind of memory. You cannot see the person: that memory comes up and covers your mirror, you become enraged. He may have changed, everything is changing; he may no longer be an enemy to you. But because twenty years back he insulted..and nobody knows whether he insulted you or not, that may have been just your idea. You may have felt hurt, he may not have meant it at all. He may not even remember, he not even be aware that he has done any wrong to you. But you go on carrying the wound. Whenever you see the person the wound starts hurting and again there is a cloud around you and you cannot see the person as he is. You see him as he was twenty years before. He may not have been like that but a least in your memory you carry that picture.

Psychological memory has to be dropped. Factual memory is okay, it is not a problem, it does not create any dust. If one can drop the psychological memory and can be new every moment, every day, then life becomes a joy. It becomes an incredible experience. Each moment brings new surprises. Each moment flowers go on showering on you from the beyond.

Sannyas is a sunrise; hence the orange colour. It is the colour of the sky in the East just before the sun 1/08/07

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rises. It is the colour of the dawn, the night is over and the new day beings. A new chapter opens.

Sannyasin is not a continuity with your past, it is discontinuous. Put a full stop on your past and start from ABC, fresh. Be a child again. Unlearn all the tricks that you have learned before. They are nothing but tricks, tricks to avoid the truth, tricks to escape from reality, tricks to deceive others and to deceive oneself.

Unlearn all that.

From this moment die to the past and be reborn. A new life begins, and it has to begin from the very beginning. Don't carry the past as a load hanging around your neck like a rock; drop it. And don't try to drop it piece by piece; that is unnecessary postponement. Drop the whole lot in a single blow. That is courage.

There are people who drop it but chunk by chunk. They take so long a time that the whole thing becomes tedious, wearisome, boring. They miss the joy of becoming free in a single moment.

Initiation simply means that you are ready to cut off from the past in one blow. don't look back. And the moment you are not more concerned with the past, the future disappears of its own accord because the future is nothing but a projection of the past. It is nothing but the desire to live the past again and again... of course in a little modified way, a little richer, a little better. it is dropping all that was miserable in the past and choosing all that was pleasurable. That's what future is. When the past is dropped the future disappears, and only present is left.

To be present in the present creates meditative energy. To be present to the present is the very essence of meditation and the very foundation of sannyas.

The past is the only problem. We are confined by our past. it hangs around us, around our neck like a rock. It keeps us tethered to that which is no more. It keeps us confined to the dead, it does not allow us to move into life.

Life is always present. It is never past, it is never future either, it is always herenow. And we are living in the past, which is no more, or sometimes in the future, which is not yet. Both are non-existential. That's why we don't taste the joy of being alive. We go on chewing stones. We cannot get any juice out of them.

The past is like a stone, something utterly dead, it cannot nourish you. And so is the future. It is not yet born, it is just in your imagination and you cannot live on imaginary food. Only the present gives nourishment to the soul, it makes you more and more alive.

So the whole process of sannyas is dropping the past, dropping the future, and getting more and more attuned to the present moment.

Sannyas is a marriage: marriage to the divine, marriage to the whole, the part deciding to disappear in the whole. It is a love affair. And it asks for much, because it asks for your totality. Less than that won't do.

You cannot be partially related to god, remember. Either you are totally unrelated or you are totally related; there is no in-between. God does not believe in half-hearted measures.

Sannyas has to become a total commitment, a total involvement -- only then can life go through a radical change. Small efforts can at the most renovate the old house, patch up things here and there. But the old, the rotten remains the same, it can't become new.

Sannyas means demolishing the whole structure, clearing the ground completely so that a new temple can be built. Sannyas is very destructive in the beginning and very creative in the end. The destructive part is very essential. It has to destroy your ego, it has to destroy your mind, it has to destroy your ideologies, belief systems -- Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, communism. It has to destroy all that you have been up to now. It has to shatter the whole identity, it has to create an identity crisis. Only then can you move into the new -- when you are completely free from the old.

To be free from the old is the beginning of the new. And then one can create. One can really be creative and a multi-dimensional creativity can explode. Then life is a joy, then life is a splendor. Then life is a celebration.

Wisdom is not information, it is a light. It is not knowledge, it is knowing. It is the capacity to see clearly, it is clarity. It is like a mirror, absolutely clean, without any dust, so that it can reflect that which is.

Knowledge accumulates theories, philosophies, ideologies -- and all those things are nothing but layers of dust on the mirror. To be wise one needs to clean the mirror completely.

Everyone is born with a small flame of wisdom inside, but that flame is surrounded by so much smoke of knowledge, information, memory, experience, that we don't feel it, we don't see it. All this smoke has to be dispersed.

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That's exactly the process of sannyas: making you utterly nude, making your heart absolutely exposed to the wind, to the rain, to the sun. And then you start reflecting that which is.

God is another name for that which is -- or truth, or enlightenment, they all mean the same thing.

Life is a god-given opportunity. We have not earned it. He gives it not because we are worthy but because he has too much and he has to give it. It is like a cloud full of rainwater, so full that it has to rain, it has to shower somewhere; it may even be on the rocks, but it has to shower. It is like a flower that has to release its fragrance. god means abundance. He is so much that he has to share his being in infinite ways.

Always remember that you are a gift of god. Respect it use the opportunity. don't waste it.

Millions of people go on wasting such precious time -- each moment can become tremendous joy. They go on wasting it in unnecessary worries, anxieties, miseries.

Becoming a sannyasin means that now you will remain alert that no time, no energy is wasted in the non-essential, that you are going to make something out of this god-given opportunity, that you are going to grow, that you are going to mature, that you are going to realise who you are.

Sannyas is a process of self-actualisation.

The seeker of truth is religious. The seeker of good is moral. And the seeker of beauty is the poet, the musician, the artist. But my sannyasin has to be a synthesis; he has to be all three together. If you are one then something is missing. Then you are one-dimensional; then you will not have depth, you will be flat.

That's why religious people are so flat. They don't have depth, they are one-dimensional people. And moral people are also very flat. To have depth one needs three dimensions.

My effort here is to create a new kind of man, a three-dimensional man. And when you are three-dimensional a miracle happens: the fourth arises out of the synthesis of the three. And the fourth is the centre of all the three. all three are three expressions of the fourth. The fourth is really god, nirvana, absolute truth. In the East we have simply called it the fourth -- turiya. We have not given it any name. To three we give names because it is possible to express them through words. The fourth we simply call the fourth.

Gurdjieff used to call his way the fourth way.... He could not develop it and could not systematise it.

The situation was not ripe and he was working against hazards. The West was absolutely unacquainted with the idea of the fourth. The West can understand three dimensions -- at least intellectually -- bu the fourth is absolutely beyond the Western mind.

Gurdjieff tried hard but could not manage it. First he was working in the West: no right space, no right soil, no right people available. Hence he was working in the right direction but could not complete the work.

He died without completing something tremendous that he had started.

I have particularly chosen not to go to the West but to call the West to the East. Now something strange has to be managed. I am avoiding Indians as much as possible. I am debarring them as much as possible because they think they already know -- that is their trouble. They know nothing, they have lost all track, but they know words -- and I don't want to waste my time with verbal people.

The West can understand because it has not egoism of knowing. But it has not background, so I have chosen to be in the East so that the East can function as a backdrop. I am working in the West, remaining in the East, calling forth the West here so that this combination becomes possible: the eastern background with the western openness. And my feeling is that I am not going to fail where Gurfjieff failed. Things have started happening. We will be able to create the fourth way, and that will become the source of a new humanity. Something immensely valuable is transpiring. All of you becoming sannyasins is not just an ordinary phenomenon. But only later on will people become aware, people always become aware only later on. Even you who are participating in this great work are not clearly alert and aware of what is happening.

But something is pulling you and you are becoming participants, not knowing that you are participating in something tremendously vast and tremendously significant for the whole future of humanity.

God is our victory, in god is our victory. Without god we are failures. We may have all the possessions and the wealth of the world, we may be great kings and queens and emperors, but still we are failures.

Without god nobody is ever a success. It can't happen in the nature of things. It is only with god that victory is possible.

When you become one with god, when you exist in harmony with god, your life has the taste of victory.

You may not have anything, you may not have much money -- that does not matter: you will sit like a king and you will walk like a king and you will live like a king. You will be a god, a goddess.

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The moment that one becomes harmonious with god one has become a god. Jesus says: I and my father in heaven are one. He is crucified because of this great statement. The small minds cannot tolerate it; it looks sacrilegious to claim "I am god." But what can Jesus do? What can poor Jesus do? The moment that you are in harmony with god you are god. If Jesus says anything else it will be lying.

Mansoor Al Hillaj declares "Ana'l Haq" -- I am the truth -- and he is killed for that. Truth has suffered so much for the simple reason that people are so mediocre, so mean that they can only understand lies. They cannot rise a little higher to see the truth.

Before one can understand truth one needs to go through a radical change, one needs a new vision. But this much is an absolute certainty, that with god we are victorious because we become gods. Without god we are failures, because without god we are very tiny, very small, struggling against such a huge universe.

Our failure is absolutely certain, it is inevitable.

Sannyas means deciding: "Now I will not try to remain separate, aloof, I will not try to be an island. I will dissolve, melt and merge into the ocean and become one with it."

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #2

Chapter title: The Individual and the Whole

2 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002025

ShortTitle: WITHME02

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

The universe is always leading you, guiding you towards the ultimate expression of your being, the ultimate flowering of your being.

If you can surrender to existence, if you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed by it, then the transformation happens so easily, without any bloodshed and without any damage. One changes so silently, so noiselessly, as if nothing has happened.

On the outside everything remains the same, and on the inside nothing is the same.

Sufis have one hundred names for God. Ninety-nine are utterable, one, the hundredth, is silent; it cannot be spoken. In India we have one thousand names for God. We have a whole scripture, VISHNU

SHASTRANAM, one thousand names of God, devoted only to the names. In that scripture nothing else is written, just the names. But each name has its beauty and each name denotes something about God, some aspect.

Hari is one of the most beautiful of all those one thousand names. My choice, if I have to choose one out of that one thousand, will be Hari because Hari means the thief. God steals the heart, hence he is called the thief, the greatest thief, the master thief. He does not steal small things from you, he steals your very heart, he steals your very being. He leaves nothing behind, he absorbs you totally. That's what actually happens, it is not only a name.

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When one moves closer to God, slowly slowly one disappears, not even a trace is left behind... because God means the whole, the vast existence. We are just dewdrops and the whole is like an infinite ocean.

When the dewdrop comes closer to the ocean it is bound to disappear. But that disappearance is not a loss, it is a gain, because certainly the dewdrop disappears as a dewdrop, but it becomes the ocean. It is a death and a resurrection.

One dies as an individual and then one is born as the universal. One dies as Jesus and is born as Christ.

We are suffering from separation, separation from God. And unless we become one with God again the suffering cannot disappear. Bliss is not possible in a state of separation. Bliss happens only when you merge and meet and disappear into the whole. It is good to long, to be thirsty for the reunion.

That's what sannyas is: a thirst for reunion with God, a tremendous longing to be one with the whole again.

God is always ready to come in, but we are not ready to welcome him. In fact it is not we who are searching for him, but he who is searching for us. But we are so non-receptive, so deaf, so unfeeling, so insensitive, that we can't see, we can't hear -- and he is surrounding us in every possible way. He comes to you in the sunrays, he comes in the songs of the birds, he comes in the colours of a rainbow, he comes in the air that you breathe. He comes in a thousand and one ways, but we cannot recognise him because we have not yet learned how to welcome the ultimate guest.

Sannyas teaches you only one thing: how to be a host, how to open your doors and pray for God to come in, how to empty your heart so that there is enough space for the guest to be inside you, how to become a womb so that God can be part of your being. And the moment you allow God in, you disappear. Then only God is. Then you speak, but in fact he speaks; then you create, but in fact he creates. You become only a vehicle. And the great ecstasy of being a vehicle of God is inexpressible. One knows it only by experiencing it.

Man has to be absolutely empty, only then is the space created for God to descend in him. And we are so full of rubbish, so full of junk; even if God wants to enter he will not find any place inside. There is no place inside. Our cups are full. Not even a single drop can be contained any more. We have to empty the cup completely.

This is the whole process of sannyas: emptying yourself of yourself, emptying yourself of all thoughts, desires, memories, hopes, expectations -- just a process of emptying.

The moment you are absolutely empty and you don't see anything inside you, suddenly all becomes light. Suddenly thousands of flowers open in your being. You become full of fragrance and music, a music that has not been heard before, a fragrance that is not of the earth. And you are liberated in that experience, liberated from life, liberated from death, liberated from time itself. You become part of the eternal flow of existence.

That is the ultimate goal of sannyas: to become part of the eternal flower, to become part of tao, of dhamma, of the universe, of God or whatsoever name one wants to choose. But one has to disappear totally for God to be.

God is our victory, in God is our victory. Without God we are failures. We may have all the possessions and the wealth of the world, we may be great kings and queens and emperors, but still we are failures.

Without God nobody is ever a success. It can't happen in the nature of things. It is only with God that victory is possible.

When you become one with God, when you exist in harmony with God, your life has the taste of victory. You may not have anything, you may not have much money -- that does not matter: you will sit like a king and you will walk like a king and you will live like a king. You will be a god, a goddess.

The moment that one becomes harmonious with God one has become a god. Jesus says: I and my father in heaven are one. He is crucified because of this great statement. The small minds cannot tolerate it; it looks sacrilegious to claim "I am God." But what can Jesus do? What can poor Jesus do? The moment that you are in harmony with God are you God. If Jesus says anything else he will be lying.

Mansoor Al Hillaj declares "Ana'l Haq" -- I am the truth -- and he is killed for that. Truth has suffered so much for the simple reason that people are so mediocre, so mean that they can only understand lies. They cannot rise a little higher to see the truth.

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Query:-

Before one can understand truth one needs to go through a radical change, one needs a new vision. But this much is absolute certainty, that with God we are victorious because we become gods. Without God we are failures, because without God we are very tiny, very small, struggling against such a huge universe. Our failure is absolutely certain, it is inevitable.

Sannyas means deciding: "Now I will get more and more in tune with the whole. I will not try to remain separate, aloof, I will not try to be an island. I will dissolve, melt and merge into the ocean and become one with it"

Existence is like an ocean and we are waves dancing in the sun, disappearing again and again and appearing again and again. There is no birth, no death -- we are eternal.

Only superficially does it appear that a wave is born and then dies, but it is only superficial, because it always remains the same. Sometimes it is manifest, sometimes unmanifest, sometimes it is rising towards the sun with a deep longing to touch the sky, to reach the stars, and the next moment, it is relaxing deep into the ocean, resting. Death is rest. And when rest is over the wave rises again. It is eternal recurrence, we go on coming again and again and again. There is no need to be afraid of death, because death is false. The most false thing in existence is death. And if death is false, naturally, birth is false too. We existed before birth and we will exist after death.

Once you start feeling this, not believing but experiencing this, all fear disappears. And the energy that is involved in fear is released and becomes love. It is the same energy that becomes fear. Once fear is no more there tremendous energy is released, and that energy becomes love. It starts radiating through you, reaching to other people. You start overflowing with love.

Sannyas is an effort to know oneself as a wave of the ocean that God is.

Tanmaya means one who is utterly dissolved, utterly lost. It is a space without ego. One is, but one has no idea of the I. It happens sometimes in listening to music: you are, but there is no sense of I, you are just an open space. That is tanmaya. That space is needed for a sannyasin, because only in that space can God be contacted. If you are then God is not, if you are not then God is.

So learn how to disappear, how to evaporate. Learn how not to be. That is the greatest art in life because the ego is so cunning. It always finds some way to come in from the back door. It can become humble, it can become pious, it can become saintly, it can become holy. It can play all kinds of games.

A sannyasin has to be constantly alert not to allow the ego to play any more games.

Be watchful. And the more you know the ways of the ego, the more you are free of it, because it cannot play. whatsoever strategy you have come to know upon you any longer. Slowly slowly all doors are closed.

One day, when the last strategy has collapsed, you are freed from yourself.

That is liberation. And that is the ultimate goal of all religious effort. Only in that liberated state can one know what truth is. They are not really two separate things but two aspects of the same coin. Jesus says: Truth liberates. We can also say: Liberation is truth.

God is always willing. He waits for us to be willing. He is ready to give but we are not ready to receive.

He is just standing at the door but we don't open the door. Even if he knocks on the door we don't listen. The blame is totally ours.

His grace knows no limits, but we are so miserly that not only in giving are we miserly, in receiving too we have become miserly. And God asks nothing in return; still we go on missing. It seems that to receive hurts our ego.

So the problem is not on God's side -- God is love, God is compassion, God is help. But the problem is on our side: how to open up, how to receive his gifts, how to be more grateful, thankful -- because in gratefulness one becomes more open, in thankfulness one becomes more receptive.

The whole process of sannyas is of becoming feminine so that you can be pregnant with God. He is ready to enter your spiritual womb. But we don't allow him, we go on reflecting him. And the irony is that on the one hand we go to the churches and to the mosques and the temples to pray, and on the other hand we reject every effort of God to help us. We are split. Our heart wants the help, our head rejects the help.

Unless we start rejecting our head we will never be able to receive the help, we will go on missing it.

My whole teaching here is: Reject the head, it is not worth anything. Sooner or later it is going to fall into dust and disappears, so why bother so much about it?

Listen to the heart, because the heart is eternal. Listen to love not to logic, because love is deathless and 1/08/07

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love is the door to God.

Man's power is ugly. It is violent. Only God's power is beautiful because it is love-power. Man's power means egolessness. Be egoless so that God can flow through you. Let God pass through you as the wind passes through the pine trees. Don't hinder God's ways. Give him your total acceptance. Just become a hollow bamboo so that he can change you into a flute, a bamboo flute, so that he can sing through you. And when God sings through you there is great power; but it is not yours, it is God's.

It is glorious, it has great splendour. It is tremendously beautiful. It will make you ecstatic. It will also make others ecstatic; whomsoever comes in contact with you will have a little taste of it, will feel it, will be overwhelmed by it. But you have to disappear for it.

Sannyas means committing a metaphysical suicide, allowing the ego to evaporate. Then all glory is God's and all power is God's.

One can fight for oneself or one can fight for God. To fight for oneself is foolish, to fight for God is wise, because to fight for oneself is bound to be a failure. One cannot win against the whole. One cannot win as a separate entity. Victory is with God -- it is not possible without him. Without him there is only defeat, failure, frustration. Life is with God because God is life. Without him there is only death. He is our breath, he breathes in our heart.

Once this is understood one becomes a vehicle for God. Then one can say with one's totality "Thy will be done." That's what I mean by becoming a divine warrior: fighting for God's victory.

First many things within you have to be conquered because they go against God: your anger, your greed, your jealousy. Once you have become full of light inside you have to help others to fight with their darkness. It is an eternal struggle between the forces of light and darkness.

By becoming a sannyasin your are being recruited for God.

Man can live in two ways: either as an ego or as an egolessness. To live as an ego is to live the ordinary, mundane life. To live as an egolessness is to live the sacred life, the holy life. On the outside everything remains the same, but at the deepest core of your being something radically changes.

If you think of yourself as separate from existence you are bound to live as an ego. Then the ego creates its problems. You are constantly afraid because the vast whole, the vast universe, is against you -- you are against it. You are in a kind of struggle, and there is no hope that you can win. How can a small particle win against the whole universe? The very idea is idiotic. But that is the idea that we are carrying; hence the fear that we may be defeated; hence the constant trembling, anxiety, anguish.

And we will be defeated again and again; nobody can win against the whole. So one's life becomes a long series of failures and ultimately there is death. Death is a by-product of the ego. If you think you are separate from existence, then only is there death. If you think you are one with existence, how can there be death? The egoless person knows nothing of death, he knows only eternal life.

Samarpito means: surrender the ego. If anything has to be surrendered it is the ego. If anything has to be renounced, it is not the world, it is the ego. Live in the world but live egolessly, and then you are a sannyasin. And you will be surprised that as the ego is dropped all anxieties, all fears disappear as if they never existed, just as dreams disappear in the morning when you wake up.

This is real awakening. Moving from ego to egolessness is the most radical change possible. There is no other revolution greater than that because it brings you to the ultimate peak of awareness, awakening. It makes you a Buddha, an awakened one.

Ramana Maharshi was dying, and somebody asked "Where will you go after death?" He opened his eyes and he said: "Where can I go? I have always been here and I will still be here." He laughed at the very question.

We can't go anywhere, we are part of the whole. There is nowhere to go. There is no death, no birth, and if there is no death, no birth, where can fear exist, where can anxiety arise? We have cut the very root of all misery.

Religion begins the moment you drop the ego. So this is going to be your work here: drop the ego, forget that you are. Then God is and only God is.

Buddha says: "This very body is the lotus paradise, this very body the Buddha." This ordinary body has 1/08/07

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the capacity to invite God into it. It can become a host, it can become a home for God -- it all depends on us.

If we prepare our mind and body, God is immediately ready to come in. And the moment God enters the body, the dust is transformed into gold. Then the body is no longer material, it itself becomes spiritual. Even matter is transformed.

Every man is an empty country without God.

Only with God do we become populated.

Only with God entering us do we start feeling contented, fulfilled for the first time.

All that is great always descends from above. It falls over you, it rains and showers over you. It is a waterfall. It does not grow from below, upwards; it showers from upwards, downwards.

In India we have the symbol of God as a tree upside-down: roots in the sky, and branches and flowers towards the earth. And that's beautiful, that's how it is. The roots of truth are in the ultimate -- that is above, symbolically -- but the fragrance can fall on us, the flowers can shower on us, we just have to be receptive.

All that is needed on our part is a deep receptivity, a total receptivity.

That's what sannyas is all about: learning to be surrendered, learning to be receptive, learning how to let the ego disappear so that you are just a pure space, empty, ready, welcoming, open, so that God can fall into your being like a fragrance, a waterfall of fragrance, a waterfall of joy, a waterfall of truth.

We are not strangers, outsiders. We are part of existence. This is our home. We are not here accidentally, we are here because we are needed. We are here because God wanted us to be here in the first place. It is his will. Hence nobody need feel alienated. That is one of the most fundamental problems that humanity is facing today. All over the world intelligent people are very worried, disturbed, anxious -- why are we here?

According to science it seems accidental. And if we are accidental then we are useless; then whether we are nor are not makes no difference. And if it makes no difference then our life loses all meaning; hence all over the world there is a climate of meaninglessness. It all started a hundred years ago with the declaration by Nietzsche that God is dead. He became the mouthpiece of the whole contemporary mind.

If God is dead then life is meaningless because God is the only possibility of there being any meaning, any significance. God simply means nothing but meaning. Life is meaningful -- that's the whole meaning of God.

A man was talking to an old rabbi and the man said: "Do you know what Friedrich Nietzsche says? He says 'God is dead'." The old rabbi looked at the man and said " Do you know what God says? God says

"Friedrich Nietzsche is dead!'"(laughter)

And the old rabbi is far truer. God is not dead, God is as alive as ever. But the idea that God is dead has made us feel very meaningless.

Sannyas means creating meaning in your life again, bringing God into your life again. The moment that God enters your life, life is a blessing, otherwise it is a curse and a heavy burden.

And unnecessarily too. If there is no God then suicide seems to be the most intelligent way to get out of this whole mess. If there is God then life has to be lived more deeply, more joyously, more prayerfully so that we can know the ultimate mystery of existence. Then death is not going to destroy us. We were before birth and we will be after death. But this is possible only if the whole of existence is full of meaning, otherwise it would not be possible.

To me God is not a person. It is the meaningfulness of existence. It is a presence rather than a person.

So there is no need to conceive of God, of how he looks, how tall he is, how old... There is no need for all these childish stories.

Godliness is eternal. All that is needed is that you create emptiness in yourself -- not that you seek God.

The moment you are empty something from the beyond penetrates you, fills your emptiness. You start overflowing with something absolutely new which you have never tasted, never known before. It is such a blessing, such a benediction. It is such an ecstasy that from that very moment you know that there is no birth, no death; you are also eternal. From that very moment you are part of a tremendous energy called godliness. Godliness is like an oceanic energy; we are just waves in it.

We are making every effort here to help you, through different devices, so that you can feel the presence of something which escapes ordinary intellect, which needs extraordinary intelligence to be grasped, which really needs less logic and more love, less head and more heart.

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superficial, that you are not accidental, that you are fulfilling a certain purpose in existence, that you are working for God in your own small way.

The moment we realise this great rejoicing arises in the heart. Then life is no more meaningless, it starts having great significance. We are messengers, messages, and we are doing something greater than ourselves.

And God's love is showering on us, otherwise we could not live a single moment. His love is our very breath. Without him there is no life.

Remember it more and more, remind yourself of it more and more, so that it becomes a constant undercurrent in your consciousness. You will start blooming, flowering, and the darkness will start disappearing. Just to know that God loves you kindles a light in you which cannot be extinguished by any external force.

God never becomes old. Although all the religions depict him as a very old man, that's utterly wrong.

People conceive of God as a very very ancient, old man with a long white beard touching the floor. That is not true. God is young, as young as one can be. He is the very essence of youth. He is as new as fresh dewdrops early in the morning, as new as a bud just opening; not even completely open, just opening, becoming a flower.

Man's mind becomes old, and because his mind has been creating God, God is depicted as old. Man's mind is accumulative. It is nothing but the whole past. It knows nothing of newness; hence mind knows nothing of God If one wants to know about God one has to drop the mind.

Sannyas means dropping the mind, entering into the world of no-mind, changing your gestalt from thought to no-thought, from words to wordless silence, from the past to the present. When you are utterly in the present you are in tune with God. Then you know, then you feel, then you understand, because then you are it. There is no separation, you are bridged with the whole.

Jan means God's gracious gift.

It is the most fundamental thing to understand, because without it there is no possibility of religion.

Deep down in the heart it has to be understood that life is a gift of tremendous value, that each moment is precious, that it has not to be wasted. It is a great opportunity to grow. One should not go on collecting coloured stones and seashells on the sea-beach. Something more important has to be done, something more significant.

One has to look inwards. One should not remain concerned just about outside things because that's how people waste their lives. One should start searching within -- "Who am I?" One should go deeper and deeper into one's consciousness to feel one's centre. The moment that you fell your centre all questions are answered, all puzzles disappear. There is no confusion any more. Everything is a clarity, a tremendous clarity. You can see through and through. And that is the moment when one understands how much the universe has given to us, and how ungrateful we have been to the universe.

Gratitude is the basic requirement for a religious life. It is out of gratitude that prayer arises, it is out of gratitude that love arises, it is out of gratitude that grace arises. But one can feel gratitude only if one feels the value, the immense value of life, the inestimable value of existence.

Go beyond knowledge if you want really to know, go beyond all information if you really want to see.

Information functions as dust in your eyes. It does not allow you to see that which is.

One has to unburden oneself of knowledge, information, scripture, systems of thought, ideologies: political, social and religious. No word is sacred, only silence is sacred. No thought is original, only silence is original. And when you move into silence, into a wordless world, you are moving into God, into bliss, into freedom, into the ultimate.

Stefano means voice -- divine voice.

It is always there, at the innermost core of our being, we just have to be a little more silent to hear it. It is a still, small voice. God is constantly trying to communicate with you. It is not only that man is seeking God, far more true is that God is seeking man.

In the Bible the story is that when Adam and Eve became aware that they had disobeyed, they became frightened: sooner or later they will be found. When God called them they were hiding behind some bushes.

God was calling the, "Adam, Eve, where are you?" And they went on hiding from one place to another place until they were found and thrown out of paradise.

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But my feeling is that the story still continues, it has not come to a full stop. God is still asking: Where are you...? And we are still hiding.

The best way would have been for Adam and Eve to have come the God, to have asked for his forgiveness. But rather than asking to be forgiven they were trying to hide. The moment you start hiding something you become false, you become inauthentic. The moment you open yourself up totally without hiding anything, the moment you are utterly naked before God you are forgiven, immediately forgiven, all is forgiven.

God is still calling us from every heart, but we have to prepare first -- how to listen? We have forgotten the art of listening. Our heads are so noisy -- so much turmoil, so much traffic, thoughts, desires, memories, imagination. It is always rush hour, day in, day out.

Sannyas means that now you will make every possible effort to make this noisy mind a little more quiet, a little more silent, so that you can hear your own heart and its message.

(To Spider): Who has given you such a spiritual name? (laughter)

-- My parents.

-- That's really something! (more laughter)

It is a beautiful name; particularly in Indian mythology it is very significant because the spider is the only being which creates its world out of itself. It creates its web out of itself and when it wants to move it swallows the web again and it will move, and again it can produce it.

In Indian mythology it is said God functions exactly like the spider. He creates the whole world out of himself, and when he feels tired, exhausted, he swallows it up, everything disappears. But then he start feeling lonely again and he creates it again.

In every mythology of the world there are stories about the creation of the world, but only in Indian mythology ares those stories balanced by the dissolution -- stories of how the world disappears. Otherwise they are half stories: God created the world, so it is finished once and forever. But in Indian mythology millions of times he has created the world and millions of times he has withdrawn it into himself.

The problem is -- it is the same problem as every human being comes across -- one cannot live alone, one cannot live with somebody either. If you live with somebody it is tiring; it creates clashes, conflicts, one wants to be finished with it. But when you are alone you start feeling lonely, bored. This whole human dilemma has been projected onto God.

Other mythologies project only half part. In that way Indian mythologies are more logical, they project the whole thing. The Indian god is very human, just a magnified form, a bigger human being, an infinite human being, but he is human. He creates the world, then he starts feeling lonely. And then he becomes tired of the relationship with the world and of all the people praying and asking him "Do this, do that," and of everybody complaining and nobody being satisfied. Then, enough is enough; he says "Withdraw. It will never commit the same crime again." But after few days he forgets (laughter)... then he is lonely, he creates again. The spider is the symbol of this very process.

So tell your parents that they must have been Hindus in some past life! (laughter) This is your name: Swami Deva Spider -- divine spider. Good!

God happens only to those who are of humble heart. But it is a humility which is not practised.

One can practise humility. The society teaches us to practise being humble: Be humble because you will be respected if you are humble. Now what kind of nonsense is this? Telling people "You will be respected if you are humble" is simply giving new nourishment to the ego. Now in the name of humbleness there will be a subtle ego hiding, because humbleness brings respect, respectability. And the more you see that people respect you, the more humble you will become. But deep down the ego is becoming stronger and stronger.

The so-called humble people have the strongest egos in the world. The saints, the mahatmas and the so-called religious people are the most egoistic, they are pious egoists. That is not real humility.

Real humbleness, real humility comes by understanding the ego, the ways of the ego, how it functions, how it goes on creating itself, how it goes on coming back in subtle ways. You close one door, it opens another; you don't allow it from the front door, it comes from the back door. One has to be very watchful, alert about the ways of the ego, that's all.

Slowly slowly you know all its diplomatic strategies: how it survives, how it perpetuates itself. It is a false entity, it is a parasite. It lives on your blood, It kills your soul. When you see it and the whole nuisance that it goes on doing to you and your life, when you see the calamity that comes through it, in its utter 1/08/07

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nudity, in that very moment you are freed from it. Now it cannot deceive you.

The first words of the Buddha when he became enlightened were... He looked at the sky and said: Listen, now there will be no need of you to make another house for me, another shelter, another security. I am utterly free of you. I will not be coming back again because I am no more trapped within your net.

To whom was he talking? He was saying goodbye to his ego, he was saying: I am finished. I have seen you -- you are false, I have seen that you are just a shadow. I have believed enough in you and through that belief I have suffered long.

In that moment of understanding one becomes humble. That humbleness opens the door for God to come in. The moment ego goes out, God comes in. The moment you are not, God is.

Courage is like bliss, like truth, like love: it is not something that you can manage; otherwise there would be nobody who is a coward. Every coward wants to be courageous; he tries in every possible way, he pretends, he creates a facade of courage. It hurts to feel that one is cowardly. One wants to hide it, not only from others but from oneself too. One does not want to recognise the fact that one is cowardly. One pretends to be brave. One goes to extremes to prove that one is brave, sometimes to foolish extremes, sometimes on tries to overcompensate. But these are not the right ways; the coward remains the coward. On the surface he may look brave, but scratch him just a little and all his cowardliness starts rising up. In a real situation he will escape, In an unreal situation he will remain very courageous.

Aman and his wife were passing through a forest and suddenly they encountered a dangerous tiger. The husband completely forgot all his manliness, all his bravery, and all his pretensions. He went behind the woman, behind his wife.

The wife cried, "What are you doing? You are supposed to face the danger, you have to protect me. You have always been saying that you could even face death for me -- now it is time to prove it!"

He said "Yes, I can face death, but this tiger is alive, he is not dead!" (laughter) Just scratch a little; pretensions never go deeper than the skin, they remain something painted just on the skin.

Real courage is a gift of God. One can pray for it, one cannot do anything else. One can surrender to God totally, and say to him "Make of me whatsoever you want to make. Let thy will be done. If you want me to be a coward it's perfectly okay, I will be a coward. If that's what your will is I will follow it joyously.

If you want me to be miserable. I will not complain. Even if you send death I will welcome it. So whatsoever your will is, is going to be my will." That is surrender and that is sannyas.

Sannyas is essentially surrender to the whole. Then a great courage arises. Then one cannot be cowardly, there is nothing to be afraid of. When one has surrendered the ego why should one be full of fear?

All fear exists as a shadow of the ego. The ego is the root cause of cowardliness. The ego gone, all cowardliness disappears. And then there is a courage which is not yours but which is God's.

Remember it, all that is great is always God's.

Rudi literally means a wolf; it is s short form of Rudolf. Symbolically it means two things; loyalty and courage.

Mythologically the wolf has been thought to be very courageous and very loyal. In fact to be loyal one needs to be courageous. To trust in somebody needs guts, it is not for the cowardly person. The cowardly always doubts, he is always suspicious because he is always afraid. Out of his fear he suspects, doubts; he is always defending himself, protecting himself, guarding. He remains closed. He cannot be loyal, he cannot be trusting, he cannot be surrendered.

Sannyas is a surrender, surrender to existence. Ordinarily we are fighting with existence, that's how we have been brought up. We have been brought up with the idea of fighting, of being aggressive, because that is the way to succeed.

Sannyas means that we are no more concerned with success at all. We are concerned with peace, silence, bliss, truth, freedom, god. We are not concerned with success at all. Even if you succeed death is going to destroy everything, so it has been a sheer wastage of your life. You may have money, power, prestige, but all will be taken away. But if you have known love it will go with you. If you have known freedom it will go with you. If you have known truth even death cannot take it away.

These are real treasures. But they can be attained only if one surrenders to the whole. You cannot snatch them away from reality. You have to love so deeply that you can surrender. You have to love so totally that you can trust the whole. You have to disappear as a separate entity, you have to become part of the infinity, 1/08/07

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just a wave in the infinite ocean of god.

Martin means a loyal spirit. It means one who is capable of trusting, one who is capable of love -- so much so that he disappears in his love.

The ego only knows how to say no, but when the ego disappears there arises a total yes: yes to life, yes to all that is. That is the meaning of being loyal, loyal to existence: being in a deep love affair with existence, not feeling oneself separate, feeling one with the whole, with no fear, holding nothing back, going totally and whole-heartedly.

The moment one can do it, one is transformed. The moment one can do it, the ego dies and one is born.

The real birth, the birth of the soul comes through a total yes.

The traditional sense of being holy is egoistic. It is a new form of egoism. Somebody is bragging about his money, somebody is bragging out his birth, blood, nobility, aristocracy, somebody is bragging about his political power. And somebody is bragging about his virtues, his prayers, his fasts, his austerities. But it is the same bragging -- no difference at all. The ego is the ego. By what it is nourished is of no consequence, it makes no difference. It can be supported by anything.

You can support it with a rock, you can support it with gold, you can support it with diamonds, but it is the same ego. Only the support changes, the ego remains the same.

When I use the word "holy" I use it in the sense of wholeness, in the sense of being total. To be whole is to be holy. And whenever you are whole the ego disappears. It can exist only when you are fragmentary, when you are divided, split. The more you are divided, the better for the ego. It rules you by dividing you.

Once you are one, integrated, crystallised, the ego evaporates just like dewdrops in the early morning sun.

Living a holy life means living each moment totally, without holding anything back. If you are dancing then become the dance, and that is the moment of holiness. If you are singing, become the song. If you are loving, become love. Whatsoever you are doing, do it with such joy, with such totality, with such involvement, commitment that you are no more separate from it. And soon you will see that this continuous experience of being totally involved integrates all your fragments into oneness. It moulds you into an individual, into something indivisible. That is being holy.

It has nothing to do with being Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan, but it absolutely has something to do with the ultimate, because when you are total you become available to the ultimate. When you are total you are silent; all those fighting fragments are no more there, no noise is there. There is great stillness, and in that stillness God can descend.

God is whole, and unless we are also whole in our own small way we cannot know anything of God And one thing is beautiful about being whole: even if you are whole in your small way... The bigger whole and the smaller whole are not really different. It is like a small circle and a bigger circle; both are circles. As far as their being circles is concerned, both are perfect circles. Quantitatively they may be different but qualitatively they are not.

And that's the beauty of being whole. You will be a small circle and God is the infinite circle, but that makes no difference. The moment you are a circle, entire, one, you know the quality of being a god, you become divine.

By purity I don't mean anything moral. By purity I mean innocence, a childlike innocence -- that's what purity is.

A moralist is not pure, he cannot be. His every step is calculated. Even his virtue is a bargaining. He is doing all kings of things, destroying all kind of desires in order to attain paradise and heavenly pleasures. It is all bargaining. Any calculated move is bound to be impure.

Only small children move spontaneously, without any calculation. Their action is without motive. It is simply a response to the present situation. So is the case with the real sage. He lives spontaneously, moment to moment, he is not worried about the future. He does not care about paradise, he is not afraid of hell or greedy for heaven. He simply joyously lives the moment that is available. In a way his life is just like a small child's life.

The child is innocent because he is ignorant of the world and worldly ways and all kinds of cunningnesses and deceptions. He has not yet entered into the mud; hence he is clean. But sooner or later he will have to enter into the mud, into the muddy waters and then he will lose his innocence. Every child is bound to lose his innocence. That innocence is temporary and is inevitably lost.

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To grow, it is necessary to lose it. But then one can attain to a new kind of innocence. Living in the world, seeing its futility, seeing its utter ridiculousness, one becomes detached, cool. One is no more involved in it. One passes through it but just as a witness, just like a mirror: reflecting everything and yet not affected by anything.

That is the second kind of innocence, the innocence of the sage. It cannot be destroyed; you cannot lose it. Once it is gained it is yours forever. Hence the sage is like the child in one sense only, they are both innocent. But the child is bound to lose his gift because he has not earned it, it is a natural gift. And the sage has earned it, it is not a gift; it is the reward of his maturity. The child is innocent because he is ignorant, and the sage is innocent because he is wise. The second innocence is called divine innocence.

Keep on reminding yourself: that is the goal.

Beauty is the most divine phenomenon in life. It is through the beautiful that man has become aware of god, through a beautiful sunset, a beautiful night full of stars, beautiful showers, mountains, clouds, people.

It is impossible to think that there is no god. If life is so beautiful there must be somebody behind all this beauty, some great artist.

The beauty of the world is enough proof of a great painter, of a poet, of a lover. God is nothing but a presence that one feels when one becomes overwhelmed by beauty. Hence I don't suggest you go to the temple or the mosque or the church. But I certainly suggest you go to the mountains, to the forest, to the rivers, to the ocean, because it is there that you will have your first glimpse of God's presence.

There is beauty which is only of the body. It does not go very deep, it is not even skin deep. It is superficial, it is only an appearance. But there is a totally different kind of beauty which belongs to the center and not to the circumference, which arises from your innermost core and spreads towards the circumference. The circumference also becomes luminous because of it, but it is not on the circumference, it comes from the center. That is divine beauty, and divine beauty is eternal.

Physical beauty is there today and tomorrow it is gone. Anything bodily is momentary. And I am not against the body -- remember it. It is a beautiful mechanism, it is a beautiful house. Take every care of it but don't become obsessed with it. Human beings have become too obsessed with the body. Their whole effort is how to keep it beautiful and they have completely forgotten that something more needs to be beautiful, not just the body and its proportions. Some inner grace is needed. That grace arises out of meditation and prayer. That grace arises only when you are bridged with God and God starts filtering through you.

When you are in deep communion with existence then something radical happens to your being. Then you know beauty for the first time, a beauty that transcends time, space, a beauty that cannot be taken away from you by illness by old age, a beauty that is really yours forever. Seek and search for that because that is your true being.

In the East we have defined God as satyam, shivam, sundram. Satyam means truth, shivam means good, sundram means beauty, beautiful. These are the three qualities of God -- he is true, he is good, he is beautiful. And these are the three doors also to enter into hi. Either one can enter into him as a seeker of truth or as a seeker of good or as a seeker of beauty.

Let the third door be for you: enter into God searching for inner beauty, for divine beauty.

[There follows and interview with Swami Bhakta, which is not included here.]

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #3

Chapter title: Truth

3 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002035

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ShortTitle: WITHME03

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

Sannyas is to be true to your original face. Then all your fragments start melting into each other and they create a centre, they create integrity, they create individuality. And that's what religion is all about.

Religion has nothing to do with god or heaven and hell and all kinds of theories and philosophies. The basic concern of religion is truth.

And one has to live it, only then can one know it.

Truth is god.

Truth does not mean a conclusion arrived at by thinking. It means experience arrived at through living.

Truth is not a hypothesis; hence philosophy has no truth in it. Philosophy goes round and round, it moves in circles, but it never reaches the target. It is only through experience, not through thinking, that one arrives home.

Sannyas is a change of gestalt. From mind you have to move to the heart, from thinking to living, from speculating to experiencing. Ordinarily religious people say "God is truth," but I would like to say that that is not right. Truth is God. If you say "God is truth," you have already come to a conclusion. But truth is God. That means a great enquiry is needed, you have to explore from within and without.

And sannyas is exploration of truth. It is not belief, it is discovery.

Truth is not something which has to be achieved. It is already inside us. We are it, the seeker is the sought. But we go on rushing hither and thither searching for the truth. We will never find it anywhere else; hence the only way to find it is to stop seeking it outside. The only way to find it is to sit silently and look within. It is not a question of doing something, it is more a question of not doing anything. When you are in a state of non-doing, utterly relaxed, it happens, it wells up. It has always been there but you have never been there. The meeting happens when you are also inside.

Truth or God is waiting there in your very heart; don't go on knocking on other's doors. There is no need to go to any church, any temple, any mosque. There is no need to search in the Bible, in the Koran, in the Vedas.

Stop all seeking and searching and find it. In fact immediately one finds it. It is such a joy to see that which we have been searching for lives together and over which we were always being frustrated because every effort was doomed to fail.

When truth is, we are not. We are the only barrier. The ego is like a wall surrounding you, it is your imprisonment. So truth can never be an achievement, because all achievements are through the ego. The ego thinks in terms of achievement.

Truth comes to you not as an achievement but as a gift. Neither is it a reward. It is not that you are worthy, pious, virtuous, so you will be rewarded by truth. It comes to those who are ready to receive it, welcome it. It does not matter whether you are a saint or a sinner, it knocks on everybody's doors. It makes no distinctions between sinners and saints. The guest comes to anybody who is ready to open the door and welcome it.

The whole art of allowing the truth to take possession of you is of being vulnerable, of being open, of being in a let-go. Or in other words, the whole art consists of one word, "surrender'.

And that's what sannyas is, that's my definition of a sannyasin: a man who is surrendered to existence so totally that he never thinks in terms of achievement any more, because he is no more. Who is there to achieve? -- he has disappeared totally, he has not left even a trace behind. In that very moment, when you 1/08/07

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are just a pure nothingness, truth arrives. It is a gift of God.

Earnestness, sincerity, authenticity -- these are the foundations of sannyas.

They are not different things but different aspects of the same phenomenon. One has to be utterly truthful about oneself. One need not hide, only cowards hide. The courageous person remains as he is, naked. He is ready to accept whatsoever the consequences, but he is not ready to compromise his truth. This is the only way to become an individual, this is the only way to have integrity.

The world teaches people to be pseudo, to be compromising. The world makes people deceptive, false.

All your so-called morality, character, respectability, is nothing but an effort to create a facade so you can hide your reality, you can hide and you can go on showing a false face to the world. Whatsoever is expected from you, you can show it to the world. But a man who hides his reality and shows his falseness to the world becomes split, he becomes two. In fact he becomes many, because in each situation he has to use a different face.

You can't use the same face with your wife that you use with your girlfriend. You can't use the same face with the boss that you use with your servant. You have to carry many faces so that whatsoever the requirement of the situation, you wear a mask. Slowly slowly it becomes automatic. You need not change, they change of their own accord. To be in such a state means to be miserable, mad, divided in thousands of pieces. Life will be a chaos and a misery and a hell.

But one can drop the facade, one can drop all the masks. That's what sannyas is: to be true, to be your original face. And then suddenly you start feeling a kind of strength which was never there before, because you start becoming one. All your fragments start melting into each other and they create a centre, they create integrity, they create individuality. Then one is earnest, sincere, authentic.

And that's what religion is all about. Religion has nothing to do with God or heaven or hell and all kinds of theories and philosophies. The basic concern of religion is truth. And one has to live it, only then can one know it, there is no other way. It is not a belief, it has to be your own existential experience. You have to experience it in the innermost core of your very being. And that liberates. That brings freedom to you, bliss to you, benediction to you.

Knowledge is human, wisdom is always divine. Knowledge comes through our efforts, wisdom comes from god -- it is a revelation. We have only to be receptive. We have not to do anything, we have just to be open and available. It is not like science -- so much work, experiments, and then finally you arrive after many experiments at a certain hypotheses. Then too it is only a hypothesis. It may be proved wrong tomorrow, some new facts may crop up. It is never absolute, it is never certain. It is temporary, it is for the time-being.

Wisdom is absolute. When you know, you know. It never changes. What Buddha knew, what Jesus knew, what Zarathustra knew is the same, it is not different. It is not that after twenty-five centuries of Buddha you will discover something else, no. It will be the same revelation, absolute the same. Truth never changes.

Through human effort we can never reach the truth, we can only reach a certain hypothesis. And because it is human we can never be absolutely certain about it. We can use it, it is useful, but it is not wisdom. Albert Einstein knows much, maybe much more than Buddha, but he is not a Buddha, he is not awakened. He has not received the truth from the beyond, it has not descended in him. His is human effort: through great human effort he has come to certain conclusions. But human conclusions are human; they have a certain limitation.

The search for truth is not like a scientific search. It is totally different. Scientific enquiry is aggressive, religious enquiry is receptive. Scientific enquiry is more masculine, religious enquiry is more feminine.

So be open, available, silent, listening, so that God can reveal something to you. It always comes as a revelation.

We are keeping truth at our backs. All that is needed is a little turning in.

We are all extroverts. Our education makes us extroverts. Society needs extroverts, it has no use for introverts. The introverts cannot be made into soldiers, the introverts are almost as useless as rose flowers.

You can appreciate a rose flower but what else can you do with it? It has no utility. It has tremendous poetry but not utility.

So is the case with truth: it has great poetry, great joy, great ecstasy, but is absolutely unmarketable.

You cannot reduce it to a commodity, you cannot sell it -- and the world believes in selling and purchasing.

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The world is a marketplace, and to be an introvert is to be out of the marketplace. Hence we turn every child into an extrovert, we try in every possible way to make sure that he does not have any idea that there is something inside him. We make him forget any desire to go in. And of course if you teach every child for twenty-five years continuously, if you condition him, hypotise him, he becomes paralaysed. He cannot turn his neck, it won't move; he can only look outwards, truth is inside you. You brought it with your birth.

My work here is just to help you, to de-hypnotise you, to uncondition you, to undo what the society has done to you. It is anti-social work. Hence the society was perfectly right in crucifying Jesus: he was an antisocial element. So was Socrates, so is every awakened person. He has to sabotage, he has to destroy the structure that society creates around you. He has to bring you to your inner reality.

That does not mean that you cannot work outside. Being an introvert does not mean that you become fixated. One should be flexible. One should be able to come in, to come out easily, without any difficulty.

So whatsoever is needed... if you are needed on the outside you can be available, if you are needed inside you can be available. Then you know both prose and poetry, then you know both logic and love, then you can be in the marketplace and yet be in yourself.

The seeker of truth has to go beyond doubt, has to drop doubting, because doubt keeps you tethered to the mind, doubt is the method of the mind. If you doubt you can never go beyond mind. It is through trust that one goes beyond mind. It is through trust that one goes beyond mind. And truth is beyond mind.

Nobody has ever discovered truth through mind -- not a single individual in the whole history of humanity. Many have discovered truth but they have all discovered through trust, not through doubt.

So one has to go beyond doubt and one has to learn the language of trust. Doubt is the language of logic, trust is the language of love. We all live in doubt, we are all doubting Thomases because we all live in the mind. The society perpetuates the mind, all the educational systems strengthen the mind. And the more stronger the mind becomes, the less is the possibility of love growing in you. You start doubting even the existence of love. You start doubting even the existence of truth, so the question of discovering truth does not arise at all.

Doubt creates such confusion in you that you don't know what to do and what not to do. You go on asking the same mind and it goes on giving you all kinds of answers, which are all contradictory to each other. Mind is a [past ?] master in creating chaos.

Learn the way of love, learn the way of trust. Even a coward can doubt; only a courageous person can trust. Trust needs some guts. It means that you are taking risks, it means that you are moving into the unknown. Who knows? -- there is no guarantee. But there is tremendous joy in exploring. With a loving heart one can go dancing into the unknown.

Go beyond your doubt, your doubting mind, and then you will really be a seeker of truth. A seeker of truth neither believes nor doubts. He is simply available, ready, open, vulnerable. He is ready to go with the universe wherever it leads. And the universe is always leading you, guiding you towards the ultimate expression of your being.

If you can surrender to existence, if you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed by it, then the transformation happens so easily, without any bloodshed and without any damage. Not even scars are left in you. One changes so silently, so noiselessly, as if nothing has happened. On the outside everything remains the same and on the inside nothing is the same.

One can seek truth either out of misery or out of bliss. Both people are seekers, but the first one is going to miss, he will never reach. His very first step is wrong. Only the second one arrives.

On the surface both seek truth, but you can find only if you seek rightly, in the right mood, with the right method; if you travel on the right path, if you enter through the right door. Otherwise you can go on and on searching and seeking for millions of lives and you will not find. the truth.

The most important thing is the first step: what is the motive? That is very essential to understand. Why does one want to seek truth? Is it out of misery? -- then truth is an escape, an escape from your misery. You want to become occupied with something so far away ,so impossible that you can remain occupied forever and need not look at your misery; so that you can avoid your anxiety, anguish, so that you avoid channeling your energies towards truth.

But one who is trying to escape from himself in any way will never reach truth, because truth is within you. Truth is not out there somewhere. Truth is now, truth is here, truth is within you. And the person who starts seeking and searching for truth because life is miserable has already taken an attitude. He has 1/08/07

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concluded that life is miserable. His mind has already become prejudiced.

The real seeker has to be without conclusions, unprejudiced. He has to function out of a state of not-knowing, he has to be an agnostic, neither atheist nor theist. He has to accept his ignorance, he has to be sincere about his ignorance. He has to say to himself and to others. "I don't know. And because I don't know, how can I be a Christian and how can I be a Mohammedan or a Hindu? Because I don't know, how can I be a Catholic or a Communist? Because I don't know, how can I believe in god or disbelieve in God?"

Disbelief is also a belief -- a negative kind of belief. The Catholic believes, so does the Communist, he also believes. The seeker of truth has to start dropping all beliefs, disbeliefs and is not to have any conclusion. He has to start moving towards truth with a cheerful heart, because only when the heart is cheerful do you become available to existence. Just look at the trees, clouds, stars... The whole universe is in an eternal dance. It is an orgy of joy, a non-ending carnival. It goes on and on. It is sheer festivity.

So unless you move through cheerfulness, blissfulness, you will not be moving in the right direction, you will not fall in tune with existence. And the moment you fall in tune with existence you know who you are. When the within and the without are meeting, merging, melting into each other, they create such an explosion of light that everything becomes clear, nothing remains unclear. That's the moment of truth.

Many have sought, very few have found because their search was wrong from the very beginning. They were tired of life, they were antagonistic to life, they were failures in life, they were miserable people -- and they started seeking and searching for truth.

My effort here is first to teach you how to sing, how to dance, how to love and how to be cheerful. Once that has started happening in you, once the process is triggered and you become like a child -- innocent, excited, ecstatic about small things... A butterfly is enough for the child to be in awe. When you are so innocent and so cheerful and so full of wonder then the first step has been taken, and taken rightly. Then you can ride on the wave of bliss and it will take you to the other shore.

The seeker of truth is on a very negative journey. Truth cannot be sought directly, you cannot make a goal out of it. In the first place you don't know what it is, where it is, so how can you make a goal out of it?

Your journey will remain a groping. So those who think that truth can be attained directly start from the very beginning in a wrong way. Their truth simply means something that they have learned from others.

They have already concluded what is true; the search is bogus. They are simply trying to prove themselves right. They are not on a real journey of discovery.

The real journey has to be negative, not positive. And by negative I mean that you have to see your lies.

You don't know truth, so nothing can be done for the moment about the truth. You cannot seek it, you cannot search for it -- the question does not arise. But you know many lies in which you are living, in which everybody is living. Our society teaches us so many lies.

The god that has been taught about by the priest is a lie. The heaven, the hell, the theory of karma, rebirth -- anything that has been taught by others is a lie. Truth cannot be taught. There is no way to transfer it. One can experience it on one's own. No education is possible about truth, but you can be he helped to be aware of what kind of lies you are living in. And as you see a certain lie, it drops. The moment you see it, it drops, you cannot hold it any more. In your seeing that it is a lie, it becomes impossible to go on living through it.

Slowly slowly more and more lies will start falling like dead leaves from a tree. And when all the dead leaves have fallen, new leaves will arrive of their own accord. That's how truth arrives: you destroy the lies and truth comes, you negate the lies and truth comes. It comes as a gift of god. You simply prepare the ground, you simply empty yourself of all kins of false notion, of all philosophies, ideologies, religions. You simply go on emptying yourself. The moment you are totally empty, truth descends in you. It is not your achievement, it is god's gift.

(To an elderly Dutchwoman):

The truth is present in our being, but only as a seed, only as a potentiality. It has to be actualised, it has to be released. It is not somewhere else, one need not go anywhere, but one has to help the seed to become a sprout and the sprout to become a tree and the tree to come to flowers and fruits. Then life is a tremendous experience, so full of joy and so full of God and so full of eternity. Ordinarily we live without actualising our potential.

They say that ordinary people actualise only five to seven per cent of their potential. What a wastage!

Ninety-five per cent of your life was available to you but you never lived it. It is as if somebody was given a 1/08/07

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palace but he lived only in the porch and never entered the palace.

We are living like beggars for the simple reason that we don't move deeper into our beings to actualise all that has been given to us as a gift by god. But we don't even recognise it, we don't even feel that there is something more to life than we are living. Even the greatest geniuses, people like Albert Einstein, Rutherford, Newton, Edison, even they don't actualise more than fifteen per cent of their potential. Only once in a while is there a Jesus or a Buddha who actualises one hundred per cent of his potential. And these are the people who become the proofs that God is.

You can also become the proof because you have the same potential. The difference is not in potential at all, the difference is that they have actualised their potential and our potential is lying dormant.

My function here is to help you make the dormant dynamic, to make the static flowing, to make the dead alive. It is possible. And it is not as difficult as it appears in the beginning. In the beginning it appears difficult only because we have never tried it. So even small things... swimming is difficult because you have never tried. Even seeing a person riding a bicycle... it looks impossible to the person who does not know how to ride a bicycle. It is a miracle.

Once you know it is so simple, just a few efforts are needed. Maybe you will fall once or twice, you may be hurt here and there... a few bruises here and there, but that doesn't matter. That happens to every meditator: a few hurts, a few bruises -- and sometimes a few fractures too. But that doesn't matter. Once you have learned, you gain so much that the price you pay for it is negligible.

And it is never too late, remember. The idea is prevalent all over the world that in old age you can't do much. That is absolute nonsense. You can transform you potential any time. Even on one's deathbed, if one decides to change, the transformation is possible. Even in the very evening of our life it is possible to come back home.

[There follows an interview with Ma Satya Bharti, which is not included here.]

One comes to discover both victory and immortality through meditation. Without meditation we are part of time, we are mortals, death is awaiting us at the end. And all that we are doing will be undone by death; hence we are simply making sandcastles. It is absolutely certain that death will come and destroy everything. It will destroy the poor man's hut and it will destroy the king's palace - they are all the same. It will destroy the beggar and it will destroy the emperor. It makes no distinctions.

Without meditation we live in time and we are mortal. As you move into meditation you start moving beyond time. You start entering a totally new kind of space which has no time element in it. It simply is. It never comes, it never goes. Time comes and goes. It is a movement, a procession of moments.

But there is a space within you which has always been there, is there right now, will be always there. It knows no change. It is beyond change. That which is beyond change is beyond time. This means change.

No change means no-time. And to experience that no-time is to experience immortality.

Then all fears fall away, because all fears are rooted deep down in the fear of death. Then all anxiety disappears, because there is really only one anxiety. All other anxieties can be reduced to a single anxiety, that we are going to die, that everything we are doing is futile, that death is there and it can come at any moment. And it comes without informing you, there is no way to protect oneself against it - hence great anxiety, trembling, fear.

But once you know that something in you is beyond time, is beyond change, then you know that something in you that is beyond death too. You are immortal, you were never born and you will never die.

The moment you pass from mind to meditation, you pass from the world of mortals into the world of the immortals. And that is victory - not the victory of Alexander, not the victory of Napoleon, but the victory of Jesus, the victory of Buddha. That is true victory.

It is only through meditation that life becomes meaningful. Without meditation life is utterly meaningless. One only vegetates, one does not really live. One hopes to live, but that hope is never fulfilled.

One goes on postponing life for tomorrow - and tomorrow never comes.

You can see that meaninglessness written on people's faces everywhere. People are trying to create some kind of meaning in their lives, but a created meaning is going to be arbitrary and you know all the time that it is just your creation, it is not worth much, and deep down you remain hollow. Afraid of that hollowness, people keep themselves occupied with every kind of activity. All the time that they are awake, they are engaged. They are afraid that if they are not engaged in something they may have to face their own 1/08/07

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meaninglessness, their own emptiness, and futility. And that is frightening, it scares them; hence they never look in. For the whole day they are occupied, and then they fall asleep and still they remain occupied in their dreams.

Meditation means facing your inner emptiness. Howsoever it hurts in the beginning it has to be encountered, because in encountering it you will be surprised that it is just a curtain. Behind it is very dark when you go in, but that darkness is only on the circumference. At the very center of it there is light, eternal light.

And once a person has experienced his own light, his own being, his own eternity, all meaninglessness disappears. One becomes praiseworthy.

It is only through meditation that one becomes praise-worthy.

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #4

Chapter title: Bliss

4 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002045

ShortTitle: WITHME04

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

Money is not your goal, power is not your goal, God is not your goal, truth is not your goal. These are different names which you go on giving to bliss.

All these names have to be removed so that you can face the ultimate goal in its sheer nakedness. Once you know the goal, immediately you know the path.

Once you recognise that bliss is our goal, you need not go outside at all, because bliss is our very nature.

Happiness can exist on may planes. The lowest is pleasure and the highest is bliss, and there are many stages in between.

Man ordinarily lives at the lowest, that's why people go on seeking pleasure. It is a physical phenomenon. Sex and food are their obsessions. Nothing is wrong in enjoying food or sex, but when they become obsessions then you are pathological. One has to go beyond the physical plane of being.

Food and sex are two sides of the same coin. Food keeps the individual alive and sex keeps the species alive. Without food the individual will die, without sex humanity will disappear. Deep down the function of both is the same. That's why it often happens that a person who starts repressing sexuality becomes more obsessed with food. His whole energy starts moving towards food. The person who starts controlling his food, who starts dieting, becomes more and more obsessed with sex.

One has to understand these energy phenomena, because only by understanding is there a transcendence.

The second plane can be called psychological. Hearing beautiful music... it is a subtle kind of nourishment. It revives the spirit, it thrills you but in some very invisible way. It is not measurable, it cannot be detected by scientific instruments but something happens. It is not objective, so nobody else can see it. It 1/08/07

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is subjective.

The first plane is objective. Sex can be seen by others. Hence for centuries every effort has been made to hide it, not to do it before others... not only not to do it before others, not to do it even before yourself: so do it in darkness.

The reason is that it is an objective phenomenon. Hence people are so interested in pornography --

because sex is transformed into absolute objectivity: it is marketable, it becomes a commodity. So is the case with food.

But with music, with the joy derived from poetry or the joy felt when you are in close proximity to nature, just in seeing a beautiful sunset something of immense value happens. You feel thrilled, uplifted.

That is happiness. It is beyond pleasure.

If one remains on the first plane one remains an animal. Only with the second is the human being born.

But humanity is only a bridge, one has to transcend even that. One should not make one's house on the bridge. One has to go beyond the joy of music, beauty, poetry, painting, creativity.

Then the third plane, the highest opens up. The first is objective, the second is subjective; the third is beyond duality, it is neither subjective nor objective. One is simply a witness, all duality has been left behind. The first is physical, the second is psychology, the third is spiritual. It has nothing to do with the body or the mind. In fact when you go beyond-mind, when you see that you are neither the body nor the mind then you start entering into the third. Then happiness becomes bliss. And that is the goal of sannyas.

Bliss is a state of awareness, watchfulness, meditativeness, of profound silence, peace. Nothing stirs in you, all is quiet, and you are absolutely relaxed. Out of that relaxation something bursts forth at you very center, some energy that has always remained there starts flowing, becomes dynamic. It has been dormant because you were never looking at it. You never paid any attention, you were concerned with the body and the mind. Now, you have turned in. Your whole concern, your whole attention, has settled at the center. You have left the circumference far behind.

When the energy is absolutely centered, at the center, bliss happens. Happiness has to move from pleasure to bliss.

Bliss is always perfect. You can't have imperfect bliss, it is impossible. It is like you cannot have an imperfect circle: if it is imperfect it is not a circle. If it is a circle it has to be perfect. Precisely like that, bliss is always perfect; perfection is intrinsic to it, not accidental. So you cannot find bliss in any other form than perfection.

If bliss is not perfect that means that what you are thinking is bliss is something else. It may be happiness, pleasure, but it is not bliss.

Pleasure is momentary and it is always imperfect. Happiness is a little better than pleasure because pleasure is more body-oriented and happiness is more psyche-oriented: a little higher, just in the middle. On one side, one extreme is pleasure, at the other extreme is bliss. In the middle is happiness.

Move from pleasure to happiness to bliss. That is the whole path of a sannyasin. I don't want you to deny anything, but I also want you to remember that life is fulfilled only when you have attained to bliss.

Don't get lost in the world of pleasures and happiness. Nothing is wrong in them, enjoy then on the way just as when you go for a walk you enjoy the birds singing on the way, the trees, the flowers. But you don't become attached to any tree, you go on moving.

Enjoy all that is available but go on moving till you have arrived to such a peace that is undisturbable, at such a bliss that cannot be taken away from you. Till you have arrived home go on seeking and searching.

Enjoy everything but don't be obsessed by anything. Remain normal, enjoy eating, meeting people, seeing all that the world makes available -- I am not in favour of escapism -- but continue to remember that this is only an overnight stay. In the morning we have to move. This is only a caravanserai, it is not home.

If this much remembrance is there, one goes on moving and on moving, and one day the miracle happens: perfect bliss has descended upon you. Then there is no misery any more, no possibility of falling back.

It happens only in perfect awareness, in perfect meditativeness, in perfect silence.

Happiness is finite, it begins and ends; hence it has no ultimate value. It is a toy. You can remain occupied with it for a moment, it brings a little sensation, a little thrill into life, but then in its wake it also brings frustration in the same proportion. Because when it ends, and it is bound to end, it leaves you in darkness. So each happiness is a costly affair.

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But bliss is totally different. It has no beginning, no end. It is always there inside you, it is something with which you are born. To express it right, it is you; hence it can neither be taken away from you, nor can it be given to you.

But the question arises: if bliss is your nature why are people in misery? People are in misery because they never look into their nature. Their eyes are focussed outwards on far-away things. They have forgotten how to look in, they have forgotten the very process of turning in.

Meditation is nothing but the simple process of turning in. Meditation does not produce bliss, it simply helps you to recognise what is already there. It does not give you anything new, it simply reveals the ancient most thing in you.

Bliss is the only rock that time cannot destroy. Everything else is destroyed by time, sooner or later.

Only bliss remains untouched by time because bliss is beyond time. Time is part of mind. In fact time and mind are two aspects of the same coin. Time is a psychological phenomenon. You can watch it in your own life: when you are miserable time becomes longer, then one hour seems to be so long. If you are sitting by the bedside of a dying man then the night seems so long, as if there is never going to be an end to it. But if you are holding the hand of your beloved time passes so fast, so quickly, that hours pass and you think only minutes have passed, or not even minutes. The night passes as if the clock has been deceiving you and going faster.

When you are happy time goes quickly. When you are miserable time slows down. So time is something psychological. And when you are neither miserable nor happy, just silent and peaceful, time disappears, time is no more found.

An ancient Sufi parable says that when Jesus was departing one of his disciples asked him "Lord, what will be the most unique thing in the kingdom of God?" And Jesus said, "There shall be time no longer."

It is not recorded in the Christian gospels but Sufis have carried this beautiful anecdote. It is of tremendous significance. The most important thing he says is: There shall be time no longer.

It can be translated as: There shall be mind no longer, there will be no pleasure, no pain, there will be no experience as such, just silence, pure silence.

Every experience is a disturbance. Even the pleasant experience is a disturbance; hence it is tiring. Even pleasure tires people. In fact it tires more than pain, because with pain you keep a little distance. You don't want it, you want it to be finished soon. You remain a little aloof, detached, you don't cling to it. But you cling to pleasure and you want more and more of it; hence it is more tiring. And you can see it: rich people look more tired than poor people, kings look more tired than beggars, for the simple reason that the beggars can only hope and dream about pleasures, and when you hope and dream it is not tiring. In fact it infuses new vitality in you. When you are just dreaming and hoping it is always a transfusion of new blood.

But the rich, the affluent, the kings -- they are living it, and it is boring and it has become tasteless. They are utterly tired but they don't know where to go now. There is nowhere to go, no exit. That's how Jean-Paul Sartre defines hell: No exit.

Whenever he is in a situation from where there is no exit, the man who is in pain can think of pleasure.

There is an exit, at least in his imagination. But the man who is in pleasure, where can he go? Not even in his imagination... To pain he cannot go; nobody wants to be in a painful state. And pleasure he has already got, so he has nowhere to go. He is stuck. That is hell.

The old idea of hell is really out of date, that people will be tortured and burned and... It is a Nazi idea, a Fascist idea. But it is wrong because if there is so much pain people will be happy. They will be hoping that sooner or later it will be finished.

I would like hell to be like the heaven that is depicted in the scriptures: all pleasures available, everybody suffering from diabetes! (laughter) Everybody so fat that they cannot walk, and refrigerators go on moving behind everybody! (laughter) Wherever you go the refrigerator goes with you, you cannot escape from it. All kinds of pleasures are available and there is no exit. That would be real hell.

The people who depicted hell did not have much imagination. They did not understand much human psychology.

There is only one thing which is beyond heaven and hell, beyond pain and pleasure -- that is bliss. By bliss I don't mean joy, I don't mean happiness, not at all -- but peace, total peace, an undisturbed silence.

One is so centred in oneself that there is no time, no mind. Each moment is all. That is the only permanent thing in existence -- eternal, rocklike.

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Bliss happens only to those few blessed souls who know how to be peaceful. Ordinarily man lives in a great turmoil. He lives constantly surrounded by a crowd of thoughts, desires, memories, imagination, expectations. He is never alone, these people go on following him. Even if he goes to a cave in the mountains these people are there. He is always surrounded by these ugly faces; hence there is no peace.

They all go on pulling you apart, they are all pulling you into different directions.

Your anger wants to do one thing, your greed wants to do something else, your ambition forces you to do something exactly opposite to what your anger wants to do -- and you are divided. You are not integrated.

Peace means that one is integrated. All these fragments have melted into one being. There is no crowd any more. One is alone, utterly alone. A deep deep peace prevails inside. Then one is ready to receive bliss.

Bliss follows peace. Peace prepares the ground, one peace is there bliss is inevitable.

Bliss happens only to those what loyalty is. Bliss happens only in the heart, never in the head. The head is like a desert: nothing grows there. It is only in the heart that everything that is of any value, any eternal value, grows in the heart. But the functioning of the heart and the head are totally opposed to each other.

And we are trained for the head -- that becomes a problem.

The head is based on doubt nd the heart is based on trust. Our whole training is of doubting, thinking, suspecting, questioning. And that is not the way of the heart; hence we remain hung-up in the head. There are very few people on the earth who know that the heart exists. For others it is only a metaphor, poetry, fiction, not fact; at the most just a jumping mechanism for the blood. But that is not the heart that mystics have been talking about.

There is a center deep down inside you, but that center can only be known through trust.

Sannyas is a jump into trust. It is getting involved in a love affair, a love affair with God himself. Less than that is of no use. Only a love affair can help.

The head will say that this is blind trust and it will condemn it in every possible way. But don't listen to the head; it is the devil who speaks through the head. Listen to the heart -- that is God's voice.

Jos is a form of Joseph, the name of the father of Jesus. Literally it means increasing faithfulness.

Bliss is possible only if you trust. It is not possible in a state of doubt. It never happens to the sceptical mind. In fact it never happens to any mind because more or less all minds are sceptical. It happens to the heart. The heart is always trusting, it is always faithful. It knows how to love, it knows how to be committed to love.

The mind is a coward; hence it cannot trust. It is suspicious, it is always afraid; out of fear it doubts.

Fear and doubt go together, trust and love go together. Doubt is not something to brag about. People brag about their doubting minds, they think that they are doing something great. They even think that they are very brave, that's why they can doubt. But doubt is rooted in cowardliness. To trust more guts are needed.

To trust it really needs great boldness. Trust is a sacrifice: sacrifice of the ego, sacrifice of fear, sacrifice of doubt, sacrifice of the head. But once one has been capable of doing this miracle, of moving from doubt to trust, from head to heart, from logic to love, then all kind of miracles become possible. Then you are entitled to incredible experiences.

It is symbolic that Jesus is born to Joseph, that Joseph is the father of Jesus. It can be translated into a beautiful symbol: enlightenment is born out of trust, trust is the father of enlightenment.

There are things which man can do and there are things which man can only allow to happen. Bliss belongs to the second category. You cannot do it but you can allow it to happen, you can be available to it, you can be open to it. All that is needed on your side is a deep trust, receptivity, love, surrender, let-go, and then it immediately starts happening. It is never your doing, it can never be your doing. Even when it is happening, if you start doing something about it, it will stop happening. Doing means undoing.

All that is great in life belongs to the second category. The first category is mundane, the second category is sacred. Bliss, love, truth, God, freedom -- they all happen. You cannot do anything, you are the barrier. When you are absent, when the ego is no more functioning, the heavens open and start pouring into you tremendous treasures of joy, inexhaustible treasures of truth. But it is always a gift from God. You cannot claim it as your doing. One can only be grateful.

Bliss is our potential but unless we work hard the potential can never become actual. It can't become 1/08/07

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actual by itself. It needs tremendous effort on our part to transform it from a seed into a tree, into flowers, into fruits.

The potential is like frozen ice: through hard work you can create the necessary heat to melt it. And once the ice starts melting your coldness starts disappearing and love arises. The more you flow, the more loving you are; the more you flow, the more close you are to god, because once you start flowing the ocean is not far away. Howsoever far away it may be, it is not far away. But if one is ice-cold, frozen, the ocean may be just by the corner and the difference is unbridgeable; the ice cannot move, it is stagnant. It has to be melted.

And we have to create the necessary heat to melt it. A sturdy spirit is needed.

People start... many people start meditating, working on themselves, but they are not sturdy. One day they will meditate and then another day they will sleep; for a few days they will work and then they will completely forget about it. And they go astray very easily, any accidental thing can take them away from their work. Great persistence is needed, perseverance is needed, patience is needed. And one has to go on and on hammering.

It is like digging a well. You go on digging. You will not reach the water level immediately although the water is there. But between you and the water there are many layers of earth, maybe rocks took and they all have to be removed. And it needs work.

Starting at one place and stopping then starting at another place and then stopping, then starting at a third place is a sheer wastage of time. It is better to work in a single direction with your total being, with your whole heart. Then the potential certainly becomes actual, and when the potential is actualised life is fulfilled. Then for the first time you know that there is great meaning.

The other name for that meaning is God.

Bliss is the beloved of all. Whatsoever we are doing, we are searching for bliss. In every act, right or wrong, moral or immoral, material or spiritual, the search is the same: the search for the ultimate beloved.

And that is bliss.

If one searches for bliss unconsciously one cannot find it. That's how many people go on searching and searching, and they always find only misery. And the more they reach, the more miserable they become. But the reason is that their search is unconscious. They have not yet become alert to what they are really seeking and searching for.

The moment you become aware that bliss is our goal, things become simple. God is not your goal, truth is not your goal. These are different names which you go on giving to bliss. All these names have to be removed so that you can face the ultimate goal in its sheer nakedness, because once you know what the goal is things become simple. Once you know the goal, immediately you know the path; once you recognise that bliss is our goal you need not go outside at all because bliss is our very nature. The way is in, not out. You have not to rush and run for it. You have to be more still and more silent.

And the moment that you are totally still and silent it wells up within you being. That moment is moment when one is really born. Before that one is only physiologically born, not spiritually. One is not a soul before that. Only after that does one become a soul, does one become an immortal, does one become a god.

Bliss is the ultimate state of flowering, when you become a flower, when you have realised your total potential. Bliss is the reward for growing to one's ultimate height. When you reach the sunlit peaks of your consciousness then only do you know what bliss it.

To be watchful is the way to attain bliss. That's what meditation is all about: being watchful, alert, aware, being watchful of what you do, being watchful of what you thing, being watchful of what you feel.

These are the three watchfulnesses, and if you can do these three then the forth arises in you: you become watchful of who you are.

Start by action because that is the grossest thing, visible, tangible, objective. Then move to thoughts.

They are a little less gross, invisible to others, only visible to you. Then move to feeling, which is even more subtle, more vague. Even to you it is not totally visible, only vaguely available.

If these three watchfulnesses can be fulfilled the fourth arises in you. Then you know who you are. Then you settle in your being. And to be absolutely unidentified with the body, mind and heart is the ultimate peak. Suddenly there is a showering of bliss. From all directions it starts showering on you, and then it goes on showering forever.

Anand means bliss; Adriana means creative heart -- a blissful and creative heart. That's the whole 1/08/07

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definition of sannyas.

Bliss is always creative, it can't be otherwise. And if the person who is creative is not blissful than all his creativity is bogus. He may be a compositor but not a creator. He may be putting things together in beautiful ways, he may know the art of painting, but he can't be a creative artist. He knows the technique, the how-to, but he is not a creative artist. He may know how to dance but he is not a dancer.

The dancer is one who loses himself in his dance and disappears in the dance. The real dancer, sooner or later forgets the technique, forgets the art; it becomes his life.

In Zen they say that if you really want to be a painter, for twelve years learn how to paint and then for twelve years forget all about painting, never touch the brush and never paint again. And after twelve years --

that means after twenty-four years, twelve years of painting and twelve years of silence -- start painting again. Now you have forgotten the technique, now you can be a painter. Now something can start moving from your very heart.

Bliss and creativity are two sides of the same coin. There are people who have been trying to be blissful without being creative and all have failed. All the monks and the nuns of the world have failed for the simple reason that they were trying something impossible. They were trying to be blissful without being creative. And being creative is an absolutely necessary part of it, an intrinsic part of bliss. You cannot drop it.

The same has happened to many artists, painters, musicians, dancers, poets. They had been trying to be creative without being blissful. And if you are miserable, what are you going to create? Your heart is dead!

You are so burdened, you are carrying Himalayas of misery. How can you sing? How can you paint? Your painting will simply be a catharsis.

That's what Picasso's paintings are, a catharsis. They helped him to unburden his misery, his insanity. If he were stopped and where not allowed to paint he would go insane. It is therapy through art but it is not creativity.

And exactly is the case with many poets, musicians, dancers and other kinds of artist. They are trying to be creative but they have nothing to share. They are almost dead, dull, unconscious, in such an inner turmoil and tension that whatsoever they create will reflect their pathology. The whole of contemporary art is pathological.

The monks and nuns failed because they were trying to do one thing, trying to be blissful without being creative. And the arts have failed because they have been trying just the opposite, being creative without being blissful.

My effort here is to create a new kind of man. My sannyasins have to be creative and blissful together because that's the only possible way to grow, to mature, to be. So remember it: be blissful and creative. And if you are blissful it is easy to be creative; if you are creative it is easy to be blissful. They help each other, they go on helping each other.

The highest peak is attained when both are fulfilled. One can call that state God, Nirvana, enlightenment or whatsoever one wants to call it... the kingdom of God, moksha, ultimate freedom. But it comes only to those few people who are trying both, who are creating a synthesis between bliss and creativity.

Hardy means strong and brave.

Bliss needs both qualities. Cowards cannot be blissful because cowards cannot be individuals. They remain part of the crowd -- and the crowd is insane, the crowd is a mess. The coward cannot be alone, he is so scared of being left behind. He always wants to follow the crowd. He feels good when he is surrounded by people, he feels as if he is safe, secure. And of course the crows is miserable and it expects you too to be miserable. If you are blissful the crowd thinks that you are mad, something is wrong with you.

One needs courage to get out of the structures that society imposes on everybody. One needs to be brave, to resist every kind of slavery, because only when you are utterly free of all slavery, all social conditioning, does your inner being start dancing. In freedom is dance, in freedom is bliss and in freedom is God.

A slave cannot know anything of value.

Bliss is naturally luminous. You cannot hide it. It is bound to explode, it is bound to reach others. It is like the fragrance of a flower. The flower cannot contain it, the winds are going to take it away, far far away. It is like a lamp. You cannot hide it, it shines forth. Even from very far away you can see it in the dark night -- just a small lamp, a candle. And bliss is a light, a flame. It is your heart aflame. When your 1/08/07

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heart has become a divine flame you feel bliss.

Nobody has ever been able to hide it, it shines forth. It is very bright, it is dazzling bright, in fact it is offensively bright, hence Jesus offends people, Buddha offends people. Not that they ever want to offend anybody, they are the humblest people possible, but nothing can be done about it. Their light is so dazzling, their love is such a perfume that it penetrates to the very core of other's people's being. Their joy is such that everybody feels inferior. They don't want anybody to feel inferior, in fact they declare "you are just as we are, we are not different. That is their whole message. Whatsoever they say is one thing, but still their very presence is enough for people to feel offended. They shrink in their inferiority, and out of that inferiority revenge arises; hence Socrates is poisoned, Buddha is stoned, Jesus is killed. These are, in a way, natural causes of death, these are not accidents. They were bound to happen.

The simple reason is that whenever your heart is full of bliss you become open, all windows and doors open up, and your light and your bliss and your presence starts reaching people. Those who understand will be healed by it, but there are very few people who will understand it. Those who don't understand will be hurt by it -- and they are in millions.

Hence the greatest risk in the world is to be blissful. The world loves miserable people, it respects them tremendously. Whenever somebody is utterly miserable it calls it holiness. It worships and respects miserable people as saints and mahatmas. The more they torture themselves, the more the people fall at their feet. But the world has never loved a man who is really blissful. The miserable person suits the miserable world perfectly well. They are on the same plane, they fit together, they hum together.

The blissful person becomes such a peak, he rises so high above the clouds, that we start feeling insulted. The only way is either to rise to the same height or to destroy that peak so that you can be at ease again, so that you can be at ease with the pygmy crowd, with the miserable lot.

Mind is a state of darkness, but one can rise above the mind and immediately all is light. Meditation means transcending the mind, getting out of the darkness into the light. Once you are in the light of no-mind, bliss arises. It does not come from the outside, it explodes within you. It is not something that is given to you by somebody; hence it cannot be taken away. It is your very nature. But one can see it only when there is light, one cannot see it in darkness. Hence the whole effort of all the mystics of all the ages has been single: to drop the mind and to go into a state of no-mind. And that's actually the process of sannyas too.

Unless one knows "I am something above the mind," one remains ignorant. The moment you know that the mind is only a mechanism -- you are not it, you are the watcher of it, the witness of it -- you have moved from misery into bliss, from the night into the day, from time into eternity.

In the East we make small earthen lamps. The lamp is earthen, made of mud, but the light is not earthen.

The flame is not the earth. The lamp belongs to the earth but the light, the flame, belongs to the beyond.

That's exactly the situation of our being: the body belongs to the earth and the soul belongs to the beyond. If we forget the soul completely and only start living as a body -- that's what millions of people are doing -- then we have forgotten our real home. Sooner or later we will be frustrated because the earthen lamp can never be eternal. It is bound to break at any moment, any small accident and it will be broken.

The body is temporal, a temporary residence. It is not your permanent address. And we have to search for the permanent address, because only by finding it will we be able to find something which abides forever. And to find something which abides forever is to find bliss, because it cannot be taken away from you.

To remain attached to the temporal, to the changing is to remain within the world of misery because the temporal will be taken away. You have invested so much in it but one day everything is taken away. Then it is natural to feel miserable.

Misery is rooted in attachment to the body and bliss is rooted in non-attachment to the body; hence all the great masters have been teaching methods and means of non-attachment, of getting disidentified with the body, with the mind, with everything surrounds you, and of just remaining a pure witness. That's what we are: pure witnessing, pure awareness.

And that's exactly my work here, to help you to experience it, to have a little taste of it. Once you have tasted it then there is no problem. You will go on moving towards it more and more. Just a drop of the nectar is enough to transform your whole life.

There is no bliss against life, although that has been the idea of the whole of past humanity, that to be 1/08/07

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blissful one has to go against life, one has to renounce life. That is the greatest error that humanity has committed up to now. Bliss is through life, in life, with life. Bliss is life.

Going against life is death. Renouncing life is simply renouncing the opportunity to grow, to be mature, to be; hence iI am against all kinds of renunciation. Renunciation is negative, life-negative, destructive. It has destroyed millions of people. Monks and nuns of all the religions have been victims. They suffered because of a mass hypnosis

My effort is absolutely against traditional religions. It may be Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, it doesn't matter. All the religions have been life-negative. They decided to be life-negative for the simple reason that that was the only way to prove who is holy and who is unholy: the people who love life are unholy. Everybody loves life -- that is natural. Then the holy man has to do something to prove that he is higher, superior. He has to do something just the opposite of the ordinary humanity. He has to be extraordinary, and nothing makes him more extraordinary than going against life. He starts swimming against the current. He becomes special, very special. But this is the way of the ego, not the way of God.

And the saints have been more egoistic than anybody else. They are not saints really. They are suffering from megalomania.

A really religious person is very ordinary. He has no claims to extraordinariness.

Be ordinary but be totally in it. Live the life that has been given to you with joy, with gratitude. It is god's gift. To me this is sannyas, this is a true religious life. When life is God then you are moving in the right direction.

God is not against life, otherwise why should he create it in the first place? God is absolutely for life. It is his creation. It is out of his love that he has created it. We have to live it so totally that the ego is lost in the living of it, that it disappears. And to live life egolessly is enough -- more than that is not needed at all.

It opens you towards God.

We take life for granted -- that is our fundamental ignorance. We never feel thankful for life. It is such a blessing. We are not worthy of it, we don't deserve it. it is given out of God's abundance, not because of our worth. We have not earned it. It is a gift, not a reward. And God gives because he has to give; he has so much.

One of the intrinsic phenomena of bliss is that it needs to be shared. All the old stories of creation somehow or other imply that God was alone and he started feeling very lonely; hence he created the world.

But I don't agree that he started feeling lonely and that's why he created the world. I have my own vision: God was alone and he started feeling so burdened with bliss that he wanted to share it, he needed people.

Not that he started feeling lonely -- that doesn't seem right. God feeling lonely doesn't fit, it is a contradiction in terms. But he started feeling so burdened with bliss, so overburdened, and there was nobody to share it with. How long can you dance alone? You need a partner. How long can you go on singing? You need somebody who will listen.

God gives because he has so much that he is heavy with bliss. Once we understand this, that we have not earned our life, we start thinking in different terms about the whole phenomenon. Then it is a blessing. And when life is a blessing prayer arises, thankfulness arises, gratitude is born. To be a sannyasin means the birth of gratitude.

From this moment start looking at everything as a blessing. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Even when you sometimes feel pain it is a blessing. You may not understand, but it is a blessing. One day you will understand and you will see that it was a blessing, that it was needed, absolutely needed, that it helped your growth. Even suffering is a blessing. It cleanses, it helps you to become integrated, it takes childishness away from you, it helps you to become mature. A certain ripeness arises out of suffering.

A man who has never suffered remains childish, juvenile, superficial. He can't understand life's deeper things. He thinks that life is just a merry-go-round, so from one sensation to another he goes on moving. He is continuously greedy and hankering for all kinds of toys. But they are toys.

The man who has suffered enough becomes mature. He can see that toys are toys -- not worth the labour, not worth the worry. He can understand the depth, and he can see other people's lives with more sympathy, with more compassion, with more love. Because he has suffered he knows what suffering is. That makes him more human. So suffering too is a blessing.

Watch, observe and try to find a blessing everywhere. Sometimes it is in disguise, sometimes not so 1/08/07

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much in disguise, sometimes utterly nude. But if you watch you will find it is always there; in success, in failure, in pain, in pleasure, in life, in death too. It is there in summer, it is there in winter, it is there in youth, it is there in old age. It is there in health, it is there is illness. I call that person religious who can see blessings everywhere, who cannot find any place, any point which is not a blessing.

It is only such rare people who attain to the ultimate.

Misery makes one mean, ignoble. Misery is a sin because out of misery only misery arises. The miserable person goes on radiating misery all around himself. He poisons all his relationships, he even poisons strangers. Whomsoever comes close to him, he sucks his energy. He is destructive in a very subtle way. He is negative, that's why he is destructive. He is like a black hole. He cannot be noble.

Only bliss is noble. When you are blissful you start sharing. Bliss has one intrinsic quality, it demands sharing, it asks you to share, because the more you share, the more it grows. It is an inexhaustible source.

The blissful person has a grace. The blissful person can never be mediocre. He is pure intelligence.

Nobility is not something that you can cultivate, but you can learn the ways of being blissful. And once your are blissful nobility comes of its own accord as a shadow. It is a by-product.

Misery has to be earned. It is through great effort that one becomes miserable. And to remain miserable is really a miracle! (laughter) Only very rare individuals can manage it. It needs extraordinary energy.

Bliss is simple, misery is complex. Bliss is natural, misery is unnatural. To main the unnatural you have to put all your energy into it -- to be natural you need not put any energy into it. But millions of people are miserable, and it is very rare to find a person who is not. So what has happened?

It is simple. To understand it is of immense significance. It is only through misery that the ego can exist, because you have to make an effort and you have to be constantly into it, creating it, maintaining it. Then the ego can remain. And if one loves the ego, then misery is necessary to keep the ego alive. In a state of bliss ego disappears because there is nothing left to do and ego can exist only as a doer. In bliss there is no need for the doer, it is simply our nature to be blissful. It is like health, health is simply our nature. Disease is an accident. So when you are healthy you don't ask how, why. When you are ill you ask "Why am I ill?

What is the cause of it?"

Misery has causes, bliss has no cause. You have to decide only one thing; if you are ready to drop the ego nobody can prevent you from being blissful.

So let sannyas be a dropping of the ego. And be blissful from this very moment. There is no need to go on maintaining your misery. Simple say "Enough is enough!"

Bliss is divine. it has nothing to do with human effort, hence it is divine. Misery is human, it is our work, it is our doing. Bliss has only to be allowed. We can prevent it from happening but we cannot create it.

It is as if the sun has risen but you stand confronting the sun with closed eyes and you remain in darkness. The sun is there, you can be in light, but you have decided not to receive the sun. Then you can remain in darkness. Open your eyes and the darkness disappears.

Misery is our decision. We have decided to be miserable, we have decided not to allow the bliss to happen. Although we go on saying that we want bliss, really we don't want it, we are afraid of it. That's my observation of thousands of people, they are very afraid of bliss. With misery they are well-acquainted, familiar, at home. With bliss they start moving into the unknown. With bliss they are at a loss as to what to do ore what not to do. In fact they become absolutely, superfluous, they are no more needed: bliss is enough! They have to evaporate. When man disappears, bliss appears.

And my work here is simply to help you disappear, to help you evaporate.

(a little chuckle) How long will you be here?

-- Till you send me away

-- No, I will never send you away!

Bliss is the most godly thing, misery the most ungodly. Misery is a sin, bliss is a virtue. But we have worshipped misery, we have worshipped people who were deliberately miserable. Sad, long faces became our saints. The dancers, the singers, the poets, the musicians -- they were not our saints. In fact they should be the saints because they enhance life, they make it richer, they give it more beauty, they leave the world a little better than they found it. That is the only way to serve god, to worship god.

Anything that creates bliss in you is sacred. So let bliss be the whole target of your life. In every 1/08/07

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possible way become more and more blissful. Don't be serious and don't be sad. The universe is a celebration, participate in the celebration. And you can participate only if you are cheerful. The stars are dancing, become part of the dance.

That's my teaching, that is my initiation into sannyas, to help you sing, to help you love, to help you dance.

Only a blissful person can bring truth to the world. It is only out of bliss that you become a vehicle of God. When one is blissful one becomes just a window. God can look through that window into the world and the world can look through the window into God. One becomes just a hollow bamboo, then God can sing many many songs through the flute. But those songs come from God. Our function is only one: not to hinder them, not to distort them.

It cannot happen in a state of misery. A miserable person is constantly distorting truth. He himself is in such a distortion. He himself is in so many pieces that whatsoever goes through him becomes something other than what is was. Just by passing through the distorted person, it becomes distorted. He is not empty; a miserable person is full of his misery. That is something tremendously significant to remember: a miserable person is very full -- of garbage, rubbish, but very full.

The blissful person is very empty. He is just space. And through this emptiness god can flow into the world.

Become empty, become blissful -- and they go together very well. If you are blissful you will become empty, if you are empty you will become blissful. It is impossible for the empty person to be miserable.

There is nothing left to be miserable about, you are not even there to be miserable. The emptiness is so total that there is no I left behind who can be miserable. The empty person is not a person at all; he is simply emptiness, an open sky, unclouded. Hence through the empty person all the beauty and the benediction and the blessing of God flows through. The empty person becomes his messenger, he brings truth to the world.

Jesus is an empty person, so is Buddha, so is Lao Tzu. And everybody can become that empty.

Meditation makes you empty on the one hand and on the other hand it makes you blissful. They happen simultaneously.

Bliss is our home. If we are living in misery we are living somewhere else, not in our own home. We are not living in our nature. We are living in something accidental. The moment you start living in your essential being, life is bliss. If you go astray... the farther away you go from you essential core, the more miserable you become. Misery is really the measurement of how distant you are from home.

So remember it: whenever you are more miserable that simply means that you have gone really far away from your home. Come back!

People go on doing a thousand other things rather than coming back home. If they are miserable they go on throwing the responsibility on others. The wife is creating the trouble, the husband thinks that's why he is miserable.... or the society or the state. There are a thousand and one excuses. One can always find them, they are always available. If you can't find them you can invent them. But no excuse is going to help, it simply prolongs your misery more. There is no excuse for your misery except the truth -- and the truth is that you are very far away from your being.

So whenever you are miserable go into meditation: become silent, watch your misery, become a witness to it, don't become identified with it, and you will be surprised that the more you watch, the less it is. And when you are perfectly watchful it simply disappears, as if it had never been there. Not even a trace is left behind. And suddenly you will find that the same energy that was becoming your misery has become a showering of bliss. You have come home.

We have to constantly come back home because our habit is to go astray. For lives together we have been going astray. For lives together we have been going astray. It has become habitual.

Sannyas means a determined effort to remember that "Whenever I am miserable I have to go back to my sources, to my roots." Slowly slowly you become aware of the whole process of misery and then you go away from your home less and less. More and more you become centred and more and more bliss is there.

When one is one hundred per cent centred and awareness is total, bliss is infinite, you have arrived home. Call it paradise, nirvana, moksha, liberation, but the most beautiful word is "home."

Sannyas is the return journey home.

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Query:-

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #5

Chapter title: Consciousness

5 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002055

ShortTitle: WITHME05

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

The goal of the meditator is to find out who he is. When one goes on enquiring "Who am I?" "Who am I?",slowly slowly, one comes to a point where action, thought, feeling -- all are negated, and there is nothing else left to negate any more. There is only pure consciousness. You cannot negate that. Who will negate it?

You are a pure knower, a seer.

To know this is the real beginning of life.

The lotus symbolises the ultimate flowering of consciousness.

Right now you are just like a bud, closed; hence your fragrance is not being released. Sannyas is a process of opening the petals of the lotus. Sannyas is like sunrise. Being with a master means entering into a sunlit world. And as the sun rises the lotus petals start opening, naturally -- they are not to be forced -- and then great fragrance is released. That fragrance is bliss, peace, celebration. One has come to fulfillment, one has come to be utterly contented because one has given whatsoever was one's destiny, one has poured it into existence. Whatsoever one was capable of contributing, creating, one has done it. That is the ultimate act of creativity, and naturally after that ultimate act one feels utterly satisfied, contented.

This happens in small activities also. When you do something creative a great contentment arises. When you finish a painting a silence falls over you. You feel fulfilled, meaningful, significant, you have done something. You have participated in God's work. He is a creator and you have been a creator in your own way, a small way of course, but you participated with God, you walked with God -- maybe only for a few steps, but you walked with God.

But the ultimate act of creativity is the flowering of your consciousness. After that you never leave God for a single moment. Then the whole pilgrimage is with him, within him. Naturally it is tremendously fulfilling. There can be not other fulfilment higher than that, greater than that. It is the very peak.

Florian means a flower of beauty. It can only bloom when your consciousness rises upwards.

Roses are beautiful, lotuses are beautiful, buth they are not flowers of beauty. They are beautiful flowers, of course, but not flowers of beauty. Flowers of beauty happen in your innermost core. They happen through inner growth, when you transform your potential into actuality. When you really become a being, when there is no more to life, when you have experienced life in its totality, then something flowers in you. That flowering brings you for the first time a gift from God.

There are many gifts from God -- birth is a gift, life is a gift, love is a gift -- but the ultimate gift is when your consciousness becomes a lotus. When one flower of beauty blooms in you. In Japan they call it satori, in India we call it samadhi. It can be translated as ultimate ecstasy.

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Query:-

Rebellion can be something on the outside, then it is political, social. But if rebellion is on the inside then it is religious, spiritual. Every rebellion on the outside has failed, because the people who have not gone through inner revolution cannot bring revolution to the outside.

First the revolutionary has to go through a revolution himself -- and he knows nothing of the inner world and its revolution. He has not moved from the unconscious to the conscious, from the mind to the state of no-mind. He has not yet moved from logic to love. He is still in deep ignorance of his own self. Nothing has happened inside him, and he wants to transform the whole world, change the whole world into a better world. He only creates more nuisance, he only messes things up more than they were before.

The whole credit goes to the revolutionaries. If the world is in such a mess it is because of so many revolutions. Utterly ignorant people, not knowing even the ABC of the inner world, are trying to change the world. With no light inside they are blind, and whatsoever they do is going to harem. Of course their intentions are good but just good intentions don't help. Somebody's intention may be good and he may operate on your appendix knowing nothing of surgery. He may not even be able to recognise the appendix.

His intention is good: you are in pain, he opens your stomach to remove the appendix. But he will do harm, he will kill you. And that's what has been happening in the world.

Only buddhas can bring revolution because they have gone through inner transformation themselves.

But not Marx or Lenin or Trotzky -- these people cannot bring revolution. They don't know anything of inner world. They are utterly blind.

Sannyas is basically, essentially an effort to change your inner world. I am not concerned with the social or the political structure., I am concerned with the structure of your consciousness, how your mind functions and how you can be the master of it. That is the revolution.

Only one revolution has never failed, but that happens very rarely. It happens in the individual heart, in the heart of a Jesus, in the heart of a Buddha. It can happen in your heart too. The thing that brings it is awareness.

The heart can exist either in darkness or in light, either unconsciously or consciously. When we start changing our energies from unconsciousness towards consciousness the heart goes through a radical change.

It is transmuted, transformed. It is no more the same heart. It is no more human, it is divine. Then god beats in it, then god works through it, flows through it.

Once you are awakened you start living life in a totally different way. Although your life remains the same you are no more the same. Your approach is different, your very style is different. You live more consciously. You don't go on groping in darkness. You live through the heart and not through the head.

Your life becomes love, compassion. It becomes a song, a dance, a celebration. And of course whomsoever comes in contact with you will be infected by it. It is contagious. It is like fire, wildfire: it goes on spreading.

I have chosen the color of fire, wild fire for my sannyasins. We have to surround the whole earth with wildfire. And once your inside rubbish is burned you will create many ripples around, naturally, spontaneously, which will affect the social structure, the economic structure as a consequence, as a by-product -- but not directly.

That is not our concern but it does happen. If many people are changed, it is bound to affect the society on the outside too. But that is not our goal. We are not interested in it.

Our interest is basically the change of your interiority. We have to make it full of light -- right now it is a completely dark continent.

There is a possibility either to fight with outer enemies or to fight with inner enemies. It is easy to fight with the outer enemies because they are visible. It is difficult to fight with the inner enemies because they are not visible and they have become so much a part of you that you don't think of them as separate. They are separate.

People decide to fight on the outside to avoid the inner war. They are afraid of the inner friction. But one grows through inner friction. There are paths which are based only on inner friction, for example, George Gurdjieff's method.

Its whole idea is to create inner friction in you and to help you to go beyond it. For example, if you want to fight then fight with your with your anger, greed. Of course it is not an ordinary fight and you cannot use ordinary weapons either. You will have to learn different kinds of strategies, you will have to learn a totally 1/08/07

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different methodology. That methodology is meditation, awareness. Gurdjieff used to call it self-remembering. Whenever you are in anger, remember yourself. In that very remembering the focus changes, the gestalt changes. You become more and more centred. Anger remains there just on the periphery of your being, but you know now that it is separate from you. You are not angry, you are only a witness to it. Now it is up to you to choose to be angry or not to be angry. You are no more identified; hence the freedom to choose.

Ordinarily you cannot choose. You don't have enough space to choose. You are so identified that when anger comes you are angry, it is not something separate. It overwhelms you. And so is the case with greed and other kinds of desire.

Sannyas means that the real war has to be fought within. The real victory has to happen within. And the basic strategy of the war is awareness. It is through awareness you will be able to transform all your enemies into your friends. That is true victory. It is not destructive, it is transformative.

And one who is a master of oneself is really a master. His is the kingdom of God.

Kabira is a Sufi name for God; it means the vast one. It is also the name of one of the greatest mystics of the East, the only mystic who comes very close to Jesus, because he was as poor as Jesus.

Jesus was a carpenter's son and Kabira was a weaver's son; both speak the same fiery language, with the same rebellion in their heart. Buddha and Mahavira are soft-spoken; they come from royal families, very cultured. Even if they want to hit they will hit in a very civilised way.

Kabira and Jesus are totally different. They come from the lowest classes. They are absolutely uneducated, uncultured, very raw but very alive too. In fact because they are so raw they are so alive. Their message simply goes into the heart like an arrow. They are pure fire.

Become a blissful rebel. Revolution is political, rebellion is spiritual. Revolution wants to change something on the outside, rebellion changes your consciousness. And it is only by transforming your consciousness totally that you will become vast, godlike, and you will attain to ultimate bliss, truth, love, freedom.

We can exist either as minds or as no-minds. If we exist as minds we become machines because mind is a machine. It is just a biocomputer... very skilful, very capable and immensely valuable, but if you exist as the mind you lose all freedom. You become encaged in a small mechanism, the mechanism becomes your boundary.

And mind can function only according to the past because mind means past. It is accumulated experience and knowledge, information. And when you function as the past you lose contact with the present, and the present is the only reality. To be in contact with the present one needs to go a little higher than the mind, a little above the mind. You are consciousness, which is a totally different phenomenon.

That's the goal of the meditator: to find out who he is. When one goes on enquiring "Who am I? Who am I?' slowly slowly one comes to the point where body is negated, mind is negated, heart is negated; action, thought, feeling -- all are negated and there is nothing else left to negate any more. There is only pure consciousness. You cannot negate that. Who will negate it?

You are a pure knower, a pure seer. And to know it is the real beginning of life. Then one is truly born, born in God. Then life has a different flavour. It is a dance, it is a song, it is a celebration.

We are not the body and we are not the mind either. Mind is also part of the body. The visible part is called body, the invisible part is called mind. It is a psychosomatic mechanism and we are the witness of it.

We are in it but we are not it.

This is the greatest experience. Once it has happened your life goes through a radical change. Then you are never the same again. It is a breakthrough.

The whole effort here is to bring this breakthrough closer and closer. Every support, every technique and device is provided for this breakthrough so that you can see yourself as a witness of it all, as pure consciousness.

To know oneself as pure consciousness is to be free of all bondage. It is to be free of birth and death, it is to be free of time. It is to become part of eternity, it is to become part of God. And that is liberation, that is nirvana, that is the ultimate goal of life, the summun bonum.

Silence can be superficial. If you cultivate it, it will be superficial. That's what many people go on 1/08/07

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doing; sitting still in a certain posture, trying to force the mind to be silent. If you go on doing it for a long time you create a kind of auto-hypnosis and you start feeling a certain silence. You can use a mantra and you can chant it. That will be again nothing but an auto-hypnotic device. You can visualise Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and that too is nothing but an effort to repress the mind by a certain visualisation process.

In the name of meditation... ninety-nine per cent are auto-hypnotic devices. What Maharishi Mahesh Yogi calls transcendental meditation is neither transcendental nor meditation; it is just a non-medical tranquilliser. It helps you to attain a superficial silence. It does not transform you, it cannot -- that is beyond its capacity. For a few days you can play with it and then you start seeing that it is just futile, you are stuck at a point.

Deep silence means silence that comes out of awareness; not by chanting a mantra, not by any visualisation, not by imagination, but just by watching the mind and its subtle ways, its cunning ways, just by being an observer, looking into the matters of the mind, into the very process of the mind -- the way it functions, how a thought arises, how it becomes a cloud around you, how it disappears -- as if it has nothing to do with you. You are just a spectator. And you are not doing anything, no mantra, no technique --

nothing. You are simply watching, a natural process. You are not imposing anything upon the mind, you are not trying to force the mind to be quiet. You are not saying to the mind "Shut up!" You are simply seeing the game, all kinds of games that the mind plays.

It is a multi-dimensional game. Desires are there and memories are there and imagination and the past and the future and a thousand and one projections, hopes, expectations. Just go on watching with no condemnation, neither condemning nor getting identified: just remaining aloof, cool, unconcerned, as if one is standing by the side of the road looking at the traffic. Then one day real silence happens. Suddenly the road is there but the traffic has disappeared. And you have not done anything to make it disappear so it can't be anything forced, cultivated. It has happened on its own, it happens of its own accord.

As your watchfulness becomes stronger, the mind becomes weaker. When the watchfulness is one hundred per cent, the mind is zero. When the mind is one hundred per cent, the watchfulness is zero. It is the same energy -- it can either become watchfulness or it can become the mind, thinking, desiring. When you are watching you are withdrawing the energy from the mind. It is getting more and more involved in watchfulness.

One day when one hundred per cent of the energy has become centred, the mind simply disappears. It is just as dreams disappear in the morning when you wake up. It is an inner awakening. And then you know for the first time what real silence is, what deep silence is.

Only that deep silence can take you to the ultimate, to God, to truth. Only that deep silence can liberate you from all kinds of illusions, from all kinds of despair, miseries.

The only thing in life which is absolutely constant is awareness. Everything else goes on changing. The body changes every moment, the mind changes every split second, the world goes on changing. If you look outside you cannot find anything that is not in a flux. But if you look inside then one centre can be found which is not part of the world of change. That's your awareness, your consciousness.

Consciousness is the only constant phenomenon. To know what consciousness is, is to know God, because to know consciousness is to go beyond time, beyond change. It is entering into the world of eternity.

Man tries in every possible way to achieve bliss, by accumulating money, by becoming powerful, by becoming respectable, by becoming knowledgeable. But all these ways are doomed to fail. They cannot bring bliss to you. Bliss comes only in one way and that is by your becoming more conscious. The more you are conscious, the more you are blissful; the less conscious, the more miserable.

Ordinarily, if we divide our being into ten parts, then only one part is conscious, nine parts are unconscious. And that's exactly the proportion of misery and bliss in our life. In ten days there is one day when you feel at home, relaxed, happy, joyous. You can feel the beauty of nature. You are more sensitive, more loving, more open, restful, and the world seems to be your home... But it is only for one day and then again for nine days it is hell. Those nine days are too much, and that one day seems to be almost illusory compared to those nine days of misery. If somebody has to live nine days in hell and one day in heaven he is bound to think that that one day must have been a dream. Because the reality is this, that nine days you are in hell. This is real. The proportion it too great.

Being a sannyasin means that now efforts will be made to make more and more parts of your being conscious. Slowly slowly, as consciousness becomes bigger and unconsciousness shrinks, you become 1/08/07

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blissful, more and more blissful. You start opening up like a flower. We are like buds, closed, as bliss comes you become a flower. In the East we say that one becomes a lotus, a one-thousand-petalled lotus. Everybody is carrying the seed, the bud, but great effort is needed to be conscious. Unconsciousness has been our habit for so many lives that it has almost become our nature.

So from this moment try to be more and more conscious in everything that you do, in everything that you think, in everything that you feel. These are the three dimensions. In all these three dimensions you have to be more watchful, more alert, more of a witness. Between these three arises the fourth, the witness and that is your true nature.

Once you have learned how to create the witness you know the secret art, you know the alchemy of transforming the dark continent in your being into light.

Chinmayo means consciousness, pure consciousness. That is going to be your meditation. Walking, walk consciously, as if you are surrounded by danger on every side -- wild animals are there and you have to be very cautious and alert -- as if you are walking on a tightrope: slight unawareness and you will fall. So you have to be alert. Your life is at risk.

And that is exactly the case: we are walking on a tightrope, completely drunk. The whole credit goes to the rope! How does it maintain us? It is a miracle to see people walking and not falling apart into pieces, somehow keeping themselves together, totally unaware. No light inside, no centre inside, no rootedness, still somehow go on dragging.

Walk, but walk consciously and then you will slowly see how you have walked before. Eat, but eat consciously. All small things have to be done consciously and then slowly slowly the last thing can also be done consciously -- that is sleep. And the day that one can sleep consciously the ultimate in consciousness has been achieved. That very day one becomes awakened. Then all sleep disappears forever. I don't mean physical sleep, I mean metaphysical sleep. All unconsciousness disappears forever.

So you are not to make meditation a separate thing in your life that you will do every day for one hour.

No -- it has to spread over your whole life. Cleaning the floor, washing the clothes, cooking the food, taking care of the home -- whatsoever you are doing let it all be meditative, conscious. In this way twenty-four hours a day can be devoted to meditation. And each act that you do with consciousness will become more efficient, more beautiful, more graceful. Naturally, a man who eats consciously cannot eat more than is needed, he cannot eat less than is needed. But the man who eats unconsciously goes on stuffing, he does not know when to stop. He can eat too much, and then he can move like a pendulum to the other extreme. If he eats too much naturally he suffers. Because of the suffering he move to the other extreme; he eats so little that it is not sufficient for his bodily needs. He may start dieting.

[missing page: 178]

Accidental from the intrinsic, the natural from the artificial, the inevitable from the arbitrary. All this becomes possible only through a single thing, awareness.

So paramhansa simply represents awareness. Become more and more aware so that you can see what is worthless and what is valuable. The moment you start seeing what is worthless, the worthless starts disappearing from your life because you cannot cling to it anymore. In your seeing that it is worthless, it drops from your hands of its own accord. Not that you have to renounce it, not that you have to make an effort to drop it -- it drops easily. You don't feel any regret, you don't repent and you don't brag about it, that you have renounced it.

How can you brag if you see that it is worthless? And the moment you see the worthless you are bound to see that which is really valuable. And to see the valuable is to do it! You can't do otherwise. Seeing becomes doing. Awareness becomes action.

I don't teach character, I teach consciousness, because consciousness character.

[There follows two interviews with: Ma Ananda Vandana and Ma Anand Sarita, which are not included here.]

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If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #6

Chapter title: Prayer

6 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002065

ShortTitle: WITHME06

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

God is for gamblers who can risk all for the unknown. The gambler is not really interested in winning.

His whole interest is in gambling. When he risks, time stops for him, mind stops for him, his heart misses a beat. that is his joy. In that suspense he unknowingly tastes something of meditation.

We are doing it here very knowingly, deliberately. I am teaching you to be gamblers. I am asking you to risk your life, and to risk it for the unknown. Worship means risking all that you have in the search.

[There is an interview with Ma Anand Savita which is not included here.]

Prayer does not mean talking to God, because God understand no language, or, he understand only the language of silence.

To me utterly in silence is prayer, not repeating certain formulas, The Lord's Prayer and this and that and all that nonsense. Prayer cannot be reduced to words, all words falsify prayer. And that's what all the religions have been teaching people: words and words.

True prayer is the art of silence. One is simply silent, with no motive, because if there is a motive silence cannot be true. The motive will remain there, lurking around. If one is silent for the sheer joy of being silent then it is prayer.

And the second thing to remember.... The first is, no word is needed, the second is, coming with God means listening to him, not saying something to him. Be silent and listen. The chirping of the birds and the wind passing through the trees and the sound of running water -- listen to it all. This is how God is speaking, giving his messages. He will not come like an Old Testament prophet and shout at you. He is not a person, he is a presence. And if you are silent you can feel the presence. There is nothing to say but much to feel, nothing to say but much to listen to. And the beautiful things about silence is, it is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan.

When you are listening you are receptive, vulnerable, open. That vulnerability, that openness, creates great joy in you because for the first time you drop all bondages. At least for the moment you are out of the prison, in the open, under the sun, under the moon. for the first time you feel the wind, the sun. these are all ways of contacting god.

He comes through the heart, but he can come only when the heart is utterly silent, absolutely still.

God need not be advised, and your advice cannot be of any meaning; the very effort is stupid. People are hiding their desires behind their prayers. Their prayers are only a facade; they want to snatch something from god. There is desire, and whenever there is desire, prayer disappears.

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Prayer means a total acceptance of whatsoever is. Desire means that something else is needed, this is not enough, more is needed. And when there is the desire for more, how can you be silent? There will be turmoil within. There are millions of desires, so you will be crowded, suffocated. You cannot be at ease and you cannot be at rest. And prayer is a deep rest, a rest in existence, a relaxation so deep that you disappear totally.

To be in prayer means to be available to god, to his creativity, to be open, to be utterly silent, relaxed, to be a non-being, so that he can possess you. You are so empty of yourself that he is bound to possess you.

Prayer is a gesture from your side that "I am ready to be possessed. I am ready to be overwhelmed --

come to me!" And that too has not to be said, that is just a feeling in every fibre of your body, mind, soul.

How long will you be here?

-- A year.

-- That's very good! Do many groups. And those who come for one year never go back! (laughter)

-- I don't want to go away.

-- There is no need to go -- you have come home!

Mediation is the only true prayer. All else that goes on in the name of prayer is mind stuff. It is utterly useless. You can go on talking to God for lives together, but you will never be heard.

Real prayer is not verbal. It has to be out of silence. Silence is simply silence, it does not belong to any religion. It certainly belongs to the religious heart. It is the very center of the religious heart but it is not part of any dogma, doctrine, church.

A really religious person is free of all Christianity, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism. Because "isms" as such are something in the mind. They are ideology, philosophy, thinking. And thinking is never silent, thinking is a always a turmoil. Silence means a thought-less stillness. When there is no thought in you, when nothing stirs, you are in prayer.

Because meditation is difficult, priests all over the world invented prayers, prayers which can be done by anybody. Even a small child can be taught so that he repeats them like a parrot every night -- out of fear, because the mother and the father, all are after him: "Have you said your prayers or not?" So he has to do it, and then it becomes a habit: when you are grown up you continue saying the same prayer every night. If you don't do it, it will be difficult for you to sleep because a routine is missing. If you say it, you gain nothing.

It is just like a habit. A few people like to have a cup of coffee before they go to sleep, a few people like to have a little smoke before they go to sleep, and a few religious people like to do some praying -- but it is all the same! (laughter) There is no qualitative difference, just a routine. sleep needs a certain ritual: make love, smoke a cigarette or jog or do something else!(laughter) Even if you enter your bed from the wrong side you will find it difficult to go to sleep. In a new room it is difficult to sleep. It takes at least three days to settle into a new room, into a new house.

Prayer also can become part of ritual. That's what it has become all over the world. It is not prayer. It is an invention of the cunning priest, a toy to play with.

Real prayer is meditation. Meditation is hard work. You have to transform much in your being, you have to drop much rubbish. You have to empty your head, you have to move more and more close to the heart.

You have to become more silent and still. And when you are utterly silent God speaks, not in a certain language -- he has no language. But through silence there is a communion. It is a totally different way of giving a message. You start hearing the message; not only that, you start living the message. Once you have heard from God in you deep silence, you have to follow it -- you cannot do otherwise, and not out of any sense of duty but out of sheer joy. The more you follow those subtle guidelines that happen in you silence, the more and more your silence deepens, the more and more you become available to God. He can communicate more. Then meditation becomes your very being. Then it is not something special to do, it becomes your ordinary life.

Cooking, you are meditatively cooking, taking a shower, you are meditatively taking a shower. Even while sleeping you are meditatively sleeping. When meditation has become just like breathing or the heart beating, then you have come home.

Praise is the very essence of prayer. If you can praise life and all its gift you are bound to encounter god.

People only condemn, their very being is negative. They are very vocal in negating, in saying no, in condemning. And not only the ordinary people but the so-called religious people are also condemnors, they 1/08/07

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are great poisoners. They don't teach people how to praise life and its blessings, they teach people how to condemn life, how to negate life. Their idea of God is that he is an enemy of life. On one hand they go on saying that God created life, on the other hand they go on teaching people to renounce life. This is such an absurdity, but it has been perpetuated for so long that nobody sees its contradiction.

If God created life then it can't be renounced. To renounce it will be to renounce God himself. It is because of this that George Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples that all the saints are against God. His statement has tremendous significance. The saints teach people to go away from life. That can't be God's intention. If he creates life and he goes on creating it, that means that he wants you to live it in its totality.

He wants you to live it with gusto, with fervour, with joy. He wants you to transform life into a love affair.

and that's what praise is.

Look at the stars, at the sun, at the trees, at the people. We are living in such a wonderful world but we are so blind and so deaf that we don't hear the music that surrounds us and we don't see the beauty that is constantly showering on us. And when we start seeing it, praise arises, silent praise. Nothing has to be said in particular. What can be said? -- all words are inadequate. But one bows down in silence, in gratitude.

That is prayer.

Prayer is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian. How can it be Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian? It is just the silent, singing heart, full of joy, full of thankfulness.

Praise is the very foundation of prayer. One who can praise has a heart ready to jump into prayer.

It is difficult to praise, it is easy to condemn. It is easy to condemn because through condemnation the ego feels nourished. Through condemnation you reduce people to being lower than you, you become higher, holier, superior. That's how the ego exists, it always reduces everybody to a lower status.

Praise means raising the other higher than you. It is poison for the ego. When you praise each and everything, when the whole universe becomes an object of your praise, the ego disappears. And the disappearance of the ego makes you available to god. Only when the ego has completely gone can God descend in you. The ego has to vacate the heart, only then can God enter in.

God simply means the whole. Ego means you are trying......

[page missing?....195]

.... is in gambling. When he risks, time stops for him, mind stops for him, his heart misses a beat. For a moment it is as if the whole world stops, everything is in a suspense. That is his joy. In that suspense he unknowingly tastes something of meditation.

We are doing it here very knowingly, deliberately. I am teaching you to be gamblers.... not in the ordinary sense, I am not asking you to risk your money. I am asking you to risk your life and to risk it for the unknown. There is no guarantee, there can never be any guarantee for it, because if there is a guarantee it is business. It is no more gambling.

Worship means risking all that you have for the search of what it is all about. This mysterious universe, this infinite existence, this beginningless, endless life -- what is it all about?

God is only a name for all this, for this totality. If it is only curiosity one becomes a philosopher. If it is only a ritual one becomes a Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. But if it is a deep love affair then one becomes a sannyasin.

Worship can be out of fear or out of greed but then it is not worship at all. That is what is know to people as worship. In the temples, in the mosques, in the churches, in the synagogues you will find people who are either afraid or greedy.

It is very rare to come to the third category because the third category rarely exists. The third category consists of those people who worship just out of gratitude, because god has given so much. They don't desire any more, they are not greedy. They are not afraid. How can they be afraid when god exists? How can there be hell when God is? It is impossible, God and hell don't fit. All those tortures of hell simply prove that there is no god. If hell is a reality then God must be unreal. Then devil is a reality. The devil fits perfectly well with hell. If God is, then there is no hell. That is enough proof that hell does not exist.

But this is strange, a very strange phenomenon, that people have been arguing against God but nobody has argues against hell. I have come across thousands of books which argue against God saying that there is no God. but I have not come across a single book which argues that there is no hell or which argues that 1/08/07

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there is no devil. It appears very strange but when you give it a second thought it has a certain logic: we are so miserable that we can accept hell easily. We are already in hell, how can we disprove it? And we are surrounded by all kinds of evil forces. We have created them, we have released them. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung are enough proof that the devil exists. Our world is enough proof that there is hell, and certainly hell will need somebody to control, to dominate, to rule over it; hence nobody says that there is no hell, nobody says that there is no devil, but thousands of people have argues against God.

The real worshipper is one who looks at the beauty of existence. Although we have contaminated everything, still it is beautiful; we have not been successful although we have destroyed much we cannot destroy the whole. Still the beauty lingers, still trees dance and birds sing and stars go on showering light, life. And the celebration continues, only man has been lagging behind. He has become heavy and he is no more part of the celebration of existence.

The real worshipper is one who becomes part of this celebration. He dances with the trees, he sings with the birds. He is blissful and grateful; out of his bliss he is bound to be grateful.

So I don't teach you God, I teach you bliss, because this is my observation: if you are blissful then you are bound to be grateful to God, then you are bound to find God. You cannot avoid it, it is inevitable. To the blissful heart God simply happens.

So worship has neither to be out of fear nor out of greed, but out of bliss. Then it is true and it has a tremendous beauty of its own. It brings freedom.

Religion has to be a conscious decision because it is going to be a commitment. For example, you are entering into sannyas, this is religion, this is your decision. This is not out of any conditioning. This is falling in love!

Now worship becomes possible. And when I say worship I don't mean that you have to worship a certain statue with certain prayers. By worship I simply mean looking at existence with worshipful eyes, eyes full of wonder and awe, with a heart full of praise. To look at existence with wonder and awe is worship, because through that wonder and awe one starts feeling the presence of God.

And once you start feeling the presence of God then nothing can take it away from you. No argument, no proofs, no logic can take it away from you. It becomes your authentic experience, nobody can destroy it.

It becomes your very foundation. And for the first time you know that you are not an accident, that you are intrinsically related to existence, that existence needs you as much as you need existence, that you are not really separate but interdependent.

To feel that is to be blissful. To feel that is to rejoice.

Daso means servant -- servant of God, one who is ready to serve existence, one who is ready to worship God through service. All other worship is mere ritual. Real worship is service. Service is pouring your love wherever it is needed -- on the trees, on the rocks, on animals, on human beings. Everybody has an inexhaustible source of love -- and love is a healing force. So wherever you find any suffering, pour your love, shower you love. You will be surprised, love heals. And love heals not only the person you shower it upon, it heals you too, simultaneously.

When you see somebody becoming whole a great joy arises in you. Even in seeing the seeds that you have sown in the soil growing up, and becoming plants something inside you also starts growing with them.

That's the beauty of creativity: it creates something on the outside about which the whole world knows, it creates something in the inside of which only you are aware. And the inner is the real, the more precious.

The outer is only a spin-off, a by-product.

Service is creativity. and by serving existence one comes closer to God, otherwise there is no way to come close to him. Love, be compassionate, share whatsoever you have. Share your very being and don't be a miser. That's the way of sannyas. You may not go to the church and you may not go to the temple but God is bound to happen to you. He is going to come to you, you need not worry. He always comes to the person who has fulfilled the basic requirement, and the basic requirement is unconditional love. That's what I mean by service.

To be blissful is the only true prayer. there is no need to ask anything from god, he already knows. all that is needed on our part is a blissful surrender. Joyously we should surrender ourselves to god. and that is enough, then god starts taking care. He is very caring but we don't allow him to take care of us.

Sannyas means leaving everything to God, and whatsoever happens -- good or bad, pain or pleasure --

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always feeling grateful for it.

There is no other prayer than love. All other prayers are false substitutes. Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan -- all prayers are just toys. Man has been deprived of love so he has been supplied by the society, the church, the state with some false toys.

It is just like when a child is deprived of the mother's breast we give him something false, a rubber breast. And the child is deceived, he goes on sucking on the rubber thing. But a child can be forgiven, a child is after all a child; he is not aware of the cunningness of grown-up people.

But as far as reality is concerned we are all deceived. Prayer has been given to us just as a substitute because love has been taken away. Something is needed, because love is a basic need: so don't love human beings; love God, love humanity. Now where is humanity? You will never come across humanity.

Whenever you meet it you will meet a human being. Don't love human beings; love humanity, an abstraction. Don't love the world, the concrete world; love God, an abstraction. And we call this love for abstractions, prayer.

My effort here is to bring prayer back to its reality, back to the earth, back to the concrete. the abstract has exploited man too long and too much. we have to get rid of great abstract words -- humanity, freedom, communism, God, Christianity -- just words.

Love the concrete: human beings, animals, trees, birds. Love the real that is prayer. The whole universe is his temple. Love more and more and you will become more and more religious. You will not become a Christian and you will not become a Hindu; you will become more and more religious.

Religion has nothing to do with all these isms. Religion is a quality of the heart. A heart which is overflowing with love, that is what true religiousness is.

[An interview follows with Ma Prem Divya, ms pg 200-202, about prayer, in verses, which is not included here.]

Meditation is the greatest adventure in life, because it is easier to go out -- all our senses are out-going --

it is difficult to come in. To come in means transcending nature, transcending the ordinary laws of nature. It is the greatest conquest. One has to be a masterful warrior.

The fight is with one's own consciousness, with one's own darkness, with one's own lethargy, sleep, inattentiveness -- in short, with one's own mind.

It is easy to fight with somebody else because you can see the enemy there, outside, you can define the enemy. The mind is so close to you that you feel almost one with it; hence the difficulty. The first step is to create a distance between you and your mind so that your mind is also separate from you. Then the fight starts.

It is a very non-violent fight. It is more of a transformation than a fight, because we are not going to destroy the mind, we are going to use the mind as a stepping stone towards the state of no-mind. But still in the beginning it looks like a fight, and one has to be very very alert, intelligent. Only then is there a possibility of winning over it, of becoming victorious.

Sannyas is the beginning of a great adventure, the greatest in life.

Bliss happens only to those who know what loyalty is. Bliss happens only in the heart, never in the head.

The head is like a desert: nothing grows there. It is only in the heart that everything that is of any value grows -- love, meditation, God, bliss, peace, silence. Anything that has any value, any eternal value, grows in the heart. But the functioning of the heart and the head are totally opposed to each other. And we are trained for the head -- that becomes a problem.

The head is based on doubt and the heart is based on trust. Our whole training is of doubting, thinking, suspecting, questioning. And that is not the way of the heart; hence we remain hung-up in the head. There are very few people on the earth who know that the heart exists. For others it is only a metaphor, poetry, fiction, not fact; at the most just a pumping mechanism for the blood. But that is not the heart that mystics have been talking about.

There is a center deep down inside you, but that center can only be known through trust. Sannyas is a jump into trust. It is getting involved in a love affair, a love affair with God himself. Less than that is of no use. Only a love affair can help.

The head will say that this is blind trust and it will condemn it in every possible way. But don't listen to 1/08/07

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the head; it is the devil who speaks through the head. Listen to the heart -- that is God's voice.

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #7

Chapter title: Music

7 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002075

ShortTitle: WITHME07

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

Once the mind is gone

there is no need of meditation.

One is simply pure music,

celestial music, sacred music.

That music has been called by different names;

Tao, Dhamma, God.

Man is carrying within himself a tremendous capacity for music. when I say man I mean every man. and when I say music I don't mean ordinary music. Not everybody can be a musician in the ordinary sense. Only few have that talent. It is something inborn, innate.

My meaning of music is totally different. I mean the inner experience of harmony. It is far more musical than any music that can be created. It is uncreated music. No instruments are needed, no training or expertise is needed. All that is required of you to listen to its deep silence. It is already there. It is your very life. The Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping.

In ordinary music there are always two things needed, only then can sound be created. If you are playing a guitar then you have to use your hands on the strings. Only through the tension created by your fingers will the strings create music. But the inner music is something which is already there from the very beginning. It is just like your heartbeat; a little deeper than that, a little more mysterious than the heartbeat.

It is the beat of your true heart.

Man has two hearts. One belongs to his body, the other belongs to his soul. When you start hearing the heartbeat of the soul, you hear something which can only be called celestrial music. And once you have heard it within yourself you will be able to hear it in the sound of running water, in the wind passing through the pine trees, in the songs of the birds, in the silence of the night and even in the noise of the marketplace.

Meditation is needed to make the mind silent and quiet, and as the mind becomes quiet the music starts happening to you. It was already happening but you were not aware of it. And once you have heard it, it pulls you inwards like a magnet, it pulls you to the very centre of your being. And it is there at the very 1/08/07

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centre of your being that all the mysteries are revealed.

Meditation is only a preparation. Meditation is an antidote to mind. Mind is a disease, meditation is the medicine. In fact the words "meditation" and "medicine" come from the same root. Once the mind is gone there is no need of meditation either; hence when meditation is perfect it ceases to be. Then one is simply pure music, celestial music, sacred music. That music has been called by different names: tao, dhamma, god.

Become a song and you become a sannyasin. A song has a few qualities which are basic requirements for a sannyasin too.

The first quality is that a song is a celebration. So is sannyas, sannyas is not renunciation but rejoicing.

The second quality of a song is that it is not a syllogism. It is illogical. You cannot understand it through logic. It is not an argument. It neither tries to prove anything nor to disprove anything. It simply rejoices for no reason, with no motive at all. It is like the birds singing in the early morning. A sannyasin also has to live that kind of life. That quality has to be imbibed.

Be less concerned with logic and more concerned with joy. A logical mind becomes joyless, because joy is basically illogical. And a joyful person drops logic. He has to drop it, it is an unnecessary burden. You cannot carry the rock of logic and yet dance and sing.

And the third quality of a song is that it is rooted in the heart, it comes out of the source of love. So does sannyas, it is exactly like that. It is rooted in the heart, not in the head, and it comes out of your love. It is not a conclusion arrived at by the mind. It is a quantum leap, a jump into the unknown for the sheer joy of moving into the unknown, not knowing where you are going, why you are going, not even bothering about where and why.

It looks mad to those who cling to logic, love has always looked mad to those people. But love is a madness which is a higher kind of sanity, because it is only through love that one achieves God.

Anugito means a small song.

My sannyas is not a serious affair. In the past monks and nuns and all kinds of religious people have been very serious. Their seriousness destroyed religion on the earth, their seriousness was like a heavy rock.

My sannyas is like a weightless flower: you have to know how to love, how to sing, how tod dance, because only through learning to celebrate does one come across the divine. The serious person never knows God, can never know.

God is not serious at all. You may meet him in deep laughter but you will not meet him in seriousness.

You may meet him in dancing, in singing, but you will not meet him if you are sad, heavy, long-faced.

So be light-footed, be light, just like a flower, weightless, as if gravitation has no effect upon you. Be light-hearted, take life as fun. That is the most fundamental thing about my sannyas. And then slowly slowly you become a small song, a song that can be offered to God.

Anandgit means a bliss song.

Remember one thing, that seriousness is a disease. And religion has been ill because off serious people.

We have to introduce a little playfulness into religion, a little drama into the churches, a little colourfulness, a little poetry. Churches have almost become cemeteries. Temples are so dead that it is impossible for God to exist there. He may still exist in the mountains, in the forests, in animals, in people, but the temples and the mosques and the churches seem to be the last places where you will find him.

The reason is that all these places have been dominated by ill people, pathological people. My effort here is to bring a totally new kind of religiousness; a religion that can sing, a religion that can dance, a religion that can love, a religion that can celebrate.

And each of my sannyasins has to become a proof of it.

One has to become joy and one has to learn to keep oneself joyous in spite of the circumstances. That's the whole art, the true art of being in life and yet above it. One should be able to dance, to sing, to celebrate and yet remain centred. Nothing should be capable of distracting you from your centre. Every experience of life should be used as a stepping stone to become more centred.

In pain, be centred; know perfectly well that it will pass away, so there is no need to be worried.

Everything passes away. Keep cool. And when happiness arrives, don't become too excited. That too is going to pass away. In life nothing remains, nothing abides. Everything goes on passing. Life is a flux. But 1/08/07

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your awareness remains the same, it is always the same. It is the only eternal thing in existence.

As you become more and more watchful of life's fluxes, changes, slowly slowly you become aware of something inside you, that in contrast to life is never changing. That moment is the explosion of light, of love, of joy. Then one becomes a song. And only if we become a song can we offer something to God. If we bloom like a flower then we can offer ourselves to God. Otherwise we have nothing, we have nothing, we are just empty, hollow, full of rubbish.

But that need not be so. The rubbish can be transformed, it can be used as manure. That's what we are doing here: we use everybody's rubbish as manure to grow flowers!

Sannyas is a love affair. It is not religious in the ordinary sense. It is far more poetic, far more lyrical, far more musical. It is more of an art than the so-called religions. It is not like christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. It is a totally new phenomenon, it is a new beginning. It has no tradition, it has no past. It is a new dawn.

And my message is of love.

Jesus says that God is love and I say that love is God. That's where we agree and that's where we differ too. My sannyasins love to become love songs, they have to become lovebirds! If you start being a song, a dance, only then will you know the alchemy of sannyas, how it transforms you, how easily, without any fuss, it brings purity to you, innocence to you. You become a saint, a sage, but without any fuss. You don't become a pious egoist, you don't start proclaiming " I am holier than others." You don't know anything about holiness. All that you know is that you love life and that you love life wholly, totally.

That is real worship and real prayer: to love life totally, unconditionally, to enjoy each moment as a gift of God, with gratitude, with thankfulness.

If one can sing a little, if one can share one's joy a little, if one can express one's being a little, that's enough, in fact more than enough.

We are very miserly, we don't share. This is the greatest calamity that can happen to any man, and this has happened to the whole of humanity: we are brought up in such a way that we become miserly. Even if we give, we give very grudgingly. and whenever we give, we give only on business terms, it is not sharing.

We give only to get more, it is always a bargain. That is not true giving.

True giving means the sheer joy of giving, with no motivation, not as a means but as an end unto itself.

Then life becomes a song. If you can love for no reason at all, if you can be friendly even to strangers... and all are strangers. You may have lived with a person for ten years but still, two strangers have lived together for ten years, that's all. But the strangeness never disappears, there is no way to destroy it. And it is good because it gives individuality to each person, uniqueness, unpredictability.

Give whole-heartedly as much as you can. That's what I mean by a little song. Don't hold it in, express it. Just like the birds in the morning: the birds don't care whether anybody is listening or not, they don't care about the audience, they are not singing to get something in return. They are simply singing out of joy. The sun has risen, the morning has come again, the night is over, and they are all song, they are all dance.

This is the real way to live, each moment rejoicing, rejoicing in life, and sharing with whomsoever you happen to be. with a tree, with an animal, with a rock -- share.

If sharing becomes your life, you have become a sannyasin. If singing becomes your life, you have become a sannyasin. My sannyas is not renunciation, it is rejoicing.

Son Dra? Come here. What is the meaning of your name?

-- It has no meaning.

-- It seems to be invented.

-- It's very inventive!

-- Mm mm. It sounds beautiful. It has music in it, but no meaning...

-- No.

... And that's good. Life needs music, not meaning!

All meaning is arbitrary. We give it to words, words in themselves don't have any meaning at all. That's why there are so many languages, different people have decided to give different meanings. Sometimes different languages give different meaning to the same word.

There are three thousand languages on the earth. That is enough proof that language is an invented phenomenon, it has nothing natural about it. It is just a social contract. We decide that we are going to mean 1/08/07

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this by this word. It is a contract. We can change the contract any moment; hence words go on changing their meaning. Fashions change, words change their meaning. Times change and words change their meaning. Sometimes a word which has seen a peak, falls down into a dark valley, loses all glory, becomes ugly and vice versa: a word that was never thought to be beautiful, was never respectable, becomes fashionable, becomes an "in" thing and this goes on happening.

But music is natural, it is not arbitrary. One should listen more to the music than to the meaning. The wind passing through the pine trees has no meaning but tremendous music. The sound of running water has no meaning but great music.

So it is perfectly beautiful that it has no meaning. Make your life the same. drop the source of meanings, the mind, and start living through the heart from where all music arises. Mathematics is of the mind, music is of the heart and one should live more according to music than according to mathematics.

Mathematics is utilitarian. It is good as far as it goes but is does not go far enough, it goes only to the marketplace, but music goes far. It reaches to the ultimate.

All the mystics of the world have experienced God as sound. The zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. In India the mystics have called it the soundless sound because its very nature is silence. But the silence is not empty, it is full of music. It is a strange experience. All is silent and yet full of music, melody.

We have to become just hollow bamboos so that God can transform us into flutes. The song is always his, we can only be the mediums. The song is not ours. All is his, we too are his.

You have to learn to be a vehicle so that God can filter through you into the world, so that God can radiate through you into the world. We are so full of ourselves, that's why we are so empty of God. Just be empty of yourself and you will be full of God. And then life becomes a song, a joy, a tremendously joyous phenomenon. Even death becomes a song -- what to say about life? even death becomes a celebration.

[ms pages 213-217 Interview with Swami Vedam about music. And ms pages 218-221 Interview with Ma Anand Gayan about dancing. These interviews are not included here.]

When the turmoil of the thoughts completely ceases, everything is absolutely clear. You know that this is the door and this is the wall; there is no question of choice left. When one is absolutely silent everything is so clear that there is no alternative, there is no question of choosing whether to go out through the wall or through the door; you know the door, so you go out through it.

It is in our blindness that we try to pass through the wall and we stumble and we hurt ourselves and we hurt others. In our blindness we go on asking people, "Where is the door?" And in our blindness we cannot believe -- even if the door is in front of us we cannot see it.

Wisdom simply means 'silence in action, meditation in action.' Meditation is inactive, it is an inner experience. You feel centered, blissfully centered, absolutely joyous. Now when you act out of this joy, this centering, this integration, your life becomes full of wisdom. You act rightly, your action has beauty, your action has grace, your action never goes wrong.

It is impossible for a man of meditation to do anything wrong, just as it is impossible for a man who has no experience of meditation to do anything right. He only gropes in darkness. Even if sometimes he does something right, he does it for the wrong reasons, his motives are wrong. And his motives, if they are wrong, destroy the whole beauty of the action.

He loves, but his love becomes domination, possessiveness, jealousy. He helps people, but his help, his service becomes egoistic. He thinks himself very special, a great servant of the masses, of the people, of humanity. Even if he does something right it comes out wrong, because deep at his very core he is wrong.

Right cannot grow out of a wrong heart. The flower of right can bloom only when it is rooted in silence, in awareness, in sensitivity, in love.

And that whole spectrum is implied by the word 'meditation'. It is love, it is awareness, it is silence, it is spontaneity, it is sensitivity. These are all faces of meditation, facets of meditation.

Without contributing to life nobody can ever feel blissful. So many people search for bliss but they fail for the simple reason that they are uncreative. They don't create anything.

There is one joy and only one joy in the world, and that is of creating something, whatsoever it is: a poem, a song, a little music... whatsoever it is. But unless you create something, you will not feel fulfilled.

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Only by creating something do you participate in God's being.

God is the creator of the whole, and when you create a small thing, in a small way you become part of God. That's the only way to bridge the gap between you and God. No other prayer is going to help, no ritual is of any significance. They are just deceptive strategies invented by clever and cunning priests.

The real prayer is to be creative. But how can you create if you don't know what your potential is, if you don't know in what direction you have to move so that you can be creative and can attain fulfillment?

The work of meditation is simply to make you aware of your own potential. It simply throws light inside you, it focuses light on your inner being so that you can read the message.

Mind is always tense because it is always in a state of worrying. It is worrying about the past; although it cannot do anything about it, still it goes on worrying. It goes on thinking "Had I done this, had I said this, had things been like this..." Now there is no way to do anything, and still it goes on worrying. Worrying is mind's nature, its fundamental quality.

Knowing the futility of it, still it continues worrying. It worries about the future which nobody knows; what is going to happen next moment is unknown. And it goes on thinking for years ahead... not only for years, for lives, even about life after death "What is going to happen to me after death?" It goes on worrying.

Mind remains in a constant tension, and we are so identified with the mind that we are affected by the tension, it is reflected in our being. This tension is a dissipation of energy, this tension creates a state of insanity. It does not allow you to see things as they are, it does not allow you to see that which is, it does not allow you to be in the present.

The only way to get out of the mind is to relax totally. The moment you relax, you slip out of the mind and you start moving towards the heart. The heart is intrinsically relaxed, just as the mind is intrinsically tense. The heart knows no worry. It never thinks about the past, it never thinks about the future. It thinks not, it simply lives. It lives in the present. The present belongs to the heart, and the moment you are relaxed you are in the present.

That's what meditation is all about, to be in the present, relaxed, at rest, at home. Then you know what bliss is, what peace is, and ultimately what truth is.

Relaxation is the shortest route to god, the short-cut to total freedom, to liberation.

It is through meditation that one becomes noble. Nobility has nothing to do with your birth; in fact royal families have been more ignoble than anybody else. The whole of history is full of the crimes of the royal families. In fact the bigger criminals become kings; smaller criminals suffer in the jails, bigger ones become emperors. If you kill one person you will be a murderer, if you kill many you will be Alexander the Great.

That's how royal families are born.

Nobody is noble just by being born in a noble family. One is noble only when one attains to spiritual birth. When one is reborn through meditation, when one goes beyond the mind, that is the rebirth. When one knows absolutely on one's own that "I am not the mind, I am the watcher, the one who observes the mind; I am pure observation, seeing, knowing, consciousness," then a new life starts. That life has grace, it has great nobility. It is the highest kind of life on earth. Only buddhas live it.

A buddha is noble not because he is the son of a king, otherwise Jesus would not be noble because he is just the son of a poor carpenter. But Jesus is as noble as Buddha. Nobility has to be earned through meditation.

Others don't live, they only crawl in the mud. They never become lotuses. They have the potential but they never actualize it.

Sannyas means a commitment to self-actualization. It means a decision that from now onwards your whole energy will be involved in growing beyond the mind, in becoming more centered, in knowing more and more who you are.

The day that you know who you are, you are born anew. You become a brahmin, the one who knows God. You become noble. By knowing God one becomes noble -- not by riches, not by blood, not by heredity; those are all nonsense things.

Character can have two dimensions. One is the superficial character that is taught by the society, imposed by the church. It has no roots in you, it is just painted on from the outside. It is not growth. It is not an evolution of your consciousness, it is implanted, imposed; hence deep down you are against it. And that 1/08/07

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creates the split. You have to do certain things, you have to follow certain rules because the society wants them to be followed and otherwise you will be in trouble. But your inner being resists every effort to reduce you to a slave. So the split is created. The whole of humanity is, in a certain sense, schizophrenic. The credit goes to the priests and the politicians. They have divided every person.

Then character is nothing but a kind of decoration. You are respected for it, your ego is fed through it.

You can't go against it because you know that you will lose your respectability; you can't go against it, because you don't want your ego to suffer any damage. Then the only possible way to create a certain temporary adjustment within yourself is to become two persons; one that you show you are and one that you are. You are one from the front door and the other from the back door. That creates hypocrisy, and hypocrisy cannot give you strength of character. It is impotent, it weakens you, it destroys you. It is suicidal.

The second dimension of character is totally different from the first. It is a growth. It is a by-product of your inner consciousness. It comes through meditation. Nobody can teach you what to do and what not to do. Yes, certain hints can be given to you about how to be more aware, how to be more clear, how to be less confused, how to see into things through and through.

That's what meditation is: an insight into things, a penetrating insight, so that you can find on your own what is right and what is wrong. And when you find on your own it is a joy to do right, it is a bliss to do right. In fact, you cannot do wrong. It is impossible. For the real meditator there is no alternative, no choice.

The moment he sees how things are, he inevitably acts in the right way.

Then there is character which has beauty. That character may not bring respectability to you. You may even be punished for it, because a real man of character never goes without being punished by the society.

The society belongs to the hypocrites, the society belongs to the schizophrenic. They are the rulers, they are the people who are in power. They dominate religion, they dominate politics, they dominate everything; hence a real man is bound to be punished by them. They cannot tolerate him.

It is not an accident that Socrates was poisoned or Jesus was crucified, or Mansoor was killed. It is absolutely logical; anything else would have been illogical. The society behaved in a logical way. These people were bringing a different dimension of character, and if that became infectious, then the whole structure of the society and the investment in it would have gone to the dogs. And the people who are in power would not like that. They never want any change. The haves never want any change, the haves cannot go through any revolution. They cannot help any revolution, outer or inner, because every change will be a loss for them.

Remember that sannyas is not a kind of morality. It is not in any way puritan. It does not expect you to follow certain commandments. Sannyas is a simple phenomenon. It is awareness, it is a meditativeness. And everything else comes as a consequence, as a by-product.

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #8

Chapter title: Man's Nature

8 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002085

ShortTitle: WITHME08

Audio:

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference 1/08/07

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purposes only.]

My work here is to make you aware of your great potential, of your infinite possibility, of the heights that you can reach, of the depths that you can penetrate. Your heights are higher than the Himalayas, and your depths are deeper than the Pacific. God has given you so much, he has made you so rich, so inexhaustibly rich -- and we are living like beggars.

My sannyas means a declaration that you are no more a beggar but an emperor, an empress.

We are never born and we never die. Birth and death are both episodes in an eternal life. Life does not begin with birth and does not end with death. It is before death, it is after death; it continues. birth and death are ordinary episodes, incidents, nothing of much importance. Millions of times you have been born and millions of times you have died, and still you are, nothing has happened to you. No birth, no death has left even a trace upon your being. It is as clean, as pure as ever, unpolluted, fresh, young, but we don't know how to find it, where to find it.

We are so identified with the body and the mind -- that's the only problem. That has to be resolved. If you think you are the body-mind, then you will never find your immortality. This is a fallacy which has to be dropped. You are a witness. You can see your body, you can see your mind, so you are the seer not the seen, you are the observer not the object of observation. Because mind can be observed it is an object; the body can be observed, it is an object. You are the observer, always the observer and never anything else.

Become more and more centred in your observation, in your witnessing, in your awareness. And that will give you the key, that will unlock the door of immortality in you. Unless one knows that one is immortal, fear never disappears. And it is fear that destroys all your energies. It is fear that does not allow us to love. How can you love when you are afraid. It is fear that never allows us to live totally, whole-heartedly. If you are afraid, how can you live totally and whole-heartedly? -- you are always holding back. You go only so far and then you stop.

When fear disappears life becomes love, when fear is no more, life becomes a beautiful adventure. Then it is from one peak to another peak, a constant rising upwards -- and there is no end to that eternal journey.

Mind is man. When you go beyond mind you go beyond humanity. The animal is below mind, the Buddhas are beyond mind, and between the animals and the Buddhas are all human beings. Human beings are in a kind of limbo-half animal, half god. the past is animal, and the future and the potential are divine; hence man is in more anguish than any animal on the earth. All animals are at ease, at peace with themselves. They are in a way complete, nothing is missing. A dog is a dog and a cat is a cat.

Man is not complete, he is incomplete. Something is missing. He is on the way. He has left the past and he has not reached the goal yet. He is on the way, he is a traveller. That creates anxiety as to whether or not he will be able to make it. And that creates many problems, many times. One problem is the desire to go back, to be an animal again. So in many moments you become animal again. When you are angry, when you become sexual, when you are full of lust, when you are greedy, when you lose all awareness and you start functioning mechanically you fall below humanity.

It is because of this that drugs have so much appeal: drugs help people to fall below the mind. You forget all the problems and all the anxieties when you are under the impact of a drug, alcohol or anything else. But sooner or later you have to come back to your senses and all your problems are there. In fact they have grown meanwhile. Nothing is gained, you have simply wasted time.

But the desire to go back arises for the simple reason that the future seems to be unknown, uncertain; the past seems to be certain, you have known it, your body knows it, you every cell is created by the past, you mind is created by the past. So the past has a great pull over you, but nobody can go to the past again -- that is a problem. Once the child is born he cannot go back into the womb again. Once you have become a young person, howsoever beautiful the childhood was you cannot be a child again, there is no going back.

One can enjoy the idea of going back, one can imagine also that one is back again, but there is no possible way of going back. You cannot move backwards in time, time has no reverse gear in it. You have to go ahead, either dancingly or reluctantly -- that is up to you. If you go dancingly you go joyously. If you go reluctantly you go in misery, in suffering.

Man has to go beyond himself, man has to surpass himself, only then does man become complete. That is a paradox. Only by going beyond himself does he becomes complete, entire. Then he again knows the 1/08/07

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beauty of being. The becoming is over, the travelling is finished, one has arrived. That's the state of a buddha, the enlightened person.

Go beyond mind so that you can go beyond humanity, so that you can surpass humanity. That is the greatest challenge, and only the greatest can accept it. In the acceptance of the challenge something great is born in you.

Sannyas is a challenge, the challenge of surpassing yourself.

Mind is never silent. It is constantly chattering. It is constantly crowded with many thoughts, desires. It goes on dreaming and dreaming. It is never still even for a single moment. And we have become identified with the mind, we think that we are our mind. That is creating the whole misery.

Get out of the mind and you will come back to your senses. Get out of the mind because the mind is a kind of madness. But one can get out of the mind in two ways. One is falling below it -- then you will have to be put in a mental asylum. The other is going beyond it -- then you become a Buddha or a Jesus. So please choose this way, the second.

There is a fear of going out of the mind. The fear is because mad people are also out of the mind. But they have fallen below, and one has to rise above. When you rise above the mind great silence descends.

You see the mind deep down in the valley chattering still, but the distance becomes bigger and bigger every day and one day you cannot hear all that chattering at all. That day one becomes enlightened.

Mind lives either in the past or in the future. If you are young then the mind lives in the past. The old man has no future. He knows that there is death so he is afraid to look at the future. He goes on reminiscing about the past, all that has been and is no more. He enjoys those golden days. Much of it is just imagination, it has never been there; much of it is just invention to remain occupied.

The moment a person starts living in the past is the moment when he starts becoming old.

Psychologically, that is the point from where one becomes old. Physiologically, it may not coincide, that that is the psychological old age, when you start thinking about the past and the beauties of the past and those golden experiences and those nice days, and how everything was just great. The future is so dark that you are afraid to look at it and you want to remain occupied with the past.

But that is not so with the young person. The young person looks at the future. Death is far away, in fact the young person never thinks of death. It is so far away, it is beyond his scope to think about it; he does not have that much insight. So he lives in the future, he makes castles in the air:"I will do this and I will get that and I will be this and tomorrow it is going to happen; if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow."

The old man wastes his present in the past, the young man wastes his present engaged in the future.

Both exercises are absolutely futile. Not only futile but very harmful, because the present which is, is being wasted for that which is not.

Don't think of the future. Live in the present. That's my message to you. Be in the present moment. And if you can be present to the moment you escape from all kinds of stupidities of the old people. If you can be in the present you transcend time. Time consists of past and future, eternity consists only of the present.

Eternity is now, always now and never then, always here and never there. And to enter into the now and the here is to enter into God.

This has to become your meditation, to come more and more close to the present moment. I am not saying not tp prepare for a journey. If you are going somewhere you will have to purchase the ticket ahead of time, you will have to plan it. I'm not saying not to do that. That has nothing to do with the future. What I mean is a psychological hope, desire, because the present seems to be unfulfilling you escape into the future and you start hoping that there will be fulfilment.

Stop going into the psychological future. The factual future is okay, it is not a disturbance at all. The factual past is also okay, it is not a disturbance at all. You have to remember your name and your address and when you meet your father you have to recognise him. You can't say to him "The past is the past and I don't know who your are!"(laughter) These are factual things, they are perfectly okay. But deep inside, the past should not possess you and the future should not be your occupation. Relax into the moment. And then one is entitled to all kinds of miracles.

Man can live his life in two ways. One is out of the past; then life is not a response but a reaction. You live through ready-made conclusions, you don't respond to the moment. To the situation that is confronting you. You already have an answer, even before the question is raised. Your answer will never fit the 1/08/07

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question, because life goes on changing. Every moment it is different, every moment it is new. It is always novel, it is always a surprise. It never loses that quality of surprise. but if you are carrying too many ready-made answers in your mind you will miss the newness of life.

The other way to live is not to live through the past but to live directly, immediately, to live without the mind, to respond like a mirror, to reflect that which is. and the life of response has tremendous beauty, grace, truth and sincerity, because whatsoever you do is adequate. You never repent for it. It always fits the situation. It comes out of your consciousness, it does not come out of the cultivated character.

Let it be a key for you. Live naturally, spontaneously, responsively, meditatively, in the present, here and now, and then you will know the significance of your life. Millions of mysteries will open their doors for you.

The whole of humanity can be divided into two categories: the fools and the wise. The fools are those who live in a false world, a world of their own imagination. They live in dreams, they believe in their dreams, and obviously they are doomed because dreams are dreams and they can never become real.

The wise ones are those who have dropped all dreams, all sleep, who have become aware, who don't project anything onto existence, who are just mirrors that don't project anything; they simply reflect. And when one becomes a mirror life is a sheer joy. Each moment is so precious, so ecstatic, that one could not have imagined it. Each people on the seashore suddenly turns into a diamond and each flower has the face of God. The whole existence starts overflowing with godliness. One is born anew.

Everybody is born as a fool because everybody is born asleep, dreaming. Everybody has the capacity to wake up but very few people use their capacity to wake up. By becoming a sannyasin you are taking a vow to wake up. That's what sannyas is all about: a decision to wake up. And if you are really intent, it is bound to happen. It is inevitable.

Man is a seed of divine glory, but only a seed -- remember it. It is not yet a flower, it has not even started growing. It is a potentiality.

At birth we are only potential beings. Life is an opportunity to actualise the potential. But very few people work upon themselves. They pay much attention to money, power, prestige, and they don't pay any attention to their own growth, which is the most essential thing because everything else will be taken away.

Death will destroy all your sandcastles, but it cannot destroy your growth, it cannot destroy whatsoever you have made actual in your inner being. That is beyond the grasp of death. And that which is beyond the grasp of death is the real treasure.

In the world people think that they are gaining, earning, being successful; they are simply living in illusion. The only people who are gaining something are the people who are moving inwards, who are becoming more and more alert to their immense potential, who are trying to transform it into a reality.

When one realises one's potential in its totality one is a god. God is not some person somewhere, it is the ultimate state of consciousness. Everybody is capable of becoming a god -- and if we miss we miss because of ourselves, nobody else can be held responsible.

By becoming a sannyasin you are taking the whole responsibility upon yourself. It is a commitment to growth, a commitment towards self-actualisation, with a deep understanding that this is our responsibility towards ourselves, all other responsibilities are secondary.

And if the primary is not fulfilled you will not be able to fulfil the secondary responsibilities. If the primary is fulfilled the secondary responsibilities are easily fulfilled.

Become what you can become.

Man is a seed. If you cut the seed there is no fragrance, but if you sow the seed, if you give it the right soil, the right climate, the right amount of fertiliser and water and sun and air, the seed disappears and a sprout arises. Soon there are many many leaves and great foliage, and then flowers appear. And then the miracle -- the miracle of fragrance. It was hidden in the seed but it needed a certain process to become manifest.

God is hidden in us like fragrance in a seed. It needs a certain progress to become manifest. Right now it is hidden but it can become manifest.

Sannyas means initiation into a certain mystery, in a certain mystic path which can help you go through the great transformation from the seed to the fragrance.

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We are seeds but it would be unfortunate to die as a seed. We have to become flowers and we have to release our fragrance, only then is there contentment. A tree is fulfilled when it blooms, when the spring comes and the tree has released, poured its heart into colours, into fragrance, into joy. When the tree is dancing in the wind, in the sun, it is fulfilled.

Exactly is the case with man too. A Buddha is a tree which has bloomed, a Jesus is a tree which has come to release its fragrance. We are all carrying the same kind of seeds in us. Everyone is a Buddha unmanifest, a Christ ready to be born at any moment.

My work here is to make you aware of your great potential, of your infinite possibility, of the heights that you can reach, of the depth that you can penetrate. Your heights are higher than the Himalayas, and your depths are deeper than the Pacific. And once you know your heights and your depths, life becomes nothing but gratitude. God has given you so much. He has poured all his creativity into your being, he has made you so rich, so inexhaustibly rich -- and we are living like beggars.

My sannyas means a declaration that you are no more a beggar, but an emperor, an empress.

One can exist in two ways: either by fighting on the outside for money, for power, for prestige... To conquer the world -- that is one way of life. It is a futile way. It is for the stupid and the mediocre, but it is very attractive, for the simple reason that everybody is running for it. And man is a great imitator: seeing everybody rushing for something he also starts rushing. He starts thinking that there must be something there, otherwise why are so many people going? And there is every possibility that others are going for the same reason -- because others are going. Everybody may be going for the same reason.

Nobody knows why people are running towards money, power and prestige, but they are running. It is a kind of madness, but it gives something, it feeds your ego.

The fight is futile, the ego is false and when you die you have to leave everything that you have conquered. That's why everybody dies crying and weeping, in deep pain and suffering. The pain and suffering is not because of death, remember. The pain is basically that "I lived my life in a futile way; the time is gone and I am finished and my hands are empty." That is the pain not the pain of death.

Death is not painful, death is very soothing, like deep sleep. The pain is that "The whole of life has passed and I was just making castles in the air and I am going empty-handed. I came empty-handed and I am going empty-handed. My whole life has been a sheer wastage."

But there is another way to live too. One can be an inner warrior. One can conquer one's unconsciousness, one can conquer one's greed, anger, sexuality. One can transform all these energies into something tremendously beautiful. and when one has known the secret of transforming one's inner being, there is great joy. Every fibre of your being dances with joy because now you know that death cannot take anything away from you. Now you know that you have attained the real treasure.

So be a warrior in the second sense. The real fight is in, not there on the outside, and the real fight is not with others. The real fight is with your own unconsciousness, with your own unawareness.

Our desires are dreams, all our thoughts are dreams. And we go on continuously living in dreams because we are asleep. Dreams can exist only if we are asleep, and dreams disappear the moment we awake.

Going beyond dreams means awaking.

It is time! Enough you have sleep... for many many lives. Don't miss this opportunity to wake up because rare is the opportunity, and to miss it is very easy. So put your whole energy into waking up.

In the beginning it seems almost impossible -- how to do it? But if one goes on trying... In sleep one tosses and turns but if one goes on tossing and turning, it is bound to disrupt the sleep. And just a moment's glimpse of being awake is enough to trigger a new process in your being. Then more and more moments of awakening happen. And the day that one becomes fully awakened, twenty-four hours a day, even while one is asleep one remains alert, aware, when the body sleeps but the soul never sleeps, when one is capable of being awake twenty-four hours a day even when the body is resting -- then one should feel contented. One has arrived. Before that, make every possible effort that you can. Don't leave any stone unturned.

We live in desire. Desire means discontentment. Desire means that whatsoever is, is not right, not enough, more is needed. And desire is never fulfilled. It is unfulfillable by its very nature.

You can have as much as you desire, but the moment you have it desire goes on jumping ahead of you, it starts asking for more. Its greed knows no limits, it is unlimited greed. It is like the horizon: it looks so close -- you can reach it within an hour if you run. But you cannot reach it, you can never reach it. The 1/08/07

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distance between you and the horizon will remain the same, constantly the same, because there is no horizon; it is an illusion. The earth is not meeting with the sky anywhere, it only appears to be.

So is the case with desire. It only appears that if I could reach to that point, if I could attain to this or that, there would be contentment. I would be happy, I would be fulfilled. But it never happens.

One has to understand desiring and its futility. In that very understanding desire disappears and one is left at home in deep peace. When there is no desire, there is no disturbance. Desire is the only disturbance.

When all desires have gone there is tremendous silence inside. In that silence you become aware of the presence of God, and that is fulfilling. That fulfils because it brings joy, infinite joy. It fulfils because it brings something of the beyond, something which cannot be taken away from you, something which is inexhaustible, something deathless. It opens the doors of the kingdom of God. It is your kingdom, because you are not separate from God and God is not separate from you.

So your work has to be to understand desiring; and in that very understanding it drops. You are not to renounce it, you are not to repress it, because if you repress it, it will come up again, if you renounce it, it will follow you. It is only through deep understanding that it disappears.

Man lives in bondage, and the bondage is not imposed by others, it is self-created. It is created because we are afraid of the insecure. In the name of security we create a bondage around ourselves. Yes, it gives a feeling of cosiness, warmth, safety, but it is all false because sooner or later death will take it all away.

Because of this we never explore, we never go beyond the boundaries of the familiar. The familiar is very small and we go on moving in the familiar, in circles. Our life knows no growth, because growth can only happen if we move not in circles but in a line. If we are linear then there is growth. If we go around in circles we go on repeating the same thing again and again.

Freedom is possible because we have made our own prison. We can get out of it any moment that we decide to. It is only a question of decision, of courage, of guts.

Freedom is the ultimate value in life. Nothing is more important than that, because out of it comes everything else that is valuable. Love arises as a fragrance, joy arises, meaning arises; for the first time life becomes significant, tremendously significant. And one is constantly moving beyond the known, going into the unknown. Life becomes a thrill, an adventure. But we have made life just a dragging affair. It seems safe, it appears secure, but there is no security, no safety anywhere. They are impossible.

Life in its intrinsicalness is insecure. Only death is secure. You cannot take anything away from a dead man -- or can you? even death cannot do any harm to him, he is already dead. In his grave he is so absolutely secure.

Because we are so obsessed with security we have made our houses our graves. We don't live in them, we only die in them slowly slowly; it is a gradual kind of suicide.

Sannyas means freedom, freedom from all self-created securities, safeties. In the beginning one feels afraid, scared, that is natural, but once you become attuned to the insecure and you know the joy of insecurity then you never look back to those old toys that you used to think were keeping you life secure.

And they were not securities, they were simply prisons, chains around your being.

One need not be a Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Catholic or communist -- these are all self-created prisons. One need not live in an ideology. One should be free from all ideologies, all dogmas, creeds, scriptures. Only then is life an exploration, because when you don't have any conclusion you can explore.

We are brought up in such a way that we are reduced to slaves. And the slavery is so subtle that very rarely do we become aware of it. We go on living life as a slave thinking that this is all that there is to live.

This is not all, this is nothing. This is not even the beginning.

Life begins only when you become free from all kinds of bondages: the bondage of nation, the bondage of race, the bondage of church -- ideological, social, political, religious. When you become free from all these imprisonments, when you simply drop all that you have been told is important, when you simply drop all that you have been told to believe in; when you neither believe nor disbelieve a great freedom arises in your being. That freedom is sannyas; and that freedom then takes you higher and higher towards the ultimate.

Only a free person can know what truth is, and only a free person can know what god is, what love is.

Freedom is very essential because it is the foundation of all that is beautiful and great.

Light is the stuff that existence is made of. Mystics have been saying so for centuries, now physicists 1/08/07

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also agree with it in their own way. It is the only point on which mystics and the physicists agree, that existence is made of light. Mystics have come to it through the experience of their own being. The deeper you go, the lighter it becomes.

In the beginning, when you start entering into yourself, it is very dark, very very dark, unimaginably dark. You cannot believe that darkness can be so thick and so dense. that's why many people escape immediately. It is frightening, it looks like death. But if you persist, and great perseverance is needed, if you go on digging deeper and deeper, the darkness becomes less and less dark, a little light starts arising. At the innermost core of your being there is nothing but light.

Now start moving inwards, and don't be afraid of the darkness that you will encounter, which is bound to be encountered. When you encounter darkness it is a good sign, you are moving in. and if darkness is encountered than light is not far away. When the night is very dark, the dawn is very close.

We are born of light, we are part of infinite light, and one day we have to disappear into that infinity again. We are just rays of a faraway sun. We have forgotten our home, we have forgotten our source.

To be a sannyasin means that now you are getting ready to remember it. Sannyas is a gesture that "I am available to be reminded of my home, of my real home, of my real source."

We are rays of light. We are not gross, nothing is gross. Because existence is a manifestation of god, everything is very subtle. Even matter is not material, even matter is just pure light, condensed light.

Everything is a different manifestation of light, a tremendously mysterious wave in the ocean of light.

To see it, to feel it, to recognize it, is meditation. Watch inside, watch outside. In the beginning it is difficult to see walls as pure light, but even physicists agree that they are pure light, nothing but electrons, condensed electricity. And walls are not static, rocks are not static; electrons are continuously in a tremendous dance. The whole existence is a dance.

When you start seeing it all around you it is a transformed world. And the day you see it inside too, the division between the inside and the outside disappears, then it is all one, it is the same phenomenon. One loses one's ego, one loses one's identity as a separate being. One becomes part of the whole. And to be part of the whole is to be holy. That is true holiness.

Those phony holy people you meet in the churches, in the mosque and in the temples are not holy at all.

They have no idea of the whole. They are very egoistic. Of course they have very pious egos, holier-than-thou, but a pious ego is the most egoistic phenomenon in the world. It is the most poisonous, because it is so subtle.

Enlightenment is a forgotten language, it has to be remembered. Sannyas is just the beginning of turning in, looking in.

Following Christ does not mean following Jesus. When Jesus disappears Christ is born in him. When Gautam Siddhartha disappears Buddha is born in him. They are totally different phenomena, but people have got them mixed-up. They think that to follow Christ means to follow Jesus. Nobody can follow Jesus because nobody can be like Jesus; God never creates the same person again. But Christ can be followed because Christ is a state of consciousness. It has nothing to do with the person, Jesus. He is one of the Christs, that is true, but there have been many other Christs and there will be many more.

Anyone who attains to the ultimate flowering is a Christ. To be enlightened is to be a Christ. To know who you are is to be a Christ. But Christianity has taken a very wrong route. It became too focussed on Jesus, the person, they completely forgot about the flowering, the fragrance which really makes him valuable. Without that fragrance he is nobody, just an ordinary carpenter.

Christhood means that meditation has come to its peak. One has gone beyond misery, beyond ego, beyond mind, beyond time. One has become one with the whole.

Blissfully follow the subtle path of being a Christ. Never be a Christian, be a Christ. When one can be a Christ why settle for being a Christian? When one can be a Buddha why be a Buddhist? That's my basic message here, that you are carrying within you the ultimate. There is no need to settle for less than that.

[.... page missing? 241/190]

... that the person cannot even see that it is there. and it works from the back door, it is never there in front of you. It works from the depth of your being. Your saints, your mahatmas, are nothing but egos painted in a religious way.

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But the real sage is one who is no more. He has drowned himself in the totality, he has merged with the source. That source is light and that source is God.

We are made of light; hence when you enter into deep meditation you start feeling more and more light inside. When you reach to the very central core all is light, pure light. That experience is called enlightenment for the simple reason that you become light again.

Each being is born enlightened. Each being is born a Buddha, a Christ. These are not states which have to be achieved, these are states which have to be only recognised, which we only have to discover within our own being. One has not to go anywhere, one has not to do anything. It is not a process of becoming, enlightenment is a state of being.

Becoming means desire. Becoming means that it will happen in the future. Becoming means that you will have to strive for it. You may succeed, you may not succeed. Who knows? Becoming means that you will remain tense until it happens -- and enlightenment cannot happen if you are tense. Enlightenment cannot happen if you live in desires, in the future. Enlightenment is possible only when you are desireless, relaxed, utterly herenow. So it cannot be made an object of desire. To make it an object of desire is to miss the point from the very beginning. It is pure understanding that we are already in that space, we just don't look in. We have not lost it, we have only forgotten it.

The early Christians used to call themselves bearers of the Christ, carriers of Christ in the heart. The ordinary, so-called Christian also carries Christ -- but in the head, not in the heart. to understand it is of great significance.

Carrying Christ in your head is absolutely meaningless. And that's what Christians are doing, and others are doing the same: Hindus carrying Krishna in the head, Buddhists carrying Buddha in the head. And these are not things of the head, these are not thoughts. These are deep, deep experiences, profound feelings. They can happen only in the heart. And when they happen in the heart you don't become a Christian, you become a Christ. You don't become a Buddhist, you become a Buddha.

It is ugly to be a Buddhist or a Christian. When you can be a Buddha or a Christ, why settle for being a Christian or a Buddhist? That is settling for something plastic, something pseudo.

Christ is a state of consciousness, just as Buddha is a state of consciousness. Really, the state of consciousness that in the East is called Buddha, in the West is called Christ. It is not different, only the language differs, but both words indicate the same flowering. Your heart becomes a flower, a lotus, and a great fragrance is released. That fragrance is bliss.

So remember, don't allow sannyas to become part of your head. Let it go down deep into your heart. The relationship with me has to be of the heart, not of the head. The heady people are going to miss me totally.

They may think that they understand me but they understand only words. They don't understand me.

Only the people of the heart are going to be my people, because only they will be able to understand that which cannot be understood. Only they will be able to comprehend that which is incomprehensible.

The mysteries can only be revealed to those who have chopped off their heads completely, who are no more heads but just pure hearts.

Man is not as small as he appears. He is vast, he is tremendously vast. He is oceanic. Even the ocean has boundaries, and man has no boundaries. Even the ocean is not so vast. Man's vastness is the only proof that God is. God is another name for man's vastness. We are not confined to the body and we are not confined to the mind either. We are beyond both.

The whole process of sannyas is that of peeling an onion. There are many layers of identification, and we have to drop all the layers slowly slowly slowly. Finally nothing is left -- that nothing is you.

Only nothing can be vast. Something is bound to be infinite. Only nothingness is infinite; hence God is ultimate nothingness. God is not a being but the ultimate non-being. He is not somebody, he is absolute nobodiness. He is only a presence, infinite, unbounded. and so are we. we are not different from god. We are part of that infinity.

Everyone is a god. Nobody can be anything else because only God exists. God is synonymous with existence. To be means to be a god. But we don't remember it, we are absolutely oblivious to it. So the question is not how to achieve godhood, the question is how to remember it. It is a forgotten language.

My effort here is to help you to remember something that is already there. Nothing has to be achieved.

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You have only to discover yourself, to discover who you are, and you will know that you are God. And the moment you know you are God the whole existence becomes divine, then everybody is god. And that day is of tremendous joy, when the whole existence looks divine to you. You are surrounded by gods. Naturally, great rejoicing arises in your heart.

From the very beginning we are that which we have been seeking all along. We are already that for which we are looking everywhere. It is our self-nature. Truth, bliss, freedom, God - they are different names of our self-nature.

One need not go anywhere, one has only to dig within oneself. On the outside one will find only frustration, failure. You cannot find that which can fulfill you. Yes, one can have as much money as one wants, one can have a great kingdom like Alexander, Napoleon, but one still remains a beggar, still seeking and searching. There seems to be no fulfillment through power, prestige, money. And the reason is not that fulfillment is not possible.

Sigmund Freud says that it is not possible because he never looked within. He says that man is destined to remain miserable, so all that we can do is to help him to be a little less miserable. We can help him to understand his misery, to accept it, and live with it and not to make much fuss about it. It is how things are.

That is the whole understanding of modern psychology. It is pessimistic for the simple reason, that it has not yet been able to penetrate into the inner world of man.

That's where religion differs. Religion says that it is true that there is no contentment on the outside, that is never possible. But there is an inner world too. There is no need to overlook it, there is no need to ignore it. To ignore it is only ignorance.

Sannyas means not ignoring the inner. On the contrary, it is giving it more and more attention, more and more awareness, more and more exploration. And when you start getting deeper into your own interiority you are surprised, because you discover an inexhaustible treasure. Your life becomes a joy, a benediction, a blessing, not only to yourself but to others too.

White has always symbolised the ultimate flowering of spirituality because white is the synthesis of all the colours. It is all the colours in deep harmony dancing together, merging, melting, meeting in each other so deeply that they disappear as separate colours and an new colour arises -- that is white.

Black is the absence of all colours, white is presence of all colours. Black represents the devil because it is absence; hence in all the mythologies the evil force, the devil, satan, is depicted as black, dark, absolutely dark.

God is white for the simple reason that God is the ultimate harmony. Light is white, but passing through a prism it becomes seven colours; the prism divides it. That's how the rainbow is created. In the rainy season small drops of water hang in the air and the sunrays passing through those small drops of rainwater create the rainbow.

Mix all the seven colours in the right proportion and white arises. The number seven is also significant.

There are seven planes of consciousness. The lowest is sex and the highest is samadhi. In the lowest centre, at the lowest plane, there is only sexuality, nothing else. On the second plane there are two things, on the third there are three, and so on, so forth. On the seventh plane all the seven energies meet together and merge together and a white lotus opens in your being. These are all metaphors.

The white lotus is worshipped in the East. You must have seen pictures of Buddha sitting on a white lotus. When you have reached the ultimate peak, when all your energies have come to a harmony great beauty descends, great silence descends, a new kind of dance enters into your being, a new celebration, because it is a new birth.

Keep remembering that the white lotus is our ultimate goal, that we have to become white lotuses in which all energies have been consumed, absorbed into one synthesis, when all the seven notes of music have created the ultimate melody.

Kent is a beautiful name. It means that you disappear as many and you become one, you become integrated, centred. You put the prism of the mind aside and you are white.

White symbolises freedom, freedom from division, from split. white also symbolises wholeness. Red is only one colour, blue is one colour, green is another. Green is not the whole, blue is not the whole; no colour is whole except white.

God is whole, god is another name for totality; hence those who have experienced god have experienced 1/08/07

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him as a tremendous whiteness arising in themselves. They become lost in that dazzling white. The mystics say that it is as if thousands of suns have risen suddenly. It is all light and all white.

The journey of sannyas is from mind to no-mind. Mind means many, no-mind means one, and to be one is to be whole, healthy, sane. to be one is to be blissful. It is with the many that conflict and misery arises.

For centuries manliness has been praised. It is time to drop that whole nonsense. It is because of that praise that humanity has suffered much.

Manly qualities are aggressive, violent. We should start praising feminine qualities. The most feminine quality is receptivity, openness, vulnerability. Man has dominated long enough and that domination has been destructive of all that is fragile, beautiful, of all that is flowerlike. Only rocks have remained, flowers have disappeared.

My whole effort here is to praise the feminine qualities. The world needs them. If I love Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, the most fundamental reason for my love is that they are all feminine, they are not masculine.

Friedrich Nietzsche has condemned Buddha and Christ for the same reason -- they are not manly enough. I praise them for the same reason -- they are not manly enough. That is good; they have a grace, the feminine grace.

We have to change the whole gestalt of human consciousness. we have to make it more surrendering, more receptive, we have to teach it how to relax and how things can happen in a deep let-go. all that is great

-- truth, love, bliss, god, freedom -- happens in a state of let-go. You cannot force them to happen. that is not possible, that is not i the nature of things at all.

You can only be a host, you can only be pregnant with those qualities, you can allow then to happen.

Don't hinder, that's all that you can do. Keep the doors open, keep the heart open, and you become a song.

God starts singing through you. You become a joyous spirit, you become a celebration.

A strong spirit is always a gift of God, the most precious gift. He gives a strong spirit to everybody. God is absolutely generous, he gives more than you will ever need. He gives courage, he gives strength.

But the society turns every possibility into its opposite. Rather than making you more and more courageous, helping your courage, strengthening your courage, it destroys it, it makes you cowardly. The same energy that can become courage can become fear. All that is needed is a headstand: put everything upside down. The society has learned the art of creating cowardliness in people because only cowards can be dominated. The society destroys the individual in every possible way, because the society is afraid of the individual.

The individual cannot always be obedient, he will be obedient when he feels that it is right to be obedient. But you cannot rely on him. Sometimes he may feel that this is not right, then he will defy all your orders, he will say no. He will live through his own inner light. He cannot be commanded, he cannot be reduced to a soldier, he cannot function like a machine. He will say yes when he feels that it is right, it will come from his own heart. But he will never be a yea-sayer, nor will he be a no-sayer. He will not cling to no or yes, he will remain free. Every moment he will choose whether to say yes or no. He will not function out of a conditioned mind -- conditioned for yes or conditioned for no.

The society does not want individuals. The society lives on the death of individuals. So the more a society becomes organised, the more and more individuals disappear. For example, in Adolf Hitler's Germany, individuals completely disappeared because the society was too organised. The whole society was turned into a military camp. That has happened many times. In ancient days in Japan, the whole society was turned into a military camp. That was the highest value, to be obedient.

All the churches also teach obedience because the priest is afraid of individuality, because the individual raises awkward questions which nobody else can answer. The individual creates restlessness in the status quo. The individual creates embarrassing situations for the people who are in power, who are in authority.

They may be popes or kings or presidents or prime ministers, it doesn't matter. Religious heads or political heads, it doesn't matter. Every establishment is afraid of individuals. And the only way to destroy the individual is to turn the gift of God into a curse.

My effort here is to remind you that you can still change your whole pattern, you can still put things as they should be. You can still be courageous, adventurous. You can still be strong in spirit, because it is only those who are strong in spirit who can travel the path to God.

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that you see in the song of the birds... that purity. and man can become all. He can be a flower full of fragrance. He can be a star full of light. And he can be a bird singing in praise of God, in praise of sunrise.

Man has multi-dimensional potential. He can be the whole universe.

Man is capable of so much but he is not aware of it. He is capable of flying but he goes on just crawling on the earth. He is capable of becoming pure love but he remains only animal, lust. He is capable of becoming pure spirit but he remains just dust. We are not aware of our own potential. We don't know how much we are carrying within ourselves which can be realised any moment that we decide to realise it. But it will not be realised unless we decide to realise it.

Many people die without knowing that they were carrying a treasure within themselves. they die like beggars and they were meant to be emperors.

Out ultimate expression is divine love, and out of that is all creativity, all service, all compassion. Out of that much happens, but we have to be alert to create the right space in which our potential can become actual.

Sannyas is only a methodology to create a space, a certain space within you, to prepare the ground so that your seeds starts sprouting. It is just a process of inner gardening. And each sannyasin has to become a garden with many flowers, much perfume. It is possible, I am not talking about the impossible. It is within our reach, we just have to start groping for it. And my function here is to help you to grope in the right direction.

Once you are on the right track then miracles start happening.

[There follows an interview with Ma Deva Tanmayo, which is not included here.]

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #9

Chapter title: Love

9 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002095

ShortTitle: WITHME09

Audio:

No

Video:

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

You have to become more conscious so that you can discover your lovingness, so that you can discover the lovingness of the whole existence and once you know, you start sharing. Then it is not a relationship, not that you love somebody, but a state: you love. You are love, rather.

In seeking love, you will find not only love, you will find your true being too.

I am talking about a love that is beyond your so-called love and I am talking about a bliss that is beyond every possible idea of bliss that you can have. I am talking about a god which is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, which is really incomprehensible. I am talking about mysteries which cannot be 1/08/07

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expressed adequately in any words, which are intrinsically inexpressible. Love is one of those mysteries.

We know a love that is not love; it is something else. It is biology, physiology, chemistry, but not love, It is instinctive, and anything instinctive is something unconscious. Anything instinctive makes you a slave.

And the whole effort of sannyas is to make everything conscious.

When your love becomes conscious the other side of it, the hatred side, disappears. No jealousy is found in it, no possessiveness, no domination. It is no more an ego trip. When love becomes part of your awareness it is a totally different phenomenon. It has nothing to do with the ordinary love. The ordinary love is an effort to somehow fulfil your emptiness, to somehow not be lonely, to remain occupied with the other; it is a biological occupation with the other. And the other is also doing the same with you: both of you are using the other so that you are not lonely.

When love becomes conscious it is not an effort to avoid loneliness; on the contrary it flows out of your aloneness. You are perfectly joyous being alone, you are so joyous that you want to share it. Conscious love is a sharing: you give because it is coming to you in such abundance that you becomes burdened like a raincloud -- it has to shower somewhere.

The ordinary love comes out of your emptiness, not out of your fullness. You are afraid to face your loneliness. Whenever your are left alone you don't know what to do with yourself. You are so afraid of yourself, you hate your company so much that you are ready to be with anybody, even with a prostitute.

And people call this love. They are using such a beautiful name, such a beautiful word to hide very ugly things.

When I use the word "love" I mean conscious love. Consciousness is always implied: whether I say bliss, joy, celebration, love, peace, consciousness is always there. Without it nothing is possible.

You have to become more conscious so that you can discover your lovingness, so that you can discover the lovingness of the whole existence. And once you know, you start sharing. But then you simply share unconditionally; you don't ask for anything in return. You are grateful just to share, you are thankful just to share. It is sharing for sharing's sake. You are not using the other.

Then love has a height, a Himalayan height; then you are moving on virgin heights. The purity of it is immense, overwhelming, and the ecstasy of it is inexhaustible. Then it is not a relationship -- not that you love somebody -- but a state. You love, you are love, rather.

Love has three dimensions. One is animal love -- absolutely unconscious, instinctive, biological. The second is human love -- a little higher than the biological, a little more psychological, a little higher than instinct. It has something of intelligence in it, a little more refined than the crude biological, the instinctive.

But still it is not the highest. There is still one more dimension -- that is divine love -- which is spiritual.

Man has three layers. first is his physiology, second is his psychology, third is his spirit, his soul, his real being.

One can seek bodily pleasures. That's what millions of people go on doing. Nothing is wrong in it, but it is a little stupid. Not a sin, but it is as if you have been given a big palace to live in and you go on living on the porch. You never enter into the palace, so you have completely forgotten about it. You have made the porch your whole life. And the palace is waiting for you, and it is yours, you just have to explore a little bit deeper.

Very few people enter into human love. Those are the people who are sensitive, alert, intelligent, who have some sense of poetry in life, some aesthetic values, for whom sex in itself is not of much value unless it is rooted in love, for whom to be under the influence of chemistry and hormones looks like slavery. They will go into a sexual relationship but only when there is a higher intimacy.

Sex can be shared but not as an end unto itself. It can only be a small part of the whole phenomenon of love. Then it has also a beauty, if it is part of a love energy.

And only once in a while ever fewer -- a Buddha, a Jesus, a Lao-Tzu -- reach to the third. The third is not a relationship at all. Divine love is a state, not a relationship.

In the first you are not concerned with the individual. You can see it in animals. There is no concern for the individual, it is a pure sexual urge. Any male, any female will meet and then they will separate forever.

They will not say even a thank-you. No gratefulness, no intimacy arises. That's the case with many human beings also, and if that is the case those human beings are not yet human; they are still living an animal life.

Their bodies are human but they don't have human souls yet. It is not personal.

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conceive of yourself making love to somebody else. Yes, you can be friendly, but love becomes a very intimate phenomenon. It will be sacrilegious to you, profane, ugly, to move into sex with each and everybody. It will be falling back to the animal level.

The human level is personal and the divine love is impersonal, on a higher plane. Animals are impersonal because they are unconscious and Buddhas are impersonal because they are absolutely conscious. They don't love anybody in particular, they simply love. The animal love is not love at all but only sex. And the love of a Buddha is not sex at all, it is only love.

Man is just between the two: half animal, half divine. His love is both something of the beyond and something of the below. Hence human love is a tense phenomenon, it is a sort of anxiety. One is pulled apart. The lower and the higher are both trying to catch hold of us; hence human love is painful. But one has to grow through it; that pain is a necessary part of maturity. But one should remember that one has to reach beyond it.

When one is in the state of divine love one is simply love. There is no question of preference, there is no question of loving this person or that. Whosoever comes to a Buddha is filled with his love. His love is constantly showering. Even when he is sitting alone he vibrates love. That's the ultimate, that is the goal of sannyas.

And only the ultimate can fulfil. Only the ultimate can bring you absolute contentment. Only the ultimate can be a blessing and a benediction.

Man's basic search is for love. He wants to love and he wants to be loved and he wants to be loved with no motive, with no ulterior motive. He wants to be loved unconditionally, and he can feel fulfilled only when that happens. But it does not happen for the simple reason that he wants to be loved unconditionally but he never loves anybody unconditionally.

You don't create the right space, everything goes wrong, from your side something is missing and the same is the case with the other person, from his or her side something is essentially missing. All lovers are expecting unconditional love from the other and nobody is ready to give it. So how can it happen? One has to begin with oneself, one has to take the initiative.

So in being as sannyasin this is going to be your work upon yourself, love unconditionally, not only people but trees, animals, clouds. Go on spreading your love, make it huge, enormous. Let it spread to the whole.

The day that you can love the whole without in any way asking for anything in return you will have known what prayer is and you will have known what worship is and you will have known the most fundamental secret of life, because you will be showered with a thousand and one blessings. The whole universe will start pouring its love energy over you. And that is the moment we have been seeking and searching for for lives together, but missing for the simple reason that we never create the right space for it to happen. Sannyas has to become the right space for love to happen.

All these ultimate experiences of surrender, of worship, of devotion, of consecration, are possible only if the heart is full of love. They are all flowers of love. without love there is no possibility of knowing God.

Without love there is no bridge. Logic is a barrier, love is a bridge -- and we live in logic.

The stupidity of our minds is such that we have even made God an object of logic. We have created a whole philosophy around the idea, we have created theology. Theology means logic about God. That is the most absurd thing possible, the most absurd thing conceivable. There can be no logic about God, only love.

Logic is something outgoing. It is needed in the world, it is a perfect instrument for scientific investigation, for objective observation. but it is not helpful in going in, it prevents it.

And God is within you. God is not an object, God is your very subjectivity, your very interiority.

One has to drop logic and one has to learn the ways of love more and more. The question is not what you love, that is not so important. Love people, love animals, love trees, love nature, poetry, music. That is not significant. What is significant is that you love... because by loving more and more you become it. The day you become love, when it becomes so natural, like breathing, that day is of great rejoicing, because God is experienced then and only then.

Our century is one of the most strange in the whole history of humanity. People have never felt such outsiders as they are feeling now. Everybody feels like an stranger, as if they are not needed, as if they are only accidental. This feeling has arisen because we have lost contact with the roots of life. We are the most 1/08/07

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uprooted people in the whole of history; hence so many people go mad, so many people commit suicide.

And those who don't go mad and don't commit suicide are not in a better situation either. Their life is a long long hell, they drag just somehow. They also contemplate committing suicide but they cannot gather courage. They are also many times just on the brink of going crazy but somehow they go on holding themselves together. It is such a strain that although they remain normal deep down they go on repressing many many abnormal things, many perversions, obsessions.

So everybody who looks normal on the surface is just normal on the surface; deep down he is as abnormal as any insane person. Any every person is a potential insane person. He carries the potentiality, he can go crazy any moment.

This situation can be changed by only one thing; if we again start learning how to connect ourselves with existence. The thing that is disconnecting us is the ego. We have started to look at ourselves as if we are islands -- and no man is an island. We are all part of a vast continent. And we are not accidental, we are needed. Nobody can replace you. You are absolutely essential, intrinsically essential to existence.

Once this is felt a great grounding happens. As you go deeper into meditation you become aware that the existence loves you, that it is showering many many blessings every moment. Then you don't take them for granted, you start feeling grateful. And slowly slowly you feel that there is great love flowing towards you from every direction. In that moment, when for the first time you feel love flowing from all directions, pouring into your being, the soul is born. One really becomes a soul, otherwise the soul is just an idea. The soul is born only when feel that god loves you. And by god I simply mean the whole. God is not a person but another name for the whole, a very loving name.

My effort here is to help you to feel that existence is not indifferent towards you. It is deeply concerned about you, it cares for you, it loves you. and when one feels loved and cared for, one is capable of loving and caring. when existence pours its love into you, you start sharing your love with others. You become so burdened with love that you have to share. You cannot contain it, it is uncontainable. It starts spreading, radiating.

That's what ecstasy is. Ecstasy is the flowering of meditation. Meditation is the beginning, the seed; ecstasy is the flower. And by meditation I mean not looking through the mind -- it is the mind that cuts you away from the world, but looking through the heart. It is the heart that joins you with the world, it is the heart that has the courage to melt and merge with the whole. The mind is a coward, the heart is really courageous.

So move from the mind to the heart, from logic to love, from ego to egolessness, and then all kinds of miracles start happening in your life. You are entitled to all those miracles.

It is love and nothing else that makes one a king. You can possess the whole world but you will be a beggar if you don't have love. And you may not possess anything, you may really be a beggar, but if you have love overflowing love in you heart you are an emperor, far greater than any Alexander the Great.

Love is the real treasure. Seek love and in seeking love you will not only find love, you will find God too. In seeking love you will not only find love, you will find you true being too. In seeking love one finds the kingdom of God, one truly becomes a king.

And love is something that cannot be taken away from you. even death cannot destroy it. that's why lovers are the only people in the world who are not afraid of death. If a person is afraid of death that simply show that he has not known love. If you have known love death disappears. If you have not known love then life is nothing but death.

Every effort should be made to seek and search for love. And it is your own energy. You are not to go anywhere else, you have to within yourself, and one day the spring starts flowering. You become full of love, you start overflowing with love. In that moment not only are you blessed, through you the whole existence is blessed.

Your name will mean, a loving solitude, a solitude full of love, and a love centred, rooted in solitude. It is one of the most difficult things in life. It is one of the greatest challenges. If one accepts the challenge and moves towards it, one grows. Even a single step towards it is a great leap of consciousness.

Why is it difficult? It is difficult because to feel your aloneness and yet be loving seems to be contradictory to the mind. The mind feels perfectly right: if you are loving, then forget about your aloneness, then be lost in togetherness. According to the mind that's what love is, it is the meeting with the other. But if you don't know what aloneness is, who is going to meet whom? Two empty shells will be 1/08/07

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meeting, two bodies will be meeting. But unless two souls meet and merge love never reaches to its ultimate crescendo. And one becomes a soul only when one knows the beauty of being alone.

The mind is ready to say that if you want to be alone then be alone, forget all about love. The mind seems to be absolutely logical. The mind says choose either love or aloneness, and those who have followed the mind have chosen either one or the other.

The people who live in the world, the majority of people have chosen love; hence they don't meditate.

Meditation seems to be going against their choice, because meditation is the art of enjoying your aloneness.

And whenever a person will start meditating, if he has a lover, the lover will be antagonistic to the approach.

The lover or the beloved is bound to create trouble. fear arises, because if the other becomes capable of being alone, then what will be the need of love? "Then I will not be needed any more," that is the fear. And everybody wants to be needed. That fulfils the ego, that "I am needed," that "without me you cannot live,"

that "I am absolutely essential for your life."

A few people have chosen to be monks and nuns. They have moved away from the world -- the world of love and togetherness and relationship. They live alone. That's exactly the meaning of the word "monk": one who lives alone, but without love you cannot be joyous. And the world is in misery. You can be loving but without knowing your aloneness your love remains superficial.

I teach something very paradoxical. I teach you love and aloneness together. Love deeply and be alone deeply. Let love arise out of you solitude. Then it will be something divine, something supramundane, something of the beyond, something that will fill you with contentment and light and bliss and benediction.

Hence my sannyasins are not to leave the world. They have to be in the world and yet be alone, they have to be in relationships and yet remain alone. I am giving a very hard task to be fulfilled. But it is my observation that this is a challenge worth accepting because it can bring your total potential into manifestation. It can become an opportunity for your potential to become actualised.

Love is not attachment. Love flowers only when you have dropped all attachment. It is because of attachment that love is not happening to millions of people. Attachment creates jealousy, possessiveness, and all kinds of pathological tendencies. Attachment is out of fear, one wants to cling. But the moment you cling you are creating trouble for yourself and the other. The more you try to cling, the more the other will try to escape, because nobody wants to carry a burden, nobody wants to become unfree, nobody wants to lose their freedom.

But then a vicious circle is created: the more you feel that the other is escaping, the more you cling. The more you cling, the more the other escapes. And there is no end to it unless you destroy the whole relationship. That's what attachment does: it goes on poisoning all relationships. All relationships can bloom into prayer, they can become divine. It is because of attachment that they become poisoned.

One has to understand ones tendency to get attached. You get attached to people, to things, to places.

There are thousands possibilities of being attached. And the more you become attached, the more you are caught in the web that you have created around yourself. You lose your freedom, you lose growth, you lose all possibility of attaining to the ultimate, you become trivia. You become that which you want to possess, to which you become attached.

You can see it happening. If a man becomes too attached to money he starts becoming more like money than like a man. He becomes dead, dull, dirty, like currency notes which go on moving from one hand to another. You can't find anything more dirty than currency notes. If you become too attached to things you become a thing because your possessions start possessing you.

Sannyas means learning the art of love without getting attached. There have been many people who renounced attachment but they renounced love also. That is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

They became dead because without love there is no life. Of course they were not attached, but just to escape from attachment they dropped being loving -- and when you drop being loving you have to become hard, you have to become insensitive. That's why your so-called saints are so hard and so insensitive, so dead -- just walking corpses, that's all. They stink of death not of the perfume of life.

My effort here is to give you a new synthesis: love without attachment.

There are two kinds of people: people who are attached, but because of attachment love is killed. Then there are the other kind who have escaped attachment and have dropped being loving because they are afraid that if they love they will become attached.

I want the third kind of man in the world: one who is capable of loving and yet remaining unattached.

That's my definition of true sannyas.

1/08/07

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Love is the only phenomenon which is immortal. Everything else dies, love never dies. Death overcomes everything except love. Love overcomes death; hence in love is our victory. The man who lives without love lives a life of defeat and failure. He lives an ugly life, utterly meaningless, hollow. He somehow drags. His life is nothing but a slow suicide.

The man who loves really lives, lives authentically, because love brings colour, love brings joy, love brings meaning. Love makes you significant. each moment becomes eternity.

Love more and more for the sheer joy of loving, for no other motive. Love unconditionally. To put conditions on love is like putting legs on a snake. The snake needs no legs. Don't help the snake by putting legs on him, otherwise you will destroy him. Love needs no motives, it is an end unto itself.

Love is the greatest blessing in life. There is no higher blessing than love. If one can love then everything is possible, even the impossible is possible. Then miracles start happening, unimaginable joys become yours. Incredible insights suddenly grow in your inner being, windows open up into mysteries.

doors which you had never suspected existed within you open and you can see the multi-dimensionality of existence. But it happens through love.

Love is not to be tethered to somebody in particular. Love should become a state, love should be a state of loving. One should be loveful, not that one loves this person or that person. One should be the very energy called love so that wherever one is one is showering love.

When it becomes so natural, so spontaneous that even in your sleep you radiate love, you have attained to god. In that moment love and god are synonymous. Hence I call it the greatest blessing. Love is not only a blessing to the person to whom it happens, it is also a blessing to the whole world through him.

When you are blessed you can bless the whole world. And that is real service to humanity, to existence.

The eagle represents three things: power, might, courage and strength.

Love needs all these qualities to bloom. A cowardly heart cannot love. Love is the greatest adventure in life, the most dangerous. The journey is full of hazards. And the danger is that you are moving towards the heights; if you fall you are gone forever. The higher you move, the more is the danger. And love is the highest peak in life, it is like everest. It needs great courage, guts. It needs adventurousness to move into the unknown.

Love takes you towards the further shore without any map, without any guide, without even any guidelines. And love takes you in a very small boat. The sea is there with all its turmoil and you are moving in a small boat, you can't see the other shore. But you are in deep trust, knowing that existence protects you, trusting that existence cares for you, that even if you are drowned in the middle there is nothing to worry about. It is better to be drowned in search of love than to live a long life without love. Because even a single moment of love is more valuable than a hundred years without love.

It needs a certain inner strength, a certain spiritual strength to be in love, because love demands the almost impossible. It demands unconditional surrender of the ego. It demands that you disappear. It demands that you be nothing, a nobody, because only when you are a nobody, a nothingness, are you empty enough for love to rush in, to fill you, every pore of your being. If you are too full of the ego love has no space to enter you.

And the eagle is a beautiful metaphor. It soars the highest. It crosses the boundaries of the known. It goes on moving farther and farther away from the earth and the earthly. Trusting only in its small wings it moves into total aloneness. It goes beyond the clouds. It goes farther and farther away from all shelter, security. It tries to penetrate into the unknown. And that's exactly what love is; love is an eagle. And it is only with love that you can reach the ultimate some day. Only love can become your wings.

Let love be your path. Let love be your religion. There is no higher religion than love.

Love is only for the courageous. The coward cannot be loving. At the most he can pretend, but his love will remain phony because he cannot fulfil the basic requirement of love -- and that is surrendering your ego.

Love grows only when the ego disappears. The ego is like a seed. When the seed dies in the soil then love grows like a sprout. Then there is great foliage and greenery and branches and flowers and fruits. Life becomes a fulfilment through love. The only barrier is the hard shell of the ego. Great courage is needed to get out of it. It seems very protective, secure, safe, cosy.

Love is sannyas. It is love in the ultimate sense of the word. It is love at its peak. It is a love affair with 1/08/07

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god himself, with life itself. It is falling in love with existence.

Love is always now. It never gets old. It never ages. It is always fresh. That's the beauty of love.

Because it never grows old, it never dies. Because it always remains fresh, it is always light, unburdened by the past, unburdened by the future. It is always in the present. That's its freshness.

The whole existence is fresh and young except for man's mind. Man's mind accumulates junk, memories, and goes on accumulating. And everybody is carrying such a big load. Because it is invisible nobody can see it, but when you start understanding the process of the mind, when you become a watcher, you can see everybody carrying a mountain-load. People are crushed under the load but they go on carrying it. The load goes on growing every day and they are being crushed more and more every day. They die under its load. Their life is just an unnecessary conflict, drag, boredom, for the simple reason that they never allow themselves to be renewed.

The very process of renewing oneself is love: love existence, and don't say "I will love tomorrow", because tomorrow has no meaning. Either love or don't love, but never postpone. always think as if This is the last moment, there may be no other moment available. Who knows? -- the next moment you may not be there. Death can disrupt life at any moment. Death is always hanging like a naked sword over your head, it can cut you down at any moment. And it hangs by such a thing thread that just any small accident, just a small breeze and that's enough.

Always remember that each moment has to be lived totally because there may not be any other chance to live again. so don't say "I will love tomorrow". Love this moment, right now and don't confine your love.

Let it spread, let it be as vast as possible, because you will be as vast as your love is. If your love can be as big as the whole, than you have become the whole. You are what your love is.

That will go on renewing you, rejuvenating you, and that will go on helping you to keep clean and fresh, mirrorlike, without any dust collecting on you. That's what makes one aware of that which is, aware of God.

It is through loving existence that one becomes aware of the presence of something mysterious that surrounds everything.

Love is victory, although in a very strange way, because love is also surrender. On the one hand it is surrender. on the other hand it is victory. It is the most paradoxical phenomenon in existence. If you try to win you will lose; if you are ready to lose you are already victorious.

To learn this secret of life is of immense importance, because not knowing it people go on trying to do the impossible and the impossible cannot happen; hence they suffer. All their hopes are shattered sooner or later, all their dreams prove to be nothing but dreams and all their desires bring only frustration, failure, pain and misery for the simple reason that they do not know the fundamental law of life.

You can win but the condition to win is to surrender in love. It looks difficult event to understand it, because if I want to win, how can I win through surrender? It is illogical, certainly, but life is illogical, existence is absurd -- or, you can call it mysterious.

Those who condemn existence, they call it absurd. Those who worship existence, they call it mysterious.

But it is the same thing. They are both saying that it is illogical.

Jesus says: If you cling to life you will lose it. If you are ready to lose it you will enter into the kingdom of God, you will attain to eternal life. He is indicating this law of love.

Give it a try, because only then will you understand what sannyas is. When you start feeling the truth of the law of love you really become a sannyasin. Then you rejoice in the paradoxes. Then they are no more puzzles to be solved but mysteries to be lived.

It is beautiful that life is not logical. Otherwise it would have been so mundane. It is good that life is not a problem. Otherwise man is so stupid that he would have solved it by now (laughter).... and then what?

Then there is only suicide. But man cannot solve it because it is not a problem in the first place. It is utterly mysterious.

The more you enter into it, the more ignorant you become, not knowledgeable. The more you know, the less you know; the you come in contact with life, the more you see the point that it is impossible to know it, it is simply impossible to know it. But there is no need to know it. Knowledge is superfluous. One can live without knowing it.

You eat, you digest the food without knowing how you are doing it. You transform the food into blood and bones and marrow without knowing how you are managing it. So it is the case with life. There is no need to know, there is great need to love. But only one who can love is ready to surrender.

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So surrender to be victorious!

The only quality that man already possesses which can be called divine is love. Love is the only proof that God exists. There is no other proof. So those who have not loved cannot conceive that God is possible.

Friedrich Nietzsche says that God is dead for the simple reason that his heart never flowed in love. In fact he should have said that love is dead. That's what was happening inside him: love was dead. And because love is dead there is no proof for God.

Sigmund Freud does not believe in God because he does not believe in love. He thinks sexuality is all, man ends with sex. If man ends with sex then there is no difference between man and animals, then there is no humanity really, then man is another species of animal. Sigmund Freud takes away all the glory of humanity.

And Karl Marx says that there is no God.

But all these three people who have dominated this century are basically of the same type. These three people have not known love. I really feel deep compassion for them. Even though I criticise them, I criticise them with great compassion. I feel sorry for them. They were really capable people, very intelligent people.

Just one thing was dead in their being, love was dead. And because love was dead there was no bridge between them and existence. Because love was dead God was incomprehensible, absolutely incomprehensible, pure nonsense.

If one wants to seek and search for God, truth, then one has to revive one's love, one has to make it flow.

And that's my work here, to help you so that you can become a flowing love.

Love is the only alchemy that brings purity, that purifies you, that helps you to become your essential self. It cuts away all that is non-essential, accidental. Then only the essential is left. The essential is that which cannot be destroyed by death, and the non-essential is that which is bound to be destroyed by time and death. That's the criterion to judge what is essential and what is non-essential.

Love is a kind of fire. Just as gold becomes pure by passing through fire, one becomes pure by passing through love. And purity brings beauty, purity brings grace, because purity brings a subtle, divine aura around you. You are no more gross, you become a fragrance. And only when your fragrance is released do you know that God is. Before all that else is argumentation; futile, sterile speculation.

When you have come to know what grace is then you know what God is. Grace is the only proof that God has happened to you. But one has to pass through the fire of love. Those who avoid love, they are avoiding God. Those who escape from love will never know what god is.

Love is synonymous with God. One should love love itself, only then can one know what God is.

Otherwise one can go on thinking about God, but thinking is not knowing. Knowing is closer to feeling, far closer to the heart than to the head, far closer to love than to logic. Knowing is an experience -- and love is the greatest experience man is capable of. One should begin with love.

My emphasis is that loving people is secondary, loving love is primary. Of course you will love people and you will love trees and you will love stars and you will love animals. That is a by-product, a by-product of being in love with love. Just as they say "Art for art's sake, " I say "Love for love's sake." When you love love itself your love cannot be contaminated and you can love may people, in many ways. But when you forget love and you become obsessed with persons or things, then your love is contaminated. It becomes jealous, it becomes possessive, it becomes afraid. It becomes all kinds of things except love.

To keep one's love pure, unpolluted, is the path of sannyas. Love as many people as much as you can, but remember always that your devotion is towards love, not towards particular people. If you become attached you miss the whole point and love disappears.

Remain unattached and flowing. That is what I call being married to love; not being married to somebody but to the experience of love itself. You can call it being married to God -- it is the same.

Sannyas is a love affair, a love affair with love itself.

The greatest thing in life and the highest too is love. If one becomes love one becomes God. The condition to become love is only one, and that is to drop the ego. Ego is a false entity. It does not exist. It exists only because we believe in it. If we withdraw our belief it evaporates, it disappears.

So withdraw your belief in the ego, in the separate existence of yourself. We are not separate, we are all one. Man is not an island, nobody is. we are all part of a vast, infinite continent. We are small waves in a vast ocean. And to feel that 'I am part of the vastness of existence,' brings great joy.

1/08/07

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Drop the ego. Start feeling more and more in tune at with the whole, not separate from it. And that will become an explosion of love in you. The moment the ego is dropped, love explodes. It is the ego that hinders love like a rock hindering a small stream. Remove the rock and the stream starts flowing.

Sannyas means dropping the ego and moving more and more into the whole. And with that all worries disappear on their own accord. When you are not separate there is no question of worrying. Worrying about the future, worrying about death -- if you are not separate you cannot die. You were here before your birth and you will be here after your death. Nobody ever dies. Death is only a shadow of the ego. Ego is false, so is death. Both are false entities, but we live dominated by these two entities, ego and death.

Sannyas means getting rid of both of them in one single stroke, in one single blow. Then life is a dance, then each moment is so precious, so exquisitely beautiful. This very moment is incomparably beautiful --

the silence, the frogs, the trees... This is what God is, this totality.

So live, not as a separate entity from now onwards, but as part of the whole. That is going to be your work upon yourself.

Love is the most immeasurable experience of life. It is absolutely unfathomable. There is no bottom to it. You can go deeper and deeper and deeper, and the mystery deepens more and more. You cannot de-mystify it. Love cannot be explained away, it cannot be defined either. It is so vast, so infinite, that no word is capable of containing it. all definitions fall short.

If you allow love to happen to you, you are allowing the mysterious to happen to you. And it is through this mysteriousness that one becomes connected to God. Love is the beginning of God, it is entering into his territory. That's why Jesus says that God is love. It's absolutely true.

For man, God is far away, just a word. It means nothing. We have to approach God through something more concrete, something more tangible, something more human. That's what love is. It is god manifested.

God is love in its unmanifest state. Love is the closest possibility of reaching towards God, the nearest door.

So never go into the definitions, don't bothered about the philosophies of love, experience it. There is no other way to know it except existential experience. Unless you experience it, you don't know it. And there is no need to know about it without experiencing it. That's what people go on doing: they accumulate information about love, they become very knowledgeable, but they are deceived. Their own knowledge becomes a barrier to experiencing it.

No knowledge is of any help, it is always a barrier. If you want to know love unlearn whatsoever you have learnt about it. If you want to experience truth forget all the theories that have been taught to you. If you want to meet God then beware of all the priests and all the theologians.

Existence needs no mediators. You are fully capable of coming directly to it. You have the intrinsic capacity to know, to see, to feel, to be.

Become a friend to all that is -- to human beings, to animals, to trees, to rocks. Create the quality of friendliness. Don't make any distinctions. Let it flow to everyone irrespective of caste and creed and nation.

Forget all distinctions and then slowly slowly you consciousness will start becoming universal.

Friendship is a sure step in dropping the ego and becoming egoless. Ego exists by creating enemies, because ego exists through fight. The moment all fight disappears from your mind ego has no more support.

And with that all you boundaries disappear, you become one with the universe.

Friendship is the pure essence of love.

Love is godly. Hate is evil. Love is divine and people live in hatred. Even when they think that they love it is not love, it is something else.

Adolf Hitler in his autobiography MEIN KAMPF says that a country can remain united only if there are enemies on the outside, because people feel united if there is a common enemy. If they can hate somebody together they feel great love for each other. If the common enemy is there then they are very friendly with each other. If there is no common enemy they hate each other.

This is a very fundamental truth. Of course he exploited it in his own ways. He was not concerned with the truth, he was concerned with how to make it a base for his exploitation. But this is the experience of the centuries.

In India, before freedom came, Hindus and Mohammedans were fighting continuously. So it was decided to divide the country in two; hence Pakistan came into existence, and it was thought that now there would be no problem: Mohammedans would be in Pakistan, Hindus would be in Hindustan and there would be no problem. But Hindus started fighting amongst themselves. Then the South started fighting against the 1/08/07

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North and the Maharastrians started fighting against the Gujaratis, and Hindi-speaking people started fighting against the non-Hindi-speaking people.

It seems that we are united only through hate, never through love. We call it love -- deep down is hate.

That's why everybody thinks that he loves buth the world is so loveless. It can't be more loveless than it is, it can't fall any further.

Sannyas means becoming aware of this calamity, that we have forgotten how to love. Even hate is labelled love, and we believe in the labels. We are great believers in labels, in words, in slogans, and we never look inside, behind the label into reality.

Husbands and wives go on pretending that they love each other and they hate, from their very guts they hate each other. Parents go on saying that they love their children, and it is not true. They love them only if the children are obedient, they love them only if the children are fulfilling their ambitions, their egos.

Otherwise the whole of their love disappears. And children think they love their parents, that is nonsense. It is just a question of survival, they can't survive without the parents. so they moment They are ready to stand on their own they forget all about the parents. They don't care a bit.

The reality is ugly but it can be transformed if we see it. First the wound has to be seen, only then can it be cured and healed.

Love has to become the only religion on earth. Hate is the only sin, the original sin, and love is the only ladder to God.

Love is the only truth. Everything else is theorising, speculation, philosophising. Love is existential experience. You cannot think about love. what is there to think about love? You can love but you cannot think about love. That is the beauty of it, that it takes you into reality immediately. You can think about God. In fact how will you live God? You can think about a thousand and one things but they are all things which cannot be lived. and if a thing cannot be lived it is not worth paying any attention to it.

Love cannot be thought about, it can only be lived; hence it is a door to God, to reality. Lovers have known god, not philosophers. Poets sometimes come closer to knowing God than thinkers because poetry is closer to love than anything else. Musicians come very close, even closer than poets, because music is so close to love that there is only a difference of one step more and you will be in the ocean of love. But that one step has to be taken. Many musicians remain just musicians, technicians. they know the whole art but they have not yet taken the jump into the unknown. They have not yet loved existence, but they come very close; closer than scientists, closer than philosophers, closer than other experts.

Get deeper into poetry so that you can have a few glimpses of love. Get deeper into music so that you can come very close to the ocean of love. Dance! And when dancing, abandon yourself totally to it. Dance so deeply that you disappear in the dance. When in the dance the dancer disappears you will have some experience of love. And then you can use that experience as a foundation stone. And on that foundation you can build the whole temple of love.

The life of a sannyasin has to be a temple of love. When you have raised the whole temple, truth comes in to reside of its own accord. You become love and you become the host, and truth becomes the guest. But unless you are love truth cannot enter you.

Life is dark without love. It is hell without love. It is a nightmare without love. Bring love into your life and the darkness disappears and the nightmares turn into beautiful, creative acts. And hell is transformed into heaven.

Hell and heaven are not two different things. Hell is the same life as heaven, with only one difference: life plus love is heaven, life minus love is hell.

So love more and more, love for the sheer joy of loving, without asking for anything in return. Love without any motive, because the moment a motive enters love is destroyed, crippled, paralysed. The moment you ask for something in return it is bargaining. It is no more love, it is business.

Love can only be given as a gift. Of course much comes back, a thousandfold, but that is another thing.

It comes on its own accord, you need not ask for it. Ask and it will never come. That fundamental law has to be remembered. If you ask anything in return for your love nothing will come. If you don't ask you will be showered with love.

Life loves not beggars but emperors.

John is one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, and in the New Testament he is called the most beloved disciple. So John has become symbolic of the of the beloved disciple. Hence so many people around the 1/08/07

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world have the name John. In different languages maybe it is a little different; in Dutch Jan, and in some other languages a little different, but John seems to be one of the most common names, for the simple reason that it reminds one of a tremendous love affair between John the disciple and Jesus the master. It has to be remembered.

It can transpire again between me and you, and then your name will be fulfilled. and it is the most blissful relationship possible because it is love at its highest peak.... and not only love but understanding too.

Love alone brings both ecstasy and agony. Love plus understanding means only ecstasy, no agony.

Agony comes through ignorant love. One wants to do good, one intends to do good, but one cannot because one is so unconscious, so ignorant, that one does not really know what is good. So in trying to do good one creates a mess. In being helpful one becomes harmful.

When love is with understanding then there is no darkness in it. It is pure light. Ordinary love is ignorant love, and the love that exists between the master and the disciple is love full of understanding. It is love out of understanding.

In ordinary love we hope that understanding will grow through love. Between a master and a disciple understanding is the first thing and love grows out of it. As you understand your master more and more, you come closer and closer, you imbibe his spirit. The more understanding happens between you and the master, the more love arises. And love and understanding can become two wings. They can take you to the other shore.

Yashodhara is the name of Gautam Buddha's wife. A very rare woman she was. Buddha renounced her.

Without telling her he escaped into the forest. For twelve years she waited for him. Never a single complaint was heard from her. She never said, never grumbled, that her husband had deceived her, betrayed her, or anything. On the contrary she would always say 'He has gone to seek and search for truth and I know that whenever he finds it, he will come to share it with me. That much is certain.'

Her trust and love were so infinite. It was difficult, it is really difficult to wait for twelve years. No message was received, nothing was known about his whereabouts. There were rumours, gossip, that he had become an ascetic, that he was doing this and that he was doing that. But nothing concrete, nothing reliable.

But she never wavered.

After twelve years Buddha came back. When he became enlightened, the first thing he did was to ask his disciples "Come with me. I have to go to my wife. I owe it to her. She has waited too long, and she has trusted.'

When Buddha came, she only said one thing. She said 'I have only one complaint to make to you: I could not have said it to anybody else, I can only say it to you. Why didn't you ask me? Could you not trust me? I would have allowed you to go. And if you had allowed me I may have come with you. If it would have been difficult to take me with you, that would have been okay, but at least you should have told me.

The only thing that hurts me is that you could not believe in me, that you could not trust me totally.'

It is said that Buddha had no answer for it. It was true, the woman was right. Buddha said 'Forgive me and forget the past. Now I have attained what I went to attain and I have come to share it with you. Be initiated and become a sannyasin.'

And she became a sannyasin immediately... not even a moment's hesitation. She didn't say 'I will think it over.' There was no question. A Buddha said 'Become a sannyasin.' She became a sannyasin.

And then she remains like an ordinary sannyasins amongst thousands of sannyasins. She loses all her claims that she is somehow special. Nothing is heard about her She goes and mixes in the crowd of sannyasins. She becomes an absolute nonentity. And Buddha's respect for her goes on growing. One he mentions her again saying 'This woman is rare. I was a little afraid that even though she became a sannysin she would try to say that she is special, that she has been my wife. But she has simply disappeared, melted.

No claim on Buddha, no claim for any special attention.'

Buddha said 'Her name is right, she has proved it. Yashodhara means the glorious one. she is a glorious woman.'

Love has not to be learned. It is our very nature, we are born with it. It is not something for which we need any education. It is something which is already there but hindered by many things. We have only to remove those hindrances and love starts flowing. And when love starts flowing you start moving into a totally new dimension. That dimension is God. and when you know how much has been given. Inestimable, 1/08/07

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immeasurable is this gift.

Love is the most precious of all his gifts -- but it dies. We never give it a chance to sprout, we never create the right space for it to grow. We never become the spring so that it can flower and bloom.

That's what sannyas is: creating a right space, the right soil for love to grow, for love to expand. As your love becomes bigger, you become bigger. When your love is perfect you are perfect. There is no other way to be perfect. Only the perfection of love can bring perfection to your being.

There are two ways to reach God: one is meditation, the other is love. A few people reach through meditation, a few people reach through love. Both are valid ways and both reach the same experience.

When the meditator reaches the ultimate peak he suddenly finds love arising in his being, and when the lover reaches the ultimate peak he finds meditation happening of its own accord. On the way they are different, at the peak they become one.

The path of meditation is arduous, it demands a little superhuman effort. It passes through deserts; it passes through rocky deserts where nothing grows.

The path of love is easier, natural, simple -- far more poetic too, far more human too. It passes through a different territory, full of greenery, with birds singing and flowers blooming, waterfalls and butterflies. It passes through a beautiful land. On the path of love only surrender is needed, nothing else; just a let-go, a deep relaxation. One stops pushing the river and starts flowing with the river. And the river is already going to the ocean; it will take you, it will carry you.

If one is incapable of love, then only do I suggest that one move through the path of meditation.

Otherwise, why bother going through a desert land when you could have passed through gardens and beautiful forest?

The first preference is love. But if somehow love has been so destroyed by your upbringing, has been so poisoned that the very word frightens you, scares you, then I suggest you go through the path of mediation.

Many more people reach through the path of love; almost ninety percent. of people will find it easier to move through love. And my feeling about you is that love will be easier for you.

Become a lover of existence.

Let sannyas be a love affair with the cosmos!

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #10

Chapter title:

10 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002105

ShortTitle: WITHME10

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

In my vision virtue has nothing to do with morality. A virtuous man is beyond the moral and immoral. A virtuous man is not calculative. He acts spontaneously, not out of certain principles. The moral man acts out of certain principles given by tradition, by scriptures, given by others. The moral man is an imitator, he is 1/08/07

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pseudo. He is trying hard to be a saint. But you can never be a saint by trying too hard, because the very strain creates tension in your being. And a tense saint is not a saint at all.

Relaxation, a total let-go, is a must. the real saint does not strive to be something, he simply relaxes, he accepts himself, whatsoever he is. He rejoices in it, and in that very rejoicing he becomes a saint.

Virtue means spontaneity. We have been told what to do and what not to do, we have not been told how to remain natural. A thousand and one things have been imposed upon us.

My work here is to help you to find your nature, that which you brought with you into the world. All that has been given by others has to be put aside. Only that which you brought with you at birth has to be helped, nourished, taken care of, so that you can be spontaneous again like a child, so that you can act out of the moment. That is true responsibility: the capacity to respond to the moment, not according to some set formula, not according to some ready-made ideology. It is the way of the stupid person to act out of ready-made ideologies.

The wise person acts out of awareness. He is fully alert in the moment, he makes himself available to the moment, he responds to the moment. And something transpires between him and existence -- and that is beautiful, that is virtue.

Love is the message of god. We all bring the message to the world but we forget it on the way. The way is long, falling and falling and falling from the heavenly abode and reaching the earth -- it is such a long journey. Then one forgets everything. One forgets why one has come at all, from where. what is one's purpose in life? Everything becomes a confusion and a chaos.

The function of the master is to remind you that you have a purpose to fulfil. Everybody comes with a destiny, everybody comes to attain to some meaning and to contribute some beauty to the world.

Love is the most essential message that everybody brings in his own way. It has to be delivered in different ways. somebody will deliver it through music, and somebody through a dance, and somebody through singing, and so on, so forth. But the essential message is love, because love is the bridge between god and man. It is through moving more and more into love that one comes closer and closer to god. When one has become love itself one has come back home.

Man can only have any contact with god through meditation, there is no other way, because it is only in meditation that you melt, that you merge into the whole. And god is not a person. God simply symbolises the whole, the totality, the totality of all: the stars, the sun, the moon, the people, the animals, the trees, the earth, and all that is. God is only a symbol, a very loving symbol and very significant too. But it is not a person, it is only a presence. When you are silent, in deep meditation, you start feeling a presence surrounding you and surrounding the trees and the mountains and the stars and the people... a subtle aura of light, a subtle aura of aliveness. The whole existence is bubbling with life, radiating joy. It is a continuum of celebration. It is a dance that never begins and never ends, a song that goes on and on and on.

The moment you start feeling it, there is nothing else to do but to be grateful, to bow down to the infinity of existence, to the mystery of existence and to the great gift that it has given to you. That you are --

this is the gift, the most precious gift. That you are alive, that you can see the stars and the sun and the moon, that you can hear music, that you can touch people and feel the warmth, that you can love and be loved....

Life is such a great opportunity but we are so ungrateful. Our ungratefulness arises out of a certain state.

That state is what is known as mind.

Mind is ungrateful, ungenerous. It is very reluctant to say yes to anything, to give thanks for anything. It lives on the negative. It is very efficient at saying no, it is very efficient at condemning, complaining, but it cannot praise. It is absolutely impotent as far as praise is concerned.

Praise arises in you only when you have put the mind aside and you start functioning from the heart.

That is meditation. Moving from the head to the heart is meditation. and then god is felt, the presence becomes almost tangible. And one cannot avoid it, one has to consecrate oneself to that presence, one has to surrender to that presence, one has to be overwhelmed, possessed, taken away.

Meditation needs great work. It is arduous, it is an uphill task. To remain non-meditative is easy in a way. You have not to do anything about it, you are already non-meditative, everybody is born non-meditative. But to become meditative really needs great courage, great determination, great patience, because to go beyond the mind is the most complicated phenomenon. We don't know anything except the 1/08/07

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mind. Even when we think about going beyond it, it is the mind that is thinking. Even when we try to go beyond it, it is the mind that is trying to go beyond itself. and how can the mind go beyond itself -- that is the complexity. It is like pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. You cannot pull yourself up by your shoestrings.

But there are methods, devices, which can be of immense help. They are all indirect. Meditation cannot be forced. anything forced will be nothing but a product of the mind. Mind is very coercive. Mind is nazi, it is fascist, it is violent. So meditation can come only when you slip out of the mind without any coercion, naturally, spontaneously.

An the device, the greatest device ever used is witnessing. Just watch your thoughts. Whenever you have time just close your eyes and see thoughts and desires and memories moving on the screen of the mind. Be totally unconcerned. Don't judge that this is right and that is wrong. If you judge you have already jumped in. If you say 'This is right,' you have already chosen something, and the moment you choose you become identified with it, you have become attached to it. You would not like it to go, you would like to keep it for yourself. And when you say that something is bad you are pushing it away, you are avoiding it, you don't want it any more. You don't want it even to be there on the screen; hence you have started fighting, struggling, and you have forgotten witnessing in all this.

Just to be a witness: one sits on the bank of a river and watches the river flow by. There is nothing to judge, nothing really to say, but only to see.

And if one is patient enough, slowly slowly the traffic becomes thin. Less and less do thoughts come on the screen and sometimes for moments there is nothing on the screen and you are facing an empty screen.

Those are the most precious moments of life, those intervals when thoughts are not there, you are simply there. The seer is there with nothing to see.

Those are the moments of purity, innocence, those are the moments which can be called divine. They are no more human. You have transcended humanity in those moments. Slowly slowly those moments become bigger and bigger, and one day it becomes such a simple process that whenever you want to you can go into that interval, into that thoughtlessness.

Fully aware yet thoughtless -- that is meditation. And that is the only thing that can liberate you from all kinds of bondages, that can bring peace to you, and bliss and god and truth.

Grace is never human, it is always divine. It is the beyond penetrating the gross planes of existence. It is matter penetrated by spirit. When matter becomes penetrated by the spirit it becomes luminous. That luminosity is grace, that aura is grace. Grace belongs to the beyond, to the eternal.

The mind lives in time, in the temporal. The mind knows nothing of grace. It is ugly to the very core, it is mean, it can't be otherwise. a mind generous? -- that is an impossibility. A mind gracious? -- that is no possible in the nature of things.

When the mind gives space for the beyond to penetrate, when a ray comes from the sun, from the very source of light and stirs your heart and stirs your dormant energies into dynamic forces, grace arises. You become utterly beautiful. It is a beauty that is not of the earth, a beauty that belongs to heaven -- the beauty of paradise.

Earthly beauty is a very momentary phenomenon: one day it is there, the next day gone. It is a soap bubble. it looks beautiful in the sunrays, and if the sunrays are penetrating the soap bubble it can have a little rainbow around it, it can look very colourful. But a soap bubble is a soap bubble after all, and soon it will be gone. You can't catch hold of it. So is the case with physical beauty.

Grace is divine beauty. Once achieved it is yours forever, it abides, it becomes your very nature.

It is only through meditation that one becomes graceful, there is no other way, because meditation is the only way through which we can transcend mind, through which we can put the mind aside. it is the strategy, the technique, of putting the mind aside, of turning the mind off. Once you have learned how to turn the mind off, something of immense splendour starts descending on you from all directions. You become suffused with god. That's grace.

Meditation means become aware that 'I am not the mind.' We are identified with the mind, we don't think of ourselves as separate from it. We are separate, but we are so close to the mind that slowly slowly we forget the separation and we start functioning as if we are minds. That creates suffering, because nothing happens to us, everything happens to the mind. Happiness, unhappiness, success, failure, birth, death --

everything happens to the mind, nothing happens to us. We are always beyond happening.

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So when we become identified with the mind, if there is success we are too excited. If there is failure we are so down. If death is coming closer we are so frightened, so miserable. If suddenly money arrives unexpectedly there is great euphoria. But all these things are happening to the mind and you are getting affected unnecessarily.

Meditation means creating a distance between you and the mind so that you are no more affected by it.

things will go on happening but you will remain simply a watcher. And to be just a watcher is a great freedom. To be just a watcher and nothing else makes one enlightened. When the watching has settled so deeply that nothing disturbs it, nothing distracts you from it, then you have achieved that which is worth achieving. You are victorious, you have become a master of yourself.

Then life has a totally different beauty, a totally different grace. It has a divine aura around it. It is sheer bliss, pure peace, a tremendous light which is inexhaustible. Then you may not have anything in the world but you are a king or a queen, because the kingdom of god is yours!

Mind is a hoarder of bitterness. It collects sounds, hurts, insults. It goes on sulking over them for years.

Psychologists are very aware of the fact that something said when you were only four years old may have hurt you so much that it is still there like a wound, still oozing pus. You don't allow it to be healed.

You go on fingering the wound so you make it hurt again and again, again and again you create it, never giving it an opportunity to be healed by itself. If we look at our mind, it is nothing but wounds and wounds.

Hence life becomes a hell; we collect only thorns.

A man may have been loving to you for years, he may have been compassionate, kind and everything, and he says just one thing which hurts you, and years of love and friendship disappear. That one thing becomes important, weighs more than all that he has done. You will forget all his love and his friendship and all his sacrifices for you. You will remember that one thing -- and you would like to take revenge.

This is the way of the mind. Mind functions in a very ugly way. It has no grace. Go beyond the mind and you go beyond all bitterness. And the more you surpass the mind, the more your life becomes sweet, as sweet as honey.

Meditation is sweet, mind is bitter. Move from mind to meditation. Surpass mind. don't be controlled and dominated by the mind; be a master. Then mind is perfectly good, then you can use it. Once you know what meditation is, once you know how you can be without the mind, you can use the mind and mind cannot use you. That is the moment when the gestalt changes inside, when the rebellion happens, when the fragrance is released.

Meditation is a sword. It cuts off your head completely. It cuts your mind entirely. As far as mind is concerned, meditation is a death, the death of the mind. But as far as you are concerned, it is a birth; you are born. So the sword has a double function. So on the one hand the sword kills the false, on the other hand it gives birth to the true, to the real.

By meditation I mean awareness.

In the West meditation has a different connotation. At the most, at the best, it means contemplation. In the East it is totally different. It does not mean contemplation at all. It is not concentration, it is not contemplation -- because it is not thinking at all.

Concentration is thinking in a focussed, centred way, thinking on a particular object, not going astray here and there, remaining with one object for a long period. and contemplation means that the object is not concrete but abstract; for example, love or truth or god. so you cannot concentrate as you can concentrate on the flame of a lamp, but you can contemplate. You can go on moving in a subtle way around the abstract subject but you don't go away from it, you remain close by. You look at all the sides, all the aspects of it; all the aspects of love, all the possibilities of love, all the meanings of love. You remain in that climate of love.

that is contemplation.

But meditation is going out of the mind, it is transcending the mind, it is becoming a witness to the mind. One simply watches whatsoever goes on in the mind. One is neither for nor against. One has no evaluation. One does not want to stop it either, one does not want to remain with a certain object or certain idea. One is not interested. One is cool, aloof, unconcerned, as if one is standing by the side of the road and the traffic is going by. In just the same way you are sitting by the side of the road and the traffic of the mind goes by and you are absolutely unconcerned.

That unconcernedness is meditation. and in that unconcernedness sooner or later mind disappears, because mind can exist only through your co-operation. If you are cold, unconcerned, aloof, your 1/08/07

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co-operation has disappeared. You are no more nourishing the mind, you are no more supporting it. It has lost all its support. It may continue for a time out of the past momentum, but sooner or later the momentum is lost and the mind stops.

That stopping of the mind is meditation. And that is really a sword, it cuts off the mind completely, it makes you headless. But it gives birth to a new heart, to a new being, to a new soul.

That's the whole process of sannyas. Sannyas is a sword. it is a death and a resurrection.

Meditation means a state of no-mind. It is the art of slipping out of the mind.

We are encaged in the mind, we are constantly surrounded by memories, thoughts, desires. It is a crowd, a big crowd. Although you feel suffocated you know nothing about how to get of this crowd, because wherever you go the crowd follows you. It is within you so you cannot escape from it. Even in your dreams it is there, even sleep is not a way to escape from it.

In sleep you escape from the world; you escape from your wife, your husband, your children, your office, your boss; you escape from everything -- but you cannot escape from your mind. the mind continues, in fact it becomes louder than ever. It occupies your sleep totally, so totally that it looks as if your dreams are real.

Meditation is nothing but the simple art of slipping out of the mind, just like the snake slips out of its old skin. It is a simple phenomenon. It looks difficult in the beginning because we have forgotten it. For centuries we have not been in contact with the art, but once you learn the knack of it, it is very simple.

It is like swimming: one who does not know it thinks it is very difficult, obviously. He feels so afraid of the deep waters and the danger. How can he believe that swimming is a very simple phenomenon? It is very simple, so simple that a Japanese scientist has been able to teach six-month-old kids how to swim. And he is now trying to teach three-month-old kids how to swim, and he hopes that he will succeed.

I perfectly agree with him, he will succeed, because the child in the mother's womb remains swimming in liquid for nine months. the liquid in which the child swims in the mother's womb is exactly the same as sea water. It is sea water, all the chemicals are in the same proportion. So if he can survive that for nine months and does not drown or anything... it seems that it will be possible to teach three-month-old kids to swim. it is a simple art.

Meditation is also as simple as that.

Terry has two meanings One comes from Latin; the Latin root means soft, tender, smooth. Meditation can grow only if you are soft, tender, feminine. Meditation is a feminine phenomenon, it is not masculine.

You cannot conquer it, you cannot be aggressive about it. You have to be very very open, receptive, like a womb. You have to be vulnerable, available to existence in deep trust, in love, so that existence can start taking possession of you. That's what meditation is in its ultimate sense. The individual disappears and the universal remains. The ego is found no more, you are one with the whole.

And the second meaning comes from Irish; in Irish it means like a tall tower. Meditation is like a tall tower too. It is the highest peak. There is nothing taller than that, nothing higher than that. It reaches to the very sky, it penetrates the beyond.

We are not minds. We are neither the body nor the mind, we are a third phenomenon: we are the witness of it all. We are the watchers of both the body and the mind. When you are hungry you are not hungry, the body is hungry; you are only a watcher. But you become identified with the body, then you say 'I am hungry.' In fact you should say 'I am watching that the body is hungry', then you are literally stating the truth.

When you say 'I am angry', again you are making the same mistake. It is the mind which is full of anger, you are the watcher. You should say 'I can see that the mind is full of anger, that the mind is full of lust, that the mind is full of greed, that the mind is in a turmoil or at peace -- but I am always the watcher.'

To know this watcher is to be free, liberated from all limitations. The whole process of meditation can be reduced to the single word 'watch'. That's why Jesus uses the word so much. Again and again he says: Watch, be watchful, be alert.

Slowly slowly get out of all identifications so that you can be a pure consciousness. The purity of consciousness, that innocence, brings god to you. It becomes the merger, the melting with the whole.

One in that innocence can we know. Mind knows nothing. It is full of garbage, full of knowledge but knows nothing. The witness has no knowledge but knows. Its knowing is of a totally different category, of a different plane. It sees. It is not like information, it is not borrowed. It is one's own. And when you see the 1/08/07

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truth it liberates. Only your own truth can liberate you.

God has no form, hence he cannot manifest in all forms. If he had a particular form then the whole manifestation would be impossible.

God is not separate from his creation. He is one with it, he is the very living spirit of it all. In the trees he is green, in the roses he is red, in the rock he is a rock. All these forms are his. It is possible only because he has no form of his own. He is very liquid, very flexible. Hence this multi-dimensional existence is possible.

He is you in you, he is me in me, and yet he is not confined to any form. He takes all forms but remains beyond the forms.

One comes to know this as one goes deeper into meditation. The deeper you go, the farther away you are from your own body. The body has form, a fixed form, and when you go far into meditation, you know you are not the body, so that form disappears. It is no more yours. It is the form of the house you are abiding in.

Go a little deeper still and the mind is also left very very far behind. and all the forms of the mind --

memory, thought, imagination -- they also start disappearing into the distance. Now you know you are not the mind either. You are only a pure witness, a seer, or rather, only the capacity to see, a seeing, a consciousness. and then you suddenly become aware that consciousness has no form, it is formless.

Knowing one's consciousness, one comes to know that this is going to be the case with the whole too. If my consciousness is formless then the consciousness that permeates the whole existence is bound to be formless. Hence I say that although god is indefinable, if one persists, insists on defining him, then this definition comes closest to the truth, that he is formlessness. and this is the goal of all meditators to attain, an experience of their own formlessness.

The day it is achieved one becomes a Buddha, a Christ. Then one is no more a mortal. One becomes immortal, one becomes a god.

The rock represents strength, stability, eternity. It defies changes, it defies time, it persists. It has a deep perseverance. Everything else goes on changing but the rock remains the same. the trees change, people change -- people come and go, children are born and old men die -- but the rock remains the same. It is the most stable thing in ordinary existence. It represents something of god, the eternity of god. It is not accidental that the first images of god were made of rock, just to symbolise the fact that god is unchanging, that god is beyond time.

Everything else is a flux. don't make your house on sands because then you will suffer, you will fall into darkness. don't try to make your signature on water, because even before you are finished it will have disappeared. So is the case with time.

Time means change; and one has to go beyond time to know that which is always the same, that which abides. Only in that can we have real shelter, only in god is our security.

Meditation is a way to go beyond time... because time is part of the mind. When you move away from the mind you move away from time. the moment mind stops, the clock stops, time disappears. Hours can pass and you will not feel that anything has passed. When one is really in meditation time leaves no trace --

as if nothing has changed, nothing has passed. Everything else outside has changed, but because you are in a state of no-time you cannot see any change. When you come back to the mind of course you will see the changes, but now you know a deep centre within yourself which is always beyond time. And you can always move there to rest, to relax, to be rejuvenated.

That point is beyond death too. In India we have the same word for death and time, because time leads to death. Time is basically death, it is not life. To know life one has to know that which is not time. And once you have tasted something of timelessness within yourself, you know that you are not going to die. the fear, the anxiety, the trembling disappears. Then life starts again with a new vigour, with a new ecstasy and euphoria. That is true birth.

Monika is a beautiful word. It has two meanings; one comes from Greek, the other from Latin. Although the sources are very different they seem to be two aspects of the same coin.

The first meaning that comes from the Greek root is alone, aloneness. Remember, it does not mean loneliness. Loneliness is a negative state. You are missing the other, you are miserable, you are empty.

aloneness has nothing to do with the other. You are rejoicing in your being, you are happy being alone; it is a positive state. You are full of your own presence, so full that nothing else is needed, nobody else is needed, just to be is sheer joy. That is aloneness.

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And the other meaning comes from Latin; it is wisdom. Wisdom arises only out of aloneness, there is not other way for it to arise. Only a man who is capable of being alone becomes wise. Being alone is the whole process of meditation. And the ultimate result, the end result, is wisdom.

Discretion is a by-product of meditation. as you become more and more silent you become capable of seeing what is right and what is wrong. If you are not silent then you have to depend on others. They tell you -- the priests, the politicians, the parents -- what is right and what is wrong. And of course nobody else can decide it for you. Any decision imposed on you by others cripples your freedom, destroys your integrity.

You may have a respectable life following others but you cannot have a true life, you cannot live authentically, sincerely. When you have your own insight into right and wrong then it is a totally different matter. Then there is no struggle against the wrong and no effort to do the right. It happens naturally because you know it is right. If you know then it is natural, if others tell you what is right then it is imposed, unnatural. and to be unnatural is to lose all grace, all beauty.

My effort here is to help you attain your own insight into things, your own awareness, so that you need not depend on anybody else. Dependence is bad; it is a form of slavery, it is against our intrinsic being. Our intrinsic being can bloom only in freedom.

There is one sky outside, there is another inside -- and unless we are acquainted with the sky inside our acquaintance with the sky outside is very superficial.

Only by knowing the inner space do we know the outer. the inner is the foundation. The outer is just a flowering, the inner has the roots. The outer depends on the inner. The outer is just a circumference, the inner is the centre. And just as the outer sky is vast, infinite, so is the inner, but more vast, more infinite.

Meditation is the only way to be acquainted with it. Meditation is nothing but the process of turning in.

We are looking outside, we have become focussed. We have to learn to look in. We have to relax. Our muscles have become tense, have become rigid; they have to be made flexible. Our necks are paralysed because for lives we have been looking outside; hence we have lost he capacity to turn in. Otherwise it is a simple process. Meditation is not anything difficult, it is very simple. Even a child can do it. A child can do it more easily than a grown-up person because the grown-up person becomes more fixated on the outside, he becomes more obsessed with the outside.

By becoming a sannyasin you are taking a decisive step in your life. The most significant step that one can take is to decide that 'Now I will explore into my inner being, who I am.' And that begins a great journey, a great pilgrimage towards the ultimate.

(To a ten-year-old)

Vinod... is one of the most beautiful names. It means laughter! Learn to laugh.... and don't be a miser in it.

Laughter is your meditation. Laugh for any reason... or for no reason.

Just the other day I was reading the autobiography of a famous author. He writes about his small son, his three-year-old son, who got into the habit of saying to everybody and anybody 'Shut up!' He loved it so much that he became a nuisance. The teachers from the school complained that he would suddenly start shouting 'Shut up!' And the family started becoming embarrassed because to invite anybody home was dangerous. He might come any time and for no reason at all simply shout at the person 'Shut up!'

So one day the father called him and told him, 'You enjoy it, we know, but it is creating embarrassing situations for us. So please learn one thing: whenever the urge arises in you to say 'Shut up!', say to yourself

'Shut up!' inside... no need to tell anybody. So your urge will be fulfilled and there will be no problem.'

So for two or three days the father and the mother watched: the boy would sit somewhere and suddenly would start gigging. so they became puzzled about what was happening. They asked 'Now what new thing have you started?'

He said, 'This is so beautiful! When the urge arises in me to say 'Shut up,' and I say 'shut up!' nobody is annoyed and nobody is irritated and nobody becomes angry at me. I start giggling because I am deceiving everybody. Nobody knows what I am doing!'

So learn to giggle and deceive everybody. Don't be worried about what they are thinking. right?

It is meditation that is the ultimate experience of life. It crowns you, there is nothing higher than it. It is 1/08/07

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through meditation that Jesus becomes a Christ and Siddhartha Gautama becomes a Buddha. It is through meditation that people have known their inner kingdom, the inexhaustible treasures of their being. They have come to know their truth, their consciousness, their bliss, satchidanand. But it all happens through meditation. There is no other way for it to happen, there is no alternative to meditation.

Meditation means becoming silent, still, thoughtless but fully aware. Meditation can be reduced to a small definition: no mind and all awareness.

Right now there is no awareness and all mind. Right now one hundred per cent is mind and zero per cent is awareness. We have to change the whole phenomenon: we have to bring awareness to one hundred per cent and mind to zero per cent. then one becomes an emperor. Then you know that this whole existence is yours, that all the stars are yours. Then there is no need to possess anything, it is already yours. There is no need to desire anything, it is already given to you. The whole existence is given to you as a gift; but we have not been able to recognise it yet. We have no yet been able to see what has been given to us: the life, the love, the joy. We are concerned about small, mundane things and wasting our time, life, energy.

Meditation brings into focus the reality of who you are and what your really possess. Knowing it, all misery, all anxiety disappears. Knowing it, one is freed from all darkness, one becomes light itself. That is the crowning process.

Meditation opens the door of all the mysteries. Meditation makes you aware that you are not a mortal, you are immortal. It makes you aware that you are not separate from the whole, that you are part of it... not only part of it but that you are the whole. Meditation is the highest peak; hence we call Jesus the crowned one or Buddha the crowned one.

Their crown is not the ordinary crown of ordinary kings. Their kingdom is not of the ordinary, their kingdom is of the sacred, of the inner, of the divine. and that's what is meant by being initiated into sannyas.

Now the search for your real being, for your authentic being begins.

And by meditation I mean a state of no-mind, a state of no-thought, of pure awareness, of a mirror reflecting nothing, just an empty mirror. The empty mirror is exactly the right symbol for meditation. One can become an empty mirror if by watching one's thoughts, one slowly slowly drops them. In fact the more efficient you become in watching your thoughts, the more and more they disappear of their own accord.

One day it happens that there is no thought inside you, there is utter silence: no ripples, no waves in your consciousness, nothing is reflected and you are fully alert, no asleep either. That is the day when one becomes the crowned one.

Let that be the goal from now onwards. That is the target. It has to be fulfilled in this life, and it can be fulfilled. It is our birthright, we just have not claimed it.

Meditation is the technique of inner conquest -- and that is the real challenge. Those who have any guts should accept the inner challenge. It is easy to reach the moon, it is easy to reach Everest; it is far more difficult to reach your own centre. But the moment you reach it all ecstasy is yours, and forever and forever.

You attain to a bliss which cannot be taken away from you.

Jesus calls it the kingdom of god. The moment you enter into it you are a king, it is your kingdom; you are a god.

It has two meanings because it can either be derived from Latin roots or from Teutonic roots. Through Latin it means a queen, through the Teutonic it means pure, purified, purity. Both are beautiful.

It is through an inner process of purity that one really becomes a king or a queen. We are born to be kings and queens. It is really very sad to see the earth full of beggars; poor beggars, rich beggars, but all beggars. They have money, they have palaces, but their souls are still begging, they are still asking for more. to ask for more is to be a beggar. To be contented with whatsoever is available is to be a king or a queen. But before one can attain to that contentment one has to pass through a process of purification, because the society contaminates us. It does not only contaminate the air, the water, the rivers, the lakes, the ocean; it contaminates more than that; it contaminates the mind -- and its contamination of the mind is far more dangerous because we are very close to the mind. and the mind affects the soul, the mind starts being reflected in the soul. The soul has to live through the mind, it has to use the mind as a vehicle. Although the soul can never be contaminated, because of its deep association with the mind it almost becomes contaminated. By the process of purification I mean one has to drop all that one has learned, because truth can never be learned. So whatsoever you have learned is untrue. One has to drop all the scriptures, because 1/08/07

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truth can never be expressed in words, and whatsoever is expressed in words is no more true. to be really purified one has to get rid of all kinds of ideologies. They are poisonous, they destroy your innocence. And it is only in innocence that one comes across god.

Purity means innocence, the innocence of a child, the innocence of a flower, the innocence of the dewdrops in the early sun -- that freshness.

Purity does not mean that one has to become a saint, and one has to eat this and not eat that, and one has to sleep at a certain hour, and do certain rituals and has to do five prayers every day, five times. Those are all rituals. They don't make you pure, in fact they are the causes of your impurity.

Your saints, the so-called saints are the most impure people in the world. Of course from the outside they seem to be utterly sacred, but deep down they are boiling because their whole process of life is repressive, and nobody becomes pure by repressing. It is repression that makes you impure. To be pure means to drop all repressive methods, all taboos. Come out of all that nonsense that society has imposed upon you. Purity means a process of de-hypnotisation.

The society has hypnotised you in a certain way. Every society does that; the society depends on hypnosis. The church, the temple, the religious education -- these are all methods of hypnotising people, of conditioning their minds, of destroying their capacity to discover truth. Giving them ready-made conclusions destroys their greatest joy of life. They will never be able to discover the truth on their own, and unless you discover the truth on your own it cannot liberate you. Somebody else's truth is never your truth, can never be your truth. Somebody else's truth is a lie for you. Somebody else's truth is going to create a bondage for you. It is only your truth that liberates.

So getting rid of all this rubbish that the society goes on pouring into every psyche is what I call meditation. Meditation is a process of de-hypnosis, of unconditioning the mind and leaving a person in a state of pure innocence.

When one can function from a state of not-knowing, god is closest. when one can unlearn all that one knows and can say 'I know nothing' -- not only say it but feel in every fibre of one's being 'I know nothing,'

-- one has become a child again. Now one's eyes will again see the wonder that surrounds us, the splendour that is all over the place. That wonder, that splendour, is the first indication of god's presence. there is no other proof, and there is no need for any other proof. This existence is proof enough, but our eyes are so full of knowledge that we have lost all contact with existence.

Our eyes have to be cleaned again.

Meditation takes you into a virgin territory, into the unknown, into absolute purity. Only meditation is capable of becoming a boat to the further shore. and meditation is the only phenomenon which cannot be contaminated by words. Virginity is intrinsic to it, purity is its very soul. You cannot make it impure, that is impossible.

By meditation I mean a state of no-mind. Mind is always corrupt because mind is cunning. We call it cleverness... it is nothing but cunningness, a good name for cunningness. Mind is very political, diplomatic, tricky, always trying to deceive -- not only others, but you too. It is a double-edged sword, it cuts both ways: it deceives people, it deceives you. It is deception incarnate.

Until we get out of the mind we don't know what being virgin means. When I use the word 'virgin' I am not using it in any sexual sense, I am using it in its highest spiritual meaning. A real virgin is one who is deep in meditation, utterly still and silent; not even a single thought passes by. When there is no thought, no traffic of thoughts, then you are pure. Thoughts are like dust; they gather on the mirror of the mind.

When the mind is without dust it becomes no-mind. and no-mind is virgin. And god can be experienced only in profound purity. Even if a slight impurity remains in you, that means that a little part of your being remains dark, ugly, unconscious, and that will be the hindrance between you and god.

Total purity is needed to create the bridge.

Meditation is the art of discovering the light within, the art of digging inwards, the art of penetrating your own soul. It is one of the most difficult arts int he world because it hurts to go in. All your interests are on the outside, and when you go in many interests have to be sacrificed. All your life is extrovert, and when you go in you have to find time, space for the inward journey.

It also hurts because when you dig inside you have to throw much garbage out of your being; and there are layers and layers of garbage inside. It has been accumulating for many lives. It has almost become part of you, it clings to you, and you have to cut it out and throw it away from you. It feels as if you are cutting 1/08/07

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

your own limbs, hence it hurts.

It also hurts because as you start digging into your own being you don't suddenly come to the kingdom of god. It is like digging a well: first you come across rocks, all kinds of rubbish that has gathered; the earth is very hard and there seems to be no hope of any water anywhere, you don't see any signs... But you go on dipping. Slowly slowly softer layers are found, then muddy waters. If you go on digging then one day you will stumble upon the sources of fresh water streams, but it is a long process.

Meditation is the only way, remember it, the only way to know oneself, to discover oneself, to know the truth of life. In short meditation simply means becoming aware of your body-mind complex, becoming unattached, unidentified with the body-mind complex, becoming a witness.

When you have achieved that point of witnessing, with no attachment and no identification, you have learned the art. then you have the right means to enter into yourself. Then nobody can hinder you, no power can hinder you from knowing your own inner being. Without knowing it, life is meaningless. The moment you know it life becomes tremendously significant. It is all splendour, all music.

Meditation is the only force that can turn evil away. It attracts the good like a magnet and it repels evil.

Meditation is like a it candle: it dispels darkness. Evil is nothing but darkness, it has no positive existence.

It's exactly like darkness, darkness also has no positive existence. It is only absence of light, not presence of something, so you cannot do anything directly with darkness. If you want to bring darkness into the room you have to turn the light off; you cannot go out and gather darkness in a bucket and bring it in.

You cannot invite darkness in. And if you want to remove the darkness you cannot push it away either, you cannot fight with it. You will be tired, exhausted, and the darkness will remain wherever it is.

Nothing can be done directly with darkness because it has no positive existence. If you want to do anything with darkness you will have to go via light, you will have to do something to light. If you don't want darkness put the light on, if you want darkness turn the light off.

That is exactly the case with meditation: meditation is inner light. If you put it on it dispels darkness, evil. Evil has no existence of its own. god has existence, the devil is only an absence of god. so you cannot meet the devil anywhere. He does not exist, he is only a shadow phenomenon. When you forget about god he is very much there, but it is because you have forgotten god. The moment you remember god the devil is nowhere to be found.

Go deep into meditation. And by meditation I mean awareness, watchfulness, witnessing.

It is only through meditation that the inner light begins. Otherwise man lives in darkness. Meditation enkindles something that is latent in all of us, but needs to be provoked.

We are looking outwards. Our backs are at our inner source; hence it is being neglected, ignored. and to ignore one's inner being is the only ignorance. To know it is the only knowledge. All other knowledge is worthless. It may help you in the world but it can't help you in eternity. And this life is a small phenomenon, the real life is a totally different affair.

This is only a soap bubble. Seventy years or eighty years are nothing compared to eternity -- just nothing. Even a soap bubble exists longer. To pay too much attention to this life and not to pay attention at all to the inner is foolish. But that's what millions of people go on doing; hence the world is full of stupidity, full of darkness, full of ugliness, full of suffering.

The moment one turns in... The very turning of the attention enkindles a light inside which is simply waiting for you to look at. Your attention begins a light inside you which knows no end. Once it has started it goes on spreading. First it fills you, then it starts spreading outside you, and ultimately it fills the whole universe.

The man who attains to that state where his inner light becomes as vast as the universe itself is called the enlightened one, the awakened one, the Christ, the Buddha.

Brigitte in Celtic mythology is the goddess of wisdom and song. That is a very strange combination.

Ordinarily wise people are not singing people, and th singers are not thought to be wise. Humanity has lived according to the sad people, the non-singing people. Sad people have been dominant up to now; they have been the saints. and the more sad a person is, the longer is face, the wiser people think he is. But real wisdom is really a song of the heart.

So your name has a tremendously significant message: Become wise but not serious. Your dance has to remain intact. don't lose cheerfulness, because a wisdom without cheerfulness is not worth anything, and a cheerfulness without wisdom is also worthless. Both together create a great synthesis.

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Another meaning of brigitte is the bridge. If you can manage to be wise and to be celebrating, then the bridge i made between man and god. Meditation is the bridge between man and god, between the visible and the invisible, between the known and the unknown, between the material and the spiritual.

Go deep into meditation. and be meditation I mean silence, awareness, witnessing. You can meditate any time of the day, you can meditate working, walking, doing things. Meditation is not something separate from life; it should not be separate, otherwise it remains a little artificial. Meditation should be spread all over life. You should walk in meditation, you should sit in meditation; that means silently, fully aware.

Slowly slowly it becomes your very flavour, then the bridge is created.

And through meditation comes wisdom -- not through studying books, not through scriptures. Through scriptures one can become knowledgeable but no wise. and knowledgeable people are sad, they are bound to be sad because all their knowledge is borrowed. There can be no song in it.

Wisdom arises out of meditation. Our *ot silence something hidden in you starts blooming. That is wisdom. And whenever some flower blooms it releases fragrance. That is your song.

We are not aware of who we are. We are not aware of the source from which we come, why we come at all in the first place. what is our purpose? Why have we been sent into the world? There must be some message to be delivered, some work to be done. something has to happen through you. Nobody is accidental, everybody is on a mission -- unaware of course, oblivious to the mission.

We are not aware, but that does not make any difference to the truth. Whether the truth is known or not known, it remains the truth; just not knowing it makes no difference. Everybody is here on a certain mission, a certain purpose has to be fulfilled. Somebody has to sing a song, somebody has to dance a dance.

Unless you have done that for which you have been sent you will not feel fulfilled, you will not feel contented. That's why there is so much misery.

The root cause of misery is that we are doing something for which we are not meant. The person who was meant to be a singer has become a priest, the person who was sent to be a dancer has become a governor. Everybody is in somebody else's place. Everything is topsy-turvy, it is a chaos. Without meditation you will never know what exactly your work here is. As you enter into meditation, as thoughts go farther and farther away from you, as you create a distance between you and your mind, as you become more centred and settled, peaceful, at ease with yourself, a clarity arises. You can see clearly that this is the thing that you have to do.

It is so absolutely clear that there is no doubt about it, no question about it. In fact one is surprised how one has remained unaware of such a simple fact for so long. And once it is known your life goes through a radical change. Then you start doing that for which you are meant. Then the rose becomes the rose, the lotus become *sthe lotus.

Right now the rose is trying to be the lotus, the lotus is trying to be the rose. The rose can neither be a rose nor can the lotus be a lotus. Everybody is trying to be somebody else -- and you can never be somebody else, you can only be your own self.

Meditation is simply the method of discovering your source, your goal, your purpose, your meaning, your significance. and once you have started doing that, that is worship, that is prayer, that is really being religious. That is sannyas.

Meditation is a process of rebirth, a process of spiritual rebirth. The body is born through the parents, but not the spirit; the spirit needs another birth. One has to go through the womb of meditation. Nobody else can do it for you, it has to be absolutely a self-discovery.

The Buddhas can only point the way, the masters can only give you hints. Then it is for you to travel. It is a long pilgrimage. It is because we have gone so far away from ourselves that coming back home is a long journey. And we have forgotten where our home is. We have forgotten the route.

Even if we come back home we will not be able to recognise immediately that this is our home. Hence the master is needed -- first to create a great thirst in you so that the seeking starts, then to give you certain hints. I call them hints because they are not very definite, and they cannot be very definite. By their very nature they are vague, because the journey is a very mysterious journey. It is not something like a superhighway; it is going zig zag into a jungle, no path exists. As you move, by your movement you create the path. and you have not gone to your inner centre for so long that thick jungle has grown all around it.

Then finally the master is needed when you have reached home to tell you that this is it, to help you recognise it, to help you remember it.

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Dhyan means meditation. Jules means youthful, youthfulness.

This is the literal meaning of Jules. There is also a symbolic meaning: the youthful heart. It is significant.

Mind is always old. By its very nature it cannot be young, because mind simply means the past, and how can the past be young? It is not only old, it is dead too. It is just a corpse which we are carrying.

Mind is purely a memory system, a biocomputer, and memory by its very nature has to be old; otherwise how can it be called memory? Something has happened, something has been experienced, something has been learned, observed. It has been recorded -- that record is the mind.

The heart is always young just as the mind is always old, because the heart lives in the present; it knows nothing of the past and nothing of the future either, because future is only an extension of the past; it is modified past. It cannot be otherwise. Whatsoever you desire in the future is projected by the mind, it is projected out of its experiences. Of course it is modified. All that was bad, sad, has been dropped and all that was beautiful, good, has been magnified, but it is nothing new.

The past is old and the future is the child of the past. Only the present is always new, young, fresh, alive.

And meditation is a simple process of shifting your energy from the head to the heart, from logic to love. A sannyasin has to become less and less of a head and more and more of a heart, and finally, the head has to be completely chopped off.

One has to behead oneself, then only the heart functions in its totality. And the functioning of the heart in its totality is bliss, is truth, is life eternal.

Table of Contents

Chapter title: None

Chapter title: Truth

Chapter title: Bliss

Chapter title: Consciousness

Chapter title: Prayer

Chapter title: Music

Chapter title: Man's Nature

Chapter title: Love

Chapter title: