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CHAPTER 12
12 February 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Anand means bliss, nityam means eternal. Eternity is not non-ending time, eternity means no-time. Eternity is not the continuity of time forever; that is the meaning in the dictionaries: forever and forever. But forever is part of time – prolonged time, indefinitely prolonged, but it is still time. Eternity is jumping out of time; it is non-temporal, it is no-time. And the present moment is the door to eternity. The past is part of time and the future is part of time. The present is not part of time, the present is just between the two, the past and the future. If you are absolutely alert only then are you in the present, otherwise you go on missing it. If you are not alert, by the time you are alert it is already gone, it has become the past; it is so swift.
So between the past and the future there is a door, a gap, an interval – now; that is the door to eternity. Only in eternity is bliss possible: in time, at the most, pleasure; at the worst, pain, but both are fleeting. Their nature is not different: pain comes and goes, pleasure comes and goes. They are both momentary, water bubbles. Once you have tasted of the eternal you become it. Bliss has no counterpart to it: it is not a duality of pleasure and pain, day and night. It is non-dual: it knows no opposite, it is a transcendence.
So this is the message in your name, to try to be more and more in the present. Don’t move too much in imagination and memory. Whenever you find yourself wandering into memory, into imagination, bring yourself back to the present, to what you are doing, to where you are, to who you are. Pull yourself back again and again to the present.
Buddha has called it recollecting oneself; in that recollection by and by you will understand what eternity is.
Anand means bliss, vira means courageous. Bliss requires that one be courageous. It is easy to be miserable, any coward can do that, it needs no talents, no guts, any impotent person can do it.
But to be blissful needs guts, courage – courage to gamble, courage to risk, courage to go into the unknown. So only a very few courageous people attain to bliss, because only a few people risk all for it.
People are so cowardly that they don’t even risk their misery for bliss. They cling to misery. Out of fear they cling to anything, even misery will do; they have to cling to something. They don’t allow the misery to go: even if there are opportunities to drop it, they don’t drop it. They find a thousand and one excuses not to. Even if there are occasions when bliss, is possible, it knocks on the door, they escape and hide.
To me, courage is one of the greatest religious virtues. So be courageous! Start moving into the unknown, into the uncharted, the unfamiliar... and sannyas is the beginning of that journey.
[A sannyasin couple are present. The man says he has been doing vipassana and it has been wonderful, but sometimes other people, for example his girlfriend, find his silence disturbing.]
You need not worry about anything else: continue Vipassana. These problems are bound to arise. You live in a mad world. If in a mad world a person starts becoming sane, he will disturb all the mad people around him. His sanity will be a disturbance because he will start moving in a different direction than everybody else. He will start behaving in ways that others think are bizarre. Your silence can be disturbing to people because they don’t know what silence is. They will interpret it as coldness, they will interpret it as dryness, as being unloving. These will be their interpretations because they don’t know what silence is and they don’t know what silent love is. They understand noise, they know that language. They expect you to be noisy just as they are. Then things are okay; you are just like them. When everybody is noisy and you are not, you create a little disturbance in everybody’s mind. The problem arises: who is sane – they or you? And of course they are in the majority: they can vote and can say that you are insane, that something is going wrong with you. So don’t be bothered by that. Slowly slowly, they will understand, but whether they understand or not is not the point. If you are feeling blissful, that is the decisive thing.
And about [your girlfriend]... she will also feel disturbed many times, because a love relationship starts in a kind of passion, a fever, agitation, and if one partner starts becoming silent, the other starts feeling as if the passion is disappearing. But she will understand because she is a sannyasin, so that will not be a problem. Soon she will understand that there is a different kind of love which is far more valuable.
[To the girlfriend] There is a love which is hot and there is a love which is cool... and remember, cool is not cold; it is simply not hot. Don’t misunderstand it as cold. It is just in the middle, it is neither cold nor hot. It is non-feverish, it is sane. It is silent, it is not noisy.
He may not say so much that he loves you; and if you understand just language so only when he says again and again, ‘I love you’ do you think that he loves you, then there will be difficulty. Otherwise his heart is saying, ‘I love you’ without saying anything. You will have to understand that language of the heart, you will have to learn a new language. And it is difficult! Who wants to learn a new language? One is perfectly okay with the old – why bother? But you will have to learn, and this learning will be of immense value to you too. Not only will it keep your relationship flowing, it will also give you new insight into love.
Love has many planes. The hot love is the lowest; it is sexual, it is of the bodies. The second level is deeper than the first; it is of two minds. And the third is still deeper; it is of two souls. And the deeper you go, the more silent it becomes.
Don’t be worried at all. Sometimes his face will look as if he is indifferent, as if he is not concerned with you much. In fact only a silent man can be loving, can be caring, others only pretend. But those pretenders are noisy; they advertise, they talk much about love. Their love is very much on the surface, visible. A silent man will not say anything. In fact a silent man feels that to talk about love is vulgar. Even to say to somebody, ‘I love you’ is wrong, because if you love then let love say it itself! Let your vibe say it, let your eyes say it. Let your whole being say it! Why bring language in? Language is so ordinary and so limited, that when you say ‘I love you’ nothing is said; the feeling of love is not contained in the word ‘love’. So the man or the woman who becomes silent and more meditative will not be so visibly loving. You will have to search a little deeper.
This is going to help you both. Don’t disturb his Vipassana, his meditation is going well. You have to become a support, and he will need your support more than ever because outside in the society people will not support him. You have to become a protection to his meditation; you have to defend him. If yr)u start feeling disturbed then naturally he will start thinking he is doing something wrong, he will start feeling a little bit guilty. Everybody outside is saying that something is wrong and the person he loves also says something is wrong. He will become suspicious: maybe it is wrong. How can he alone be right and everybody wrong? He may start getting doubts, and those doubts will disturb something very valuable that is growing in him.
Always remember: when something is growing it is delicate, very delicate like a flower. It can be destroyed very easily. And people who are very close can destroy it, naturally, because they are close. Whatsoever you do will affect him. He is not yet enlightened; he will be affected by it, he will think about you. He will think, ‘If it is so painful to you, I should stop it, drop it.’ But that dropping is not good for him and is not good for you in the long run. His meditation will become a source of meditation to you too. Feel happy and blessed and love him more. Sometimes you will find difficulties. For example, you wanted to go to a movie and he is meditating; you wanted to go to a social gathering and he doesn’t seem to be much interested in it. If you insist, he goes with you, but you can see that he is not there. He would have enjoyed his meditation more than chit-chatting and gossiping with people.
Allow him this freedom, because what he is growing inside iS far more valuable than a club or a movie or the rotten gossiping that goes on in the society; that is not of any value. It is certain that it will be a little hard for you, all changes are painful and hard, but this is going to attain some plenitude. If he really moves into deep meditation and you go on loving him you may not need to do meditations. Just your love for his meditative energy will go on taking you higher and higher; you can have a natural high.
That is the beauty of loving a person who is meditative. That’s why I say it is a blessing to find a person who is meditative. You love him, you love him utterly, and then you will see that you are benefited without meditations. His energy goes on overflowing in you and you will naturally become meditative: slowly, slowly, you will find great changes happening to you. So help each other.
[To the boyfriend] And you don’t be worried by anything. The only criterion to remember is: whatsoever makes you blissful is good. No other consideration has to be considered. All else
can be sacrificed but never sacrifice your meditation for anything, because that is the highest value in life. And I will help her to become meditative also so that will not be a difficulty.
[To the girlfriend] So next time you have also to do Vipassana, mm? – you also move in the same meditation. That will keep you closer and you will understand each other more. And when love has understanding, it is something of the beyond. When love has no understanding, it is very muddy.
[A new sannyasin, who used to be involved in the Moon movement asks: Who is god?]
Mm! That is not your question. The question is borrowed. It is the Reverend Moon’s (laughter). Right? It is not your question (chuckling), because how can you ask a question about god?
God is not a thing about which questions can be asked... or answered. The question, the answer, are both irrelevant. Whatsoever you say about god will be wrong. Even to say ‘God is’ is wrong, because the word ‘is’ is very ordinary. We say ‘the table is’, ‘the chair is’; how can we use the same word for god? The word is too ordinary, mundane. And when we say ‘the table is’ it is implied that one day the table was not and one day the table will again disappear and will not be.
God is always. So the ‘is’ has a totally different meaning with god. You cannot use the past or future tense with god. You cannot say ‘God was’; you cannot say ‘God will be’. God always is, but the chair is not always, the man is not always, the tree is not always. Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. So the word ‘is’ is not adequate.
Buddha kept quiet. Whenever people asked about god he would avoid the subject, he would not say anything. He would close his eyes and would not answer this way or that. And he was one of the most penetrating persons in the whole history of man; he was more in tune with god than anybody else. But why did he keep quiet? To say anything will be wrong. To ask about god is to deny god. You have already-doubted it, hence the question. The question always comes out of doubt, the question is a doubt.
No answer can satisfy. I can say ‘God is’; how is it going to help? You have heard that answer many times, you have read it in the books. From every pulpit, from every temple, every mosque, every church, people are shouting ‘God is!’ They have already given all the proof that can be given but no proof seems to be convincing; hence the question. Otherwise how many proofs have been given down the ages? Nothing new can be added to it. People have exhausted the whole subject. Millions of books have been written and still the question remains there ‘What is god? Who is god?’, so that simply shows that all the books and all the answers have proved futile. All the theologians and all the philosophers have been utterly meaningless because the question is still there. All their answers are there but not a single answer has been achieved; no conclusion has come into the hands of humanity. Again every child asks ‘What is god?’ That simply shows one thing, that god is not something which can be asked about or answered.
God has to be experienced. It is an experience, and so profound an experience that even if you have it you cannot put it into words. If somebody asks you ‘What is sweetness?’ you will be at a loss. It is such a simple experience and everybody has it, but if somebody asks ‘What is sweetness?’ how are you going to explain? At the most you can offer a sweet to the person. You can say ’Take it and taste
it.’ But he will say ‘I will taste only if I know beforehand what it is’; he is also right and logical. He says ‘How can I take it? How can I eat it unless I am convinced that it is sweet? What is sweetness? First define it and prove it, and then I will eat!’ Now there will be no way to prove it. The only proof is the taste of it, but that he is not willing to try; he wants a philosophy.
All answers are philosophic. Only silence is the non-philosophic answer, if you really want to know. What name you use for god – god, tao, nirvana – doesn’t matter; if you really want to know you will have to become utterly silent. That is the meaning of your name, Satyamurti; you will have to reflect reality, only then will you know. I can help you to cleanse your mirror but I will not give you any answer about what god is.
When your mirror is clean you will know. God can be known through experience but no knowledgeable answer is of any help. All answers are rotten. You meditate, mm? – and it will happen one day!
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