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‌CHAPTER 17

17 September 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, paraso means vision – divine vision. God is not a thing outside you – God is not an object, so all search for God as an object is futile. God is a totally new quality of vision. It is a new way of seeing the world in a new light. It is the same world but your eyes are different. And suddenly God explodes. God has always been there – just the vision was missing.

It is just as you can see the same thing in different ways and then it behaves as different things. You can look at a beautiful rose flower as a scientist, as a botanist, and then there is no beauty; beauty does not Come across the botanist’s mind. It is screened off, it is not allowed in; it simply does not exist for the scientist. He has no way of seeing it. He sees something else: the material constituents of the flower – the color, the weight, the quantity. He completely goes on missing that aesthetic value of beauty. He has no way of coming across it, it does not come on his path – not that it doesn’t exist.But one day the flower can be seen as beautiful, when he does not come as a scientist to it.

He has fallen in love with a woman and now he wants to give this flower to her as a token of his love. Suddenly the beauty explodes. Now he has come as a poet, as a lover. Now it is no more a question of the constituents of the flower; he is no more concerned about its parts. Now the whole comes into his vision with all its immense, incredible, immeasurable beauty. Nothing has changed in the outside world – the flower is the same, exactly the same – but something has changed in the vision of the person. He is no more looking at it through mathematics, through logic; he has changed his glasses. He is looking at it through love, through sensitivity. It is a different approach, he has opened a different window to the reality of the flower. And suddenly, with all its poetry, the flower is there; it has been always there with all its beauty. Something has changed in the vision, not in the reality. The reality is the same – it is the same for you, it is the same for me – yet it is not the same because visions differ.

My whole approach is subjective. The question of an objective God is a wrong question, and once you start with a wrong question you will go on moving into wrong answers. And then there is no

end: one wrong answer will lead into more wrong questioning and so on and so forth; it goes on ad infinitum.

My approach is subjective. God is not an object in the world but a totally different way of looking at the same world. That’s what I call divine vision – divine because the divine becomes available in it, through it. So all depends on you. You alone are enough to transform the whole world. It is your world, it is created by your way of seeing, by your way of being.

To think in terms of an object is to be a materialist, so the person who thinks of God as an object, as a person there somewhere, sitting high in the heaven, is a materialist. He does not know anything about spirituality. His approach is that of a materialist – the objective approach.

The spiritualist changes himself, cleanses his being, his vision, drops all kinds of prejudices, concepts, conditionings, becomes open, available to whatsoever is there with no choice of his own, with no like, no dislike, just with no idea to project... passive, alert, available, and immediately, instantly, God is found.

——– ******** ——–

Deva means god, daraso means seeing, meeting – seeing God, meeting God. And seeing is meeting; they are not two things. One cannot see God separate from oneself. Whenever one sees God, one sees him as oneself. God is never encountered as the other, God is never encountered as “thou.” He is sitting there at the deepest core of your being as “I.” He is the “I” of the whole universe. He is the real “I,” and there is no “thou.”

To see God means to allow the separation between the knower and the known to disappear. It is a tremendously orgasmic experience, where all dualities disappear into oneness – that oneness is God. That’s why no image can be made; no image is possible. And no word can contain... no description is possible, no definition either, because the experience is of such oneness, where night and day meet, where death and life meet, where summer and winter dissolve into each other, where man and woman are no more man and woman – where all the polarities are suddenly one. And because the polarities are suddenly one, there is transcendence: that transcendence is freedom, liberation. And everybody is seeking and searching for that transcendence, for that freedom.

In duality we are in a bondage, in duality we are crippled, in duality we are paralyzed because we are divided. In duality we can never be at home. We are always in a subtle kind of inner conflict: to be or not to be, to do this or to do that, to follow this path or that? There is always division and alternatives. And whatsoever you choose, you will be in misery; the other half that has been left will take revenge. So no choice is a good choice. Choice as such is dangerous, because whatsoever we choose is going to be only half of the story and the other half will always be missed. If we choose the other half then this half will be missed, so one always repents.

You can see it all over the world: people are searching and seeking in every possible way and in the end everybody repents that his life has been a wastage. The man who has earned much money repents that he wasted his life and the man who has attained much power repents that he has wasted his life. The man who has painted great paintings repents that life has not been a real joy, not a real fulfillment. Even a man like Van Gogh commits suicide. Such a great painter, such a

great genius, but still the fulfillment is not there. Even a genius like Friedrich Nietzsche goes mad. He philosophized and philosophized beautifully; in fact there has never been such a tremendously penetrating mind – but he goes mad, because other parts suffer.

You go on philosophizing, poetry suffers; you go on poetizing, philosophy suffers. You become a lover, then other things suffer. If you become an egoist then something else suffers. Whatsoever you become you always suffer, because that which has been left remains like a black hole in your being, and one has to Choose. So a life of choice is the life of misery.

Then there is a totally different way of living: the way of living life in its totality without choosing. That is possible only if God is encountered, never before it. That is possible only when you have known God and the unity with existence. Then there is no alternative, then you don’t choose – you simply live without choice. Then in fact you never do a single thing. Things happen. You are no more a doer. You are in a let-go.

You flow – wherever the wind blows you go with it, with no choice of your own; hence there is no misery and no repentance. And one never feels that one has done something wrong or that one should have done something else; one is always fulfilled. With God is fulfillment; without God there is always misery.

And God is the experience of unity. When your inner polarities dissolve into one, when you don’t think of yourself as the body or as the soul, when the body and the soul have become one, when you don’t think of yourself as the emotions or as thinking – when thinking and emotion have become one, when the heart and head are functioning in a symphony – that experience is God!

God is never experienced, because God is not something to be experienced. God is the name of that total experience itself, of that total coming-togetherness – all the parts function and one becomes an orchestra and there is melodyThat melody is fulfilling.

——– ******** ——–

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: After the Encounter group I got sick, and as I got better I got really blissful too, but since then everything seems like a dream.I don’t understand anything.]

It is really so: everything is a dream. EXCept the dreamer, everything is a dream. Except the seer, everything that is seen is a dream. This is a good experience, a real beginning. Don’t lose track of it. Go on reminding yourself again and again: “Everything is a dream.” This is the seed, and one day out of this seed a new experience arises. Suddenly the dream is not there; only you are there, the watcher, the observer. Before one can come to that point of just being a witness one has to pass through this experience of the world as a dream.

Only when the world is a dream can you witness it without attachment. If the world is real, attachment is natural. If the world is real, possessiveness is natural. If the world is real one would like to be powerful in it. If the world is unreal what is the point of possessing it? If it is a dream there is no need to cling to it. There is no point in hoarding dream-things, dream-stuff. Slowly slowly nonattachment arises, nonpossessiveness arises; a distance between you and the world arises. You go on doing things, whatsoever is needful – you function perfectly well – but yet with a certain detachment, distance, aloofness. One becomes cool.

If the world is a dream one never loses one’s cool there is no point. If somebody insults you in a dream, so what? There is no need to get stirred, disturbed, distracted. If somebody praises you in a dream, so what? There is no point in feeling puffed up, bloated. One remains the same – in failure, in success – because all is a dream. Then out of this detachment arises the watcher. One becomes more and more rooted in watching because now one is not involved in seeing. One’s energy is free of seeing so one’s energy starts falling into the seer. This is turning in.

And one day, just as this time it has happened that you are feeling all is a dream, unreal, one day you will feel that you are the only reality. The only reality that there is is the reality of the witnessing soul, of consciousness. That is the second part to the same growth, but it comes only later on if you can persist in this first introductory chapter. It is a preface.

So don’t become worried about it, because worry comes. We have been taught that the world is very real, very very real. We have been forced, trained, conditioned, to think about the world as real, solid. “You are a dream, the world is real” – that’s what has been taught to us. “God is a dream, the soul is a dream, religion is a fiction, and meditation and prayer is just opium; people are deceiving themselves through them. This has been taught to us; in a thousand and one ways this has become our fundamental philosophy, at least in this age.

So your whole conditioning will go against it. Be watchful; don’t allow that conditioning to come in. You are moving in the right direction. Go on moving.

[The sannyasin says he will be away two years completing his BA in philosophy.]

Go and see – if you feel like doing it, do it, mm? It is a dream and a good dream! If you feel like waking up in the middle, you can wake up – it is a dream; nothing is lost. But either way it is perfectly good. If you feel good, you can go on dreaming for two years. If you feel like waking up, wake up!

——– ******** ——–

Prem means love, Anubhava means experience – love experience. And that is the deepest experience one can go into. There is nothing beyond it, not even God is beyond it. Even God is the ultimate experience of love. And love is not a theory – you have to experience it, only then do you know it. There is no other way of knowing it except through experiencing it; there is no shortcut. And experiencing is arduous – it demands much of you; that’s why millions of people have decided to live without love. Although they live in poverty, spiritual poverty, and they suffer, they are not daring enough to go into the experience of love because the demand is great.

The basic demand of love is: Die! Die as you are, as an ego – commit suicide as an ego! That is the demand of love, and very few courageous people are ready to risk that much. But those who can risk are blessed; they will know the real joy of life and the real meaning of existence. They will be immensely showered with blessings from every nook and corner of existence. Yes, like flowers, blessings will shower on them, but they will have to do one thing absolutely: they will have to die as the ego. And cowards shrink back – they want to protect their egos; then the door of the temple of love is closed. then you can have money, you can have power, prestige, name, fame, everything – except love. But nothing fulfills except love.

So your name is a provocation, a challenge, a call to risk, and that’s what sannyas is all about. It is risking all for something utterly unknown... risking the known for the unknown. But once you start doing it, the adventure is so beautiful that one never turns back. One goes in and in and in and in and disappears and dissolves. And when one is completely dissolved, God is found.

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