Chapter title: Music

‌Chapter title: Music‌

7 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002075 ShortTitle: WITHME07 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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed.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 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

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