18

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‌CHAPTER 18

18 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, Sindhu means ocean. Love can only be oceanic; it cannot be small. It cannot be small because it cannot be a closed phenomenon. It is an open, wide sky. Love knows no limitations.

Love is not attachment. Love is not possessiveness. When love becomes possessive and love becomes attachment it is no more love; it is simply a corpse. The bird has flown; now you are only carrying an empty cage, howsoever decorated. It may be golden, studded with diamonds, but the bird is no more there, the song is no more there.

This is one of the most fundamental qualities of love: it is always greater than the lover and the beloved. It is greater than you. You disappear in it. It is not like a thing that you can manipulate; it is a mystery in which you are lost. You become a drop; it is the ocean. And great courage is needed for the drop to disappear into the ocean.

To know love and its oceanic experience is to know God. God is nothing else but love in its ultimate flowering.

Prem means love, Yoko means a child of the sun – love, the child of light. Love is the child of light. Love cannot arise out of a dark heart. Out of a dark heart only lust arises. It pretends to be love but it is just the opposite. It is just the opposite because lust exploits: it uses the other as a means; it reduces the other to a thing. It is destructive, destructive of the greatest thing in life: the presence of the person.

Love shares. Love does not use the other. Love respects the other and the freedom of the other. Love never reduces the other to a thing; on the contrary love raises the other to divinity. The very

CHAPTER 18.

eyes of the lover give you a flight towards the divine. Love transforms ordinary human beings into gods.

But love is possible only if the heart is full of light – and the heart is not full of light, it is surrounded by great darkness. By darkness I mean unconsciousness, and by light I mean consciousness.

Start becoming more and more conscious, become more alert. It is a long arduous journey but immensely paying, worth all the trouble, because once one has arrived then one knows what exactly life is, its eternal grandeur, its infinite splendor, its incredible beauty.

This is going to be your work: become a child of light so that love can become possible. And this is what sannyas is all about: about life, about love, about light, and where all these three L’s meet, God is experienced.

[A sannyasin says: I am afraid that if I go back I will lose what I got here in my heart because I will be among people who are only interested in material things.]

Don’t be afraid. Whatsoever you have cannot be taken away. That which can be taken away you didn’t have in the first place. Don’t be worried – something real has started happening in you; it will continue. I only trigger the process, then the process continues. You put in the seed, you water it, and then it starts growing into a sprout. You take a little care of it and one day it is such a strong tree that no care is needed. Yes, it is still delicate, and fear is natural, but don’t be worried at all.

Sometimes the worldly situation rather than destroying it enhances it, because it becomes a contrast. It becomes like a blackboard and whatsoever you have attained becomes like a silver line on it – it comes loud and clear.

You will feel me more there than you have felt me here because here I am something outside you; there I will be totally inside. Here, to see me you have to open your eyes; there, to see me you will have to close your eyes. I will be just your interiority, your very heart.

Don’t be worried. Continue to meditate, and whatsoever has happened will go on growing, maturing.

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