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‌CHAPTER 19

19 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Maria comes from Hebrew; it means rebellion. And rebellion is the very flavor of sannyas, rebellion is my message. But remember the distinction – and the distinction is great – between rebellion and revolution. Revolution is an organized effort; rebellion is individual. Revolution becomes automatically political; rebellion remains religious, rebellion is part of spirituality. And Carmela comes from Arabic, it means a fruitful field.

The full name will mean rebellion, the fruitful field. It is rebellion that makes you aware of your potentialities, of all that is possible. It makes you alert that you are not finished, that birth is not the end but the beginning, that all that is significant has to happen after birth. In fact death has to be the culmination of your whole life, the blossoming, the opening of the lotus.

Man is potentially God, but only potentially. Unless great effort is made it never becomes actual. That great effort is meditation. Meditation is the bridge between the potential and the actual.

Rebel against the crowd, rebel against the extrovert life – that is the first part of sannyas. And the second part: turn in, meditate. Start moving deeper and deeper into your very core of being so that the potential can become actual, so that the paradise lost can be regained.

Prem means love, Mike means godly, divine. Love is the only experience in life which comes closest to God. Everything else lags far behind. It is only love that can become the door; it is only love that can help you to grow wings to go to the ultimate. Remember that love has two aspects: one is the earthly and the other is the unearthly. Love is a paradox – the meeting of the polar opposites, the meeting of the sky and the earth, the meeting of the body and the soul the meeting of God and universe.

Many people become aware only of the first part, the earthly part, then love is reduced to sex. If you become aware of the other side of it then love becomes prayer, and only when love becomes prayer

know that you have known love, never before it. As far as sexuality persists something remains impure, something remains unconscious, something remains like a dark shadow.

The moment sexuality disappears and love is only a pure sharing, a joy, a celebration then you have touched the highest peak, the Everest of your being. And the highest peak of your being is the beginning of God. The highest peak of your being is the moment when you touch God’s feet, never before it. The highest in you is lowest in God. And it is love and only love which can take you to the highest peak.

I am not saying be against sex; I am saying don’t remain confined in it. Make love more and more unearthly. Make love free of gravitation. Make love more and more a subtle fragrance of friendship, non-possessive, non dominating, and then slowly slowly something opens up in the heart. Sex is an opening downwards, love is an opening upwards; and the heart is the field of both.

In old Tantra mythology each center of energy – there are seven centers – is represented as a lotus flower, but hanging downwards. When the love energy starts moving upwards, in that flood of energy those lotuses turn upwards. And the moment your inner wheels start turning upwards you are entering into religious experience.

That’s what mysticism is all about. It cannot be explained, it cannot be described; only hints can be given. And that’s the function of the Master: to give you a few hints – then you have to work them out. Buddhas only point the way – then you have to walk the whole journey. It is a long and arduous journey but tremendously fulfilling, incredibly fulfilling.

Veet means going beyond, transcending, surpassing. Marc is Latin, it means the god of war. Go beyond war – that is the meaning of your name, go beyond being warlike. Man has lived in war down the ages. Not only on the outside; the outside war has not been so much a calamity as the inside war. Man has been fighting outside, destroying people, and man has been fighting inside and destroying himself.

The outer war is perfectly well-known; it is visible. In three thousand years, five thousand wars have happened. It simply proves that man is insane, man as he is is not normal. It is very rare to find a normal man; once in a while a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna, a Christ – only once in a while is there a normal man. The whole humanity is insane.

But that is not so important. Far more dangerous has been the inner war. In the name of religion people have been taught to fight with themselves, to struggle with themselves. That creates schizophrenia, that creates a split in you: you start fighting with a part of your own being. You cannot defeat it because you are it, and you cannot let it win because that is against your ego. So the war becomes unending and it dissipates energy.

It makes people sad instead of joyous. It makes people so dissipated as if all their juice has dried up. They simply live like ghosts or ghosts in machines. They live like robots, dragging somehow. Life becomes a burden, loses all poetry. Life becomes ugly and deep-down one starts hoping for death. The whole cause is that we have not been told to love ourselves; we have been told to hate, to condemn, to judge. We have not been told to be total; we have been told to choose: some parts are good and some parts are bad.

My whole teaching is that nothing is bad in you. And if something appears bad that simply shows that you have not been able to use it in a right way. Rightly used even poison becomes nectar, wrongly used even nectar is bound to become poison.

Man is a great experiment: an experiment in tremendous transformation. Man has been given all the potential to be a god but it has to be arranged rightly, used rightly. The instrument is there but one has to learn how to play upon it, only then the melody, only then the music, only then the benediction.

And the first lesson of a sannyasin is not to fight with himself. Drop all fighting. Accept yourself. Accept yourself as a great gift of God, with great reverence and gratitude, and then the journey starts. Then transformation is possible. Transformation is possible only in the milieu of acceptance, never when you are in conflict.

Become harmonious, be in accord with yourself. Yes, there are roses and there are thorns but both have to be accepted because both are part of the rose bush. And the thorns are not against the roses, they are bodyguards. The real art of life is to transform even the thorn into a rose. But what we have done with man is just the opposite: we have changed even roses into thorns.

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