25

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‌CHAPTER 25

25 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

This is your new name: Swami Anand Prartho. Anand means blissful, Prartho means prayer. The word “prayer” comes from the same root as Prartho – a blissful prayer. And that is the most incredible thing that can happen in life to a man. Even love is not that far out; even love falls short, even love remains human.

Prayer is a flight into the divine. It is love evaporating into the divine. It is love going beyond the gravitation of the earth. It is the most mysterious experience of life – indefinable, elusive, but experienceable. One cannot do prayer, it is not an action; one can only be in prayer, it is a state of being. If one is doing prayer one is simply moving through empty gestures, one is following a ritual; and all rituals are dead; and no ritual is capable of containing the aliveness of prayer. It is so alive that it escapes all confinements, all limitations.

Prayer is not intellectual, verbal. It is a silent bowing down of the being, silent gratitude in the heart. But the silent part is the most essential part of it. The moment you say it, you have profaned it; the moment you say it you have gone astray. Bring words in and the prayer goes out: it is a wordless experience – because with the words comes the mind, the intellect, and prayer has nothing to do with intellect at all; it is utterly non-intellectual.

And when I say that it is non-intellectual I don’t mean that it is emotional. Emotion is a feminine part of intellect; intellect is the masculine part of emotion. Emotion and intellect are not really opposites – but are two aspects of the same coin. Hence the intellectual can be changed into the emotional any moment and the emotional can become the intellectual any moment. Just let the intellectual drink a little more alcohol and he becomes emotional and cries and hugs and... It was just there!

Prayer is neither intellectual nor emotional. Prayer is a transcendence of all duality. It is a state of witnessing, of becoming aware – nothing to say, nothing to do, but just to be.

Just the other day I was reading Buckminster’s version of the Lord’s Prayer – very intellectual and very stupid, stupid because it is very intellectual. I had never expected such a silly thing from this man Buckminster Fuller. I had hoped that he would show a little more sense. The prayer starts with definitions, prayer stars with scientific definitions! He uses one word and then he defines it; twenty lines of definition follow it. If he says “God”, immediately he says “What I mean by God” – it is a prayer! – “I mean four things by God”, and then he describes each thing.

He says “All glory is the Lord’s” and then he immediately defines what glory is – as if he is teaching God what glory is. And then he goes on a long dissertation of glory, God, of what he means by “mystery”, of what he means by this... It is a long dissertation but there is nothing of prayer in it. When he has defined everything then he says “Now Lord, I can address you, because all definitions have been made, everything has been explained, now I can address you.” But then too it remains the same intellectual thing. There is no God in it, no feel for God. There is no heart in it. It is very insensitive and utterly unaware of what prayer is – defining God and glory and this and that, and utterly unaware of prayer.

Seeing it, reading it, I felt sorry for the man, really sorry for the man. He has not experienced a single moment of prayer. Now he has gone beyond eighty – world-famous in many ways, respected in many ways – but has missed the real point of life.

So prayer is not any intellectual effort on your part. It is just a blissful dance for no reason at all. It is sheer joy just for being’s sake. Just because we are it is enough, it is more than enough to be prayerful, to be thankful.

And God knows no language so there is no need to bring language in; one can be utterly silent with God. That is the beauty of the communion called prayer: it can be utterly silent and yet it can say all that you can never say through words.

[The new sannyasin says: I had the experience of the oneness of all thing, and also in Zazen the experience of emptiness. How can I intensify and deepen those experiences so as to integrate them into my everyday life?]

The moment you ask how it will become more and more difficult. This is one of the most fundamental problems for the seeker to encounter and to settle with. Once you experience something a natural desire to experience it again and again arises – not only to experience it but to experience it on deeper levels, higher levels. And it is a natural desire – I am not finding fault with it, it is absolutely natural. But then it becomes the barrier, because the first time the experience happened you were not expecting it. That was the basic condition of its happening: it could happen because you were not expecting it. It took you unawares, it came as a surprise. Now you are clever about it, knowledgeable about it. Now you have known it. Now deep down you are demanding that it should be given to you again, that it should come not only as it had come before but even in a better way. All these demands in the mind and desires in the mind will destroy the very possibility; they will not allow the space for it to happen again.

So the seeker has to learn a great thing: experience things and forget all about them. Don’t carry them with you, don’t let them hang around you. Good that you experienced something; be thankful to God and be finished with it. Don’t let it become a psychological memory otherwise it will not allow you to go even to the same depth again – to say nothing about going higher or deeper.

And the more it is not happening, the more you will be desiring, and the more tense you will become, and more and more angry: “Why is it not happening? When it has happened once, then why not now, why not again and again?” You will make it impossible. Forget about it! It was beautiful – thank God and be again as if it had not happened.

This is the whole art of the meditator: to always function from the state of not-knowing. Never function from the state of knowledge. Never allow your past experience to encumber you, to burden you. Never allow the past experience to become a screen between you and the reality. Go on dying to the past each and every moment.

When something beautiful happens thank God, say “Amen” and be finished. That is the meaning of amen: that now this is the full stop. I close this chapter here and now. I will never ask for it again. And it will happen again and again. It happens only in that context of not-knowing, of that space called innocence.

Your experience has contaminated you. It has destroyed your innocence. When it happened you were innocent; naturally it had a totally different quality. Since then you have become experienced. Now you have to become unexperienced again – that is the how.

Forget about it! And many more times many more things will happen; always remember to forget them. Remain open, available, expectant but without any expectation. Mm? It is a very subtle distinction – expectant but without any expectation: alert, watchful so nothing is missed, not asleep, awake, waiting, patiently waiting, but not demanding, not putting conditions on reality, not asking that it should be like this, like that, it should be higher, deeper. No, that is not for us to do.

Leave it to God. It is always a grace. It happens only when you are innocent. It certainly happens, and it will happen many more times and each time it will go deeper. But each time you will have to learn to become more and more innocent because the deeper it goes, the greater a natural longing to expect will arise. Hence as the person deepens in his inner search more and more problems have to be faced, greater problems with each new experience.

The ordinary person is in a state of blessedness because he has very ordinary problems to solve, mundane: money, power, prestige. They can be solved; it is not a big deal. But if you start on the interior journey greater and greater problems are waiting for you. And this is one of the greatest problems: how to get rid of a beautiful experience. It hurts; even to think about forgetting it hurts.

It does not look right; it seems ungrateful. One wants to remember it again and again. It is such a fulfillment, it gives you joy to remember it.

But it makes you past-oriented, it makes you past-possessed. It takes you away from the present and it closes you to the future.

Forget about it, die to it and things are going to happen far bigger than you have ever imagined, ever experienced.

Anand means blissful, Satyam means truth. Truth is always blissful. And untruth always brings misery, although it promises to bring bliss. But it never delivers the goods, it cannot. Untruth pretends, poses, has beautiful masks. Hence the majority of people follow it.

Truth is naked, with no masks, with no garments. And truth never promises. It delivers but it never promises. To follow truth means to follow something without any expectation; to follow truth means to go into the unknown, the uncharted. One never knows what is going to turn up. One never knows where one is going to land.

To follow truth is to go into insecurity. But insecurity is freedom, insecurity is life; and insecurity is another name for God.

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