29

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‌CHAPTER 29

29 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss; Pujan means worship. Bliss is worship. To be blissful is to be prayerful. To have the capacity to celebrate life is religiousness.

But down the ages the so-called religions have done Just the opposite: they have made religion a very serious, somber affair. They have made it almost pathological, morbid. They have made it utterly negative: life denying, love denying, bliss-denying. Their God has been the God of denial. Deny, renounce, condemn – that has been the foundation up to now.

And because of this the earth has remained irreligious, because very few people can manage to be so pathological as religion has been demanding. Only a few sadists, a few masochists were eligible. The sinner and the healthier part of humanity has remained unconcerned, indifferent to the temples, churches, the priests, for a certain reason: the religion that was taught was not healthy, it was not wholesome. It was a kind of disease. It has appeal only for the wrong people.

Only very few people, who can be counted on fingers, were healthy and religious – a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, a Kabir – only here and there, far and few in between. Otherwise the greater part, ninety-nine point nine percent of the so-called religious basically needed no religion but psychoanalysis. They needed psychological treatment. Maybe electro shock would have helped them more than all their worship and prayer and God.

I teach a totally different kind of religion: I teach a religion of love, a religion which affirms life, a religion of yes, a religion which is not afraid of the world, not afraid of the body, not afraid of matter; a religion which is not afraid at all, a religion which trusts in God so deeply that there is no need to renounce anything. One can celebrate, one can rejoice!

God has to found in the world because that is the only place he can be found, there is no other place. And God has to be found in your ordinary life because your so-called ordinary life is permeated with

God. There is nothing ordinary. Everything is extraordinary because everything is in some way or other part of God.

So I don’t teach denial, I don’t teach condemnation; I don’t teach no-saying, I don’t teach escape. I teach: live in the world and yet live divinely.

Anand means bliss; Nartano means dance – a dance of bliss. Life is meant to be a dance of bliss. If it is not then we don’t know how to live it. If it is not then we have gone astray. If it is not then we are doing something suicidal.

Man is not born to be miserable. Nobody is born to be miserable – no animal, no bird, no tree. Why should man be in such misery? – misery is an unnatural state. But there are reasons: misery has a few things which bliss cannot supply. And one of the greatest things that misery can supply is the ego, which bliss takes away. And because we want this ego so deeply we cling to it at any cost – we are ready to suffer hell.

Somebody asked George Bernard Shaw “Where would you like to go when you die, to heaven or to hell?” He said “It doesn’t matter where I go. The only thing that I am concerned about is whether I am going to be first there or not. If I am first in hell it’s perfectly okay; if I am number two in heaven it is hell for me.” What he is saying is true about every human being, every human mind.

The ego is possible only in the ocean of misery. The more miserable you are, the more the ego becomes strengthened. It lives on it, thrives on it. Misery is its food, anxiety its nourishment, anguish its very base. So those who want to remain separate, those who want to be unique, those who want to be special, superior to others, holier-than-thou are bound to remain miserable.

The key to bliss is very simple: drop the ego and all misery disappears – because the basic cause disappears, the root disappears. And then there arises great bliss in your own being. It wells up from your own resources; it is not something that comes from outside, it is something that arises in you. It is you! It is your very being. And then life is a dance, a song, a laughter, a love affair. And to be able to dance, to sing, to love, to laugh, is to come closer to God.

My God is a dancer, a singer, a poet, a musician, a lover. My God is totally different from the God of Plato. On the doors of his Academy, Plato has written that God is a mathematician. If you don’t know mathematics please don’t enter here.

My God is not a mathematician. God a mathematician? It is simply a contradiction in terms! God is not a calculator. And mathematics can be done by a computer far more efficiently than by God. He is not needed at all! If God is a mathematician then he is the most perfect computer, that’s all. The heart is not involved.

To me, God has no head. He is heart all over: from the toe to the head he is just heart, a heart pulsating, a heart vibrating, a heart dancing.

And to come to this heart of the universe, closer to this heart of the universe you have to learn something of the same quality. Dance a little more sing a little more. Be playful! Don’t take life serious-ly. The ego always takes everything seriously.

Sannyas is entering into the world of non-seriousness. into the world of laughter, into the world of poetry, into the world of paradox, into the world of contradictions – because God is so vast he contains all contradictions. He is not a logical syllogism: he is an ecstatic expression of joy.

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