CHAPTER 31
31 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem means love; Helmut means great courage. Love is the greatest courage in life.
It really needs guts to be in love. It needs a capacity to die into the love, to disappear into love. It needs courage because the ego has to be surrendered. Hence many people would like to love and be loved, but cannot dare.
Their basic problem is not love; their basic problem is that they are cowards. They go on asking how to be loving, how to love, how to be loved. They should ask how to be courageous. They are asking a wrong question. And of course it is the greatest courage to surrender the ego.
Love means that the other becomes more important than you, and that is very difficult for the ego to conceive: the other becoming more important than you? The ego would like you to become more important than the other. The ego would like to dominate, possess, and love requires that you be possessed.
And both the lovers have to surrender, so ultimately the surrender is not to the other but to some unknown force called love. Both surrender to that unknown god called love. Nobody dominates, nobody possesses, but both are possessed.
This union that happens through love gives the first glimpse of prayer. Those who are fortunate enough to love are bound to stumble upon the world of prayer sooner or later. Only lovers can become religious. Those who have missed love will also miss religion. They have not taken even the first step, how can they reach the goal?
Anand means bliss; Satgyan means true wisdom – bliss arises only out of true wisdom. And the wisdom is true if it arises in you. If it comes from the outside, through scriptures, through words,
then it is not true Then it is mere knowledge, not wisdom at all. It it is borrowed it is bound to be untrue because one of the fundamental qualities of truth is that it is untransferable. One can know it but one cannot make it known to others. One can show it but one cannot say it. We can indicate the moon, but it is not expressed. And all the words are at the most reflections, pictures not true reality.
You can go to the Himalayas and see and feel, or you can look through an album of pictures of those same mountains. The album represents the scriptures. All scriptures are maps, but remember that no map is the territory. So there is no way to learn truth from others.
The greatest problem for the seeker is, then what to do? Learning is not the way; unlearning is the way. One has to unlearn whatsoever one has known from others. One has to empty oneself totally. In that state of emptiness truth arises; it is born in you. When truth is felt in the deepest core of your being you become wise. And it brings bliss, just as a byproduct, as a consequence.
One need not make bliss the goal; the goal is true wisdom. Bliss simply comes with it, in the bargain. Anand means bliss; Svabhavo means self-nature.
Bliss is not something foreign; it does not come from the outside. It grows in you, it is your very nature. To be miserable is somehow to be artificial. Misery is an acquired thing. It is going against nature; it is something learned. It looks very silly to think that people learn how to miserable, but it is so.
Bliss needs no learning. We are born as bliss. All that is needed is dropping of the strategies that create misery. All that is needed is to stop creating more miseries for yourself. Just that much negative effort is enough, and suddenly bliss arises. It is a gift from the whole or from God. And it is already there, just blocked by wrong upbringing, wrong conditioning, wrong attitudes, theories, ideologies. Somebody has become a Christian, now he is bound to remain miserable. Somebody has become a Hindu, he is bound to remain miserable. Religious ideologies or political ideologies all create misery because they all try to enslave you. And only a miserable person can be enslaved.
A blissful person is naturally rebellious.
His bliss gives him freedom to act, to think, to live according to his own being. The society is very much afraid of blissful people. It wants to make everybody a cripple. It does not want you to be able to dance. Dance seems to be dangerous to it. It does not want you to know how to sing because the heart that sings sooner or later would ask for the whole sky.
He cannot be contained. He will break through all the barriers. The heart that can sing will sooner or later become aware of his wings; and he would like to go on the ultimate flight, the flight towards truth, God, nirvana. And the society does not want you to look at the sky and the stars. It wants you to remain crawling on the earth, in the mud, wallowing in misery. Then you are ready to be exploited, then you can be reduced to machines, then you can be used as means.
Bliss brings freedom, and hence bliss is the most dangerous thing in the world. People killed Socrates because he was a blissful man. And they killed him because not only was he blissful, he was making efforts and creating a certain space for others to be blissful too. They crucified Jesus because his bliss was becoming contagioUs. They can do the same with anybody.
To be blissful in this miserable world is taking the greatest risk, but that’s what sannyas is all about. Take the risk! – it is worth taking.
Sat means being, the innermost truth of your existence, your ultimate interiority. And prem means love – love that arises out of centering, love that overflows you when you have attained to your being, love not as a relationship but as a state of being.
Love that is a relationship is not much of a love. It is the lowest kind and the ugliest too. It is exploitative. It is very mean because it is jealous. It is very egoistic because it is possessive. It is basically an ego-trip because it wants to dominate. It is violent because it reduces the other to a thing, a commodity.
And love as a relationship brings only misery and nothing else. It promises much but those promises are never fulfilled. In the very nature of things they cannot be fulfilled because both are hoping that the other is going to give something that they don’t have. Now, you cannot give something that you don’t have. Two beggars begging from each other, that is the state of the so-called lovers. Both are utterly empty. There is no bliss in their being and they are pretending to share that which is not there in the first place. But they are hoping that by pretending the other may give. And the same is the state of the other.
Hence every love affair ends in frustration. But if one is alert and aware one can learn much out of the frustration. One can learn a new kind of love that is not a demand, that is not a begging. One can start moving into meditation deeper and deeper. Rather than going into the other one starts going into oneself because the other has failed so now there is nowhere to go except into one’s own being.
And then the miracle happens one day. Sud-denly a fountain is found. The bliss that you were hankering for is already there in you. And once it has started flowing it is an inexhaustible source. Now you can give, now you can share. Now you have to share because by sharing your bliss will go on growing.