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‌CHAPTER 7

7 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, Marian means rebellion and grace. Mary means rebellion; Ann is part of Hannah, it means grace. Your full name will mean love, rebellion, grace.

Love is rebellion and love is grace too. Love is rebellion because it is the expression of your innermost core. It is not imitation, it is not being a carbon copy; it is your originality. Love is always original. Your love is going to be just your love and nobody else’s. Nobody has ever loved like that and nobody will ever love like that. That is your individual flavor, that is your perfume, that is so uniquely individual that it cannot be repeated, it cannot be imitated.

Hence each lover attains to individuality – only lovers attain to individuality. Love becomes the process of individuation. It is rebellion. It is rebellion against the crowd, rebellion against the mass psychology, rebellion against all those who are making an effort to destroy the individuality – the state, the church, the society.

But it is not only rebellion, it is grace too. It brings a subtle beauty, it brings a tremendous splendor. It is not violent. Rebellion it is, but it is non-violent, it is very graceful. It is love rebellion.

Begin with love and end with grace, and it is rebellion which bridges the two. But every step has to begin in love and every journey has to end in grace. Grace is the ultimate benediction. Grace means that God has arrived. Grace means that one is fulfilled. The tree has come to blossom. The song has been sung. The river has reached the ocean.

Anand means bliss or blissfulness, Silvio is the Latin god of the woods, the god of the woods and the forest. Your full name will mean a blissful god of the woods.

Nature is the only proof of God. Whatsoever man has made gives no indication of God. The great cement structures, the bridges, the railways, the airplanes – the great technology that surrounds us

today gives no hint that God exists. It makes us feel as if we are the creators and there is no other creator.

But when you go to the mountains, to the sea, to the woods suddenly you become aware of a totally different reality, not manmade. And it is not only that it is not manmade, it has a totally different dimension to it: it grows. The ocean goes on breathing, waves are its breath. The forest is alive, it grows: the trees are growing and the birds are alive and the animals are alive. Whatsoever man has made is dead, it does not grow. And only something growing can make you aware of the presence of life. Growth is life.

If you can feel life pulsating, God is not far behind. To feel life is to enter into the temple of God.

Go more and more into nature. Go more and more into something that is God-made and which man has still not destroyed, because it is there that God is still alive. Friedrich Nietzsche says “God is dead.” It is true: in New York he is dead, in Bombay he is dead, in London he is dead, in Berlin he is dead; but not in the woods, not in the Himalayas, not in the oceans and the rivers and not in the clouds and the stars. There God is very alive, as alive as ever. We have just to open our eyes towards nature more and more. Let nature be your meditation.

Anand means bliss, Arupa means formless, limitless, infinite. Bliss has no form because it is not a thing; it is an experience. Bliss has no boundaries because it is not a phenomenon of the mind; it happens in the unbounded soul.

Bliss is another name of your inner sky. It is infinite, beginningless, endless, with no form, with no definition, in fact with no name at all. We call it bliss because some name has to be given to it. One can call it God, one can call it truth, one can call it enlightenment – they all mean the same thing. They all indicate the indefinable, the indescribable. And that is the goal.

Sannyas is a movement from the form to the formless, from the definable to the indefinable from boundaries to no boundaries. Sannyas is another name of total freedom.

[A sannyasin says: When I was sitting in Buddha Hall one morning, you passed in the car, and you had a beautiful expression on your face.

I heard the words “Comfort ye my people.” and it was later that I realized that they were Christ’s words.]

That’s... absolutely true. But it will go on happening more and more, even there. Once a window opens, once a perspective becomes available it remains available; you just have to go on creating the context, the space for it. So for at least one hour go on sitting silently, that will do. Many times you will see me and you will see many more things.

Life does not end with the senses; there is much more to life than is available to the senses, but we have to learn the art of becoming sensitive to that which is not available to the senses. Life is mysterious, very mysterious. It is only the fools who think that they understand life, it is only the fools who are tired and bored with life; otherwise it is a constant surprise.

It has been a good experience; it has opened a door into you. Now go on knocking on the door. Much more will become available. And don’t analyze things which reason cannot prove or experience. Don’t bring your mind in, in an effort to understand them otherwise you will stop the whole process.

The deepest is available only to intuition, not to intellect. It was an intuitive flash, a lightning, in the depth of your soul.

It will be happening more and more...

[A sannyasin who is leaving says: I feel quite happy about being here and uh... going back home is frightening.]

Now I am coming with you, don’t be frightened. I will accompany you, don’t be frightened. It happens to every new sannyasin: when for the first time you go back, a little fear. But once you are there, people will be afraid of you – you just...

You need not be afraid. We are going to frighten the whole world. Just wait! [A sannyasin says: Just that I feel very um... very much like lost.]

That’s perfectly right, mm? But if you are lost you can be found; that is the beginning of the journey. First one has to lose one’s identity, only then can one know who one is. It is through losing oneself that one finds. The really unfortunate people are those who never feel that they are lost. Then they remain superficial. Everybody is lost, but people are so afraid to feel it that they go on pretending they are not lost.

When you come here you cannot avoid the truth, the truth has to be accepted, faced: you are lost, as everybody else is lost. But to understand it is a good beginning. It is a blessing, because if one really feels that “I am lost”, then one starts searching. Then inquiry begins, then life becomes a quest.

And you have started moving. To know that “I am lost”, is the beginning of a long journey in which one finds oneself. That too will happen one day. I hope one day you will be able to say to me that “Now I have found myself.”

It is a long, arduous journey, with many pains and with many pleasures, with many dark valleys and many sunlit peaks, many peaks of joy and many lows of sorrow and sadness. But one has to accept both and go on inquiring.

One day the witness arrives. One day you start feeling that you are just a witness: you are neither sad nor happy. Both things come and go and you abide, and that which always abides is your real nature, is your real self, the supreme self.

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