< Previous | Contents | Next >
CHAPTER 17
17 April 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem means love, Vasanto means spring – love spring. And the spring has come. That’s what sannyas is all about. In India orange is the colour of the spring. It is the colour of joy, youth, newness, love, life, celebration.
In the spring nature celebrates, but it can celebrate only in spring. It is an unconscious phenomenon. Man can celebrate the whole year round, man can celebrate every moment of life. And there comes a peak of celebration when even while you are asleep the celebration continues; one just has to know the knack of it. And if the whole day is full of celebration, how can the sleep be different? – because the sleep only reflects the day, it is just the day recycled again. It is the same movie played again, the same tape replayed. It is just a kind of unwinding to relax the mind.
That’s why psychoanalysis is so interested in dreams, because in knowing the dreams much can be known about the day which may not be possible to know directly. Because people hide, they don’t show their true colour. They feel one thing, they say another. They want to do something and they do something totally different. They are full of tears and they smile. But in dreams they cannot deceive. So dreams have become far truer than the day. This is ironical, that the dream shows much more about reality than the reality itself. Man has become so false that you cannot depend on his day-time behaviour.
But once celebration penetrates your being it continues. Then there is no holiday, the whole of life is a celebration. Then all days are holidays, work is play, love is worship and every act is meditation.
I don’t teach renunciation of life. I teach indulgence in life – utter indulgence, total indulgence in life. Once you abandon yourself to life, once you become totally drunk with life, God is not far away. Only those who move towards God in deep drunkenness, reach.
CHAPTER 17.
‘Vasanto’ is just a symbol, to signify that the day you become a sannyasin the spring has come, that now, no more misery. Don’t play old tapes. Just cut the very root, just drop the whole idea of old patterns and old habits and start living in a new way. And it is only a question of decision. Once you decide, things start changing, because everything depends on your decision. That is the meaning of the word decision: it means ‘it cuts’, decision. It cuts your past, it creates a discontinuity. Sannyas has to be that kind of decision: in one stroke of the sword, suddenly you are no more related to the past. It looks like a miracle but it happens. It is happening to everybody, it has to happen to you too. Just allow and co-operate. And remember always: unless you co-operate with a reality, that reality does not exist for you. That’s why my insistence for sannyas.
Many people ask ‘Why can’t we be here without sannyas?’ You can be here but I will not be a real phenomenon for you, because a reality is real only when you participate in it. If you don’t participate in lt, if you remain a spectator, then it is not a reality to you. So from this moment now become an absolute participant in whatsoever is going on here. And immense things are happening. Once you start entering them, more and more things become possible.
To give possibilities to man, to give infinite possibilities to man, is the whole purpose of religion. If there is no religion, man is satisfied with the mundane – the office, the family, the money, the bank and things like that; then there cannot be any significance. Religion opens up infinite possibilities. It allows you to look to the heights, to the depths. It allows you to see the sacred. And once the sacred is seen, even the mundane starts becoming the sacred, it becomes part of it. The sacred is not against the mundane but if you know the sacred then the mundane is also sacred. If you don’t know the sacred then there is only the mundane. And that is trivial, boring and repetitive.…
Meditate and take part in the music but participate in at least two, three groups. Then you will see that something very valuable is happening through them too. Everything here is devised in such a way that it helps everything else. If you go deep in meditation you will be able to go deep into the music. They are not unrelated phenomena, they are all related. And everything helps. Once you have seen that interrelatedness, then you will be surprised that one can go into music infinitely more deeply than one has ever gone before.
If you can go deep into meditation... But you can go deep into meditation if you can go deep into your emotions and into catharsis, then meditation will be helped. They all support each other.
Book for a few groups and then we will see how you feel.
[A sannyasin says he had to shave off his beard because of a rash.] But without a beard you look so empty!...
Let the beard grow! A man without a beard looks almost like a woman with a beard! Just think of a woman with a beard... let it grow!
< Previous | Contents | Next >