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‌CHAPTER 3

15 February 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss and praghosha means a declaration – a declaration of bliss.

Become a declaration of bliss. Don’t hide It – manifest it as much as you can. The more you manifest bliss, the more it will be coming to you. Remember a very basic law: that if bliss is expressed, shared, it grows. If you hide it, it shrinks and dies. And people go on doing just the opposite. They express their miseries and then that grows, and they go on hiding their bliss as if afraid of the world. People smile in a very miserly way. They have forgotten the very language of bliss.

So be a manifestation, a declaration – each moment. Don’t miss an opportunity where you can become blissful and where you can express your bliss, for small reasons – for no reason at all.

Let this become your very style of life and you will be enriched tremendously. [The new sannyasin says: I don’t know what I am going to do from here... ]

No need. We think about the future when something is missing from the present. Only a miserable mind thinks about the future. It is a creation, a projection, and consolation of a miserable mind – that today is not good but tomorrow will be. It is a hope. If today is good, who bothers about tomorrow? It will take care of itself.

This moment is the only moment there is. When the future comes, it always comes in the present, so there is no need to think about it. Just the present is enough. This day is enough unto itself. This moment is going to be the mother of the next moment, so if you have lived it totally, the next moment is bound to be more beautiful than this, because things go on growing. So if this moment has been lived in total celebration, the next moment is bound to be of more celebration, more rejoicing. And once you learn this, you stop thinking about the future, but you start creating it.

My insistence is to create future – not to think about it. And the way to create it is to forget it completely. Just look in the present, just live it, and through it you are constantly creating the next moment. If you don’t live this moment, and you go on thinking about the future, you will not be able to create it, because the next moment will come out of this one, not out of your thinking. It has nothing to do with your thoughts, nothing to do with your desires and hopes. It comes out of the lived experience.

... This moment is the only moment available. The past is gone, the future has not yet come. Just between the two there is a small passage, very small. If you are very very alert, only then you can live it; otherwise you will miss it. Just a little unawareness and it is gone. The moment you think that this is the present moment, it is already passed. One has not a single split second to lose.

That’s what meditation is all about – living in life without bringing thinking in too much. Once you know the knack of it, you have found the key.

[The new sannyasin, who is a doctor and acupuncturist, says: ... all my life I’ve wanted to know God, and to be of better service to people.]

Both will happen together. They are not two separate things. Service is nothing but a way of prayer – a very substantial way, a very potential way of prayer. If you seNe, you are doing prayer. And if you pray, in a subtle way you are doing service. Both are complementaries; never divide them. Humanity has divided them and has suffered much for it.

If you serve without prayer, then service remains just on the periphery. If you pray without service, your prayer becomes isolated from life. You become like an island. If you pray and serve, and you serve in such a way that it is a way of prayer, and you pray in such a way that it is a way of service, then you are not isolated, and you are not on the periphery. You remain on the centre, and yet one with the whole.

Service means feeling one with the whole, feeling one with the other. It means a point where I and thou disappears. And when you are no more there. the whole starts functioning through you. And that’s the real therapy. You can know techniques – of acupuncture and acupressure – but if you are not prayerful you can miss the whole thing.

Acupressure and acupuncture were born out of very deep meditation. Five thousand years ago there was no way to know the energy points, the meridians and the bridges, except through meditating. People meditated and went so deeply inside themselves that they became aware of certain energy phenomena inside themselves. By and by these points became so dear that they started working on other people.

Working with deep love, the quality changes. You can touch a person with hate; then rather than helping him you will harm. You can touch a person with indifference; then whatever can happen, only that much will happen.

But if you love a person, your touch is with love and deep concern. It is as if it is you who is suffering there. Suddenly the technique is no more a technique. And healing is a function of love.

[A sannyasin said that he felt tension in his back and in the sex organs when meditating.]

When energy arises, it has to make a passage, and the passage is blocked because the energy has never used it. So the energy hits hard against the block – that is the only way it can make a channel.

So the whole body will tremble and you will feel severe pain, but there is nothing to be worried about. It will make the way clear, and once it does, you will feel such a relaxation as you have never felt before. So don’t be worried. Just continue, and be happy about it.

[The sannyasin adds: My whole being feels in need of love.]

I understand. That too is good. That too is part of the same energy, because when the energy moves upwards, the sex energy is transformed and changes its quality. Then the sex need will become less and less, and the love need will become more and more. Energy going downwards becomes sex, and energy going upwards becomes love.

But don’t wait. You start becoming more and more loving towards people. Just become a spendthrift about love. Just be loving even towards strangers, towards friends. Even to trees and rocks just be loving.

You are sitting on a rock, and just as one touches one’s beloved, you will see that if you touch a rock with deep love, there is a response from the rock. You can almost feel it immediately – that the rock has responded. The rock is no more a rock. Touch a tree with deep love, and suddenly you will see that it is not one way. It is not that you only are loving to the tree; the tree is responding, resonating.

So just be loving in whatsoever you do. Even if you are eating food, eat very lovingly, chew the food very lovingly. Taking a shower, receive the water falling on you with deep love and gratitude, and in deep respect – because God is everywhere and everything is divine. Once you start feeling that everything is divine and sacred, you will not feel the thirst for love because from everywhere it will be fulfilled.

Everything is going well. Feel blessed.

[A sannyasin said that she needed help to break what she felt was a pattern she had formed of making relationships with people who needed her as a mother, to whom she would give shelter and food and money... but that her friends said she was simply buying love... ]

You are wasting your time and energy and everything. And not only that, but you are creating a pattern by repeating it again and again.

A few things have to be understood. First, love is not compassion. You think compassion is love. And love needs no rationalisation. It is simply there. It is its own proof, self-evidently there. It is enough unto itself. Compassion can become part of it, but they are not synonymous. Love is more than compassion.

You always become interested in people who need your sympathy – and there is nothing wrong in it. Give them food and shelter – but don’t pretend that you are in love. If you see a beggar on the street, you can help him, but help him and forget him – no need to make it a love affair. The beggar will feel obliged to you, and he cannot escape from you because he has become dependent on you.

You have become his mother, and you enjoy being mother, you enjoy being superior. It becomes an ego trip. He is an inferior person because he is dependent on you, and he has to go on pretending he loves you. Deep down he will know that love has been purchased, and he will cheat you. He will do everything that he can to harm you, because he feels hurt. You have become superior because you have money and he has none. So he goes on pretending he loves you.

Love is not that cheap. And you want it very safe. If love is not happening, don’t force it.

... I know you are in need of a lover – so you imagine anything is love. Someone shows their gratefulness and you immediately think it is love because you are in need.

It is as if someone is hungry, and even bread on the rubbish heap looks like beautiful food. You are hungry, that I know. You need love, that I know. Everybody needs love.

But this is not going to help you at all. By and by it will become a dead routine, and you will continuously repeat the vicious circle. Get out of it.

Love happens when two persons meet on the same ground, are equal. Between a superior and an inferior person sympathy is possible, not love. So don’t go on fooling around. Stop all this nonsense.

Be loving, be available, be open, and then someday with somebody on equal terms it can happen. When you love somebody, you do whatsoever you can, you give all you can, but you feel grateful that he has accepted. You don’t expect even a thankyou from him – that will look too superficial. So somehow you have to destroy this association between sympathy and love.

[She answers: At this point I can’t discriminate.]

Then you just do one thing: for six months no love affair – so at least the vicious circle is broken. You can be as sympathetic as you want, but no love affair.

In these six months somebody will happen, otherwise not. A real lover will not like you to be a mother no. He is in search of a beloved. A mother he has already – enough! He is trying to escape from the mother really. He is in search of a woman who can save him from the mother – and again here is a woman who wants to be a mother. That’s why you always seek persons who want a mother. You don’t look for people who are not interested in your money and your help. You go on finding beggars, this and that.

So for six months you stop completely – no love affair. [She asks: You mean no sex or... ]

Yes, no sex or love affair. It may not be that long, but just become as hungry as possible for love. It will be hard, but to break any vicious circle is always hard.

And there are so many beautiful people here that you can’t find anywhere else.

... It may not be six months, I may allow you after six weeks. But let it be six months in the mind, so that an appetite arises and you go almost mad, and this circle is broken.

If you go on making love to strangers, this and that, you are simply not respectful towards yourself. You are harming yourself. Just wait for six months. If is not too long – it can save your whole life. The way you are going, you are wasting your whole life.

Remain available, make friends, and if one day you feel that some equal person comes, who is not inferior in any way, then come to me and tell me. If I feel it is right, I will allow vou – but let me be there. Left to yourself you will not be able to come out of the vicious circle. But if I am there I will not allow you to continue in it.

It is hard, but there is nothing that can be done about it.

[A sannyasin says: All your lectures are making me so high, and I’m enjoying the meditations but I’m experiencing a lot of physical agitation. It’s very hard to sleep and there are lots of heavy nightmares.]

That is a part of the process. The body and the mind are releasing things, deep repressed things which meditation brings up, but it is very good. You will feel so fresh and so weightless – as if you can fly. Things are going perfectly well.

[The sannyasin then asks: I’ve always understood that all realms of consciousness are always and continuously available to us... I would never mindfully put myself into a place that was not pleasant and good for the others around me.

These groups seem to take people to very very sensitive places, and sometimes places that are not necessarily seeming to make them happy, and sometimes make it difficult for the people around them.

I’m interested in them and I’m just wondering if they’re necessary to... ]

No, for you they are not. And that is exactly the right attitude. It is a question of where you put yourself, it is your choice, and all realms are always available.

These groups help people because people have become addicted to particular moods; for example, sadness. Once energy is available, a certain person simply moves into sadness. It has become a routine, and he does not know any other way. All other ways are blocked. He has forgotten about them.

It is as if you live in a big house and you know only about one room. You have lost the keys and you have completely forgotten that the house has many other rooms. These groups help to make living in the one room so impossible that they have to escape from there – that is the whole point.

If somebody is angry, they allow them to go deeper into it – so deep that the very experience becomes such a hell that one runs anywhere and stumbles into another room of the same house, about which one has become unaware. Once one enters, one knows that there is no need to go to the same room again and again; that there are other rooms available.

But for you there is no need. If you have this understanding, then there is no need.

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