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CHAPTER 16
No ‘I’ can see god
16 October 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Visarjan means dissolution, dissolution into the divine, immersion in the divine, the state of being lost.…
One has to learn how to disperse oneself, how to come to a point where one is not. Only then god is. You and god cannot exist together; that’s not possible. That’s why so many people go on missing god – because they are asking for the impossible: they want to remain themselves and they want to see god. God can be seen only when you are not. That nothingness can encounter god, not you.
So the whole process of sannyas is the process of visarjan, dispersion. Slowly, slowly, one loses, goes on losing, goes on losing. The more one loses, the more one understands how beautiful it is not to be. Then more courage arises, a little bit more. One goes a little deeper and a little deeper, and one day the final risk, the final gamble: one simply jumps and disappears. In that very moment there is god. That moment is god.
Deva means divine, rasila means juice, juicy. And the juice that runs through our veins is divine, the blood that runs through our veins is divine. Dust is divine... all is divine. One has to start enjoying this; then more juice comes. One has to start sharing it. The more you give, the more you are given.
Another name for that juice is love. When you give love, new energies start flowing in you. That’s why whenever somebody falls in love they start feeling young again. Whenever love is stuck and the doors are closed, one starts feeling old.
Let love flow more... and don’t be a miser. Because this is the paradox of life: the economics of the divine is just the reverse of the economics of the world. In the ordinary economics if you don’t hoard
you will not have; m the divine economics if you hoard you will not have. In the ordinary economics if you don’t give you will have; if you give you will lose. In the divine economics just the opposite is the truth: if you give you will have; if you don’t give you will lose. That’s what jesus means when he says: Those who try to save their lives will lose them. The loser in the divine game is the winner... the defeated is the victorious. And he who is nobody is all. Nothingness is fullness.
So go on giving to everybody and anybody. There is no need to make any conditions. Never say that you will give only when this is fulfilled: never give with conditions. To give with conditions is to destroy the whole beauty of it. It is immensely beautiful when it is unconditional. When you enjoy giving, when you are not giving in order to get, you get, you certainly get; you get a thousandfold. That is another storySo let this juice that you are carrying in yourself, flow. And don’t confine it
to your husband, to your children only. Give them as much as you can but don’t confine your love; there should be no limit to it. Don’t confine it to your race, religion, colour, the country. Don’t confine it! Love is god’s gift: it should be given to all. It should be given not only to persons but to things too.
Once you have learned the secret – that the more you give, the more it comes, and you go on becoming younger and younger and you go on becoming fresher and fresher, and you go on becoming livelier and livelier – then you have stumbled upon the greatest secret of life, the key. It can open the door of the ultimate. Love is the key for the door to god.
And in India we call it ‘ras’ – juice – because it is really the sweetest taste possible. And it is not only a taste on the tongueit is the taste that spreads all over your being, to every cell of your being.
You become suffused with it. Every hair on your body starts tingling with it. It is a thrill that goes through and through. Every fibre of your being starts dancing in it. That’s why we have called it ‘ras’, juice.
Let sannyas be your resurrection. Come here! This will be your new nameand a new beginning;
a new birth. Forget the whole past as if it has never existed – as if you have seen it in a movie or you had heard about it from somebody else. Disconnect yourself from it. Yes, it will remain there in the brain cells as a memory but let the psychological memory of it disappear. And those two are two totally different things.…
The brain carries a memory just matter-of-factly, like a mechanism, like this tape recorder will carry what I am saying to you. But the tape recorder is not involved in it. If you efface it, it will not cling to it. If you want to record something else, if you want to replace it, if you want to change it, it has no personal involvement in it; it is just a mechanical thing. The brain goes on recording things mechanically.
The real problem is with the psychological memory – that you get involved in it. Then things go on and on hanging around you, and the load becomes heavier and heavier every day, because each day many more memories are happening.
A child comes into the world weightless, and an old man dies carrying a mountain on his heart. There is no need. One should learn to die like a child; one should go as one comes. One should go absolutely light, weightless. If that is possible – and that is possible – then life has been meaningful. Then you were not destroyed by your experiences: you remain transcendental to them.
This is the beginning of sannyas: go on unburdening every day. Never get psychologically involved in the past. A man who lives in the past, lives not, because how can you live in the past? It is gone and gone forever, and there is no way of bringing it back. Nothing can be done about it: you cannot add anything to it, you cannot take anything out of it. You cannot undo, you cannot redo. Nothing can be done so it is utterly futile to put any energy into it... and much energy is involved there. As I observe people, nearly ninety per cent of their energy is involved with the past. Release that energy from the past; get out of it.
That is the symbolic meaning of sannyas. It will help you. The change of the name, the change of the dress will simply help you to look into the mirror again and ask: ‘Who is this man standing here?’ You will have to start learning again. and this time of course you can learn far better than you did the first time. Now you will be more conscious. You will not commit the same mistakes again, you will not repeat.
So when I say to drop the past, I mean that from now onwards. that is going to be an everyday thing. Every night before you go to sleep, finish that day. It is finished in existence; now it is futile to carry it in the mind. Just be finished with it. Say goodbye to it.
If something has remained incomplete in the day it is difficult to finish it. Complete it, complete it in the mind. You were passing on the road and you saw a beautiful woman and you wanted to hug her. Now that cannot be done; something hangs incomplete. Before you go to sleep just look at the whole day and see what is incomplete. Complete it psychologically: hug her. Relive that moment, hug her in the mind, thank her and be finished with it! Don’t carry it incomplete. Only incomplete moments are carried. They hang, because each experience wants to be complete.
There is an intrinsic mechanism in each and everything that compels it to become complete. A seed wants to become the tree, a child wants to become a young man, the unripe fruit wants to become ripe, and so on and so forth. Everything wants to complete itself; it has a built-in urge to complete. And that is so about every experience.
You wanted to hit somebody and it was not feasible, not practical. It would have cost too much and you were not ready to lose that much. Do it before you go to sleep. Let there be half an hour every night, and that will be your meditation: go on finishing. Start from the morning and finish everything that has remained incomplete. You will be surprised that it can be completed. And once it has been completed you will tall into sleep. By and by you will see that dreams are disappearing, because dreams are a mechanism, a natural mechanism to complete things... but then things are completed very unconsciously.
In a very very primitive way the dreams try to complete what you are not doing. Dreams are great helpers; they complement your existence in many ways. You wanted to hug the woman: you will hug the woman in the dream but it will be an unconscious thing. Maybe in the morning you will forget about it, you may not remember it. The mind that wanted to hug is the conscious mind and the mind that hugged is the unconscious. They may never meet; the message may never be delivered. There are a thousand and one barriers for the message to reach.
So in the unconscious it has been completed but in the conscious it remains incomplete. A hankering and a longing goes on and on. There are many things clamouring for your attention and this load
becomes bigger and bigger every day and then it is almost impossible to finish it. From tonight start finishing things every day. And within two, three months your dreams will start completely disappearing. When dreams start disappearing that is an indication that meditation is working.
I am not interested in analysing dreams; I am interested in helping them to disappear. That’s the difference between psychoanalysis and meditation, between the western psychology and the eastern psychology. For nearly three thousand years we have been working on how to help dreams to disappear. Once dreams are gone completely you have a clarity, your mind is unclouded, but the way to help the dreams go is to complete things consciously, otherwise they will be there.
If you have completed things there is no need for them to be there. Then the sleep becomes deep sleep – what in yoga is called ‘sushupti’ – a dreamless sleep. Patanjali says sushupti can become samadhi. It is just on the verge of it. Yoga divides human consciousness into four states: the waking, the dream, the sleeping, and the fourth... and the fourth is below the third. When dreams have disappeared and you are perfectly asleep, everything is silent, utterly silent, then there is a possibility of slipping into the last substratum of your being.
So this is your special meditation that you have to continue.…
Sahaj means of its own accord, and ananda means bliss: bliss that comes of its own accord bliss that comes spontaneously, bliss that comes uninvited, bliss that comes unawares, bliss that comes and cannot be brought, bliss that happens but cannot be controlled, cannot be managed, cannot be provoked. Nothing can be done about it: you have to be in a state of non-doing, then it happens. It is a happening. There is no way to do anything for it The doer never achieves bliss because the doer remains in the ego. The non-doer, the state of non-doing, just a passive silence, awaiting, with no effort for anything whatsoever... in that relaxation, it happens.
It is called ‘sahajananda’. And that is possible...
Ananda means bliss, blissfulness, neelamber means blue sky: blissful blue sky. Blue is the symbol for depth. The sky is not really blue; it looks blue just because of the infinite depth.
Neelamber is one of the names of Krishna, because he is as blue as the blue sky.
So the first thing: abysmal depth... and one has to disappear into that abysmal depth. It is not like falling in that depth, because if you are falling then the depth cannot be very much because you are there; you will make it shallow. Going into depth is more like disappearing. It is as when you put a cube of salt into water and you don’t know where it has gone. It has started disappearing, and a moment comes when it is nowhere to be found. But you can taste the water and it will be there.
Buddha was asked, ‘Where will you be when you are gone from the body. Because this is your last incarnation in the body; you will not come back again to any womb. Where will you be?’
He says, ‘Taste existence and you will find me there. As salt dissolves into water I will dissolve into the cosmos. And if you are capable of tasting it you will taste me.’
The existence is becoming more and more enlightened, because more and more enlightened people are disappearing into it. Man is not falling, man is evolving. Whenever one buddha again disappears
into existence it is more salty. Of course existence is vast and big, and a buddha howsoever big is again just a drop, but still that one drop changes the quality of the very existence. You would not have been the same if Jesus had not existed in the world, although it is very difficult scientifically to find out how much he has affected you, how much buddha has affected you, how much lao tzu has affected you. You may not even have heard the names of many buddhas, still they have affected you because they are flowing in your blood. You are breathing them; you cannot remain unaffected by them. The trees have absorbed them and the stars have absorbed them, and wherever you look something of them is present.…
So one has to disappear into the depth. When one disappears then only is there depth. If one is, then it is just a pretension of depth; it cannot be real depth. Real depth cannot allow the ego to exist. Ego as such is the superficial. It is just as on the surface of the ocean there are waves, but if you go deep there are no waves. There cannot be any waves because there is no wind. The ego is just on the surface of the mind – those waves and ripples and all that. Once you start entering deeper into your being all that disappears – the mind and the ego and the thoughts. And it is a bottomless abyss: it has no boundary to it. That is the meaning of the sky.
Sky is very symbolic in eastern mysticism... the greatest symbol there is. It means many things. One: it is always present, yet absent. It is present everywhere yet absent. Its very way of presence is being absent. It exists by not being. That’s how god exists. That’s why you cannot show where god is; that’s why you cannot pinpoint him. He is everywhere and nowhere... and that is the quality of the sky too. It is not just an accident that whenever people pray they look at the sky. Unknowingly, they raise their eyes to the sky, because god is like the sky: present and yet utterly absent.
The sky contains all, and nothing contains the sky. God contains all, and nothing contains god. The sky penetrates everything and yet never interferes. It is a miracle! It penetrates without trespassing. It is so non-violent. It accepts all: the sinner and the saint, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. It makes no distinctions: it has no likes, no dislikes. It has no mind. It is simply open and available to all, whosoever wants to partake of it. It makes no conditions. It is unconditionally everybody’s: man and woman, animals, birds, trees, rocks, stars and sun. It is available to all. It protects but it never patronises. It surrounds you within and without... without ever touching you. And these are the qualities of god.
Black clouds come and go and the sky makes space available for them. White clouds come and go and the sky makes space for them with no distinction; it is choiceless. The acceptance is total; Buddha calls it tathata. The sky exists in a state of tathata, suchness: whatsoever is the case is good. Clouds come and go; the sky remains, it abides. It is eternal, it is timeless. It is always the same. It is the ancientmost and yet as fresh as the dewdrops; it never becomes old.
So meditate on the sky, and whenever you have time just lie down on the ground, look at the sky. Let that be your contemplation. If you want to pray, pray to the sky. If you want to meditate, meditate on the sky... sometimes with open eyes, sometimes with closed eyes, because the sky is within too. As it is big without, within it is the same.
We are just standing on the threshold of the inner sky and the outer sky, and they are exactly proportionate. As the outside sky is infinite, so is the inner sky. We are just standing on the threshold. Either way you can be dissolved, and these are the two ways to dissolve.
You asked what prayer and what meditation is. If you dissolve in the outside sky, then it is prayer. If you dissolve into the inside sky, then it is meditation. But finally it comes to the same: you are dissolved. And those two skies are not two; they are two only because you are. You are the dividing line. When you disappear, the dividing line disappears. Then in is out and out is in.
The extrovert prays because he can only relate to the outward. The introvert meditates. The extrovert has to conceive of a god there as ‘thou’ so he can have a dialogue. The introvert need not have any god; he can simply close his eyes and start disappearing. The extrovert needs some help – somebody there, objective. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, are all extrovert religions. Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, are introvert religions; they don’t have anything like prayer. Prayer is just absurd in Buddhism; because it carries the duality it is absurd.
Prayer is more like love: the other is needed. Whether the other is or is not, is not the point, but the prayer becomes possible only through the excuse of the other. If there is no god then god has to be invented, otherwise the extrovert will never be able to reach to the ultimate. Once he reaches he will know, but on the way he needs a support, an objective support, something there he can relate to. Prayer is a dialogue.
The introvert is enough alone. He need not create a god. God may be there; he is not needed. Whenever Buddha is asked, ‘What do you say about god?’ he says, ‘It is irrelevant.’ That was the attitude of socrates too. He says, ‘If gods are there, perfectly good, but they are irrelevant.’ They don’t get in the way of a socrates or a buddha.
Prayer is akin to love and meditation is akin to silence. Prayer is a bridge between the two. Meditation is absolute aloneness – not lonely, not solitary, but alone, in a state of solitude. These are the two ways. Man is standing just in the middle of the two and he is the dividing line, so whether he disappears this way or that, once he disappears the dividing line disappears. Then there is no prayer and no meditation.…
[The ashram architect is leaving tonight for Gujarat to begin work on the construction and there of the new ashram. He asks: Give me some of your strength!]
You will be getting all of my strength – why some?! Just go there and start working and you will have immense energy... no problem. Much has to be done. You will need energy and I will be sending it, mm? Don’t be worried about that.…
You will have a group of twenty people so they can start helping. But go fast!
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