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‌CHAPTER 12

15 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand Angelika. Anand means bliss; Angelika means a messenger of God. Bliss is the true messenger of God. No man can be a messenger of God; man can only be a vehicle of bliss.

Bliss is the message. And if one can be blissful, one suddenly becomes religious, because it is impossible to be blissful and not to be religious. They can’t be separated. And vice versa: the mind enclosed in misery cannot be religious. It can pretend. It can go to the church, to the temple; it can be Hindu, it can be Mohammedan, it can be Christian, but it cannot be religious.

To be religious means that you have come to see the celebration of life, that life is intrinsically joyful. That vision is religion; that insight into things that reveals the song of existence, that makes you aware that life is not a burden to be carried nor a duty to be fulfilled, but a dance to be danced.

In that moment is transformation. One is no more of this world. One starts growing wings, one takes off the ground; one becomes part of the beyond. And to become part of the beyond one need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. In fact, these are barriers.

That crucial moment in the history of humanity has come when religion has to become religionless, when God has to drop all old masks, when God has to be only godliness, not a person but a presence.

And that’s my whole work here: to make you aware that there is no God as a person, but the whole existence is divine. It is full of godliness, but you will not find God anywhere. You will find godliness, but you will not find God anywhere. You will find godliness everywhere and God nowhere.

One has to be freed from all bondages of theology, philosophy, doctrine. Now religion has to take the ultimate jump. It has been coming to this point slowly slowly. Once it was confined by magic, then

it transcended magic. Then it became confined by theology. In many countries it is still confined in theology, but in the East it took a jump off theology; then it became confined in philosophy. But in few rare souls it has taken a jump even from that point; it is no more philosophy. For a Buddha religion is not a philosophy. It is so existential, it can’t be speculative.

My work consists in helping you to be free from all magic, theology, philosophy, sectarianism, churches, so that you can be religious. But now the religion has to be religionless and the God has to be godless. That is the ultimate revolution. Man has been waiting for it for long. And we are living in one of the most fortunate times, because that impossible is possible now. Man has attained to such maturity that he can take that jump. He is no more a child; man has come of age.

Veetgyan. Veet means going beyond; gyan means knowledge – going beyond knowledge, going beyond mind.

That’s what sannyas is all about. It is not a teaching. I am not indoctrinating you. I have no doctrine, so even if I want to I cannot indoctrinate you. I am not a teacher; I don’t teach a thing. On the contrary I try to take away all that you have learned before.

To be initiated into sannyas is not to be initiated into a school of learning but into an anti-school of unlearning. If we can unlearn whatsoever society has forced upon us, if we can manage to unburden ourselves of all the luggage, of all the baggage, that is not really ours in the first place, has been forced upon us by the parents, by the state, by the church, by the society, by the educational system, by the people around – so that we are almost crushed under mountains of weight... How can we know the joy of life and how can we know the freedom of life crushed under these mountains, these Himalayas, of knowledge?

And all this knowledge is just rubbish, because unless you know something it is never true. My truth can never be your truth; there is no way. In the very nature of things truth is untransferrable. I can talk about it, but to talk about it is not to say it. To talk about it means from the very beginning the point has been missed. And then whatsoever you will listen is going to be totally different than what was said, because you will listen from your conditioning. You will interpret it, you will distort it, you will color it. By the time it reaches you it is a lie. And because you think it is a truth you will carry it as if it is of immense value. It has no value at all.

Truth to be true has to be your own experience, so nobody can give it to you. No scripture can give it to you, no teacher can give it to you.

Then the question arises: What the Buddhas have been doing down the ages? What Jesus was doing? What Zarathustra was doing? They were not teaching; they were creating certain spaces in which unlearning becomes possible. They were creating a certain kind of milieu which is helpful for you to unburden. Where many others are unburdening it becomes easier for you to unburden. When you see people coming out of the garbage so joyous, so blissful, with such cosmic laughter, a great longing arises in your heart also, that you would also like to be free. Unless you see a bird on the wing, you will not remember your own wings.

Buddhas create a certain energy field in which things become easier. And that’s what I am doing here. No teaching is being given, no philosophy is being taught. On the contrary all that you bring

CHAPTER 12.

has to be discarded. Once all that has been put upon you is discarded your own being asserts. And the flowering of your own being, that flower which is crushed under these mountains of knowledge, is truth. Blossoming of one’s own being is truth.

Truth is not a theory; it is not a hypothesis, it is not some explanation. It is an experience, and so profound and so penetrating that once you have seen even a glimpse of it you will never be the same man again. In fact you will never be the man again. Once you have seen a small glimpse of it you are divine.

From that moment existence is divine. Then everywhere are the signatures of God. Then each leaf and each pebble is divine. And to live in that world where everything is divine, where you can feel the divinity of each and every thing, from the smallest to the greatest, is to be in paradise.

The Biblical story is beautiful – that man has been thrown out of paradise because he has eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. We have to somehow cleanse our soul of knowledge. We have to become innocent again ignorant again. If we can become ignorant and innocent as Adam was before he ate the fruit, we will be again in paradise. There is no other way.

So I teach ignorance, I teach innocence. Blessed are the ignorant for theirs is the kingdom of God.

Prem Kavito. Prem means love. There is no other word in any language which is more sweet, more profound, closer to God, than love. Love is the bridge between this world and that, between the visible and the invisible.

Hence whenever a person is in love he is other-worldly. Even if he walks on the earth there is a distance between his feet and the earth; they don’t touch. He does not walk, he flies. The moment the heart is full of love we escape from the grip of gravitation; the earth has no more claim over us. The earth can claim our bodies certainly; the body belongs to the earth. But love brings the soul in or wakes the soul up. And the earth has no claim on the soul; it cannot contain the soul. Soul is far bigger, too vast for any earth to contain it.

We are both: we are dust and divine – we are divine dust. But without love we know only about the dust – with love we know about our divinity.

Love has to be one of the most important arts to be imbibed. Just as people learn how to play guitar or how to play on a flute or how to paint, exactly like that one has to learn the art of love. We are born only with the capacity to love. But it can be raised to Himalayan peaks; we can take it to the skies.

There are people who are mediocre in their love, and there are people who are talented in their love, and there are geniuses too. But one thing very important to be understood: that nobody is born as a genius as far as love is concerned. Everybody has to learn, and the more you learn, the more you have.

Love should be the only learning in life. But people learn rubbish things: geography, history... The Oxford university teaches six hundred subjects. Love is not a subject in those six hundred subjects. Love is not taught anywhere; no university exists for it yet. This is unfortunate, because that is the

most important thing in life. It is neglected, ignored, denied, rejected, laughed at, called blind, mad, and every kind of name.

But my world, my university, teaches only one subject, and that is love. And I teach it because it is not a subject. I teach it because it is not a question of knowledge; it is a question of being. The more being you have, the more loving you are. When you have the being of a Buddha, a perfect being in your innermost core, your love is perfect. Love is the shadow of your being, and I teach how to be more.

There are two ways in life: either one can be more or one can have more. All other universities teach how you can have more: more money, more power, more prestige, more cars, more gadgets. They teach how you can have more. I teach how you can be more. It is not a question of money, power, or prestige. It is a question of authentic being. It is a question of being true to yourself and to existence.

Kavito means poetry. It is only out of love that poetry is born. And only when it is born out of love it is true poetry. Otherwise it is just a composition of words. One can be very clever in composing words, one can make poetry, but it will not have any soul in it. It will be a beautiful corpse. And many poets are like that. In fact, ninety-nine point nine percent of poets are dead poets.

Only once in a while there is a poet who can truly be called a poet. His poetry is born out of his being. It is not that he composes it. It is like flowers blooming in a tree. Not that the tree is trying to create those flowers; there is no effort, effortlessly it comes. It is an overflowing joy; the bliss is so much one cannot contain it. It starts reaching others, and because it starts reaching others... that very reach is poetry. The form may not be that of poetry; the form doesn’t matter. All that matters is the spirit behind it.

Buddha is a poet, Jesus is a poet, Krishna is a poet. And I would like you also to be a poet in that sense – not in the sense that Shakespeare is a poet or Milton is a poet. These are beautiful people, but they know nothing of real poetry. Great composers, great artists about words, but something is missing: the inner awakening is missing.

And when the light is not there inside your house and the house is dark, whatsoever you do remains mundane, ordinary. And when the light is inside you, wherever that light falls, whatsoever is touched by that light, becomes sacred.

The real poet lives his poetry, walks his poetry. He is his poetry.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I’m a little bit afraid that I’ll lose there what I’ve found here.]

No, you cannot lose it; there is no way to lose it. It has really been found so it cannot be lost. Things are lost only when they are not really found but only imagined.

It has happened. It is just a beginning, but rejoice! It will go on growing, and wherever you are it will go on growing. My function is to trigger the process, and then the process continues on its own and goes on accumulating momentum.

Be in contact with my sannyasins there... help them. Good!

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