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CHAPTER 14
17 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Anand Trees. Anand means bliss; Trees means a reaper, a harvester – a reaper of bliss. We are seeds, we are only potentialities; we have to become actual. And that is the moment of great bliss, when we become actual, when the seed is no more a seed but becomes a flower.
Ordinarily millions of people are born as seeds and die as seeds. That’s the misery of life. To be born as a seed is perfectly right but to die as a seed is a misfortune. That means life has been utterly futile. That means life has not been lived at all; that means we have missed the target.
Sannyas is a step towards dropping the seed into the soil, a step to create a right context for the growth of the seed, a step in creating a space around you in which you can blossom. Once this becomes a deliberate, conscious search, the goal is not very far. The goal is far away only if we remain unconscious of the search. Once the seed has become conscious what it has to become, the goal is not far away at all. It is just around the corner.
Anand Gwynneth. Anand means bliss; Gwynneth means blessed – blissful and blessed. The only blessing in life is to attain the state of bliss. Bliss is not something that happens to you; it is something that you are. It is not an accident; it is your very nature. Nobody can give it to you, nobody can take it away. Not even death can destroy it. It is ultimately yours; it is absolutely yours.
And still, the irony that we go on missing it. Still, the strange state of affairs that the natural is missed and the accidental is achieved; that the essential is missed and the accidental is attained. Misery is an accident, it is arbitrary, it has no necessity to be there; still it is there and very much, too much. In fact for millions of people it is all that is there. Bliss is only a hope for them; it is always somewhere in the future.
It is just the same old story of the donkey and the carrot. But the carrot is always hanging ahead; it is always tomorrow, it never comes. Instead comes death and destroys all potential. And life simply
goes on slipping out of the hands, in hope, in dream, in desire, but neither desire nor dream nor hope can be of any help they are in fact the barriers.
To attain to the essential, one has to drop all desiring, all dreaming, all becoming. One has simply to see what one is already. One has to look into one’s own nature right now. It has not to be improved, it is perfect as it is; it cannot be improved. To understand this becomes a great blessing, because then one knows one has not to go anywhere, that one is already at home, just one has to wake up. And to wake up is both blissfulness and a state of blessedness.
My sannyasins have to become blissful, and through becoming blissful, have to become blessed. And not only they have to become a blessing to themselves, they have to become blessings to others too, to the whole existence. A blissful person naturally is a blessing to the whole universe. His very being is a constant showering of flowers. He is a perfume which goes on spreading to the ultimate source of life and existence.
Prem Rene. Prem means love; Rene means reborn. Love is a rebirth. The first birth is only physical: one is born as a body, as a physiology, as a biology; one is born as a chemistry. One is born as a circumference, but the center is missing, the spirit is missing. For that one has to go through another birth.
Jesus says: Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of God. And he also says that before you can be reborn, you will have to die. Resurrection has to be preceded by crucifixion. Each birth is a death and each death is a birth.
Sannyas is a death, because it is a birth. You die as you have been up to now. You simply become disconnected with all that. You drop the whole past, not in pieces but in toto.
You simply get out of it, just as a snake gets out of the old skin because it is no more useful. It hampers, it hinders. It is no more really a part of the snake’s being. And so is the past. It hinders, it hampers, and it is not really a part of your being; it is just a part of the memory mechanism.
To get out of the past is what I mean by death; to live in the present is what I mean by rebirth. And to live in the present is to live in love. There is no other way: if one simply lives in the present one lives as love.
Hate cannot exist without past. Have you observed this strange phenomenon? Hate cannot exist without past, but love can exist. In fact love can exist only without past. Hate cannot exist without future either; hate is a wound of the past. Somebody had insulted you yesterday: and you are carrying it and it is creating the poison. And you are waiting for the right opportunity to take revenge; hence you are waiting for the future. Hate implies past and future. Hate has no present, hence the person who lives in hate lives not. His whole life is only a pseudo game.
But love is totally different than hate. It has nothing to do with past. If you love somebody because you loved him in the past, that is not love; that is habit, that is just a mechanical habit. If you love somebody because he has been good to you yesterday, you are simply repaying. Or maybe you are hoping that if you are loving towards him, he will be good to you again. It may be greed, it may be habit, it may be convenience, but it is not love.
CHAPTER 14.
Love has nothing to do with the past, no reference at all with the past. And hence it has no reference with the future either. You don’t love because of some motive. If there is a motive, then there is no love. If you love somebody because he has so much money and the money will be yours; if you love somebody because he is so famous and you will be famous; if you love somebody for some reason, then it is not love. Then it is greed, an extension of greed, camouflaged as love. You are deceiving the other and not only the other, you are being deceived by yourself too.
Love is utterly of the present. It needs no cause in the past; it needs no motive for the future. It is a spontaneity, and in that spontaneity one is reborn. Time disappears, mind disappears. For the first time one feels oneself as spirit, as soul, as divine, as part of God.
Deva Lothar. Deva means divine, Lothar means warrior – a divine warrior. Man can fight for himself; then he functions out of the ego. He is a warrior but undivine. Man can fight not f3r himself but for God; then he functions not out of the ego, then really he functions not; he allows God to function through him. He becomes just a vehicle, an availability, an openness. If God wants to use, he is ready; then he is just a medium. Then one is a divine warrior.
It is one of the most beautiful experiences of life not to exist as the ego, not to exist as the person, but to become a passage, utterly empty, so that God can overflood you, so that God can overflow you, so that God can act through you. But the demarcation is very subtle and the ego is very cunning. The ego can fight for itself and can pretend that “I am fighting for God.”
The history is full of so-called religious wars, crusades: Mohammedans fighting for God and killing millions of Hindus and Christians; and Christians fighting for God and killing millions of Mohammedans and Jews. Even one of the most liberal and catholic religions of the world, Hinduism, has destroyed millions of Buddhists.
India talks about non-violence, yes – in their scriptures. They have written beautiful doctrines of non-violence. They say: ahimsa parmo dharma: Non-violence is the greatest religion. But what happened to the Buddhists, how did they disappear? Millions of people were converted by Gautam the Buddha. Almost ninety percent of India had become Buddhist. Where they all disappeared, evaporated? What happened to those people? They were burned alive. They were killed. And these people were thinking that they are fighting for God, remember. They were not in any way fighting for themselves; they were fighting for Hinduism, for Islam, for Christianity, for Judaism. Beautiful labels, and ugly realities behind.
The line is very very delicate, and only inside one’s own subjectivity is one capable of knowing the difference. The difference cannot be known from the outside, but you can know. You can know whether you are fighting for your own glory and using God as a pretext, or really you have disappeared, and only God is, and you are just in his hands. Only you and nobody else can decide about it, hence one has to be very very aware, alert, watchful. Mind is a cunning fellow, and if you are not watchful, not alert, it will deceive you, it will drag you in some ditch.
Become a divine warrior – that’s what a sannyasin has to be.
Prem Amrisho. Prem means love; Amrisho means god of immortality. The full name will mean god of love and immortality. Love and immortality are two aspects of the same coin. Love knows no
death, love is deathless. Everything else dies except love. Hence love is the only representative of God on the earth. The only ray of eternity that has penetrated into the darkness of the earth is that of love. If we can catch hold of the ray and follow it, we will reach to the sun, the source of it; God is the source of love. And God is eternal. We cannot say God was and we cannot say, God will be; we can only say God is.
Love is the bridge, the rainbow bridge, that joins the earth to the sky. And yes, it is a rainbow bridge because it is multidimensional. It has all the colors of the spectrum. It sings all kinds of songs. It exists on all the levels of being, from the lowest, sex, to the highest, samadhi. At all the seven centers love has its own mode of functioning.
Follow love from the mud to the lotus; from sex to samadhi. Follow love, and you will be moving naturally towards God. There will be no need to go to any church or to any temple, and there will be no need to follow any other ritual. Love is enough unto itself.
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