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‌CHAPTER 18

21 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Love is not something which we can create; it is something given. It is inbuilt in our very being. It is not something that we produce later on; it comes with our birth, it is a natural energy. We may deny it expression; then it becomes a repressed force. It can turn sour, bitter, poisonous, if it is repressed. If it is not repressed it is grace, pure grace, beauty, bliss, benediction.

And these are the only two ways to live life: either one can live a life which represses love... That’s what ninety-nine point nine percent people are doing and have been doing down the ages – a life which is against love. But how life can be really life if it is against love? It is far more better to die than to live without love; it is far more worse than death.

Life is life only through love, because of love. Love is the indwelling spirit of life; without it life is an empty house. Life is a corpse if love is not there. But people have decided to live lives without love, because a life without love is more convenient, more comfortable, more secure, safe. A life without love needs no intelligence, needs no courage, needs no risk. It is mundane and mediocre, but safe, certainly safe, and people are so much interested in safety that they are ready to become dead. If everything is insured they are ready to enter into their graves right now. If somebody can take all the risk of life, they are ready to lose life itself.

It is stupid, but that’s how man has behaved up to now. Man has not proved himself an intelligent being. Utterly stupid, that has been our past. And if something very radical is not done immediately, that is going to be in the future too.

Sannyas is a radical standpoint. It is changing your whole life pattern. It is living love. That’s how I define sannyas: a life dedicated to love, a life utterly committed to love, a life totally dissolved into love. And then there is grace, great grace descends.

Anand Sean. Anand means bliss; Sean means God’s gift. Bliss always comes as a gift; it is not an achievement. Hence nobody can brag about it, because it has nothing to do with you at all, it is not your doing. It happens, it is a happening.

And it happens only when the doer completely ceases. When you are not in a state of doing, only then it happens. When you are not in a state of doing you are not, because you are nothing else than the doer. When all doing ceases, the doer disappears. It is not an entity but an illusion. And the doer is the base of our ego. Doer gone, the ego is found nowhere. And in that empty space bliss descends, comes as a gift of God.

One cannot make it a goal and one cannot be ambitious about it; if one is, one is going to miss. All ambition has to go for bliss to happen and all goals have to be dissolved for bliss to happen. In fact one has to disappear for bliss to happen. You cannot be blissful: either you can be you or you can be bliss. You both cannot exist together. Nobody can say “I am blissful” because the I is not found there.

The really blissful person says “I am bliss” – not blissful. He has to use the words “I am” because of the convention of language, otherwise he will simply say “bliss” no reference to I. It never happens in that context. I is the barrier, the root cause of misery.

A sannyasin has to learn to undo the mechanism of the ego. Slowly slowly, chunk by chunk, it has to be dropped. And the day the whole ego is gone and there is utter silence, in that silence comes the dawn. Bliss simply pours in, and one bows down in deep thankfulness because the gift has arrived, and in the gift, God has arrived. The gift proves the giver, and only the gift proves the giver.

Deva Yme. Deva means God, Yme means protector – God is the protector, God protects, God is protection.

We live in unnecessary fear. We live in an imaginary world of worries. We go on spinning and weaving new worries, new fears. We are tremendously efficient in creating anxiety and anguish. And all is baseless, because we live in a universe which protects, which is a mother.

God is more a mother than a father. The people who thought of God as a mother were closer to truth than the people who thought of God as a father. Hence all the religions that have thought of God as the father became institutional. It was a byproduct of their idea of God. Father, the very idea of father, is institutional, it is not natural. The phenomenon of the mother is natural. Father is a social convention, invention of our own making; it is a social institution.

There was a time when there was no institution like the father. And there will be a time again when the institution will disappear, because no institution can be forever. Its relevance has already gone, it is becoming a burden; but the mother is going to remain. And God is more a mother.

This universe is not alien, is not inimical. How it can be inimical to us? – we are born out of it, we live in it, we are it. Hence the protection: it cares. And to come to a tacit understanding of this fact – that the universe cares – is to become a sannyasin. Then one is no more worried about security, safety. Then one is simply no more worried. One lives moment to moment and trusts life. That utter trust makes one blissful.

And that’s what you have to learn here. That’s my only teaching: trust existence, trust life. Trust is the door to truth.

Anand Amrisha. Anand means bliss; Amrisha means goddess of immortality. The full name will mean goddess of bliss and immortality. And both are the same: to be blissful is to have a taste of immortality.

Bliss is eternal; it is not a temporal phenomenon. Bliss does not happen in time; it happens beyond time, thousands of miles away from time.

Friedrich Nietzsche has reported one of his experiences; it is of great importance. Moving in the mountains one day, suddenly he felt that he is being uplifted. He could not believe it himself – not uplifted from the earth but uplifted from time. It is a very strange experience to be uplifted from time. And he says he felt thousands of feet above time. He could not abide there because he was not a meditator. If he had known a little bit of meditation he could have remained there, he could have made his abode there. But because he was not a meditator, and it was just an accident – just the silence of the mountains, the beauty of the trees, the color, the pure air... A certain climate, a certain chemistry inside him, may have coincided, and it was just an accident that he felt rising above time.

He fell down and went mad! If one goes above time without a right method, without a certain direction, without any preparation, that is bound to happen. It has happened to many people, not only to Friedrich Neitzsche. People have found mysterious experiences accidentally, but then those experiences are so disorienting that when they come back to the earth, to the normal world, they cannot settle any more. Something has gone so deep in them, they can never be normal again. And they don’t know how to reach to those peaks that had happened, they don’t know how to climb back. They don’t know the way that leads. They don’t know how it happened at all in the first place. It happened almost without their knowing.

Sannyas means moving towards timelessness with a method, with consciousness, with deliberate effort, with full awareness. Each step has to be taken with determination, with awareness of all the consequences. And one has to move very cautiously. As you go higher you have to become more and more cautious, because if you fall from the height you will be destroyed.

That’s what happened to Nietzsche: he was destroyed because of this beautiful experience. The experience would have made him a Buddha had he known the way to it. Had it not been just accidental he would have never fallen down, he would have remained on the sunlit peaks.

Bliss is a non-temporal phenomenon. One has to go beyond time, only then one knows bliss. And to go beyond time is to go beyond mind. To go beyond time is to go beyond past and future. To go beyond time means to live moment to moment, utterly in the moment.

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