24

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‌CHAPTER 24

27 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem Carolina. Prem means love; Carolina means freedom. And hitherto man has not been able to synthesize these two ultimate elements of life: love and freedom. Those who have chosen love have lost their freedom, and those who wanted to be free had to sacrifice their love.

That has been the history up to now and because of this, life has suffered very much, because life can grow only when both are available. The person who had chosen love remained worldly and the person who had chosen freedom became a monk, in the past.

My effort here is to create a new kind of man who does not choose between love and freedom but creates a synthesis between the two... and it is possible. And once this happens – that your love brings freedom, not bondage, and your freedom brings richness of life, not escape – then you are on the right track, in the right direction is your movement. You are growing. Otherwise both have remained stifled, paralyzed.

What freedom can mean without love? It will mean simply loneliness. What love can mean without freedom? It will mean only possessiveness. Love can be love only when it is with freedom, and freedom can be freedom only when it is with love. Freedom has light when there is love, and love has tremendous insight when there is freedom. The meeting of love and freedom creates meditative energy, energy that transforms one from human being into divine being.

So it is not a question of either/or; both have to be lived. Certainly it is more difficult to live both together; that’s why people have chosen the cheaper way. The cheaper way was to choose one and drop the other. It was simple: it needed no intelligence, it needed no creativeness.

My challenge is for intelligence and creativeness. And this is the greatest creativity: to bring love and freedom together in your life so that both can become wings. And only with two wings you can

have the flight from this world to that, from the earthly existence to the heavenly existence. The flight is possible only when you have both the wings intact, alive, functioning.

The worldly, in the past, has not been able to reach to God, and the so-called other-worldly has not been able either. Both had a paralyzed being, both were crippled.

Remember this. This is one of the most important things about my sannyas, the very fundamental, the very foundation. This is the radical revolution that I want to bring in the world. There is no need to go to the monasteries and no need to go to the Himalayas, no need to escape to the caves. And there is no need to create a life of utter slavery, bondage, possessiveness. One can love and remain free; one can give love without any conditions, without any motives. Then love brings freedom, and freedom brings more capacity to love.

Atmo Richard. Atmo means the innermost self, the ultimate being, your very core. The body is only a circumference; the mind too is an inner circle, and the heart even more an inner circle. These are all concentric circles. But behind all these circles there is a center – invisible, intangible, but that is the very source of your life. From that invisible source you live, you love, you are. That is atmo, the supreme self.

And Richard means powerful ruler. Your full name will mean one who rules upon oneself, one who has become a ruler of oneself. And that is the goal of sannyas.

Man ordinarily is a slave, a slave of a thousand and one things: instincts, unconscious desires, thoughts, memories, conditionings that the society has given to you. It is all a slavery.

Man becomes a ruler only when he becomes aware of one’s innermost core and starts living from there. Not from the unconscious, not from the instincts, not from imitating people, but from one’s simple center. And everything is dominated by that simple, invisible center. Then one is a ruler of oneself.

That’s exactly the meaning of swami: a master. The fool is a slave; the intelligent person is a master. It is an arduous journey to become a master. One has to come out of many traps – and one has invested too much in those traps. Coming out is not easy, it is complex. There are traps behind traps behind traps; you win one and suddenly you become aware of another trap behind it.

The journey is difficult but not impossible, and because it is difficult it is a challenge. And any man of intelligence will accept the challenge. By accepting it, your intelligence is sharpened; by accepting it you become more alert. Trying to get out of all kinds of slaveries you have to be more watchful, you have to be more cautious, and because of watchfulness, cautiousness, awareness, intelligence arises. It is asleep; it has to be awakened. And only certain challenges can awaken it. And the greatest challenge in life is the challenge of becoming a master of oneself.

Deva Oscar. Deva means God; Oscar means a warrior – God’s warrior.

Everybody is a warrior, everybody has to be a warrior, but there are two categories of warriors: those who are fighting for their own egos and those rare few who are fighting for God. That’s the meaning of your name – God’s warrior. Fight, fight with totality, fight with all kinds of slaveries, but not for

yourself. The ego should not be nourished by the fight, otherwise the whole point is lost: the ego becomes the master, you remain a slave. And the stronger the ego is, the greater is the slavery.

The real freedom is possible only when the ego disappears completely, entirely, in toto. That’s possible if you fight for God, surrender to God, if you become just a medium, a vehicle; if you say, “Thy will be done – not mine but thine. I am just yours and I will be just like a dry leaf in the wind. Wherever you lead me I will go, whatsoever you want me to do I will do. I will not come in between you and my own inner being. I will not stand in the way, I will not obstruct. I will be just a hollow bamboo so you can make a flute out of me.” That’s the meaning of the prayer, “Thy will be done, thy kingdom come...” and that is the first lesson in sannyas.

From this moment, offer everything to God. Don’t live on your own – let him live through you. And you will be surprised: just a simple gesture of surrender, and all worries disappear, all anxieties, all anguish. One is simply, utterly calm, quiet and silent. And a great joy arises: the joy of being of some service to God, the joy of being some service to the universe.

Anand Govind. Anand means bliss; Govind is a name of God. Your full name will mean god of bliss.

Every being is groping for bliss – even trees, even rocks – every being as such is a search for bliss. Bliss is the ultimate god. Even the atheist who denies God is searching bliss. Hence bliss is far more important a concept than God itself – because God can be denied but bliss cannot be denied. People can say no to God, but they cannot say no to bliss.

Hence bliss is the ultimate god, the real god – not the god of Christians and the Hindus and the Mohammedans. Those are just toys, concepts, man-made, homemade, of not any real significance. But bliss is not a man-made idea; it is part of our inner search, part of our nature. It is not introduced by somebody in us; we are born with it, it is built in. It is the very nature of our being to seek and search for bliss. Hence I call bliss, the God.

And if bliss becomes the God, then there will be no need for anybody to be an atheist. And if bliss becomes the God there is no need for anybody to be a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian. Then our search is one, our goal is one.

And a great brotherhood can happen on the earth, because the search, the same search, will create a great love, because we will be all fellow travelers. Of course in different ways we will seek and search, through different means and methods, but that doesn’t matter, that makes no difference. We are moving towards the same goal, towards the same source. That movement will make us brothers.

The world has suffered too much because of these religions. They talked about love, but they only created war. They talked about creativity and they were all destructive. They murdered, they butchered, they killed, they raped; and they all talked about great values. Behind the facade of the great values were hidden animalistic tendencies.

We have to get rid of all that old nonsense! A new kind of religiosity, a new kind of religiousness, is needed. It will not be through worshipping a certain god – that divides people. It will not be through certain rituals – that divides people. It can only be through the ultimate search for bliss, peace, silence.

In the East we have defined God as satchitanand. Sat means truth, chit means consciousness, anand means bliss. These are the three faces of God, the true trinity – truth, consciousness, bliss.

Deva Kavita. Deva means divine; Kavita means poetry.

Life can either be prose or poetry. Life can either be a syllogism or a song. Life can either be logic or love. Those who live logically live not. They calculate much, they are very clever, but ultimately they are proved to be just foolish. All their cleverness and calculation leads to nowhere. Of course they will have great success in the world – they will have money and they will have power and they will have prestige – but ultimately it means nothing. Death comes and destroys all that you have done, and before death you stand stark naked, stupid, foolish, ashamed.

But life can also be lived like a poetry, like love, like a song. Then you may not be very famous, you may not have much money, you may not have much worldly power, but you will have great joy. You will have meaning, significance. You will have grace, and you will have a light within your heart. You will feel your energy as ecstasy, as a dance.

My sannyasins have to learn to live like poetry. They are not to be calculative; they have to learn to risk. And when life takes everything away, everything can be risked. But one should not risk one’s innermost soul, one should not share it. And that’s what people go on doing: they accumulate money, they destroy their soul. They sell their innermost treasures for nothing.

A sannyasin has to protect himself against this world. This world is dominated by the calculating people. They are very much against poetry, against love, against music. They are very much against ecstasy. They are very serious people and they don’t want anybody to be playful.

But unless one is playful one never comes to know what it is all about. Unless one is playful one never comes to know what prayer is. Unless one is playful one never comes to know the childlike wonder – those innocent eyes that are surprised at each and every thing. And without those eyes you cannot know the mystery.

God is only a name for the mysterious, and the mysterious surrounds us but we are unbridged with it. We can be bridged through poetry. That’s what I mean by poetry: I don’t mean literally, I mean a poetic way of life. Living lovingly, that’s what I mean by poetry. Living dancingly, that’s what I mean by poetry. Living ecstatically each moment as if this is the last moment, pouring oneself totally into it, not holding oneself back. And then life really becomes poetry; it attains to great grace and great benediction.

To me the life of poetry is the religious life, true religious life. The man may never go to the church or to the temple, but wherever he is, there is the church and there is the temple. Wherever a man is ecstatic there is God. It is through our ecstasy that we provoke Cod to come close to us.

Forget the old [name] – it helps immensely. Just by forgetting the old name, the past becomes disconnected. The name is the center of our identity. Once the name is changed it is easy to change your being. Again you are born, as if a new life starts, and one can do from ABC. And that’s exactly what is needed.

The way we have been brought up, the way we have been taught, is so utterly wrong. It is not really our fault that we go on missing bliss, ecstasy, God. The whole social structure is against ecstasy. It poisons our being from the very beginning. It does not allow us to be joyous – it is afraid of joy. It wants us to remain miserable.

So changing the name is simply dropping the whole past in a single stroke. Satyanand Bharti. Satyanand means truth is bliss.

Truth is never learned from others; truth has to be discovered by one’s own efforts. It is never possible to transfer it from one hand to another; it is never a heritage. Even those who know what it is cannot give it to you; they are helpless. That is the difference between scientific truth and spiritual truth.

Scientific truth can be easily transferred. Once a scientist has discovered something it becomes the property of everybody else; it becomes the property of humanity. Then any schoolteacher can teach it within hours. The scientist may have worked his whole life to find it, but by and by it will be taught even into the primary school and even children will know about it, without making any effort on their own.

Spiritual truths are very different. A Buddha discovers, but the truth disappears with the Buddha. A Krishna discovers, but the truth disappears with Krishna. It is untransferable. Thousands of times it has been discovered and lost. In a way it is very beautiful, because a borrowed truth can’t have that beauty. When you discover on your own, when you discover through long struggle, when you reach to the peak of the mountain through all kinds of hazards, the joy of reaching is tremendous. You can be dropped on the mountain top by a helicopter, but then there will be no joy; you will miss the whole point. In fact the joy is not exactly there on the hilltop; it is spread all over the journey. The more you travel and the harder the journey, the greater is going to be the bliss.

And God has made it in such a way that truth is not easily available. One has to risk much, one has to inquire much, one has to fail many times. And only then finally, passing through all kinds of fires and tests, one arrives. That arrival is a tremendously beautiful event.

Satya Bharti. Satya means truth, authenticity. We live in lies, we live in pretensions. We are one thing and we go on showing to the world something else. We say one thing, we do something else. Inside there is one reality, outside we have painted another reality. This is what I mean when I say we live in lies.

And a sannyasin has to slowly slowly drop all kinds of lies. He has to make his inner and outer the same. And the day it happens when the inner and the outer are the same, life becomes such a simplicity and such a spontaneity, that you cannot imagine right now that life can have such innocence. Just like a small child who has no division between the outer and the inner. He says what he feels and he feels what he says. He is still uncorrupted by the society. One has to become a child again.

That’s what sannyas is: becoming a child again again reclaiming the innocence of childhood which the society has destroyed. It will be difficult, because to live with people who live in lies, without lies

living with them is difficult. People who are all pseudo and phony, to live with them as true is to invite danger – but it is worth.

This life is bound to go, so even if one has to sacrifice one’s life for truth one should not be worried about it. Truth is far more valuable than life itself because life ends in death but truth never ends. Truth is eternal, timeless, deathless.

Manoj Bharti. One thing to be remembered: that from this moment meditation becomes your goal; everything else is secondary. So arrange your life in such a way that everything revolves around meditation. Arrange your life in such a way that everything helps your meditativeness. Do things, but do with such consciousness, such alertness, that every act has the flavor of meditation, because it is only meditation that brings transformation.

Initiation into sannyas is formal. It is a beautiful gesture from your side that you are ready to listen to me, that you will welcome whatsoever is given to you; that you will be open to me, that your doors will not be closed; that you will not be in an argumentative relationship with me but in a dialogue. That’s what sannyas is: a simple gesture from your side that now a dialogue opens, an intimacy, an I-thou relationship, a love affair. It is a formal beginning – but it is only a beginning, remember. It is not the end; it is just the gate.

To reach the temple many more steps have to be taken, and the first and the most important step is meditation. Then everything else follows on its own. Then many doors will open, but they will open on their own. You have to open one door – the door called meditation – then all other doors will open on their own accord.

So manage your life in which meditation becomes the center. And manage your life in such a way that you can find at least few hours purely for meditation. One hour in the morning and at least one hour in the night – that is the minimum, but if you can find more you can never do more than enough. Even if twenty-four hours are devoted to meditation it is always less than enough. Because meditation is such a phenomenon, the more you go in it, the more you become capable of going further. And ultimately it leads you to the inexhaustible mystery. It is inexhaustible. You can only enter into it and dissolve into it; you cannot know it. You can be it, but you cannot know it.

This is a great, auspicious moment. Being initiated into sannyas is one of the greatest experiences, but much more has to follow. Don’t be satisfied by just becoming a sannyasin. Sannyasin has to create, on the contrary, a divine discontent. God has to be achieved, and every possible human effort has to be made. This is a commitment, an involvement, a resolution.

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