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‌CHAPTER 25

28 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva Faina. Deva means divine; Faina means freedom. Freedom is the most divine thing in existence. Everything can be sacrificed for it, but it cannot be sacrificed for anything else. Even love, if it goes against freedom, becomes worthless. Love has value only if it protects freedom, nourishes freedom, if it helps freedom. Otherwise it goes ugly, nauseating.

Freedom is the ultimate value; everything else becomes valuable through it, even love. And if it is missing, then nothing is of any value. Then life is trivial, mundane. Then life, at the most, is only a survival, but it can’t have any significance.

One can survive without freedom; maybe one can survive in more security and safety without freedom. A slave survives perfectly well. In fact he has no worry of his own. And the man who is in the prison has a certain kind of security which nobody can have outside the prison. He is well protected, he need not worry about the tomorrow; the food will come in right time. He need not have any worries of his own; he is freed from his responsibility But once you are freed from your responsibility and challenges and dangers, your soul is destroyed. He only survives.

But that’s the situation of the whole humanity: people are only surviving day to day, bread and butter, managing somehow, dragging somehow . . . for what? to where?

All effort ultimately culminates into death. One can die rich, one can die poor, but death is death; it is not poor, it is not rich. It doesn’t make any difference when you die whether you will be carried by millions of people to the grave, or just dragged by a few people, or maybe just in a municipal van taken to the cemetery. It doesn’t matter at all. Death is death, and death is very communistic, very equalizing. And if death ends everything, then life has no meaning. Life can have meaning only if there is something which survives death, which transcends death.

Freedom is that value: freedom from the body freedom from the mind, freedom from the society in which you are born, freedom from nationality, freedom from race, freedom from past. And then suddenly you become aware of something in you which is indestructible. When all this garbage is dropped – when you are no more a Christian and a Jew and a Hindu and a Mohammedan – when you are no more an Indian, a Chinese, a German; when all this nonsense is dropped when you are totally free, you are just freedom, freedom from all conditioning – suddenly you become aware of a very small light at the deepest core of your being which is indestructible, which death cannot destroy, which is never born and never dies. But it is known only in the space of freedom.

Anything that helps freedom is good, anything that hinders it is bad, is evil.

Sannyas is a declaration of remaining free, of remaining utterly free, whatsoever the cost. Sannyas means freedom from all that is foreign to you so that you can be just yourself, pure and simple and innocent.

That innocence brings great benediction. One can call it God or enlightenment – names don’t matter – but only when that benediction has happened life has value, meaning, significance.

Anand Fitzhugh. Anand means bliss. Bliss is not only happiness, it is something more. Happiness comes from the outside. It is always foreign: at the most it can be a visitor and soon it will be gone. You can be a host to it, but the guest cannot become permanent. It is not in its very nature; it is a flux. It has a rhythm like day and night, summer and winter. So in the wake comes unhappiness; it is absolutely followed by unhappiness. It brings pleasure, but it brings pain too – and in the same proportion; there is a balance between the two.

And it creates much turmoil, because when it comes you cannot enjoy it fully: because you know already that it will be gone. So while it is there you are afraid of losing it. The fear, the anxiety, of losing it, does not allow you to be really in it. Before you have lost it you have already lost it in your fear, in your anxiety.

And when it is gone there is unhappiness. And you fight with unhappiness and you want to throw it out, but it is not possible. It will remain to the same extent and to the same proportion as you allowed happiness to be in you. And with happiness you cling, you would like it to stay a little more but the more happiness stays, the more unhappiness will stay.

So in fact you continuously suffer: you suffer when happiness is there because you are afraid you are going to lose it, and you suffer when unhappiness is there, obviously.

Bliss is totally different. It has the flavor, some flavor, of happiness to it, but unhappiness is utterly absent. And it does not come from the outside. It is not a guest – it is the very nature of the host himself. Hence once known, it is forever; once discovered, even if you want to lose it, you cannot lose it. It is unlosable. Even if you want to forget you will not be able to forget it; there is no way.

The only question is: one has to discover it first. Then it becomes a permanent source of joy in you; it goes on bubbling up. Day in, day out, year in, year out, it goes on inexhaustibly, it goes on overflowing you.

CHAPTER 25.

And “Fitzhugh” is also a beautiful word. It has three meanings: son of spirit, or son of intelligence, or son of fire. And they all are deeply connected: spirit, intelligence, fire. Spirit is intelligence and spirit is fire. The more you have intelligence the more spirit you have; and the more you have intelligence, the more fire in your life. You live passionately, intensely. You live with a totalness, with abandon. And it is only by living intelligently, totally, intensely, that one becomes more and more spiritual – a son of spirit.

So the full name will be: a blissful son of spirit, intelligence, fire.

Prem Joel. Prem means love; Joel means a declarer of God, one who declared God, a prophet. The full name will mean declaration that love is God.

That’s what sannyas is all about: a declaration that love is God. In fact there is no other God. To say love is God is a tautology, because love and God are not two things but two names for the same phenomenon.

The old gods are all dead, and it is perfectly good that they are dead. There is no need to cry and weep for them. Instead we should rejoice: the human heart is unburdened. We are finished with the Christian and the Jewish and the Hindu gods – and those who are not finished are simply carrying corpses, and those corpses are stinking!

Sannyas means you are becoming aware of the death of the old gods. It is a search for a new god, a new vision. It is a search for a new prayer, a new kind of worship. We are not going to create new temples, because the universe itself is enough. We are not going to create new scriptures, because nature is his scripture. And we are not going to create rituals, formalities: love and its joys are going to be our prayer.

Live as deeply and as lovingly as possible, and you will be coming closer and closer to God. When one becomes just love, when one’s whole existence is pure love, one has come home. Then there is nowhere to go. Then one can relax into one’s own being, and that is the ultimate in ecstasy!

Prem Marie Anne. Prem means love, Marie means rebellion, Anne means grace – love, rebellion, grace. And they are very deeply interlinked.

Love is always rebellious, hence the society is against it. Hence the society tries to kill it, suffocate it, distort it. And not only one society – all the societies up to now have been doing that crime of distorting, destroying, corrupting, love. They are all for marriage because marriage is an institution, and an institution is manageable, controllable.

But love is pure fire, uncontrollable, unmanageable. Marriage can be arranged, love cannot be arranged. Marriage can be made part of law; love can never be made part of law. Love is a law unto itself; it knows no other law.

And the ways of love are very strange and mysterious. How it happens nobody knows, why it happens nobody knows, and how one day it disappears, that too nobody knows. Its coming and going is mysterious. The society wants things which can be controlled, predicted. The society wants things which can be caused, relied upon. And love is not caused, cannot be caused. It happens

out of the blue, and just as it comes, it goes, like a breeze. The society has been always very alert about it: this is dangerous! The society does not want the mysterious to enter it. The society wants everything neat and clean, calculated. And love is not neat, not clean, not calculated.

And the people who are in love go almost mad in the eyes of society – and in certain way they are mad. They have been struck by the moon, they are lunatics, and they are not in their senses. Either this is true, that they are not in their senses, or everybody else is not in their senses. And of course, the majority is of those people who are obedient to the society, to the state, to the law. They cannot allow such a dangerous fire to strike people. Hence every effort has been made that love should not be allowed. It is a way to prevent rebellion.

But then grace disappears. Then people are no more beautiful, then people are no more alive. Then their life has no poetry, no song, no dance. How can a person sing when he has no love? When he has not known love, how he can dance? What he can know about grace if he has not known love?

I teach love, I teach rebellion, I teach grace. But everything starts with love and everything ends in grace, and rebellion is the bridge. I teach rebellion.

Rebel against everything that goes against your innermost self. Rebel against everything that wants to destroy your individuality, that wants you to become just a carbon copy, a pseudo phenomenon. Rebel against everything that takes you away from your authenticity. And you will have great love arising in your heart, and you will have great grace. It will follow you like a shadow.

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