5

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 5

5 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva Thomas. Deva means divine: Thomas is the name of one of the apostles of Jesus who has come synonymous with doubt, because he doubted. He was one of the most beloved disciples of Jesus. But doubt is very natural. It goes only by and by, very slowly. We are born with it. Jesus loved him tremendously; he loved Jesus, but still the doubt persisted. The doubt persists to the very last.

Your name will mean divine doubt. Ordinarily doubt is never thought to be divine. All the religions of the world have been against doubt. I am not against it. I am not against anything at all, because my observation is that whatsoever is given in life is significant. All that is needed is to know the art of using it. Doubt can become a door to the divine, rightly used.

And if doubt is condemned, rejected, repressed, then you will never attain to trust; it is impossible. At the most you will attain to a kind of belief. But belief is impotent; trust is potent. Belief is dead; trust is alive. Belief is borrowed; just to repress the doubt you have borrowed belief. You are sitting on the doubt pretending to believe, but you know perfectly well that it is all pretension.

You can deceive the whole world, you can even deceive yourself, but you cannot deceive existence, you cannot deceive God. He will see the doubt deep in your heart. Your belief systems will not in any way be able to prevent him from seeing the doubt that you are hiding.

The doubt has not to be repressed; it has to be transformed. The doubt is the seed of trust. Doubt totally, doubt intelligently. Doubt with all the power that you have, and you will be surprised: the more you doubt, the more you are coming closer to trust. The more you question, the closer you are to the answer – obviously, naturally. If your questioning becomes deep, intense, then the goal of your quest is not far away. When the question is so tremendous that you become the question mark, immediately, instantly, the answer arrives. And that answer brings trust; that answer is trust.

Trust comes not against doubt but through doubt, just as the morning comes not against night but through the night. The night is the womb for the morning; it grows in the night’s womb. Trust grows in the womb of doubt.

Use whatsoever God has given to you: doubt, anger, sex, greed. All that has been given to you has to be used and has to be transformed. It contains infinite potential in it. Anger transformed becomes compassion. Greed transformed becomes sharing. Fear transformed becomes love. And doubt transformed becomes trust. Hence I call doubt also divine.

Deva Prabhato. Deva means divine; Prabhato means morning – a divine dawn, a divine morning.

Sannyas is a beginning of new life. It is not continuity with the old; it is a discontinuity. You have to think of yourself from the very beginning again, from ABC, as if the past had never existed. Simply drop it, and not in pieces but wholesale. Drop it in toto! Simply disconnect yourself from it, just like A snake slips out of the old skin and never looks back.

Think of this moment as your real birth, and then things are very easy. It is very difficult to renovate an old house; it is easier to make a new one. And howsoever you renovate an old house it remains old. You can paint here and there and you can do few things here and there, but the total structure, the quality, the flavor, remains that of the old.

I don’t believe in renovation. I believe in destroying the past completely and starting from ABC, fresh and new. That s what sannyas is all about: it is a death, death of the old, death to the old; and a birth, birth of the new, birth for the new.

Rambhajen. It means a divine song, the song of God. Each being is a song of God: unique, individual, incomparable, unrepeatable, but still coming from the same source. Each song has its own flavor, its own beauty, its own music, its own melody, but the singer is the same. We are all different songs of the same singer, different gestures of the same dancer.

To start feeling it is meditation. Then conflict disappears, jealousies become impossible, violence unthinkable, because there is nobody else than our own reflections all over the world. If we belong to the same source, just like all the waves of the ocean, then what is the point of conflict, competition, feeling superior, inferior, and all that nonsense? Nobody is superior and nobody is inferior: everybody is simply just himself or herself.

And everybody is so unique that there has never been any other individual like you before and there is no possibility of ever there being an individual like you again. In fact you yourself are not the same for two consecutive moments. Yesterday you were a different person, today it is just somebody else. Tomorrow, one never knows.

Each being is a flux, a constant change, a river flowing. Heraclitus says you cannot step in the same river twice. And I say to you, you cannot step in the same river even once, because the river is constantly flowing. And the river represents life.

It is tremendously significant that each individual is unique. Then all complexes of inferiority and superiority can simply be dropped. Then there is no point of carrying an ego and the weight of it.

And the weight is too much – it is killing people! And if there is no point of carrying the ego, there is no need to become humble either. Because the whole effort of the so-called religious to become humble is nothing but because of the ego. It is a long shadow of the ego; it is the echo of the ego.

A man of understanding is neither an egoist nor he is humble. He simply is. You cannot say that he is an egoist or an anti-egoist; those words don’t apply to the man of understanding at all, because he lives incomparably. He simply lives authentically. And to live authentically, to live simply, naturally, as you are, without imitating anybody, is to allow God to sing wholeheartedly through your being.

God wants you just to be that which you are and nobody else. If he had wanted you to be a Jesus or to be a Buddha, he would have created a Buddha or a Jesus. He is not a fool – he would not have created you! He has created you because he needs you. Jesus is not needed any more, Buddha is not needed any more. You are needed!

Feel it, imbibe this spirit. The deeper it goes, the deeper it will color your being into the color of sannyas. The change of the outer dress is only symbolic; the change has to happen within. And in India orange is the symbolic color of the spring, because in the spring all trees bloom and the forests become orange. The color orange has to penetrate your very being. Your very being has to enter into the world of spring, of song, of dance, of celebration.

But remember one thing: you can only celebrate yourself and nobody else. And that’s what is needed. That’s what I teach: I teach you to be yourself.

< Previous | Contents | Next >