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CHAPTER 7
7 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Dharma Farrell. Dharma means religion; Farrell means a man of courage.
Religion is possible only through courage, but usually the cowardly become religious. The temples, the churches, the mosques, are full of cowards. Their God is nothing but a projection of their fear; their prayer is nothing but a demand for protection. It is a kind of bribe. Their praise of God is not true: either they are praying because of fear or because of greed. And fear and greed are two aspects of the same coin; they are not basically different.
Hence the earth has remained irreligious in spite of so many religious people. In fact, ninety-nine percent of people are religious – somebody is a Hindu and somebody is a Christian and somebody is a Mohammedan – but religion does not exist anywhere. It has not yet found the right ground, a foothold, for itself.
And the reason is: the religion can arise only out of courage. It arises out of adventure. It is an inquiry into existence. The fearful cannot inquire. He needs consolation – and lies are very confirmative and consolative. He does not care about truth, because who knows? – truth may shatter his dreams. He may not be able to bear it. He accumulates beautiful lies around himself. He goes on decorating those lies, he goes on repeating those lies. And when you repeat constantly a certain lie it starts looking like the truth. Repetition is a way of auto-hypnosis. So the people who are thought to be religious are not religious but only auto-hypnotized.
Sannyas is a totally different endeavor. We are trying to inquire into truth. We are not believers; we are seekers. We are not in search of a comfortable philosophy of life. Our search is for the truth and we are ready to sacrifice everything for it. Our inquiry is Socratic.
And great courage is certainly needed to go into the unknown, to risk the known. But out of courage joy arises, because out of courage you become more alive. And joy is nothing but a shadow of aliveness; and sadness is a shadow of deadness.
Satyam Johannes. Satyam means the ultimate truth; Johannes means the gracious gift of God. The greatest gift of God can be nothing else but the ultimate truth – truth as it is, not as we would like it to be; truth not as a projection of our desires but as a vision of reality. It comes as a gift, but to receive that gift, to be able to receive that gift, to be able to see that the gift has come, one needs great preparation. The gift costs nothing but the preparation costs everything.
To receive truth one has to drop all clinging with beliefs, with philosophies, theologies, religions, because if we go on believing into something we cannot see that which is. If our eyes are full of beliefs they cannot mirror truth. They will distort the truth; they will manage the truth in such a way that it fits with them.
Beliefs are very manipulative. When you believe in a certain thing you see only certain things. Your seeing is very choosy: you see only that which strengthens your belief and you don’t see that which goes against it. And then you become a very very cunning interpreter. You interpret everything in such a way that it is a nourishment to your belief, to your prejudice. So the man of belief is the man of untruth.
One who wants to be able to receive that which is has to do one very fundamental cleansing: one has to put all the garbage of the mind aside – beliefs, prejudices, concepts. That is the great preparation. It is hard, it is arduous. It is difficult to drop the beliefs, because dropping them one feels empty. But one has to become empty before one can receive truth.
Truth can come only into the inner emptiness; it needs space. Our inner being is so much cluttered with rubbish, rotten furniture of the centuries, so many scriptures and so much dust, that it is impossible for truth to find a place there. Truth is possible only in a totally empty and clean space.
And that’s what meditation is all about: trying to cleanse the heart, trying to cleanse the interiority of your being. The day you are utterly empty and available, truth comes; there is not even a gap of a split second.
It always comes as a gift; we cannot purchase it. But to receive it one has to go through many many purifications.
Prem Anselm. Prem means love; Anselm means God is protection. Your full name will mean God is love and protection. It is so. We are unnecessarily worried in life, unnecessarily anxious for security, for protection. It is unnecessary because we are already protected. No other insurance is needed; we are already insured. God is our insurance.
We are not alien to existence, we are part of it. The existence is not indifferent to us; it cannot be. How the tree can be indifferent to a leaf? It will bring all kinds of nourishment to the leaf; the leaf belongs to it. But if the leaf has a mind it may become very anxious: it is too windy... who knows? And there seems to be no protection, and it is too hot. And what about tomorrow? Who is going to take care of me tomorrow?
CHAPTER 7.
And that’s what has happened to man: because of the mind man has created much unnecessary anxiety. And that anxiety has become a wall between man and God.
Sannyas means dropping that wall completely; living with joy, with serenity, with trust that God is love, that God is protection, that no other love and no other protection is needed, that we need not think about it. Jesus says to his disciples: “Think not of the morrow” again and again because mind exists in thinking about the morrow, mind is the tomorrow. Either it is the yesterday or the tomorrow, but it is never this moment.
And when one trusts, yesterdays and tomorrows both disappear. Then there is only this crystal-clear moment, this existential space, this now. Now and here – these two words are the most religious words in any languages, although in churches they don’t talk about now and here as religious words. But these are the most sacred, most religious, the holiest words in existence.
Live in the now and live here, because God is love and God is protection. That flavor transforms you into a sannyasin. That gives you freedom from anxiety, anguish, fear. That gives you freedom from death. That gives you freedom from future, from time. That simply makes you free to celebrate.
Anand Madir. Anand means bliss; Madir means intoxicated, drunk – drunk with bliss. It contains my whole message: I am creating drunkards. My whole effort is to help you become drunk with God.
God is the ultimate in drugs; everything else falls short. In fact man has always remained fascinated with drugs since the very ancient times. In the oldest scripture of the world, Rig-Veda, the first drug is talked about – soma. And they talk about it in such a way that it gives the feeling that it must be the ultimate in LSD. From soma to LSD man has remained immensely fascinated with drugs. Although all the religious priests and all the monks and all the puritans have been against drugs – but there seems to be a certain spiritual fascination about drugs.
My feeling, my observation, is, that the desire for drugs has a certain religiousness in it. The man is searching for the ultimate drug I call God but because he cannot find God he becomes a victim of something cheap – LSD, marijuana, alcohol. These give him only a temporary relief – or only a temporary dreamlike experience of the unknown. They don’t transform him; they only postpone transformation. But the desire is religious, the search is religious. It may have gone in a wrong direction, certainly it has gone in a wrong direction. When alcohol becomes your God it is a wrong direction. When God becomes your alcohol, that is the right direction!
Learn only one thing: that life is not a philosophical question. One need not brood about it; brooding leads nowhere. One need not intellectually inquire into its truth, because intellect is impotent.
Life has to be loved, lived, and lived with such intensity, with such passion, with such totality, that the very living makes you drunk, the very intensity of living takes you to a higher plane of existence.
If one can live life with the total heart, holding nothing behind, one takes off; one is no more on the earth. And that experience of taking off, that experience of being uplifted into the unknown sky, is the experience of God.
My teaching consists of no doctrine; hence I don’t call it a teaching. It is more or less a learning, a kind of imbibement, getting permeated with me, allowing me to take you to the world that has
become my abode. Helping me, cooperating with me, the impossible becomes possible. One day suddenly you are so unburdened that you simply spread your wings; you are on the wings. And that first thrill of being on the wings is the beginning of an eternal pilgrimage. It has only a beginning, and no end.
Sannyas is only a beginning, it has no end. But the essential of sannyas is to be drunk with life, love, existence, God.
[A sannyasin, arriving, says he feels afraid this time.]
That’s a good sign. Something is going to happen! And remember, fear is a good sign: something wants to surface, hence the mind is afraid. The mind is apprehensive; something is coming very close. And mind becomes very much aware whenever something dangerous is going to happen to the mind. And here being with me is very dangerous for the mind. It is tremendously beautiful for the heart, but for the mind it is a death – a birth for the heart and a death for the mind. So it is very natural that the mind should become afraid.
The closer you will come, the deeper you will go, the more and more fear will arise. But that is how one day one surpasses fear. The day the mind dies, all fear dies. And to live fearlessly is really to live. But nobody can live fearlessly with the mind. Only when no-mind is attained one can live fearlessly.
And all these groups and meditations and my work are focused on one thing – creation of no-mind. So we have to uncreate the mind and create a totally different kind of space I call no-mind, because no-mind is the temple of God. And it is only those who have known that space of no-mind... That has been available to very rare people, but only those are the people who have really lived, loved, danced, sang. Their life has been a celebration, and only a celebrating life is a life of prayer.
So don’t be afraid of fear. Accept it, welcome it! It is a good sign – rejoice in it!
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