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‌CHAPTER 8

8 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand Ryoko. Anand means bliss; Ryoko means good. Bliss is good; everything else is bad. Bliss is virtue; everything else is sin. But this has not been said to humanity.

People have been taught many things but not the truth, because the truth goes against the vested interests. It goes against the status quo. It goes against all the oppressors. Hence the truth has been always kept secret. Only very few, rare, courageous individuals have been able to steal it.

One of the greatest Masters of this age, George Gurdjieff, used to say that truth has to be stolen. One has to be almost a thief, because truth is so closely guarded by the oppressors. They don’t allow anybody to know about it, because any leakage of the secret will bring revolution in the world.

And this is one of the very guarded secrets, that bliss is virtue. People have been told to be serious and sad, not blissful. Down the ages religion has become associated with seriousness. It is a lie! Religion is a dance, a song, a celebration... because only the blissful can give bliss to others. You can only give that which you have; you cannot give that which you don’t have. And virtue is sharing your bliss with others.

The miserable person cannot be religious. He is ill, he is unhealthy – how he can be religious? Religion means inner health, sanity, wholeness. The miserable person can only pretend. And ninety-nine point nine percent of your saints in the past have been miserable peopLe. And because they were miserable they wanted everybody to be miserable. They created a very negative approach towards God. They created a very pathological religion.

My effort is to bring health to religion again. My sannyasin has to be blissful. He has to make bliss his only religion.

Prem Kutira. Prem means love; Kutira means a small house – a small house of love.

A sannyasin has to become a house of love, a temple of love: not love in the ordinary sense, as a relationship, but in a totally different sense – as a flavor of your being, as a state of your being. Not love addressed to somebody in particular, but just being loving in general – loving to the trees, loving to the river, loving to people, loving to the stars.

The emphasis is not on the object of love; any object will do. Any object is an opportunity, a great opportunity, to express your love. The emphasis is on your subjective feeling: be loving. Even if you are sitting silently in your room and there is nobody, still be loving. Fill that empty space of the room with the vibe of love. Pulsate with love. Let love become like breathing: it is always there even while you are asleep.

When love attains to that height it becomes the very door to God. That height of love is prayer.

So learn how to use all possible opportunities. Don’t miss a single opportunity of being loving. And the other part is: go on missing as many opportunities as possible which provoke the unloving aspect of your heart. Go on missing them. Both are available, just like day and night. And one has to find a great balance of missing all opportunities for hate and of not missing a single opportunity for love. Only then slowly slowly, in a delicate way, love grows.

What people are doing usually is just the opposite: they never miss any opportunity of hate, anger, rage. They never miss anything that is negative. Their minds are so much attracted towards the negative. Mind has a deep attraction for the negative because mind itself is a negative thing.

Just the other day I received a book a man has written against me. In the book he writes that he agrees with me about ninety-nine percent things, but disagrees only about one thing: about my attitude towards sex. But he has not written a book for me, although he agrees about ninety-nine percent things. And he has written a book against me because he disagrees about one percent.

This is how the mind works: it is attracted like towards a magnet wherever it finds something negative. He is enraged against me. He himself confesses that only about one single thing he is against; otherwise he is absolutely with me, for me. But that’s all that he writes in favor; the whole book is against me.

Looking at his book I remembered that this is how everybody’s mind functions. We only count the thorns in life; we don’t count the flowers. They may be ninety-nine percent, but we don’t count.

You have to reverse the whole process. Opportunities will be coming when hate is easy, anger is easy, rage is easy, jealousy is easy. Remain detached. I am not saying repress; I am saying remain detached, aloof, just a watcher, aware that, “I am not going to be pulled in it.” Keep a distance, and soon it will be gone. No opportunity remains forever; if you can keep a little alert it will be gone soon.

And if it has not been able to pull you in, when it is gone you will feel such a release of energy in you, such a positive release, that you may not have ever experienced. The same energy that would have become anger, rage, hatred, now will be released, will bloom in you. It will vitalize you, it will rejuvenate you. It will make you more integrated.

CHAPTER 8.

And when you see any opportunity of love, jump into it, although the mind will always say, “Watch, wait, don’t be in a hurry!” because the mind is very much afraid of love. Love is a sure death for the mind, hence the fear. With hate, mind survives – not only survives, becomes more and more strong. With love mind dies. Love becomes the grave for the mind.

So don’t listen to the mind. Jump headlong! Don’t lose a single moment. Love as much as you can, as totally as you can, and slowly slowly this will become your path to God.

Anandram. Anand means bliss; Ram means God. Bliss is godly, bliss is divine. Misery is human. Misery is man’s invention; misery is mind’s work. Bliss is when mind ceases working. Bliss is when mind is no more. Bliss is natural; it is the very ground of our being. We are made of the stuff called bliss, and not only us but the whole existence.

Bliss is synonymous to God. We can drop the word “God,” we can forget about it. It has many wrong associations. It has lived long with wrong people: in the churches, in the temples, with the priests and the popes. It has been in bad company; hence the word itself has lost its glory. But bliss we cannot drop because it is not a question of any philosophy, religion, doctrine.

Bliss is something absolutely essential. And U is not only man who is searching for it but everybody: the trees, the birds, the animals. The whole existence is moving towards it. Consciously, unconsciously, our whole movement is towards bliss.

Once this is understood the search becomes more deliberate, efforts become more efficient. Once you have a sense of direction you stop wasting your energy in going astray. Once you know the target you automatically stop wavering. Once the target is clearly seen you become an arrow and you start moving in a straight line.

Remember, bliss is God. That’s the target; that has to be achieved. And it can be achieved because it is your nature. It is our birthright. All that has to be done is removing the barriers that the mind has created, unlearning the habits of the mind that create misery. Bliss is more a matter of unlearning the habits of the mind than learning a new science.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I don’t understand what my intuition is any more. I get it mixed up with maybe a fear or hurt.]

Intuition is not the same phenomenon as intellect. Intellect is clear; intuition is dark. Its very nature is mysterious. To ask that the intuition should be clear is to ask something impossible. The question is coming from the intellect. The intellect wants to understand the intuition, which is impossible. Intellect cannot understand it; intellect has simply to go.

Surrender to your dark intuitions. Yes, in the beginning they will look confused, confused because of the mind asking for clarity. And they cannot be clear; if they are clear they are not part of intuition. Intuition is surrounded by great mist. It is like early morning when it is all misty and the sun has not risen. It is still dark. You can see, but you cannot exactly see.

You drop that demand from the intellect! That demand can be very destructive; it can close the doors of intuition which are opening. You have to accept its darkness, its unclarity. Once you accept

it, things will start settling. Confusion will disappear. Clarity will never come, but confusion will disappear. Once the intellect drops the demand of being clear, confusion will not be there.

You will know, but you will never know in the same way intellect knows. It is not the world where two plus two are always four. No, sometimes they are five, sometimes they are three, sometimes they are four. The world of intuition is not the world of calculation; it is not the world of arithmetic, logic. It is the world of poetry, where symbols exist, where dreams, visions visit, but everything remains always a mystery.

Something beautiful is happening, but if you demand that it should be clear it will disappear. It cannot fulfill your demand. Your demand is coming from the intellect, and intellect is a lower phenomenon that intuition. The higher can understand the lower, but the lower cannot understand the higher. Intuition can understand intellect. It understands perfectly what it is – just a bio-computer and nothing else, a mechanism, beautiful mechanism to be used – but not to be used by it. But the mechanism cannot understand intuition. It is like: you are driving a car. You can understand the mechanism of the car, but the car cannot understand the driver. That is impossible!

You forget about it! You enjoy its unclarity, its poeticness – call it its poetry, not unclarity. Enjoy the dim light that is there. It is not a twilight. Don’t ask that it should be full noon. It is not and it cannot be. And go with it, trust it.

And I am not saying that you will always find that it has been profitable. Sometimes you will be a loser following it; sometimes you will feel you have gone wrong following it. I am not promising you that you will always be right. But one thing I can say certainly, absolutely: that it is better to be wrong with intuition than to be right with intellect. It is better to go astray with intuition than to be always right with the intellect.

Following the higher in itself is a virtue. Certainly when you start moving upwards you can fall, you can go astray. It is not a superhighway; it is a labyrinth in the jungle of life. You may be lost, but getting lost is beautiful. And you will learn much by being lost and you will understand much by being in the wrong, by going wrong, by going astray. Each going astray will bring you closer and closer to the home.

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