Chapter title: None

‌Chapter title: None‌

18 July 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8007185 ShortTitle: GWIND18 Audio:

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

Misery is a by-product of being unconscious, unaware and in the same way bliss is also a by-product, a by-product of being conscious, alert, watchful, vigilant. These two alternatives are available to man: either he can live in an unconscious mechanical way or he can live with a deep awareness of each moment, each act, each thought, each feeling.

As you start becoming aware bliss follows of its own accord. Everybody wants to attain to bliss but nobody tries to be aware. That's why people desire bliss and still remain miserable. It is not possible to achieve bliss directly.

You can achieve vigilance -- that is possible. That's the whole art of meditation, the whole secret of religion. And then bliss follows. Jesus has a tremendously beautiful saying. He says 'Seek ye first the kingdom of god then all else shall be added unto you.' Don't be bothered about anything else. People are worried about everything else except the kingdom of god -- and that's why they remain failures. They are interested in attaining the fragrance but they are not interested in growing the rose bush, in growing flowers.

How can they achieve fragrance? It is impossible.

Grow the flowers, plant the seeds for flowers then one day, fragrance comes. It is a natural phenomenon, it is inevitable; you need not worry about it.

Be watchful, and you will be surprised: in the same proportion bliss is going to happen, and without any other effort on your part. Go on making efforts in the direction of being aware.

Man cannot be virtuous unless he is blissful. In the past religions have been teaching just the opposite; hence the failure of the old religions. All religions have failed. Humanity has not become religious at all.

After thousands of years of teaching, nothing much has happened. Only very few people have been really religious -- a Jesus, a Buddha, a Krishna -- just people who can be counted on fingers. They can be thought as exceptional. They just prove the rule: that millions of people have remained absolutely irreligious.

Something has gone wrong basically; religions have been teaching something fundamentally wrong.

They have been telling people: be good, first be virtuous be moral and then you will be rewarded with bliss. That is not so, that is just the opposite of the truth. Be blissful and you will be good. A person who is blissful cannot be bad to anybody, he cannot do wrong -- it is impossible. When you are blissful you share your bliss with people. And that's what good is, virtue is: sharing your bliss. When you are blissful you become a blessing to others; when you are miserable, how can you be a blessing to others? Even if you intend to be a blessing you are not going to be a blessing, you will be a curse.

And that's what one can watch and see. I am not talking about any theoretical phenomenon: everybody wants to help but everybody harms. Parents want to help children; their intentions are good but the outcome 1/08/07

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is not good. The teachers want to help the students; the universities are there to create better citizens but nothing happens. The churches, the priests, the temples

everywhere are trying to make life more beautiful --

it goes on becoming more and more ugly. And I am not doubting their intentions, I am not saying that their intentions are wrong; their intentions are very good but very unscientific. They want you to live long and they go on giving you poison.

Their desire is good but what they do is not good, it cannot be good. They are miserable, so anything that they do brings misery to others. We can only give to others what not we have already got; vice versa is not possible. You cannot give bliss if you are miserable, and you cannot be helpful if you yourself are living in a dark valley, in darkness. When you are full of light, when your whole being is full of blissfulness, naturally, whatsoever you do brings joy to others.

And blissfulness comes through meditation, not by being virtuous. Meditation brings bliss, bliss brings virtue: this is the fundamental law.

Nothing else makes a man victorious except when he becomes blissful. Money, power, prestige, fame --

nothing helps to be victorious. The real victory consists of being blissful.

Alexander the Great is not the really victorious person; Jesus Christ is, although Jesus dies on the cross and Alexander dies as the most powerful person in the whole history of man, the greatest conqueror, the man who ruled the whole of the earth as it was known at that moment. But still he is not victorious. Deep down he also knew it.

On his deathbed he wept and he said to his friends, his generals, 'When you take my coffin to the grave, let my hands hang outside the coffin.' They were puzzled. They said 'That is never done. Why are you asking such an absurd thing?' He said 'I want to let it be known to everybody that I am going empty-handed.

Let people see my hands. I am dying as a beggar. My whole life has been a wastage. I remained concerned with unnecessary, non-essential things. I have not done anything really worthwhile. I am dying ignorant of myself...' although one of his teachers was Plato, the direct disciple of Socrates, and the teaching of Socrates was carried down by Plato to Alexander and the whole teaching was based on a single fundamental and that was: Know thyself. He wept because he did not know who he was. That is the only victory, to know oneself, and in knowing oneself bliss arises.

In that very knowing you are showered with bliss.

Aurora means the dawn, the early morning when the sun is just about to rise, when the east has become red and the birds have started singing and the flowers are opening and the whole earth is getting ready to receive the sun. Exactly the same happens in the inner world with meditation.

The colour of sannyas is the colour of the dawn, the early morning sun. It represents the inner dawn. A man who has not known meditation lives in a dark night of the soul. He has not seen inner light. And if you are full of darkness inside your life is bound to remain miserable because all your actions will come out of your darkness; they are bound to be wrong. You are bound to fall here and there. Your whole life will be that of stumbling from one error to another error. That's what people are doing: moving from one mistake to another mistake.

As they grow old, their misery becomes bigger and bigger. They carry mountains of misery for the simple reason that they have not tried to bring any light into their inner source. And it is very simple to do it, people have just never been told to go in.

The vested interests are against it; they don't want people who are full of inner light. The people who are powerful -- the politicians, the rich, the priests -- are all against it, because a man who has his own inner light cannot be enslaved. You can kill him but you cannot enslave him. Basically he remains rebellious, because he cannot do anything wrong. Whatsoever the cost he will always do the right thing. He can risk his life but he cannot risk his light.

The powerful people became aware of that fact long ago; hence all their efforts are to prevent every child from entering into his interiority. The schools, the college, the universities, the churches -- they all exist to make people extroverts. That is a subtle strategy, a spiritual exploitation and oppression.

My effort here is to create rebellious souls, people who have their own intelligence and who are ready to live according to their own inner light, even though they have to sacrifice their whole life for it. Even a single moment of absolute freedom is more valuable than a long life of slavery, because in that single moment of intensity you come to know god.

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Man without meditation is homeless, he has no refuge. He is just like driftwood, accidental -- goes on living from one event to another event, not knowing why, not knowing from where he comes, where he is destined to go, why he exists, how to exist so that you can know the truth of your being and the mystery of life. Without meditation everything remains closed. Meditation is the key. And just as a simple key can open a complex lock.… Mind is like a complex lock and meditation is a very simple key but it can open the complex lock -- and behind the mind is the real treasure.

Once you can enter and by-pass the barrier of the mind, you are in for a great surprise; you are carrying the very kingdom of God within you. And to know it is to know one's real home. To know it is to become part of the mystery of existence. To know it is to know deathlessness, eternity. Once it is known, then your ordinary life is no more ordinary; it becomes full of grace, beauty, music, celebration.

By becoming a sannyasin you are taking a vow to enter into the world of meditation. Now all your efforts should be concentratedly centered on a single point: how to be more meditative, more aware, more conscious. And once you pour all your energies into one direction it starts happening. All that is needed is intensity and passion.

Sannyas has to be a love affair so that you can put your total energy into it. Then things start happening on their own.

Heather is a wild shrub, with thousands of flowers, very long-lasting.

So is meditation, with only one difference: it is also evergreen, it is also wild, but its flowers are not only long-lasting, they are everlasting. Once attained they are yours forever, for eternity, because meditation means transcending mind.

Time is part of mind. The moment you transcend mind, you transcend time too; they disappear simultaneously. And when time disappears you know eternity. Eternity is always now, it is always present; it never becomes past, it is never

future. There is no past, no future, there is only the present.

Present in fact is not part of time. Time is past and future. Present is eternity, just touching the periphery of time. That's why you cannot hold the present moment, you cannot pinpoint it. The moment you say 'It is,'

it is no more; it only touches it. The moment you become aware of the present it is already past. Either it is in the future -- then you have to wait for it: it is coming, coming, coming -- either it is coming or it is gone.

But you cannot catch hold of it while it is there -- it is just a touch.

We live in the past and the future if we live in mind, and both are non-existential. Past is no more, future is not yet. That's why our life remains almost non- substantial, the same as dreams, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. The reality consists only of the present. When you move beyond the mind you start living in the present.

And the beauty of being in the present is immense, inestimable, inexpressible, indefinable. Words like

'truth', 'god', 'nirvana', 'enlightenment', are just ways of expressing the inexpressible. But in fact it remains unexpressed. These words are just like fingers pointing to the moon. Don't become too interested in the fingers. Look at the moon and forget the fingers.

Being here with me your whole effort has to be that of meditation. And meditation means a jump from the mind into the no-mind, from thought into no- thought, from noise into silence, from constant movement in the mind to a deep stillness of the heart. And suddenly, you enter into the evergreen world, with millions of flowers -- flowers of eternity.

That's exactly the meaning of the word 'paradise'. The word 'paradise' comes from the Persian, 'firdaus'.

Firdaus means a garden full of evergreen trees, full of ever-blossoming flowers. It has lost its meaning in English but it is rooted in the word 'firdaus': a walled garden.

There are a few animals in the world -- the bear is one of them -- which know

the art of going into hibernation. Frogs know it: after the rains they simply disappear, they move into the earth and lie down there almost dead. They don't breathe, they don't eat. They go into a kind of suspended life; for eight months they will remain in that same suspended coma, dead and yet not dead. Dead in one sense, because they are no more breathing, all functioning has stopped, but they are not dead in another sense! because as the rains come again, they will be revived.

In Yoga there are a few exercises which can make a man perform such things also. There have been yogis who practise such things. In fact, they have nothing to do with religion, of no intrinsic value, but people are very much surprised, because if a yogi goes into the earth for six months or nine months, lies down there and then comes back alive again it seems like a miracle.

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Once it happened in Egypt, in 1880, a man performed such a miraculous feat. He went for twenty years; it was the longest record. But people forgot to take him out after twenty years. Twenty years is a long time; the people who had put him into the earth had died. He remained buried under the earth for forty years.

Looking into some old records a librarian came to know about this fact, that a man was lying buried in a certain place. People had forgotten about him and he must be dead by now because it was 1920. He was to be dug out in 1900 -- twenty more years had passed...

The place was searched and the man was found. When he was brought out he was almost dead. But he was massaged according to the instructions he had given forty years ago. It was on record what you had to do: you had to massage and give him a bath. All the things were done and he lived for three more years!

That is the longest record, forty years, of remaining in suspended life, neither dead nor alive.

The bear is also capable of doing it, particularly the bears that exist in Siberia, because when it is so cold that they cannot move they go under the ice and they lie down there, frozen, for nine months. Only for three months is it worth living, otherwise it is impossible to live. Hence the bear has become the symbol of resurrection.

Man can be reborn through meditation, he can have a new life. The ordinary life is not much; it is just so-so, lukewarm -- somehow we are alive. It is a suspended kind of life. A Buddha lives because he lives with such totality, such intensity, with such awareness. Ordinarily people simply go on making empty movements, empty gestures. They appear to be living but they are not really, not authentically. Not knowing at all what they are doing, they go on doing things, almost under a kind of natural hypnosis. Whatsoever their instincts tell them they go on doing. They will reproduce children just as their parents reproduced them, not knowing exactly what they are doing and whether they should do it or not... Some biological urge forcing them. They will reproduce children and they will die. And their children will go on doing the same thing for centuries to come.

Each generation repeats the same mechanical pattern. It is through meditation that one can escape from this prison of biology, from this prison of mechanical, repetitive life and can be really reborn.

Mind is always old. Even a one-day-old child has a one-day-old mind, because mind means the past. It accumulates the past; it is accumulative it goes on accumulating experiences and everything that happens. It is always old and it goes on becoming older and older. But the heart is always young; it never accumulates, it is non-accumulative. It lives in the moment. That's why the mind and the heart are never in agreement, they cannot be in agreement, because the mind talks about the past and the heart wants to live spontaneously, right now.

The mind always gives advice, tries to be very wise, calls the heart a fool, mad, and all kinds of names, but the heart never becomes wise in that sense; it remains a fool. And it is good that it remains a fool, it is good that it never becomes old, because that is the only hope for man. That is the only door to know reality, because reality is in the present.

Mind can never know anything about reality. It can have no encounter with reality. The past is always standing in between like a wall, and the wall goes on

becoming bigger and bigger every day. That's why children are more alive, more spontaneous, more beautiful, more joyous than old people. Old people become too experienced and everything that is spontaneous is not possible for an old man. He has a condemnation for it; he has a thousand and one opinions about it.

The mind calls love mad. Out of its experience, observation, knowledge, it creates a false kind of love it calls marriage. Marriage is an invention the mind. It is a very poor substitute. It is an institution. It is more utilitarian, certainly; it has more economic value, it is more marketable, it is more worldly. Love looks mad, but it is love that gives you feel of being alive, not marriage.

And it is the same about anything else. Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism -- these are mind things. To be with Jesus is a heart thing, but that is possible only when the master is alive. To be with the pope is a mind thing. He has two thousand years of heritage. Jesus was a madman; no rabbi followed him, no knowledgeable professor followed him, but simple people: carpenters, fishermen, prostitutes, gamblers, drunkards -- these type of people who are really simple and in a way more spontaneous. A prostitute is a far more alive being than a rabbi. I respect a prostitute more than a rabbi, because a rabbi is absolutely dead.

Mary Magdalene was far more alive -- she could see the beauty of Jesus. But the head-priest of the great temple of Jerusalem could not see: he thought 'This man is simply dangerous, a madman collecting other mad young people and trying to destroy the whole social structure.'

It was mind crucifying the heart when Jesus was crucified. That has always been so and that will always 1/08/07

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be so. Only the heart can move into meditation, only the heart is the hope. There is only one hope for man: if he moves from the head to the heart, starts listening to the heart and follows the heart. It is risky: everybody will condemn you, everybody will think that something has gone wrong, that you have gone cuckoo. But that has always been so: the people who had been with Buddha

were thought to be cuckoos and the people who are with me are bound to be thought to be cuckoos. But to be a cuckoo with a Buddha is a blessing!

So feel blessed!

Bliss is poetry. It is not science, it is not logic, it is not mind, it is not prose. It is art, it is dance, it is music, it is love: it is poetry. And one has to learn the ways of being poetic; they are totally different. In the world mathematics is needed, not music; logic is needed, not love. So the world teaches you to be logical, but logic destroys your love, which is far more valuable because it is through love that you will know god. It is through being poetic that there is a possibility of knowing the beauty of existence. It is tremendously beautiful, but we need a different perspective to see the beauty, a different vision, a different approach, a different context altogether.

Ordinarily, what we have been taught is not poetry. We have been brought up in a very calculative way.

We are being made to be cunning and clever because that is what succeeds in life, that's what helps you to achieve ambitions. You are brought up in such a way that you can go on power trips -- and reality is not a power trip, it is not an ego trip.

One has to put aside the ego and all the calculating and cunning ways. One has to learn something of the aesthetic sense; one has to be more sensitive, more in tune with existence. That's what I call poetry.

I don't mean that you have to read Shakespeare and Milton and Shelley and Byron. When I say poetry, I mean that you have to be in a love affair with life; it should not be calculative. You should be more open to the wind, to the sun, to the rain. You should be more full of wonder than of knowledge; you should live in awe.

Each moment should be a moment of awe, of wonder. Looking at life with the eyes of a child, the whole world becomes god-full. If your heart is full of wonder, then the world is full of god; if your heart is calculative and cunning, god disappears from the world, god dies. Then you live in a godless world, and living in a godless world is not worth living at all. Life loses all significance altogether. It becomes absolutely mundane, a commodity -- and that is the ugliest thing that can happen to a man.

My sannyasins have to live a beautiful life; a life of grace, of poetry, of music and celebration. Dance, because it is through the dance... sing, because it is through singing... that you will become vulnerable to god, open to god. It is not a question of argument, it is not a question of proofs, of philosophy or theology.

The word 'love' defines sannyas precisely. And a heart full of love is naturally full of poetry. To live life in poetry is to be a sannyasin.

The Golden Wind

Chapter #19

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