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‌CHAPTER 20

8 October 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine and shraddhan means trust. But remember that it doesn’t mean belief. Belief is a pseudo substitute for trust. Belief in fact is just the opposite of trust – notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. Belief is a head thing, and trust is of the heart. Belief is dead and borrowed – trust is alive and kicking. Belief is a way of the mind to avoid the heart, to give you a substitute so that you can go on playing with it. It is an escape. All beliefs are escapes. If you want to escape from Christ, become a Christian.

The first disciples who came to Christ didn’t believe in him – they trusted him. Later generations have been believing in him. When there was trust there were many miracles because trust creates the space where miracles happen, because trust is alive, glorious, and it allows many glories of God to be revealed. But belief is dead. It is transferred from one generation to another. It is a conditioning of the mind.

Trust is an opening of the heart. It is like falling in love. It has no logic in it.

I can feel your love for me, hence I give you this name. It is falling in love. You don’t know where you are going – you cannot know; there is no way to know about it – but you can trust me. And trust is a great rest and a great shelter. Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Those who are weary and tired, they should come to me – I will give them rest. My burden is light.’ The same I say to you.

Now from this very moment you can drop all your burdens. And my burden is light. From this moment onwards you need not cling to your past. If you cling to the past, the future remains closed. Clinging to the past means continuously hankering to repeat it in some way or other. .. maybe a little modified here, a little changed there. But I am not here to give you any change. I am here to give you total transformation; less than that won’t do.

So simply drop the past. And I say drop it – I don’t say how to drop it, because those are again the tricks of the mind. The mind asks how to drop it because with the how, time enters in. Then you will say, ‘I will have to practise, then by and by I will drop it.’ Meanwhile you will go on doing it.

Sannyas is a quantum leap. It is a jump into the unknown. You don’t ask how; you can simply drop it. If you trust me you can drop your past because now you have something better than the past as a shelter. Now you have a greater light than your past can ever provide. So if you look at me it is very simple to drop the past. One never asks how. When somebody gives you a beautiful diamond and you were carrying an ordinary stone in your hand, you don’t ask, ‘Now how am I going to drop this stone? I have carried it so long. It has become almost a part of my life. How am I supposed to drop it?’ You don’t ask – you simply drop it, because now you have created space for the diamond.

The diamond is here. Once you drop the past you can possess it, you can become the owner of it. Just for asking’s sake, it is yours. And I don’t ask anything in return – I simply want to share it with you. And the beauty of it is this – the more you give, the more you have. So I need thousands and thousands of sannyasins to share with me the light that has happened, the treasure that has opened, the benediction. So just trust me, mm?

This word shraddhan is very beautiful. The word trust just carries a little of the meaning of it. Don’t believe in me, because belief keeps you away. Just trust. Belief is yours. If you believe in me, you will expect something. You will be constantly watching and judging as to whether I am going according to your belief or not. But if you trust there is nothing to judge. You don’t have any belief to judge against, you have no evaluation. You have moved with me... you have moved into the unknown.

The journey is strange but tremendously beautiful. It is a blessing – but only for those who are courageous to move with no luggage from the past. So become a shraddhan, a trust.

[The new sannyasin said that he lead groups: I took the essence of Fischer-Hoffman – going back through the past – and combined that with working with heart energy. Wiping out the old and bringing in something higher.

Last month something just came through me that I could not understand.]

It is something that is beyond understanding. It can be felt, it can be lived, but it cannot be understood, because understanding is a very small thing and the experience is a very big thing. The understanding cannot hold it, it cannot contain it.

But do a few groups here. Do two or three groups as a participant, and forget all that you know about groups. Just be a participant, because it is a totally different experience. To lead a group is one thing – to participate in a group is totally different.

When you are a leader in a group, it is bound to be that it becomes a head thing. When you are a participant, you are more relaxed. You have no responsibility and you can be more total. If you have been a leader, becoming a participant will pay tremendously, because you will be looking from the other’s shore. Mm? – you have been leading people to do this and that; you have been helping them. Suddenly you change the role – you become a participant; you allow people to help you.

It is very easy to help others. It is very difficult to allow others to help you because to help others is not against the ego. To allow others to help you is against the ego. To advise is easy – to receive somebody else’s advice is very difficult; it hurts. Deep down there remains a resistance to it, of ‘Whom do you think yourself? Whom are you advising? I know all this!’

A participant has to be ignorant. And if somebody is simply ignorant, it is not so paying. When you know and you put the knowledge aside and play the game of one who does not know, it is very beautiful. So do a few groups and then I would like you to lead a few. I will start working on you now. Sometimes you will be the leader and I will work on you, and sometimes you will be the participant and I will work on you. I will put you in different situations so that different corners of your being can be touched and I can enter into you from different doors.

A man has many doors to his being but ordinarily people get fixed, obsessed with one door. They become efficient in that. Somebody is an engineer and somebody is a doctor and somebody is an advocate; they get fixed. They become so efficient that they never bother to explore other doors of their being. This becomes their chief entrance – from this they come in, from this they go out. By and by they become oblivious that the house has many rooms and many doors in it, many chambers and many hidden treasures.

To be really enriched one needs to find different ways to enter one’s own being. Whenever you find a new door to your being, you will be surprised at how much you were missing unnecessarily. This door has a different quality to it. It is not simply a door. It is also a dimension. It is a new being to you. You become aware of something about which you were never aware. By and by one should enter from as many doors as possible. That’s what inner exploration is.

First do the camp – and in doing, be as total as possible. Don’t think about the results because meditation is not result-oriented. In fact it has no motivation in it. You have to enjoy it for itself – not as a means to an end but as the end itself. So let it be more like a festival, a celebration, and less like a process which leads somewhere. It leads nowhere – or it leads here and now. Its value is intrinsic.

And you are on the right track. The journey has started. You have heard my call and my invitation. You have come in the right time. Now it is up to me – you simply relax!

[A sannyasin says: I cannot trust enough.]

Mm mm.How much can you trust – percentage? Thirty percent? Fifty percent? How much?

... Just try! Let it be arbitrary, but try. [The sannyasin replies: Only half-half.]

That will do. Fifty-fifty? That’s good – more than enough – because if you have fifty percent trust, then the fifty percent distrust is bound to be defeated. There is no problem. In fact if you had said one percent, it would have been more than enough. Whatsoever percent you said I was going to say, ‘More than enough,’ because even one percent trust is enough to kill ninety-nine percent mistrust.

It is like light. You bring a small candle into a dark room – it is enough. You need not bring big torches. Just a small candle will do. Light is potential – trust is potential. Light is powerful – trust is powerful. Darkness is impotent, mistrust is impotent. Doubt has no spirit in it, doubt is already dead; it is a corpse. So if there is a corpse – say, the great Mohammed Ali is dead and a small child just born is there – who is the bigger? Who is the greater? Even if the child is one day old, he’s alive – maybe very fragile. A child is fragile, vulnerable. You can throw a rock on a child and he will be crushed. He is like a flower – but alive. The dead Mohammed Ali may be Mr. Universe but that makes no difference – he is dead.

Doubt is dead... doubt is never alive. So you will never see a sceptical person celebrating. The doubts will hang around you, around him, and will make him almost dead. Only a man of trust celebrates. Only a man of trust is really powerful.

So let it be one percent. You say fifty percent – that is too much. One percent will do! [To a sannyasin recently arrived from London]

There are problems I know – and sometimes there are problems of which you may not even be aware. This time you have to work hard and drop them. If you don’t work on a problem it tends to become part of your system. By and by it settles into your being, into your guts – then you don’t look at it as a problem but it goes on destroying your life.

And with people who are very intelligent, it always happens that they can explain away problems – and that’s what I see with you. But explaining away a problem is not solving it. To solve a problem one has to bring it into total consciousness. To solve a problem one has to help it to flower. Once it flowers, it dies. That’s what a flower is. When a tree has flowered it seems that something is ready to die because flowering is the last thing. Now there is no more going... a flower now has to wither, to drop into the earth and disappear.

Humanity has been taught to repress, to explain, to rationalise, so we go on in subtle ways avoiding problems, pushing them into the unconscious. By and by we become oblivious that they are there, but they go on working from there; they go on manipulating you, they go on shadowing your life. Even your small acts are being corrupted by these problems which are piled up in the basement. They have to be allowed to flower – that’s what the work of the group is.

In the group you are not supposed to repress anything, not to explain anything away, but to bring it to a focus where the seeds can sprout. Even if it is a poisonous seed, the only way to get rid of it is to allow it to flower. Maybe it is jealousy, maybe it is anger, maybe it is possessiveness or whatsoever. It is very difficult to allow jealousy to flower... it is arduous. But that is the only way to be finished with it: to allow it total being, to listen to what it wants to say and let it be and help it. It is painful to see how jealous you are. It is painful to see how angry you are. It is painful to see how mean you are. It is painful to see how egoistic you are. It is painful to see how sad you are – but they have to be allowed. Painful? Let it be. All growth is painful.

Once jealousy or anger or sadness come to a flowering, those flowers start withering; they fall into the earth and they disappear. They leave you alone – and that aloneness is what sannyas is... that purity when there is no problem to corrupt you, when you are absolutely alone without any problems.

Suddenly sitting there, nothing to be obsessed with, nothing to be occupied with, for the first time you are at home, and for the first time you encounter who you are. For the first time self-knowledge becomes possible. Out of that purity where no problem corrupts you.…

Not that you have repressed those problems, because if you repress them they go on corrupting. Their work may not be so gross, it may be very subtle, but it goes on corrupting you. Only when you are left alone, all the problems have left you because you completed them. Once the problem is completed it disappears. If it remains incomplete, it continues – it goes on knocking at your door. If you don’t allow it in the day, it comes in the night... in the dreams it knocks at your door. Man has become so cunning and clever in explaining everything that now even dreams are explained away.

You go to a psychoanalyst – a freudian or jungian or somebody else – and you give your dream. Even your dreams are no more yours, no more private – and he interprets. He is there ready with his explanations, interpretations, theories, dogmas, and he simply explains it away. Once he has explained you feel very good... you feel as if you have understood something.

His explanation has nothing to do with your dream. His explanation has something to do with his own conditioning. If he is a freudian, he explains it in one way. If he is a jungian, he explains it in another way. If he is an adlerian, he interprets something else. And he can be a hodge-podge of all. He can make the explanations appear really clever – but it is useless.

A life does not need explanations but flowerings. If your dream is knocking at your heart it simply is saying, ‘Allow me being ! I need space! listen to me, observe me, help me to be!’ Once you can help it to be, it flowers. Flowering is the end of it... flowering is the death of it. And when it is dead you are left alone. That stillness is what meditation is. It is not a forced silence. It is simply there because there are no problems. So there is no way how not to be still – one is simply still. The energy is there, vibrant, but there is no motivation to go anywhere, to do anything, to be occupied with anything.

This time I would like you to come to this point. So you will have to pass through many groups. The work is to bring everything up. No more being clever about it. Every problem, whatsoever it is – don’t feel ashamed of it, don’t feel shy about it; all problems are human – just bring it out. Give it a chance to flower. Then it ends, and it ends on its own accord and leaves you in such an incorruptible state of purity that unless you have known it, you cannot even believe that this sort of purity exists. It is virginity: it is as pure as the himalayan peaks and the snow there. Nobody has walked there... for millennia the snow has remained there; it has not melted.

That purity, that silence, that snowwhiteness, everybody is carrying within his own heart, but the problems are all around, a turmoil. They have to be said goodbye to. They can leave you only when they are complete, not before it.

So all group processes are processes of completion. Whatsoever has remained incomplete has to be made complete. Once a thing is complete, it dies. The world never dies because the world is never complete. God is eternal because God is always incomplete. Life is eternal because life is incomplete. It never comes to a point where you can say that it is perfect. It remains a journey, a pilgrimage – you go on and on. You are always arriving but you never arrive – that is the beauty of it.

[The Encounter group was present. A group member says: It was hard... becoming aware of how much is going on up here (indicating her head).]

Mm mm, it is hard. It is hard for everybody – and the more sincere you are. the harder it is. If you just fool around, it is not hard. But if you are really sincere it hurts just to see the things that you have been carrying for your whole life – just to see the whole mess, just to see the whole rottenness inside... and that’s what we have been thinking we are. It is hard but if you can go through it, the things that are creating this arduousness start disappearing.

The only way to get rid of all this mess is to become perfectly aware of it. You are not supposed to drop anything. You are not to create a fight, you are not to create a conflict. You are just to be watchful – with no condemnation, with not even a worry that these things are there. They are there – so what? You have simply to watch – this is how you are. In deep humbleness accept and watch. By and by you will see that the more your watchfulness arises, the more things start disappearing. In a total awareness the mind simply does not exist. And all that is contained in the mind – jealousy, anger, sadness, misery, unhappiness and hell – they all simply disappear.

Once you come to a peak of awareness, you will see that the only problem in life is how to be aware. All other problems are just by-products of not being aware. There is no need to fight with each problem separately. If you can simply become aware, that one solution will solve all. That is the panacea, the masterkey. It unlocks all the locks.

This was your third group? So do Vipassana – it will give you a sharpening so that you can become a sword of awareness; that’s what is needed.

In buddhist tradition they call awareness ‘the sword of Manjushree’. Manjushree was a buddhist monk, a disciple of Buddha... one of his greatest disciples. His awareness became so sharp, the story goes, that when Buddha saw that somebody had a problem, he would say, ‘Go and sit in front of Manjushree and he will cut your knot with his sword.’ And it used to happen! His awareness was so sharp – like a sword – that when you came in front of him, you would start trembling. His presence was like a sword.

Awareness is the sword of Manjushree. Whosoever has it has the whole world, the whole universe at his feet. In unawareness you are a beggar. In awareness you become an emperor... incomparable. So all these hard things are going to help. They will become the rocks on which you can sharpen your sword.

[A group member says: I still try to live up to the expectations of other people and not stay with what is coming out of me. I don’t feel very centred.]

That’s a good experience, a good insight. But just let it be there and it will start changing you. Just remember it, don’t forget it – that’s all. You are not to enforce it. If you enforce you will again create something unreal. You have found exactly the place where the change needs to happen. But the change is so much that you cannot do it. If you do it your doer will come from the past. So you need not do anything. Simply remain alert that this is so – that you try to fulfill others’ expectations, that you are always trying to live up to others’ ideals, and that you are never giving any ear to your feelings. Just remember it, that’s all. By and by the very remembrance will help you, and everything

will stop and you will start hearing your own voice. By and by the change will come – but you are not to force that change. if you somehow enforce it, it will not give you freedom. It may be that again you have been listening to others and they – this group... the groupleader – have told you that you are trying to fulfill others’ expectations and you are not listening to your own heart. Maybe now you have started to fulfill their expectations. Do you understand me? So that danger is always there for people with a mind like yours.

People like you are very vulnerable. If the groupleader says. and convinces you, that you are living up to others’ expectations, you will start living up to the expectations of the groupleader and you will think that this is an insight. Don’t do this any more. Simply remember it. be watchful, and pass through a few groups more and you will see that is has started happening.

[A group member says: The group has been hard for me but really beautiful. I’m always scared of the next layer that peels off, but I’m determined.]

That’s good... that’s very good. I am happy. I would like to give you a meditation now. Start it every night after the Encounter group. It is a sufi meditation... the Sufis call it ‘jikr’; it means remembrance. It is going to go very deep in you, and now the layer has broken off from where it can enter – I was waiting for it. Something has peeled off. A softer layer is there and things can go very deep now. This meditation will be useful.

Every night for twenty minutes sit on your bed and have the light off or very dim, and the fragrance of some incense burning. You can go and find the incense that Sufis burn in the mosque; that will be very helpful. You have been a Mohammedan in your past life – that’s why I am giving it to you.

Sit silently, comfortably, and then for two or three minutes say, ‘Allah.Allah’ loudly, with the lips

used. In the second step just the tongue is used inside and the lips are kept closed. In the third step the tongue is not used... just the word resounds in you, ‘Allah.Allah’. You will be able to do it.

In the fourth step even that has to be dropped. Only the vibrations of it remain. Very subtle vibrations will be felt inside you, as if somebody else is saying ‘Allah,Allah’ and you are simply resounding with it. The fifth step has nothing to do with you. By and by those vibrations will disappear. It will be as if somebody was playing on a guitar and then the player stopped, but for a while the vibrations continue; for a little while the whole atmosphere is full of the vibe. Then by and by they also disappear. Then there is just nothingness, the great nothingness. That’s what Allah is, that’s what God is – the great nothingness.

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