27

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‌CHAPTER 27

27 June 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Soma means the moon, and deva means god – moon god. It is one of the most pregnant symbols. The moon represents the feminine energy, just as the sun represents the masculine energy. Masculine energy is out-going; feminine energy is in-going. It is like inhalation; masculine is like exhalation. Inhalation is life, exhalation is death. The first thing the newly-born child is going to do is to inhale, and the last thing a dying man is going to do is exhale. With inhalation life begins, with exhalation life ends. Exhalation is extroversion, inhalation is introversion; hence man is war-minded, aggressive, violent, and woman is peaceful, loving, cool, calm.

The world suffers too much from conflict because of male energy and the domination by it. The balance is needed. I am not saying that the male energy is not needed at all; it is needed, but in proportion. Right now, ninety-nine percent is male energy and the woman exists only on the margin. She is not the main current of life, hence there is strife, struggle, fight, war. That energy has brought humanity to the brink of total suicide. It can happen any day, unless the feminine energy is released to balance it. That is the only hope.

The third world war can be avoided only if feminine energy is released into the world to balance male energy; otherwise there is no way. It cannot be avoided by peace marches and protests against war, because that too is male energy! Have you not watched protesters? – they are as violent as anybody can be, and each peace march turns into a riot. Sooner or later they are burning buses, throwing stones at the police. They were there shouting for peace, but in their very shout is war.

The masculine energy can talk about peace but can only prepare for war. It goes on saying that we have to fight to protect peace. Now look at the absurdity: we have to go to war, otherwise there will be no peace in the world. To attain peace we go into war. That’s how we have been going into war down the ages and peace has not come. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars. Not a single day passes when there is not war somewhere or other. Sometimes it

is Vietnam, sometimes it is Israel, sometimes it is Kashmir, sometimes it is something else, but the war continues. And it is not only a question of changing the political ideology of the world – that won’t help because all those ideologies are masculine.

The feminine energy has to be released. That can bring balance. The moon has been neglected too much, the sun has become too prominent. The moon has to be brought back to life. And with the moon is not only the woman: with the moon is all poetry too, all aesthetics, all love, and all that belongs to the heart, comes from the moon. All that is intuitive feeds on the moon.

Remember this. And in each being, man or woman, both energies exist – the sun and the moon. The emphasis has to be towards the moon. We have leaned too much towards the sun; it is destroying us. Just to keep balance we have to lean to the opposite direction, and slowly slowly one has to be exactly in the middle – the moon in one hand, the sun in the other, but both equal. I declare man and woman equal, not because of any political reason: I declare them equal for some existential reason. They have to be equal, otherwise life will be destroyed.

So find the woman in you. Feed it, nourish it, help it to grow. Don’t be shy of it and don’t think ‘I am a man.’ Nobody is simply a man and nobody is simply a woman; both are both. It has to be so: half of your being has been contributed by your father and half by your mother. You are the meeting of these two energies. You cannot be just man, you cannot be just woman.

Absorb the woman, enhance and help the woman; become more soft, receptive, passive, loving. Because meditation comes easy when one is passive. It is not an active approach towards life. It is just waiting in openness.

Meditation comes – it cannot be brought, it cannot be conquered. One has to surrender to it. That is the meaning of the feminine.…

Kavya means poetry, siddhi means attainment the attainment of poetry. And by poetry I don’t just mean poetry. I mean a poetic vision of life, a poetic approach to reality. It happens sometimes that one may be a poet, very clever at words, but may not have the poetic vision. One may be able to write poetry but will not be able to live it, and unless one lives it, to me, one is not a poet. Poetry is a way of life. Of course, if writing flows out of living, it is perfectly good, but your song should first be lived within your heart. Your song should not be composed. It should be born in your womb, it should be your blood, your bones, your marrow. It should contain you. It should not be just a composition in words – clever, rythmic, but not really poetic.

And sometimes it happens that a person may never write poetry but his whole life is poetry – the way he walks, the way he looks, the way he listens. His whole life may have the flavour of poetry. Buddha is a poet in that sense. Jesus is a poet in that sense. And even when they speak prose, it is poetry because it comes out of their inner world. That I call ‘attainment of poetry’: when you start living in an aesthetic way, when beauty is your god, when beauty is your highest value, when bad is bad because it is ugly, when good is good because it is beautiful, when religion is relevant because it leads you to deeper beauties of lifeBut your criterion remains beauty.

In India we have thought of three criterions – satyam, shivam, sunderam. Satyam means truth; that is the criterion of the philosopher, who always asks ‘Is it true?’ The second is shivam – it means

good; that is the criterion of the saint who always asks ‘Is it right? Is it good?’ And third is sunderam – sunderam means beauty; that is the criterion of the poet and that is the highest criterion... higher than truth and higher than goodness. Because truth is dry, looks like a logical syllogism. It has no heart, it does not beat with life, it has no pulse. It is a bare, naked proposition. And it doesn’t change people’s lives.

It has happened many times – it happened in the case of David Hume, an English philosopher. He arrived at the same conclusion as Buddha, exactly the same, but the procedure was different. Buddha arrived through beauty and Hume arrived through logic. The conclusion is exactly the same. Hume says ‘There is no self; all is empty within’, but this is a logical conclusion. Buddha a!so says ‘There is no self; there is utter emptiness inside.’ But this is not a logical conclusion; this is existential experience. Hume never went in – he simply argued. He argued against the concept of self and proved it faulty and hence concluded there is no self. Buddha does not argue – he meditates. He goes in, he looks for it and he never finds it, so he says there is no self inside.

And it is not only that they differ in their procedure; the ultimate outcome is totally different. Hume remains Hume – the same person. The conclusion does not change, cannot change him. If you arrive at a certain conclusion through logic it will not affect your life. He lives the same kind of life as he was living before... no difference at all. But Buddha is utterly transformed.

The second criterion – goodness – creates guilt in people, gives haughty ideas, egoistic ideas to people, that ‘I am good and the other is not good.’ People start constantly moving with that ego that goes on declaring to the world that they are holier-than-thou. In their eyes there is condemnation for others, only hell for others and heaven is reserved for them. These people, howsoever good, deep down are not good people. It is the same ego trip in new names.

But the third criterion is the ultimate criterion. A man who starts loving beauty – the beauty of the flowers and the birds and the rivers and the mountains and the sun and the moon and people – cannot condemn. He cannot think of himself as superior; a great humbleness arises. Seeing this splendour all around he bows down, he surrenders to this infinitely beautiful existence. And in that very surrender he comes closer to god.

And when one sees all this beauty and feels it, poetry is born, living poetry is born.

Das means servant or slave, anudas means a slave of slaves, a servant of servants. And this has to become your approach towards life. God is not visible – only his servants are visible. Serve them and through them you will find him. There is no way to connect with god directly because the very phenomenon of god is such that we would be burned. But through something – through a medium, through a curtain – the contact is possible.

The question is: Why is this century missing god? The problem is that people are looking and trying and searching to have a direct glimpse of god. That is not possible, that has never been possible. In the past people were searching through people or through nature or through sun and moon, but not directly. Hence the sun became a god, the moon became a god; rivers became goddesses, mountains became gods, trees became gods. People searched via these and slowly slowly they started getting glimpses of the divine. And the divine is everywhere but not available to a direct approach. One has to be very indirect, delicate. The phenomenon is such that you cannot shout at god, you can only whisper.

I am giving you one of the most significant names: a slave of slaves. This is a Sufi approach. Wherever you find anybody a tree, a man, a woman, a rock feel worshipful. Be of some use, of some service; whatsoever you can do, do. At least you can touch the rock lovingly. And you will be surprised that when you touch the rock lovingly, prayerfully, the rock disappears and there is god in the form of a rock. Hug a tree and see! And it is not one-sided – the tree is hugging you! The day you feel that the tree is hugging you and that the tree waits for you, and if you don’t come the tree feels sad, and if you come the tree is joyous, you are coming closer to god – because these are his manifestations. If you want to show your appreciation of a musician, you hear his music, you appreciate his music, you are thrilled through his music. You go into an ecstasy through his music. And going through that ecstasy, passing through that ecstasy, you are coming closer to the heart of the musician.

[A sannyasin asks: My grandmother is dying and I want to ask how to help her... The is eighty-two, and she’s completely unaware and very scared.]

Just teach her a little meditation: watching the breath. With her lying down on the bed, just sit by her side and put your hand on her head. Become very quiet and silent and meditative, because meditation is contagious: if you are really meditative it can be transferred. So sit by the side, become completely silent, put your hand on her head and explain to her that she should just watch the breath – the breath going in, the breath going out. Tell her that if she can watch this breath going in, going out, she will become aware that she is not this body and she is not this breath either. She is the one who is watching, and that watcher never dies, it is immortal.

The moment we know our witness we are immortals. And the best and the shortest way to know is to watch your breath because breath is the bridge that joins the body with the soul. If you are watching the breath you are already on the other shore. Watching the breath means that you are watching the bridge – the bridge that joins you with the body. The body is left far behind. Between you and the body is the breath, and you are watching the breath; because you are watching you are separate from it. You can watch a thing only if you are separate from it.

So if in these last days you can help her to watch, that will be the greatest gift that you can give to her before she leaves, because then she can leave in perfect silence, in absolute cool and collectedness... and that is the real way to die.

There are people who don’t know how to live and there are only a few people who know how to die. And that is the greatest art, because that is the culmination of life. If you miss death you have missed your whole life. You will be thrown back into the womb again because you will have to learn and go through the whole process again. You failed, so you have to go through the same class – unless you pass. And the only way to pass is to die so centred, so alert, so peaceful, that there is no fear ever. This cannot be managed just by becoming brave, no. This cannot be managed, there is no way to manage it. Unless you know that there is something in you which is deathless, it is not possible to manage it. And that deathlessness is always there; that is your witnessing consciousness.

So just go, help her every day. Whenever she is ready – in the morning, evening – sit for a few minutes by her side, and while you are putting your hand on her head, you also watch your breath. You really do what you want her to do, only then can it be transferred. Your meditativeness can jump into her being. It is an every-moment happening. We are not aware of it.

Sometimes suddenly you find a thought coming in and you have never thought about it and it seems so irrelevant – it makes no sense to you. It may have simply jumped from somebody else’s mind into yours. It may not have any roots in you. It may be just that a passer-by who is passing by had looked inside you. Thoughts are continuously jumping from one head into another.

And you know it sometimes it is very clear: somebody is sad, and just sitting by his side you become sad, for no reason of your own! Somebody is joyous and happy and you may have been sad just a few moments before, but his happiness is contagious: you forget all your sadness and you are laughing. Later on you feel a little guilty too – that this was not the right time to laugh (a burst of whispered laughter from the group) because you were so sad – but you were possessed by the moment, by his atmosphere. It depends... Whenever you come by the side of a powerful man, more powerful than you, whatsoever he has will affect you.

So just go there, sit silently, meditatively, watch your breath and tell her to do exactly the same. She may not be able to do it because she has never meditated and when one is dying one is not together, but let her try... just a little bit of effort on her part. The real effort has to be on your part; her part will be just a help. And she will try, because who would not like to be joyous? Who would not like to have a glimpse of the deathless and the timeless? And particularly in the moments when one is dying, one would like to know what it is all about.

So first you have to prepare yourself. Take a bath, go as if you were going into a temple, sit by her side, put your hand on her head, start breathing and start watching the breath. Within a few days you may be able to impart something of the taste. It can be done – try!

[A sannyasin says: I just feel so in my head, not in my heart. I feel not open, receptive to you.]

There is no problem really. You will have to go through the head to the heart. You cannot by-pass the head; it is very essential to your being. So never think in terms of opposition – that the heart is opposite to the head. To you, in you, the head is going to become the passage to the heart. And it is different with every individual, so there are no general prescriptions possible.

So nothing to be worried about. Use your head! And don’t be worried I can penetrate even the thickest of heads! (laughter) Don’t be worried! And your head is not that thick. But the way will go through the head. You will have to understand me first intellectually – you cannot by-pass it. If you by-pass it, it will take revenge, it will come back again and again; it will always disturb. You can by-pass it and go to the heart but that will never be your resting place. You have to go through the head; first the head has to be convinced. And there is no problem in it – I can convince it! Once the head is convinced it will become a servant; it will never create any trouble. That’s how it has to be with you.

So don’t compare with others. There are people who can by-pass; the head is not an essential part. It is non-essential to them and it cannot create any trouble. But when the head is very essential, when you have been brought up and you have worked on the head long enough, and it has attained to a kind of sophistication, it cannot be easily subsided. And it should not be! Whatsoever doubts it raises can be solved.

I am not against reason – I am as much a rationalist as anybody can be. All that I am trying to do is indicate that reason is not all, that there is something beyond reason too. That which is beyond

reason is not necessarily against reason. It is transcendental to reason, incomprehensible to reason, but reason can be used to approach it. And reason has to be exhausted completely. When reason sees its impotence before the mystery of life, then it surrenders, not before it. And I enjoy – there is no problem in it. I enjoy people who have some intellectual journey to go through.

Never be untrue to your own self. If your head is so essential, then it is part of your being and you have to be true to it; don’t betray it. Anything betrayed will take revenge. Anything left behind sooner or later will come, will assert itself and will destroy all that you have made.

So the first thing to remember you are not to fight with the head, you have to use it, and it will become a beautiful servant. Good!

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