Chapter title: None

‌Chapter title: None‌

1 January 1981 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8101015 ShortTitle: POND01 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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.]

The truth is not known through mind and its turmoil. It is known through absolute silence, then the mind stops all its functioning, then the mind is no more. In that pause, in that silence, suddenly you become aware for the first time, of that which is -- call it truth, call it god, liberation, nirvana, moksha, different names for the same phenomenon. All that is needed is a deep silence.

Because of this a great problem has arisen. The secret has been known down the ages that silence is the most necessary requirement; hence people have escaped from the world thinking that it is impossible to be silent in the world. That was an absolutely wrong conclusion, a wrong logic, because silence has nothing to do with the outside world. It is something inner. You can grow it anywhere. You can go to the mountains but your mind will be the same; it will go on playing the same games. In fact, it will play the same games more in the mountains, because there you will not have anything else to do, so the whole energy will be available to the mind.

In the monasteries, in the deserts, in the mountains, the mind becomes more predominant than in the marketplace, than in the ordinary life; hence my insistence is that no sannyasin should leave the world. It is the right place to attain to silence. One has to learn the art; escaping is not going to help.

If you have cancer, escaping to the desert won't help. You have to go through the treatment -- through surgery, medicine -- because the cancer will go with you wherever you go. And the same mind will follow you anywhere. So the question is not of changing places on the outside, but of changing the inner attitude, approach, the inner gestalt.

Once you change the inner gestalt, the outside noise enhances your silence, it does not disturb it. It is not a distraction at all, it becomes a nourishment.

One of the old Zen haikus is 'THE OLD POND... PLOP!' -- vizualise it -- an ancient pond, very old.

You can see by the rocks, by the moss that has gathered on the rocks, you can see by the trees that are standing on the bank. Everything shows its very ancientness. THE OLD POND... PLOP!, a frog jumps in, Plop!' And you can go on sitting of the bank of the pond but the sound of the frog jumping in is not going to disturb you. In fact, it will enhance. You will see that from before the frog jumped in to after the frog has disappeared into the pond, the silence has deepened.

And the same can be done with everything in the world -- the traffic noise, the train passing by or the aeroplane in the clouds, the thunder, the lightning -- everything can become just a background. You have to be alert, watchful, relaxed, resting in your being. Just simply being, not doing anything, then nothing disturbs. Things go on happening and you remain untouched like a lotus leaf in the water. And that's what sannyas is all about living in the world and yet not being part of the world, living in the world but not allowing the world to live in you.

A sannyasin has to grow great love for silence. Unless you love silence totally, it cannot happen. And if you love, it is bound to happen. Love functions like a magnet. Once there is great love for silence you have created the magnet and then, from everywhere, from all the directions and dimensions, silence starts pouring in you like river, pouring into the ocean.

There are people who would like to be silent, but just liking is not enough -- love is needed. Liking is 1/08/07

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very lukewarm, it is so-so. Love means you are passionately involved. Love means it is a question of life and death. Love means intensity, totality.

And the great gifts of life are only for people who are ready to go totally into something, whether it is silence, freedom, truth -- it does not matter what it is. All the ultimate values require you to be a lover.

Sannyas is a love affair with silence.

The most unique experience of life is that of silence; otherwise life is very noisy. Outside there is noise, inside there is noise, and both together are enough to drive anybody crazy. They have driven the whole world crazy.

One has to stop the inner noise -- the outer noise is beyond our control and there is no need either to stop it. But we can stop the inner noise. And once the inner noise is stopped and silence settles in, the outer noise is no longer a problem at all; you can enjoy it, you can live in it without any problem.

The experience of the inner silence is the most unique, incomparable. There is no other experience which can be of so much value, because out of this experience all experiences grow. It is the foundation of the whole temple of religion.

Without silence there is no truth, no freedom, no God. With silence, suddenly things which were not, they are there, and things which were there are no longer there -- your vision has changed, your perspective has changed.

Silence makes you capable of knowing the invisible, of knowing the unknowable

-- that's its uniqueness.

Bliss is a flower, a lotus, which grows in the lake of silence. If one wants to grow the lotuses, one needs the inner consciousness to become just a lake of silence without any waves, thoughts, desires -- just a lake without any ripples at all.

And it is possible! It can easily happen. It can happen through meditation; and meditation means only one thing: awareness. Be aware of your body, its actions,

be aware of your mind, its thoughts, be aware of your heart, its feelings. With this three-dimensional awareness you will one day enter into that ultimate silence in which suddenly thousands of lotuses bloom. Life becomes fragrant, life becomes just sheer joy!

Shantirup means silence is our self-nature. It is not something cultivated from the outside; it is not something that we have to earn. It is already the case. It is just inside us waiting like a seed for the right climate, right soil and the right opportunity to sprout, to become alive, to be dynamic. It is in a dormant state, as if asleep; you have simply to wake it up. Hence it is not such a difficult project as people think it is.

If it was something to be created then it would have been really impossible.

We have brought it within us but we have never opened our innermost core, we have never made a well deep enough into ourselves so that we can see what is there. We are acquainted only with our circumference; our own center is unknown to us. This is the misery of man.

To know your center is to know silence simultaneously because it is our self- nature, it is our very being.

We are made of the stuff called silence; hence the longing for it. It is a longing for one's own being, it is a longing for one's own ultimate truth, and that's why it brings liberation. The moment you know your nature, you know there is no death, there is no need for worry. There is no need for hurry, the whole eternity is yours!

And when there is no worry, you can dance, you can sing. And when there is no hurry, you can enjoy the moment totally. There is nowhere else to go.

The Bibles, the Korans, the Vedas, are not real religion, because they are mere words. Of course, Moses has religion, Jesus has religion, the seers of the Vedas have tasted religion, because they were silent people, but the moment you communicate your silence it becomes words and it loves all truth.

Silence is incommunicable, it cannot be communicated through language at all. Yes, there is a way of communion. That's what sannyas is all about getting in tune with someone who has already become silent makes you silent. Just getting in harmony with a master, the disciple starts becoming the same. Just sitting by

the side of the master, doing nothing, one starts imbibing the spirit. Nothing is said, nothing is heard, but a flame is transferred.

The Zen people call it the transmission beyond scriptures. The true religion is always a transmission beyond scriptures, beyond words, beyond philosophies. Hence the true religion can only be experienced 1/08/07

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with an enlightened, awakened master, with a Jesus, with a Buddha, with a Zarathustra, with a Lao Tzu you can experience it, but not through the words. Although the words belong to Buddha, still, the moment something is said -- something which cannot be said -- it becomes false.

And this is one of the problems man has to solve because we remain confined by theories, ideologies, words Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism

-- these are all words now. Once when a man like Buddha was alive, the silence was there. And for the disciple, even those words were significant because they were not listening to the words, they were listening to the source of the words. But now the source is no longer available, only words are there.

Words are like pictures. A picture of a Buddha or a Jesus is not the Buddha or Jesus. You have to come in communion with an authentic, alive master.

And the only definition of the authentic and the alive master is that he is never traditional, he is always rebellious. So that can become a demarcation line; whenever you find a traditional saint he is phony.

Otherwise he cannot be traditional. Rebellion is the very spirit of a true master -- utter rebellion.

And to be a disciple of somebody who is living silence is the only way to taste religion, to have the first glimpse of religion, then certainly you can start searching for it within yourself. But the first ray, the first hit, the first shock that wakes you up has to come from the master, otherwise one can go on sleeping for lives together.

So wherever you can find a living silence, drink of it. And the only possibility to drink of it is to put your mind aside, because you cannot argue with silence. Either you fall in a deep synchronicity with it or you are not able to understand it. There is no question of argumentation. It cannot be proved, it cannot be disproved. Logic is absolutely impotent about it.

It is a question of love not of logic, a question of the heart not of the head.

Man lives in words, and to live in words is not to live at all. It is a fake life. To live in words is just to live on the surface; life has profound depths and you have to dive to know them. And there is no more end because there is no rock-bottom; it is depth and depth and depth. And as you dive deeper you become more and more silent; or, vice versa, the more silent you become, the deeper is your penetration into life.

The moment one becomes absolutely silent, one has found the home, now the journey is complete, the pilgrimage is over, one can relax, the full point has come.

But attachment with words is so deep because for thousands of lives we have lived with words only.

People don't love, they only know the word 'love'; people know nothing about god, they only know the word

'god'; they have not tasted anything of truth, but the word is there and they go on playing all kinds of games with it. And one can become very efficient -- that's what makes a person a scholar, a theologian, a philosopher. They become so skilful with words; and one word leads to another word, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, one can go on and on. But the whole thing is rubbish, just pure rubbish. There is no content in it. Words are empty shells; there is nothing in them.

The meaning is contained in a wordless silence. Hence three thousand years of philosophizing has brought man to a state where everybody is feeling meaningless. Life seems meaningless, love seems meaningless, everything seems to be just a nightmare. This is the outcome of three thousand years of great philosophers -- Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hegel and Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein -- a long, long history of philosophy, much ado about nothing.

They have created great dust and they go on creating dust. And that dust does not help anybody to see; in fact, it makes it impossible to see anything. The philosophers are throwing dust into people's eyes, they are making them blind.

My work here consists in just the opposite; to take all the dust from your eyes, to clean your eyes of words, theories, philosophies, ideologies, religions -- these are all dust, nothing else.

Once your eyes are clean and clear, virgin, uncontaminated by anything, once you can see the immediate reality, your life is transformed into bliss, into a festival of lights, into a continuous ceremony.

1/08/07

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The Old Pond ... Plop

Chapter #2

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