Chapter title: None

‌Chapter title: None‌

25 January 1981 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8101255 ShortTitle: POND25 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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.]

Pleasure is dependent on others, bliss is independent. Pleasure comes through relationship, bliss arises in your absolute aloneness; hence pleasure always brings misery in its wake, because when something is dependent on somebody else there is bound to be many problems.

First, the fear: what is available today, will it be available tomorrow too or not? And fear destroys all joy; it is poison to joy, it creates anxiety, anguish, worry. Out of this fear one tends to possess the other, so that the future becomes secure, insured. But the moment you possess the other you have reduced the other into a commodity. And joy is possible only if the other remains as individual, not a thing.

So one is in a dilemma. If you allow the other freedom, then there is fear. If you don't allow the freedom, then you cut the very roots of your joy. And when you try to possess the other, the other is going to resist, because freedom is the greatest longing in every heart. Nobody wants to be enslaved.

The resistance can be either feminine or it can be very male. Feminine resistance is subtle, indirect; male resistance is aggressive. So the other can be resistant in a subtle, feminine way; hence all the women go on nagging their lovers in every

possible way -- that is their way of resistance. Or, it can be aggression -- both 1/08/07

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are ugly. The male is aggressive; hence he has reduced women to a kind of property.

All these problems are bound to arise, and when you try to possess the other, the other is bound to react in the same way, tit for tat; the other will try to possess you. And then there will be a struggle over who is going to dominate, who is superior, who is more powerful, who is on top.

Pleasure brings many miseries. They follow it like shadows. Bliss is a totally different dimension. It is your natural flowering. It is just being con-tented with yourself. It does not mean that you have to stop loving, but your quality of love will be totally different.

When you are seeking pleasure love is only a means; the real desire is to find pleasure. Hence when you have found the pleasure your love disappears, because love was only a means to a certain end. When you are hungry you eat; of course, when you are not hungry you are no more interested in the food. Hence all lovers go through these phases: when they are in need they are very loving, when the need is no more there they are very unloving, they take revenge, they become almost enemies.

The blissful person also loves but his love is not a means to any end. It is an end unto itself, it is a sharing. He does not want to get anything out of it. He has so such bliss, so much fragrance in his being, he wants to share it. He is almost like a raincloud, so full of rainwater that it wants to shower.

Monika is one of the most beautiful names possible. It defines exactly the state of the awakened person: he lives alone; out of his aloneness he shares, but he is alone. He may love thousands of people, he may love the whole universe, but it arises out of his deep aloneness. And remember, because his aloneness brings flowering, bliss, freedom, truth, it is not loneliness at all. His aloneness is just

the opposite of loneliness.

Loneliness is a state of despair; aloneness is a state of total bliss.

One can cultivate character, but then there is no dignity in it; it is arbitrary, artificial, imposed. It in fact creates a schizophrenic state in the person. It makes one split. One is something inside and just the opposite on the outside. It gives you only a beautiful facade, a mask, and a mask cannot have any dignity -- it is dead.

It can give you respectability, it can give you much honour, because as far as your behaviour is concerned the society is in control. And the society always respects the people who allow themselves to be controlled and enslaved. The society never respects the rebellious person; it respects the popes and it kills Jesus.

It is a very strange world. Christ is crucified and popes are enthroned -- and popes are nothing! They are just parrots. It kills the real and honours the phony.

Society wants slaves, the state wants slaves, the church wants slaves; hence they all try to cultivate a certain conscience in you. Conscience is a trick.

Now scientists have been working on putting electrodes in the human brain and these electrodes can be manipulated by remote control. And the person who has the electrode fixed in his brain will not be aware of it at all, because the inside of the skull is absolutely insensitive. Even if you put a small rock there you will not feel it. So just a small computerised mechanism, not bigger than a button, can be put into the head very easily, and the remote-controller can make you do things which you will think you are doing out of your own choice and you will be simply behaving according to some far-away source.

Delgado has invented many things on these lines, and it is possible that in the future humanity will have to face this danger. This is far more dangerous than atomic bombs or hydrogen bombs; they can kill your body, but these electrodes can kill your very spirit. In a dictatorial country every child, when he is born in the hospital, can be fixed immediately with an electrode -- the first thing to be done -- and then for his whole life he can be controlled, and he will never know. When he says yes he will think he is saying yes, but it is the electrode that is making him say yes.

Now this is a more developed form of the old conscience. Conscience is a bullock cart method; it takes a long time. The family, the society, the school, the college, the university -- almost twenty-five years it takes, one-third of a life- time, to create a certain conscience: do this, don't do that. The old method is simply nothing but hypnosis. Go on repeating to the small child 'This is right and that is wrong.' This creates a subtle conditioning in his mind and then that conditioning will control his whole life. This conditioning cannot have any dignity. It will give you a certain character, but it will not give you dignity; you will not be a Christ or a Buddha or a Lao Tzu or a Zarathustra.

For dignity of character, consciousness is needed, not conscience and that's the function of meditation.

Meditation does not give you any character directly. It does not say what to do and what not to do. It never gives you any commandments. It simply gives you a technique for becoming more aware, for being more alert, watchful, witnessing.

Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will 1/08/07

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arise -- not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera.

My effort here is just to help you to be more aware so whatsoever you do comes out of that awareness.

That awareness has no ready-made answers; it is just like a mirror: it reflects the situation, the challenge of the situation, and you act immediately, spontaneously. You don't look for an answer in the memory, in the scriptures, in your parent's ideas, in all that has been taught to you. You simply encounter the situation

immediately; in your own light. Your action then has dignity, beauty, grace, because it is coming out of freedom. Freedom makes everything graceful. Freedom is the greatest value in life.

And then certainly, whatsoever you do -- your character, your behaviour -- is

yours, authentically yours.

It has your signature on it. Then you are not a carbon copy, you are original. The Zen people call it finding the original face.

For that, one has to drop all the masks, one has to risk many things, particularly respectability. That is a bribe by the society. It will give you a Nobel prize and it will give you many honours; it will do everything to make you feel great, if you can fulfil one condition: if you are obedient, obedient like a robot, then all respect is for you. Then the society will make you a great hero, but there will be no grace, no beauty, no freedom, no truth, no being; you have committed a real suicide.

Meditation opens the doors of your inner treasures, what Jesus calls the kingdom of god. Meditation is only a key, and keys are always small things, but they can unlock immense treasures. Everybody is born as a prince or a princess, but gets lost in the blind crowd of beggars.

A person who is always asking for more I call a beggar. He may be a rich beggar or a poor beggar -- that does not matter -- but the quality that determines his beggarhood is that he is always asking for more.

Whatsoever he has is never enough. And it is never going to be enough. He is always desiring, and because of that desiring he is always in deep discontentment. And desires have a certain nature; they are like the horizon: it looks as if it's just there, a few miles ahead, just a few minutes' drive, but by the time you reach there it has gone ahead of you. The distance between you and the horizon will always remain the same, because the horizon does not exist in fact; it is all illusion, an optical illusion. Because the earth is round, the illusion is possible. It seems somewhere the sky is meeting the earth. It does not exist; hence you can go on and on and on, but the distance between you, wherever you are, and the horizon, will be the same.

The same is true about our desires: the beggar is in discontent as much as the so- called rich person, because the distance is the safe. It is the distance that hurts.

The beggar also knows that if only he can reach there all will be fulfilled; and the rich person, even a man like Alexander the Great, has the same horizon, the same distance. He dies in immense poverty, just like everybody else.

Meditation is a turning in; not running after the horizon which goes on receding. Understanding the futility of desire is the beginning of meditation; seeing its absolute absurdity, ridiculousness, its impossibility, one turns in. When one searches inwards because the outer search seems to be pointless. And the moment you search inwards a miracle happens -- it is exactly a miracle -- because whatsoever you have been searching for always and always, maybe for many many lives, is suddenly there. It was always within the seeker himself; the sought is in the seeker. And we have been running everywhere, except withinwards.

Meditation makes you aware of the immense blissfulness that is just your very nature. And to know it is to become an emperor, an empress; to know it is to become rich for the first time, and it is a richness that cannot be taken away from you. Even death cannot take it away from you, because in death only the outer shell dies your innermost being remains as it is, it is eternal.

To know the eternal, to be the eternal, is the whole enquiry of sannyas. My sannyasins have to find that they are princes, emperors, not beggars. I am not for beggars. In the past, monks and nuns have lived like beggars. They have been taught to live a life of renunciation; I teach living a life of rejoicing.

And one who knows his inner world, how can he avoid rejoicing? His whole life will be just a celebration.

The only thing needed to find bliss is a little bit of courage -- just a little bit. Society makes us cowards.

It makes us afraid. In a thousand and one ways it makes us fear-oriented: fear of others, fear of death, fear of disease, fear of failure, fear of poverty, fear of old age. And even death does not satisfy the society, so they 1/08/07

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create the fear of hell after your death.

This fear-orientation is bound to create a life of misery. My sannyasins have to learn to drop this whole orientation. It is not a question of dropping one fear: if you drop one, nothing will happen because there are a thousand other fears. It is not at all meaningful to go on pruning the leaves; it is better to cut the very root.

Hence my insistence is on love, because love is the polar opposite of fear. Life should be love-oriented, not fear-oriented. All the religions in the past have made it a point to use fear-orientation, because that is an easy way to manipulate, dominate, subjugate people -- but that has made the whole of humanity miserable.

This is the work of your saints and so-called mahatmas.

In my vision they are the greatest criminals in the world, because they have crippled the very possibility of man becoming blissful, they have poisoned the very being. But if one has a little bit of courage one can pull oneself out of this orientation. It is just imposed on us, it never becomes part of us. It is just like clothes: you can throw them off. Just a little courage to be naked is needed, that's all. One can throw off the clothes -- they are dirty and they are suffocating and they are borrowed and so many people have used them before.

A love-orientation makes all the difference. If one moves from fear to love one move, from misery to bliss. Bliss arises when you start looking at life in a deep loving way. The stars, the trees, the animals, the people, the very earth -- all this is so beautiful, in fact there cannot be any more beautiful world than it is.

There cannot be any more perfect world than it is.

One needs only to grow a little more sensitivity, a little more of an aesthetic approach, a little more poetic vision. It all depends on how you look at life.

When a painter comes into the garden he sees many shades of green. When an ordinary person comes into the garden he simply sees green trees. He has not that subtle demarcation, that sensibility, that awareness that can see that there is not only one kind of green tree; each tree has a different green. The painter knows there are many more colours than ordinary people are aware of, but they are not aware at all, they are really colour-blind. George Bernard Shaw was colour-blind and up to the age of sixty he was not aware -- and such an

intelligent man... If this can happen to a man like George Bernard Shaw what to say about ordinary people?

On his sixtieth birthday somebody sent him a beautiful suit as a present. The person just forgot to send a tie with the suit. Bernard Shaw loved the suit and he went to the market to find a tie of the same colour. His secretary followed him; she was surprised because the suit was green, and Bernard Shaw was choosing a yellow tie -- 'That will be just monstrous!' (laughter) She could not control herself. She said 'I should not interfere, that is not my business, but I have to tell you that this won't look good at all. This is yellow and the suit is green. ' He said 'Is there any difference between this tie and the suit?' That was the first time he became aware that he could not see yellow.

For him there was no difference between yellow and green. He could only see green, he was blind to yellow. But he lived sixty years without knowing it; and millions of people are living in the world who don't know the beauty of colours, who don't know the beauty of the birds and their songs, who don't know the beauty of the stars. They never look above in the sky. They go on crawling in the mud. They don't have any time to see a beautiful sunset. Even if they see it they only pretend to see; they are not really there, not in that moment -- their mind is far away, somewhere else, always somewhere else. They may even see and say

'This is beautiful,' but they are simply repeating a cliche. They are not aware of what they are saying. They are saying something, that is expected of them. They are simply fulfilling, the expectation, but they are not really aware of the beauty. They don't mean it when they say it is beautiful: they are repeating parrotlike.

Otherwise, this existence is so beautiful that if you cannot love it, it is really unfortunate. My whole effort here is to help you to love existence, without any fear, without any greed, because greed is nothing but fear in disguise, another phase of fear. If you can love the existence, to me that is religiousness. And out of that love arises bliss!. Then life has a totally different flavour to it. You can call that flavour godliness, a new fragrance, you can call it Buddhahood, Christ- consciousness, but just to call it a totally new fragrance is enough, more than enough. Then your life is surrounded by a new poetry, a new dance, a new song.

I am not concerned with hell and heaven and all that nonsense. I am not concerned with mythologies and theologies; my whole concern is how to help you to understand beauty, love, bliss. And I repeat: just a little bit of courage is

needed -- nothing much!

The only way to find bliss is to surrender to existence -- not to Buddha, not to Christ, not to Krishna, not to me, but to the whole! The master has to be used only as a window, so that you can see the sky beyond, so 1/08/07

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that you can see the further shore -- that's all. Once you have seen it you need not cling to the frame of the window.

Surrendering tc a master is really surrendering to the whole. That is just the beginning, because at first the whole will be too much. You may become afraid.

There is a beautiful story in Srimad Bhagavad Gita: Krishna is explaining to Arjuna to surrender to the whole -- don't bring your will in.' But Arjuna is a sophisticated prince, well-educated, as educated as Krishna himself, far richer than Krishna, belongs to a far more renowned family than Krishna. Krishna is just functioning as a charioteer to Arjuna in the war. They are old friends, and relatives also: Krishna's sister is married to Arjuna.

So Arjuna goes on arguing. Finally when he cannot argue any more he says one thing. He says 'If you talk so much about the whole can you show me a vision of the whole?"

And the story is beautiful -- I don't think it is factual, it cannot be, but it is significant: Krishna becomes a window and Arjuna can see the vast universe, stars appearing and disappearing, the whole eternity. It is so vast that he becomes frightened. Its very vastness is frightening, is scary. He trembles, perspires and starts shouting, 'Close this window! I am absolutely convinced of what you are saying but don't show me this vastness -- this is too much. I cannot look at it any more.'

And Krishna closes the window, he becomes again the same friend; he had disappeared and Arjuna had had a glimpse of the eternal process of existence.

The parable is beautiful because that's exactly what happens between a disciple and a master -- but not literally; it is a beautiful metaphor, metaphorically it really happens.

It is difficult to surrender to the whole. The master is only an excuse, but once you surrender to the master you have surrendered to the whole, and slowly slowly you will learn how to move closer and closer to eternity and infinity without any fear. In fact when one is surrendered, ego disappears, and with the ego all fear disappears.

Sannyas means surrender -- in the beginning to the master and then through the master to the whole. But one has to remember: one has to reach the whole. The river has to reach the ocean. Only when the river disappears into the ocean, loses its identity, has it come home.

The goal of every human being, in fact of all the beings, is to attain to the state of bliss. Even trees are trying in their own unconscious way to reach the state of bliss; animals, birds, in a haphazard way, zig-zag, because there is no consciousness.

Man is privileged: he can become conscious of his longing. To become conscious of your longing for bliss is sannyas. Millions of human beings also go on searching for bliss, but in unconscious way. You cannot find it in unconscious ways; consciousness is an absolute necessity, a prerequisite. Only when you are conscious will you be able to attain to bliss; hence consciousness is the law, the ultimate law. To me consciousness is godliness.

The moment you become absolutely conscious, all your unconsciousness disappears, as if suddenly you have brought light into the house of your being and that very moment you know that the world does not consist only of matter -- matter is only a form of sleeping awareness -- that matter itself is immaterial, that the world consists of consciousness. And when you have known it, realised it -- not intellectually but existentially -- you can call it the realisation of god or truth or nirvana... they are only different expressions for the same thing, but the taste is one and that is of bliss, absolute bliss, unwavering bliss. Once attained it is attained forever.

Intellect is a pseudo coin, easily attainable, but not really of any worth. Our schools, colleges, universities all impart intellect. And the more a person

becomes intellectual, scholarly, learned, informed, the more his intelligence becomes covered with rubbish; otherwise every child is born with tremendous intelligence. We destroy his intelligence; we are afraid of his intelligence, so we start crippling, paralysing his intelligence. And we start burdening his intelligence, putting on such a load of unnecessary knowledgeability -- geography, history, and all kinds of nonsense -- that he becomes so full of rubbish and loses contact with his own intelligence, he loses the way to his own being.

My effort here is to help you to find the diamond that you have lost in the rubbish of intellect. One has to learn how to throw all intellectual jargon out of one's being, how to empty oneself of all knowledge. The moment you are ready to empty yourself of all knowledge you attain your natural intelligence -- and that becomes a second birth. One becomes a 'dwija', twice born -- and that is the real beginning of life. Sannyas 1/08/07

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has to be a second birth.

Jesus says 'Unless you are born again you shall not enter into my kingdom of god.' He is absolutely right: one has to move from intellect to intelligence, from knowledge to wisdom, from information to transformation. And this can be easily done by meditation, very easily. One just has to become more and more silent. So whenever you have time, just sit silently, doing nothing. Just watch your mind, all its gimmicks, games; enjoy all its trips and numbers, but remain aloof, cool, detached, just a watcher. It is just a screen, like a TV screen, on which things are moving; you are just an observer, unidentified with it. This is the whole secret of meditation: becoming unidentified. Dropping the idea that 'I am the mind' is meditation.

When you know 'I am the witness and the mind is there, just an object, and I am subjectivity, mind is a content and I am consciousness,' that 'I am the seer and the mind is the seen' -- this is the whole process of meditation. And this brings the transformation, this brings you to the world of the immortals.

The Old Pond ... Plop

Chapter #26

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