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‌CHAPTER 3

3 December 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means beyond, arthen means meaning – beyond meaning. Life is beyond meaning, being is beyond meaning. Meaning is a manufactured thing; it does not exist anywhere except in the mind. The whole of life is blissfully meaningless.It knows no purpose, no goal, no end. It is a perpetual play... just a play. Allow this seed to sink in your heart, that life is a play, not even a game; because in the game you start being serious. When the play becomes serious it is a game. When the play becomes so serious that you are bent upon winning, it loses playfulness.

Life is a playfulness, hence the beauty. If there is meaning beauty will be lost; meaning creates business. Once you become too much obsessed with the meaning, what the meaning of life is, why are you here, you will lose all that is possible here. You will become a psychological case sooner or later.

In the West, psychoanalysis is needed too much because for two thousand years the Western philosophy has been searching for meaning. Psychoanalysis is a by-product of that disease. If you understand that there is no need to understand, you go beyond the trap of psychoanalysis. You can never become a psychological case. You will remain a person; you will never become a case.

Once you search for meaning you are searching for your own doomsday, because the meaning cannot be found, so you are trapped in an impossible thing. The more you search, the more meaning will not be found, the more frustration will settle in you. The frustration can create physiological diseases, psychological diseases. It can become madness, it can become cancer; it can become both together. Search for the meaning and you are searching for hell. Life has to be lived in a very very undeliberate way or it is better to say, in a very unselfconscious way... not unconscious but unselfconscious.

I have heard about a man who had a very magnificent beard. Somebody, just a stranger on the street, looked at him and said, ’Sir, I am not known to you, you are not known to me, but I am

fascinated with your beard; it is such a beautiful beard. Just one question, one curiosity arises in me: where do you put it when you go to sleep? On the blanket or under the blanket?’

The man had never thought about it. He said, ‘Sorry. I will have to see. I have never deliberately thought about it and I have never looked into the matter. Come tomorrow and I will answer your question.’

So that night first he puts his beard on top of the blanket and tries to go to sleep and cannot. He tries hard but sleep eludes him. Then he tries it under the blanket; now he is becoming more awake and alert, because for the first time he is trying to sleep self-consciously. Then again on top, then again.… He cannot sleep for the whole night and he is tired! He cannot understand what has happened. He has never suffered from insomnia, never in his life; what has gone wrong? And it doesn’t work either way. It must have been somewhere but what has happened today? The morning is coming and the sunrays come from the windowsHe became so tired and so puzzled and worried that he went

into the bathroom and cut off his beard, otherwise now there would be no possibility of sleeping!

This is what is actually happening in life: people are trying to live it deliberately, people are planning to live. They go on planning and planning and planning and they never live. Either you can live or you can plan. You cannot do both things. Either you can live or you can think. You can’t do both together. They are antagonistic, they are enemies.

So drop one thing todayIt will take a long time but let it sink into your heart that the search for

meaning is the most absurd search, the maddening search of man. Once it is dropped, you have a totally new kind of life. You are a new man; you are born again. That’s what Jesus meant when he said to Nicodemus that unless a man is born again, nothing can be done. Unless a man is born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. This is the birth he was talking about – rebirth, this is resurrection.

[A sannyasin has returned, after two years in the West, to spend a month here. She says it was very difficult, and a friend helped her return to Poona. She had many problems and is afraid of the same problems on her return.]

Mm mm. The problem has nothing to do with sannyas or with your being here or there. You are the problem, so wherever you are the problem will be there... unless you drop it! And I am saying not that you have to solve it; you have to drop it. If one starts trying to solve a problem, more problems arise. Now solving it becomes a problem. One has to understand, one has to see the problem, see what it is. In that very seeing the problem is dropped.

For example, my feeling is that your problem is that you have not yet been flowing in love. The reason seems to be that you desire somebody to love you but you don’t love, you don’t give, or even if you give, you give very miserly. If you don’t love you will feel abandoned, you will feel lonely, you will feel helpless.

Now [your friend] has helped you; that can become a problem. For example, if you become perfectly okay you will be afraid that you may lose his love. He loved you because you were feeling lonely, depressed, abandoned. Now if you don’t feel abandoned, if you are no more lonely, if you are on your own and perfectly healthy, then what will be the point of his love? – it will be pointless.

So now you will persist in your mood, you will try to keep it because now it will have an investment in it. You will want to remain helpless and you will want to remain feeling abandoned so that his love goes on flowing towards you. This is how dangerous it is; it is very dangerous.

Never ask for sympathy. Never! Once you ask for sympathy you will never be able to love, because then sympathy will not be coming any more. Many women learn that trick; it is one of the most ancient, feminine strategies, to ask for sympathy. Sooner or later somebody is going to give sympathy and then the fear arises that if all one’s problems are solved then this sympathy will disappear. And it will disappear, that too is true, because it is not love; it is sympathy. If it is love it will not disappear, but love cannot go on giving to you continuously unless you respond.

It is good that he loved you; now you love him! Make it a give and take, make it balanced. And to be loved is not such a joy as to love. To be loved is beautiful but there is a higher joy and that is of loving. To get love is good but to give love is far better. When you give and get you don’t feel obliged, otherwise obligation becomes heavy, it becomes like a rock.

So my feeling is: you are feeling lonely. Everybody who is not deeply loving will feel lonely. It is only love that will redeem you from your abandonment, it is only love that will redeem you from your loneliness. But remember, when I say love, I mean both give and take. My feeling is: he has given to you but you have not responded so it has created problems on both the sides.’

For this one month that you are here be loving, be utterly loving. It costs nothing to be loving. Don’t hoard it; it is not a thing to be hoarded. It is not money, it is not gold. It is like flowers: if you hoard them they will die and instead of the fragrance there will be just nothing or they will even start stinking because they will become rotten. Love is a flower. While it is there let it be shared, while it is there let the fragrance be released.

And remember always: you cannot accumulate it. The love that you didn’t allow yesterday is no more there. What you are having is just at this moment, in this moment; that belongs to this moment. If you loved yesterday, that love will remain with you; if you did not love yesterday, it is gone. This is a paradox: you can have as much love as you give. By giving, you have it. By hoarding it, it is gone down the drain. It is not that a person who has never loved in his last day will have all the love accumulated in him, no. He will be just a dead, hollow person. But when a man who has loved his whole life is dying he will be full of love. This is very paradoxical but this is so.

So you learn the ways of love, and always remember that whenever somebody shows a gesture of love, respond in a thousandfold way. Don’t simply receive it and don’t say thank you. The only way to thank is to pour love. Always give more than you get and you will never feel this trouble that you have been feeling.

Do a few groups while you are here. Have you done any groups before?

[A sannyasin says: I had a dream just before I came here. You touched me on my mouth and on both bands and feet and I was completely black. I was completely black like coal. I don t know what I can do with such a dream.]

Don’t dream such things! Don’t give me such troubles, mm? But a good dream. Yes, right now you are just like coal, everybody is, but the coal can be transformed into a diamond. It is coal that

becomes a diamond one day. Their chemistry is the same, coal and diamonds are chemically the same. It is coal that out of immense pressure and heat one day becomes diamond. Nobody can see the fact that coal and diamond are the same, but they are.

And so it is with an ordinary man and a Buddha. Darkness and light are not different. Darkness simply means less light, and light means less darkness. They are one and the same.

So the dream is good; you have realised a fact about where you are. From there the journey starts. One day you can become a diamond, a Kohinoor. But don’t dream such dreams again!

Deva means divine, satranga means a rainbow – literally it means seven colours; sat means seven and ranga means colours – a divine rainbow. And man should be a rainbow. Man should not become obsessed with one part of life. He should know all the aspects and faces of being in all the possible ways; that creates richness. But ordinarily people have only one colour to their life. Even that is not very intense, even that is very faint, only lukewarm, so-so. That’s why so many people are miserable. Misery is simply an indication that the man has not lived his life as he should have: with intensity, with passion, with authenticity, with sincerity.

And one should not become attached to one colour, to one way of life. One should remain flexible, available to all the possibilities. One should keep all the doors open. One should not be afraid to commit errors. That fear cripples many, paralyses many, so they only open a small door of their life, afraid that if they open all the doors they may not be able to manage. Maybe so many things will start happening and they will not be in control. There is no need for you to be in control. Open all the doors, all the windows. Let the sun and the rains and the wind come. Let God come in as many ways as he wants: through music, through poetry, through dance, through song, through love, through meditation, through work, through play. Let all the doors be open.

There are people who are too much in the world; there are people who have left the world and have become ascetics. Both lack balance. One should be able to fast and to feast both. One should be able sometimes to be an ascetic and sometimes, licentious, indulgent. One should not become fixed. Fluidity is the quality of life, and if you can have all the colours, why choose a few? Why choose one? When all the dimensions are possible, why become one-dimensional?

One-dimensional man is ugly, sad, miserable, One-dimensionality is what hell is. Multi- dimensionality is what heaven is. Heaven is a rainbow!

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