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‌CHAPTER 1

1 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Michael means one who is godlike, and anando means blissful. One is basically divine because all is divine. To exist is to be divine, to be alive is to be divine, to breathe is to be divine. Hence trees are divine and the rocks and the birds and the people – whatsoever is. Divinity is another name of isness.

God is not a person. God is the feeling of the presence of this tremendous isness that surrounds you. It is infinite, it is eternal: no beginning, no end. And it is incredible, unbelievable! Why is it there? – there is no answer to the question; it is simply there. It is mysterious, it is miraculous. Nobody has ever been able to fathom the depth of its abyss. There seems to be no bottom to it – no ceiling, no bottom. This infinite isness is what is meant by the word “god”.

But the moment we use the word “god”, it misleads us. It gives us a feeling of a person, and that is totally wrong. God is not a person but a presence, a pure presence. Suddenly, in the mountains you feel it: the silence, the solidity of the mountains, almost the eternal quality, the permanence of the mountains, and the closeness to nature. One is overwhelmed with the isness, the isness of things.

This bird chirping, the rain falling on the roof, the wind blowing through the trees... all this is included when I say isness. Even things are included, even things are not just things, they also partake of, and participate in, divine existence. To be overwhelmed by it is to be blissful, to be aware of it is to be blissful.

Sannyas is initiation into this isness, into this freedom of existence, into this mysterious “x. Because it has no name, it is better to call it”x” than God, because God becomes a definition. And the only way to know it is to be utterly free in yourself – no dogma, no scripture, no religion, no ideology. Sannyas is a declaration of freedom.

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I am not here to make you a slave in any way, because I have no ideology. Even if you want to depend on me you cannot, I am absolutely undependable! Even if you want to cling to me you cannot, because I am not there. And I have no doctrine and no scripture and no religion. I am not teaching you anything at all. I am simply showing you my freedom, inviting you to drink a little bit of my freedom so that you can have the taste, and then you have to move on your own way.

My sannyasins are not my followers: my sannyasins are my friends, my lovers, my beloveds.

So this moment of initiation is not a moment of a new bond but a moment of new freedom. If you meet me on the way, kill me. You have to be in total aloneness, because only when you are totally alone within yourself – with nothing to cling to, nothing to hold to – does the isness impinge upon you. It comes like a flood from all directions; because you are so empty it rushes towards you. That rush is bliss, and when it fills you to the brim you have come home.

Prem Anita. Prem leans love; anita is Hebrew, a form of anna. It is a very pregnant word; it has three basic meanings. The first, and the most important, is prayer. Love is prayer. There is no other prayer, all other prayers are just pseudo, substitutes for’ love. The other prayers are invented by people who cannot love, who are incapable of love, who are afraid of love; who have been so badly damaged by the society that they have lost their intrinsic quality of love. Prayer is a substitute for those people. But it is a poor substitute, and it cannot fulfill them because it will never become real.

A prayer is real only when it is not a substitute for love but a flowering of love, when it is the fragrance of your love.

Then it is not Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan. Then it has no form; then it is not a ritual at all. Then it is a way of life. When one lives lovingly, one is prayerful.

And the second meaning of anita is mercy. One who is prayerful is bound to be compassionate – naturally; it has not to be cultivated. A cultivated compassion is not true compassion. A cultivated character is only acting, pretension. Basically, anything that you cultivate makes you a hypocrite.

Real things grow; they are not painted from the outside. You don’t learn them from the society, you grow them from your innermost core. They grow in you just as leaves grow on the trees. You can paint a beautiful tree but it will be only a painting. It will not be a tree and it will never grow. No new leaves will come. Spring will come and your painting will remain dead. Spring will come and go. but your painting will not grow a single leaf, a single flower; it will know nothing of the spring. The cultivated character is like a painting – non-growing, dead.

The real character is a real tree: it knows how to grow. It has sources in the earth, it has roots in existence.

A prayerful heart naturally becomes compassionate, because you are so happy that you start feeling for others. Mercy arises, and now the mercy has a totally different quality from the cultivated mercy. The cultivated mercy always makes you egoistic, as if you are obliging people, doing something great, doing some service to humanity. But the real compassion, the real mercy, knows nothing of all these things; it is simply natural. You don’t become egoistic about it, it does not feed your ego; on the contrary, if anything of the ego is still left, it takes it away. The last traces of ego are taken away by compassion.

And the third meaning of anita is grace. Naturally, when a person is prayerful, compassionate, he will have a new kind of beauty to his individuality: he will have grace. He will have a kind of poetry surrounding him, his vibe will be poetic. His presence will have a music to it.

But everything starts with love, remember; love is the ultimate law. Then prayer, mercy, grace, follow of their own accord.

Anand Visarjan. Anand means bliss; visarjan means dissolution – dissolving into bliss.

Bliss is possible only when you are not. If you are, then only misery is possible, then bliss is impossible. The ego never allows you to move into the dimension of bliss because the ego is afraid of getting dissolved. The ego is afraid because at the very gate you will have to drop it; only then can you enter into the temple of bliss. You will be allowed, but the idea of I will not be allowed in. You will be allowed as a presence, not as a person. You will be allowed as pure existence, consciousness, but not as an identity. Not only your identity card will be taken away, your very identity will be taken away. You will move into the world of bliss as nobody, as a nothing, as a zero. But immense is the beauty of that zero. Tremendous is the joy that happens when you disappear, because with your disappearance all the blocks of your energy disappear. With your disappearance, all the memories, all imagination, past, future, desires, all disappear. The idea of the ego keeps all these things together, it holds them.

Once the ego is gone, all is gone, and then something totally new, which has always been there in a sense but of which you were never aware, becomes your reality. It has been your reality all along but you were lost in so many dreams and so many desires; you were asleep. In sleep the ego exists; the moment you wake up, you cannot find the ego.

And then life has ecstasy. Each fiber of your being dances, dances with abandon, because now there is no fear of death. Only the ego can die; now the ego is no more there so there is no death any more. The egoless person cannot be afraid of death, death has already happened! That which could die has died; now only that which is eternal is left.

And when there is no fear there is no anxiety. And when there is no fear you cannot be exploited by the priests and the politicians. And when there is no fear there is no question of guilt; it is fear that becomes guilt. When there is no fear there is no hell, no heaven. When there is no fear you are utterly herenow. It is fear that takes you to the past or to the future. And fear is the shadow of the ego.

“Visarjan” is a tremendously significant word: it has to become your secret key.

Dissolve, disappear! Let sannyas become your death, and then immediately you are born anew. You die as darkness and you are born as light. You die as a lie and you are born as a truth. You die as death and you are born as eternity.

Nilima means blueness. Blueness is a symbol for depth. The sky appears blue – it only appears blue, it is not blue; it has no color. It appears blue because of infinite depth. That infinite depth creates the color blue. No other color represents depth as deeply as blue. That’s why wherever the river is deep the water looks blue. Water has no color; if it is shallow it is not blue, but if it is deep it is blue.

In the inner world also the symbol is applicable. When you look inside you will find infinite blueness, a new sky opening up with as many stars as outside, with as many suns and moons as outside. The mystics say that the outer sky is nothing compared to the inner: the inner is vaster, the inner is far more beautiful, tremendously so. And it is so – I am a witness to it.

Meditation is the way to go into that depth of your own interiority. And when you become silent, again you will feel a blueness vibrating inside you. Just as depth has the color of blue, silence also has the color of blue. It is soothing – the very color of blue is soothing – soothing to the eyes, soothing to the body, soothing to the being itself. With silence, the very word, you are reminded of something blue.

And it also happens when you become inwardly alert, aware, that you start seeing a kind of blue flame between your two eyes; at the center of the third eye a blue flame is seen. That flame arises only when awareness deepens, when silence becomes natural.

That’s why Buddha is represented seated on a blue lotus, and Krishna is represented as blue colored. You cannot find anybody of blue color; there is no blue race in the world! Krishna cannot be historically really blue, unless he was suffering from blood disease or something. But he is represented as blue because of these three reasons: he has seen the inner sky in its totality; he has become utterly silent and has seen another aspect of blueness; and he has become fully aware, a Buddha. He has seen the blue light of his own being. These are the three faces of blueness.

Hence I am keeping your name, not changing it. It is a beautiful name. Explore its meaning: not literally, not verbally, not intellectually, but existentially.

[Osho invites a sannyasin, who has just arrived here, to stay forever.]

Mm, the time has come! Everything has its own right time, and when the right time is there, don’t miss the opportunity. Now you are absolutely ready to dissolve here in the commune, so dissolve!

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