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‌CHAPTER 10

10 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand Kaela. Anand means blissfulness; and if kaela has no meaning, then your name will mean a blissful meaninglessness. And that’s exactly what life is: it is utterly blissful but it has no meaning. It is blissful because it has no meaning.

To have meaning means to become a commodity, to have meaning means to become a thing. Only a thing has meaning, because it has some purpose. A car has meaning; it serves some purpose: it takes you from one place to another, it is a means of transport. Food has meaning: it nourishes you, keeps you alive. The air has meaning... because they are all means for something else.

But life is the end unto itself. It leads nowhere, it serves no purpose, and because it serves no purpose it has tremendous beauty. Beauty never serves any purpose, and because it serves no purpose it has tremendous beauty. Beauty never serves any purpose, joy never serves any purpose, and because man goes on asking for meaning, he goes on destroying all that is beautiful.

The mind cannot be satisfied unless it reduces everything to meaning – that is the obsession of the mind. The disease of the mind is rooted in this search, this constant search. Everything should have meaning. “What is the meaning of love?” the mind asks, and because it finds no meaning it says that love is blind. It denies the existence of love, it denies the existence of the heart.

And slowly slowly, if meaning becomes one’s obsession, as it has become to the modern, contemporary mind, then all that is beautiful, lovely, significant, starts disappearing. Now love, beauty, joy, meditation, God – they are all meaningless; hence they have no place. And we are cluttered with things, objects, which have meaning.

To be really religious means dropping this obsession for meaning, becoming utterly blissful for no reason at all, just for blissfulness’ sake.

So don’t search for the meaning of the word – it is beautiful but it has no meaning. And let that be my message to you. This is what sannyas is all about: living a life of utter joy, blissfulness, but asking for no meaning. Meaning leads into philosophy; celebration leads into religion. Meaning keeps you tethered to the world; blissfulness takes you to the beyond, into the infinite, into the uncharted.

Veet Tye. Veet means beyond; tye means great – go beyond greatness.

There is a greatness that is beyond greatness. There is a greatness which is not comparative, a greatness which does not reduce anybody else to smallness; a greatness which is not yours but God’s, in which everybody shares, and shares equally.

The ego has a totally different idea of greatness; it is comparative. Others have to be smaller, inferior, then only can you be great. Your greatness depends on their inferiority. And just think: how can you be superior if your superiority depends on others’ inferiority? A superiority that depends on others’ inferiority is very inferior indeed. It is violent, it is ugly, it is political.

The ego is very ambitious: it wants to be great. Because it is not great it has the desire to be great. Remember, we desire only that which we are not, we only desire that which is not the case.

But there is another dimension of greatness which is not ambitious, which is not comparative, which has nothing to do with others at all. It is simply encountering your inner infinity, it is simply slipping into the infinite abyss of your being... and then you encounter a sky as vast as the outer sky.

It has a greatness, but now you are not comparing it with anybody else. Its very mystery, its very presence, is so significant, so pregnant – beginningless, endless, eternal – but it is not yours any more either. You have disappeared into encountering yourself.

To see oneself is to be dissolved, is to be lost, lost forever. To see oneself, in fact, is not to be. It looks paradoxical: the real state of being is a state of non-being. The ego disappears, you cannot claim any I.

You are – for the first time in fact you are, you are tremendously, but you cannot claim any I. It is utterly silent, there is no claim.

In that greatness everybody can share, you can share it. It is religious. Political greatness depends on reducing others to inferiority. You have more money, they have less money; you have more knowledge, they have less knowledge. You have a big post, they have not such a big post; you are the boss and they are the servant, and so on, so forth. This whole realm, this comparative realm, belongs to politics. It is all power politics. It may be of money, it may be of prestige, it may be of knowledge. It can even be of saintlihood: “I am a great saint and you are not so great a saint.” Then immediately you have entered into the world of power politics, and that is the ugliest game that man can play.

Get out of it! Then you will know a real, different taste of greatness, which has nothing to do with you, which is God’s, which is divine. Be egoless and know it. Dissolve and be it.

Prem Ulrich. Prem means love; ulrich means rule. The full name will mean rule of love. Let love be the ruler of your being. Let love be the king, then everything else follows of its own accord. If one

can live lovingly, then no other commandments are needed, then no rules of discipline are needed. Then all morality is irrelevant.

Morality becomes relevant only if love is missing. Morality is a substitute, a poor substitute, a plastic substitute, for love. Because people have completely forgotten the language of love they have to be told what to do and what not to do.

They have to be given details, and sometimes details can be too much.

In Buddhist scriptures there are thirty-three thousand rules for the Buddhist monk. Now, even to remember them is impossible. Thirty-three thousand rules – one will go simply mad remembering them! Doing is not the question; even to remember them is impossible.

If love is missing, then you have to decide on a rule for every single situation. And the mind is so cunning that it can always find ways to get out of the rules; it can find loops and holes. To cover those loops and holes the Buddhist scholars went on increasing: more and more rules, more and more rules. Now it is a jungle of rules. And that is the situation of all the religions.

The real thing is not to have many rules in life. The real thing is to have one central force, one central light... that can make you luminous. You need one single light and vision, then wherever you go you have the capacity to see what to do. You don’t need any rule for what to do, what not to do: you have the vision, the clarity, the perception. And you act out of that perception, you act out of that vision, hence your action is never reaction. It has a spontaneity, and whenever an action has a spontaneity it has beauty.

Love is the only light that is needed, the only rule, the only discipline. Become a lover, and ultimately become love. To be a lover is a beginning; to be love itself is the end. Then one has arrived home.

Veet Asmito. Veet means going beyond; asmito means the ego – going beyond the ego.

That’s the path of the sannyasin: he does not renounce the world; he renounces himself. He lives in the world but he does not live in the ego. He has no more any interest, any attachment, any investment, with the ego. He is no more interested at all in being somebody; he has come to know the beauty of being nobody. He has come to recognize the tremendous joy of being anonymous. He is not seeking and searching for power, prestige, respectability.

These are the strategies of the society to persuade people to go on moving in circles, the same routine rut. These are the bribes of the society through which it seduces individuals to remain slaves. The society gives respect to you if you follow whatsoever is told to you. If you are a conformist you become respectable; if you are conventional then the society honors you. If you are just a slave to tradition, to the past, then the society calls you a saint. If you start living on your own the society is very much against you.

Just the other day I was reading a statement of Albert Einstein, that the mediocre people have always been against the intelligent ones. The mediocre people have always opposed the genius. Jesus is not crucified by Jews but by the mediocre people; the same mediocre people who tried to poison Buddha, who tried to kill Buddha, who actually poisoned Socrates and killed him; the same mediocre people who killed Mansoor.

It has nothing to do with any society, any culture, in particular. The mediocre crowd is always against the genius, for a certain reason: the appearance of the genius makes them aware of their slavery. The appearance of intelligence makes them look silly, stupid. The appearance of the individual and his beauty and his glory reduces them to such a miserable state that there are only two possible alternatives left for them. One: they should also become free, intelligent, talented, creative, free, liberated. They should also assert their individuality and get out of the prison called society, church, state, but that is arduous and risky. The other alternative is: they should destroy this person – which is simple, which is cheap. It is more simple to destroy Jesus rather than to change the whole crowd; it is simple to destroy this man and forget all about him.

This is really strange: Jesus is not even mentioned in history books of those days. They killed this man and they have not even mentioned him. He must have been too dangerous for them. He must have been significant enough; otherwise, who bothers to crucify a man? Still the history books of those days don’t mention him; he has been ignored. All that we know about him is through his disciples. Hence it is very suspicious whether he was a historical person or not. Hence there are people who go on believing that he is just a myth.

The same is the case with Mahavira in India. Hindus have not even mentioned his name in their scriptures, not at all. Such a man – and not even mentioned! If he had no followers we would have completely forgotten his name. And we have forgotten many beautiful people’s names for the simple reason that they did not have a big following but a small following which was destroyed.

To be individual is risky, but it is worth it, the risk is worth taking. And the only way to become an individual is to go beyond the ego. The ego makes you a personality, false, pseudo, never satisfying. How can it satisfy if it is not real? Only real food can nourish you, mm? You can go on looking into beautiful cookery books and you can read all kinds of descriptions of delicious food. You can even see colored pictures – the pictures may be even three-dimensional – but still you will remain hungry.

But that’s what people go on doing, not about food, but about other things they do exactly that.

They go on looking into pornographic literature – what are they doing? Why are Playboy and magazines like that read by millions of people? – just looking at pictures, colored pictures of women Now women also have their magazines – colored, nude pictures of men.

And the same is true about religion. People read scriptures – as if you can find God in the scriptures. You cannot find a woman in Playboy magazine and you cannot find God in the Bible either. The religious scriptures are a kind of spiritual pornography.

One has to seek and search within oneself. We contain the truth. We have to go into our own being; we have to learn the ways of being more and more interior so that we can start functioning from deeper recesses of our being. This is what sannyas is all about. The ego is the periphery, the circumference, and the real self is the center.

Drop the periphery, start moving towards the center. And the day you become rooted in the center is the day you gain paradise lost; it is regained. All joy, all beauty, all truth, suddenly starts showering on you, as if thousands of flowers are showering on you. And then they go on showering forever. But one has to sacrifice the ego.

All that I ask from my sannyasins is: sacrifice the ego. It is false, it is futile – don’t cling to it. Let it be dropped, and in the very dropping... a new being is born.

[To a sannyasin, who is a lecturer at M.I.T.]

Now only the M.I.T. remains! So let it be – nothing to worry about. It is good to go for three months and create some rumor about me there!... Next time it will be even better, because orange people will be growing everywhere. It is a new kind of mushroom – it is psychedelic! So keep the M.I.T. because I would like to corrupt those people! Three months per year, that is perfectly good!

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