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CHAPTER 17
18 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Deva Constantinos. Deva means God; constantinos means constant. Only God is a constant factor in existence; everything else is always changing, moving. Everything else is a process; only God is a being. God is the very center of all this movement, and the center cannot move, only the wheel moves. The world is a wheel and God is the center of it – the center of the cyclone.
And the way to reach God is to become slowly slowly more constant in your life. A kind of trust, faithfulness, makes one constant. The person who lacks trust remains hesitant. Without trust one cannot become integrated. Without faith there is no crystallization.
Sannyas is a jump into trust and faith: faith in the unknown, trust in the invisible. Whatsoever eyes can see, God is not; whatsoever hands can touch, God is not, because senses can only grasp the circumference – they themselves are circumferential. God can be known only by reaching to your inner center.
Man is a miniature universe. Just as God is the center of all, you also have a small center in your being. Reaching that center becomes the door to know God.
Find out what is constant in you, what it is that never changes. The body changes – the child becomes young, the young man becomes old – it is changing every day. The mind changes even faster. What is it that never changes in you? – to know it is to know the secret of sannyas. It is the witness in you: one who watches the mind changing, one who can see the thoughts moving, feelings arising, coming and going; the one who remembers his childhood, youth, old age. That watching, that witnessing, is a constant factor in you.
Hence meditation means watchfulness, becoming more and more watchful, alert, aware. And the day you know your center, you have known the center of the whole.
Anand Ulla. Anand means bliss; ulla means rule. Be ruled by the goal of bliss; let that be your discipline. Remain cheerful, like the birds are cheerful in the early morning. Let there always be a song going on inside you, a constant humming.
It has to become an undercurrent. Go on doing whatsoever you are doing, but let there be a constant undercurrent of cheerfulness. Everything else will change, but don’t let your cheerfulness change. Even if sometimes on the surface you are feeling sad, depressed, don’t forget that deep underneath there is a current where you are still cheerful, still blissful.
Slowly slowly that awareness transforms one’s whole being. Sadness simply disappears, the negative is not found at all, and with the negative, the positive also disappears. Then real cheerfulness arises. Then there is nobody who is cheerful but only a state of cheerfulness. You cannot call it positive because there is never anything opposed to it. It simply is, neither this nor that; it simply is. That isness is God, and there is no other God except that; all other gods are inventions of man.
Seek and search bliss, and one need not go anywhere else. One has to create an inner discipline. So if you are cooking food you can go on cooking food, but let there be a song, a humming; cooking has to become a play. If you are cleaning the floor, go on cleaning, but why not hum, why not remain in an inner rhythm?
Bring joy to every act and every activity. This is the way a sannyasin has to live. The moment you become sad and identified with sadness, you fall from your sannyas, you remain only superficially a sannyasin. If you can create the flavor, constant flavor of joy around you, then you are a sannyasin. Many times one falls – get up. Many times one falls asleep – wake up. Many times one goes astray – come back. Many times one loses track – search again, and find it.
Then slowly slowly there is less and less possibility of forgetting. One day that great moment arrives when there is no possibility of going back; one has come to the point of no-return. That day one really becomes a sannyasin. This is only a beginning for that moment, a formal beginning.
There are two initiations: one, the formal – this is the formal; the second, the real. For that you have to work. You have to earn it, you have to be worthy of it. It can’t be given as a gift.
You can achieve it, you can prepare for it. And the way to prepare is to remain as cheerful as possible, for no reason at all, for no motive at all, for no cause at all – just for cheerfulness’ sake. In the beginning it will be difficult, in the beginning it will look phony, in the beginning it will look pseudo, but only in the beginning. Soon you will find it is neither pseudo nor phony nor false, because at the innermost core of our being we are bliss.
Once you have created the right space for it, it starts welling up, and you will see the difference. The cheerfulness of your discipline is one thing: that is just paving the way for the real cheerfulness to assert. When the real asserts it is totally different, the quality is so different. Then it is not a discipline any more, it is simply your self-nature, it is Tao.
Veet Dies. Veet means going beyond; dies means a righteous man.
The past has praised the righteous man very much. But the righteous man is not the right man. The idea of being righteous is egoistic. The right man – the really right man – remains blissfully unaware of his rightness. It follows him like a shadow, but he is not self-conscious about it. The righteous man exhibits it – he is not only self-conscious, he makes others also know about it. He goes on exhibiting, he magnifies it. He is always carrying the look of holier-than-thou.
The past has suffered very much because of the righteous man. He is phony, he is pseudo. His whole motive is to be praised by others, to gain respectability, to reach heaven and enjoy all the joys there. He is not really interested in virtue; virtue is a means for him. And virtue can never be the means for anything else. If it is, then it is not virtue at all any more. Virtue is the end unto itself.
So go beyond the righteous man, only then you will be the right man. Go beyond that attitude of the holy man. Be ordinary, just ordinary, utterly ordinary, and you will know some extraordinary joys. Don’t let religion become your ego trip. It becomes so and it becomes so very easily. In fact it is one of the most subtle ego trips possible. To have money, to have political power, is gross; but to have virtue, to have saintliness, is very subtle. And one can go on being trapped by it forever. It is so subtle that it needs great insight to understand it.
So remember it: never feel holy. That is the attitude of the unholy man: to feel holy. Never think yourself higher, better, holier than others. To compare is ugly. Be a nobody. Live your life with tremendous awareness, but without any comparison with anybody.
And then you will know who you are, and then you will know what this existence is, and then you will know the joys of real virtue. Then heaven is not something after death, then it is herenow.
Prem Sabina. Prem means love; sabina has no meaning. It comes from an ancient Italian tribe, Sabines; it means a woman from the tribe Sabines – sabina – but it has no literal meaning. But because it sounds good, it has some music in it, I will keep it.
Love is the deepest flowering of human consciousness – and love is also very primitive. Love is not sophisticated, cultured. In fact the more man has become sophisticated, civilized, cultured, educated, the less loving he has become. Love is primitive, primal; it is our very nature. We need not learn it, we need not be civilized and conditioned for it; we are born with it.
And that’s why it has become more and more difficult: because society is so civilized and love remains an uncivilized phenomenon. It is wild, hence the head goes on condemning it as mad.
To the logical head it looks mad. The head goes on condemning it as blind, and to the head it looks, at least appears, blind. It is neither blind nor mad. On the contrary, it is the sanest sanity possible, because it makes you more natural. And to be more natural is to be sane; to be totally natural is to be ultimately sane.
And it gives you new eyes to see life, real eyes, mirror-like, with no prejudice, with no knowledge. It makes you innocent, it makes you a child. A child is a primitive person; hence he has to be indoctrinated, initiated into society, church, school, college, university. It takes twenty-five years to destroy his primitiveness! Then we think, “Now he is an adult!” When we have destroyed all that was natural in him, we give him the right to vote; then we accept him. Now he will behave sanely.
In fact now he is just like a robot, he has lost all track of his natural potential. He is just a machine, a memory machine, a computer. But the society believes in computers, in machines: they are more obedient and less troublesome. And they are very obedient, they never say no.
Love is rebellious; it is not machine-like. It can take you into unexpected realms, it can take you into uncharted territories. In fact only it can take you into the unknown; there is no other boat that goes from this shore to the shore of the unknown.
So be loving, become more and more love. Become more and more primitive, wild, childlike, innocent. Drop all the layers that the society has given to you. Hidden behind all those layers is your real being. Discover it. To discover is... To discover it is to know what God is. God is hidden in your naturalness, in your spontaneity.
In that context sabina also becomes significant: a primitive tribe, a woman from a primitive tribe.
Premdas. Prem means love; das means a servant – a servant of love. But to be a servant of love is to be a Master. Love is very paradoxical: one who tries to be victorious is defeated there, and one who accepts his defeat, surrenders himself, becomes victorious.
Love’s ways are strange: if you try to possess, it will slip out of your grasp; if you remain non- possessive, it is yours forever. The ordinary, worldly mathematics is not applicable there; a totally different kind of vision is needed. Here, if you want to be a master, you have to struggle and fight; there, if you want to be a Master, you have to surrender. So the servant of love becomes the master of love.
It is difficult to be a servant of love, because the ego has to be dropped. The ego is very ambitious and wants always to be the master. That’s the only barrier; nothing else prevents a person from becoming loving more than the ego. And the irony is that the ego gives you only suffering and nothing else. It simply poisons you, kills you; it is suicidal. And love can give you eternal life, it is nectar.
So when you drop the ego, really you are not losing anything except your misery, except your chains; and you are gaining everything, you are gaining all. But still one needs courage, because right now you don’t have anything other than the ego and its shadows; that’s your whole world.
One needs trust, because who knows? – “I may drop the ego and I may not get anything in return! Then what? Something is better than nothing.” That is people’s logic – something is better than nothing.
It is not true! Nothing is better than everything, because nothing becomes the door to God. It opens you up, it creates the space for God to descend in you. And God is another name for love.
Love and God are synonymous, existentially synonymous – linguistically not. But those who know love know God, and those who know God know love; and those who know either know that the other is simply another name for it
Prem Chetano. Prem means love; chetano means consciousness. Consciousness can have two possibilities: either it can be self-consciousness or love-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a
state of disease; love-consciousness is a state of being whole and healthy and holy. The self has to be dropped and love has to be brought in.
Ordinarily the society teaches us only one way of being, that of self-consciousness. Society functions with the strategy of the ego – it teaches every person to be egoistic. Even if it says, “Be humble,” it says it so that you can be respected, so that you can have some respectability. Being humble for the sake of more respectability? – it is so absurd! But that’s what is being taught by the churches and the temples and the mosques and the priests and the politicians.
The humble person is respected very much, so “Be humble.” But the desire is to be respected. And how can that desire allow you to be humble? Your humbleness will be just on the surface, a mask. Society functions through ambition, competition, hence it teaches every child to become more and more self-conscious: “Strengthen your ego, feed your ego.”
And not only the old religions have been doing that nonsense, even modern psychology is doing it. Modern psychology has not proved as revolutionary as it was thought; it seems to be just an offshoot of Christianity and Judaism. It has not gone beyond the past, it perpetuates the past with new terminology, it makes it look modern. It is the same old thing in new bottles, with new labels.
Hence the world is in tremendous misery. It has never been in such misery before; man has never been in such anguish. Everybody is boiling within, everybody is sitting on a volcano. Life has lost all charm, all grace, all meaning, all poetry; it is simply a dragging phenomenon. Death has started to look more appealing; hence so many suicides. And those who are not committing suicide are not really living, they are simply afraid of committing-suicide, that’s all; they are only cowards. They cannot kill themselves. What to do except to go on living and wait for death to come on its own accord?
There is another way of life, that is love-consciousness. The self has to be replaced by love, the ego has to be replaced by love; they both can’t exist together. The egoistic person can never be loving, and the moment ego is not there you cannot avoid being loving – it is inevitable. Love simply explodes in you. It was the rock of the ego that was blocking the path. Once the ego is not there, thousand-and-one springs start flowing in you, one starts overflowing with love.
That is true life; then life is simply wonderful. Then to be is ecstatic, then even to breathe is celebration. And when there is love-consciousness you share, you are bound to share; it is so much you cannot contain it. You have to share, and you have to feel grateful to the person who accepts your gift. You are not obliging anybody; when somebody accepts your love, you are obliged.
These are the two ways of living: the way of ego and the way of love. Sannyas is the second way: the way of love. It is against the whole modern psychology.
The East discovered thousands of years ago that the ego is nothing but hell, self-created hell. It is a nightmare which you go on feeding. You can drop out of it any moment. Because you are the creator you can destroy it, dismantle it, any moment you decide.
Let sannyas be the moment of that decision: that from now onwards ego has not to be supported – instead, love. Love is the polar opposite of ego. I am not saying humbleness, humility, because
those words have been used, and ego is so clever that it goes on hiding behind them. Hence I don’t say humbleness is the polar opposite of ego. I say love, not humbleness, because ego has used humbleness as a garment, as a decoration, but the ego cannot use love.
That’s the only hope, because ego cannot use it. It is simply impossible for the ego to use love, because they can’t exist together. They are like light and darkness: the moment light is there, the darkness is not there. How the darkness can use the light?
So from this moment, become a loving consciousness. Let that be your concentrated effort. And then great experiences will start happening on their own. Through love one becomes vulnerable to God.
[A sannyasin says she has a problem about whether she should marry... ]
It is better to avoid! Love is enough, because marriage brings divorce in. Why suffer divorce? – it is better to avoid marriage! The only way to avoid divorce is to avoid marriage!
Keep it (the box) with you – and whenever this idea of marriage arises...
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