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‌CHAPTER 18

19 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem Matthew. Prem means love; matthew means a gift of God. There are things which we can attain to, which can become our achievements – money, power, prestige – and there are things which we can never attain, which can never become our achievements: life, meditation, love. The things that we can attain are ordinary. They are commodities. They can be purchased and sold, easily transferable from one hand to another. They are material. They belong to the marketplace.

The things that we cannot attain by our own effort, but are always gifts of God, are the real values which cannot be purchased or sold. The things that we can attain enhance our ego. The things that come as gifts can come only to us when the ego is put aside. The ego is a help in the world and a barrier when you start moving towards God. The world is nothing but a projection of the ego, and God is nothing but getting rid of the ego.

Veet Faye. Veet means beyond; faye means a fairy.

The fairy represents the unreal part of our being, the imaginary part. It is not the reality. It consists of our dreams. Children live in that land, fairyland. Children can’t make any distinction between the real and the unreal. They can’t make any distinction between sleep and wakening, between the dreams and that which is not a dream. The childish mind is very interested in the world of the fairies. It is imaginative. And we continue to live in imagination; although the body grows we never become inwardly mature. Inwardly we remain very childish. Inwardly we go on living in imagination and dreams. Our dreams go on changing – they become bigger as we grow – but the bigger they are, the more foolish they are; the bigger they are, the more dangerous.

Our life is wasted in dreams. A life which could have known the truth remains surrounded by the untrue, false. We live in a kind of auto-hypnosis.

Sannyas means going beyond it, transcending it, dropping imagination, dreaming, and waking up. Deva Namito. Deva means divine, namito means humbleness – divine humbleness.

Humbleness can be of two types. One is homemade; man can manufacture a kind of humbleness on his own accord. He can cultivate it as a character, but then it is only superficial, a facade, just a mask. Hiding behind it is the ego – well secure, safe behind the mask, playing all kinds of games from behind. In fact humbleness itself becomes a strategy of the ego then, and that is the most subtle strategy that the ego can adopt. This is the type of humbleness that has been taught down the ages to man. I am utterly against it... because it is not true.

The second type of humbleness is not made by us. We can invite it, but we cannot invent it. It comes from the beyond. We can be open to it, we can receive it like a womb, we can become pregnant with it, but it is not our doing. It is a happening. Meditation is the way to the second kind of humbleness. It helps you to be open, vulnerable; it helps you to surrender, it helps you to see the falsity of the ego – and seeing the false as the false is the first step towards seeing the true as true. The moment you see the falsity of the ego, humbleness comes, instantly, not even a single split moment is lost; hence I call it divine humbleness – it is a gift of God!

Veet Mamto. Veet means beyond; mamto means attachment. Go beyond all attachments, that’s the message of it. Love is not attachment. Attachment is the death of love. Attachment simply shows the clingingness of the mind.

Attachment comes out of fear. Out of fear we cling to money, to people, to the house, to the wife, to the children; out of fear we cling to the church, to the nation, even to God! And fear can never bring you to truth. It is one of the most significant barriers towards God; it has to be understood well: it is one of the greatest enemies. And fear becomes attachment. Love becomes non-attachment.

Fear and love are polar opposites: either you can live in fear – then whatsoever you do is out of fear; or you can live in love – then whatsoever you do is out of love.

Out of fear, everything is wrong, the whole of life is wrong. Out of love, everything is right. So I don’t tell you in detail what is right and what is wrong. I don’t give you instructions how to discipline your character; I simply indicate a simple phenomenon: change from fear-oriented life to love-oriented life, and then everything will be right on its own accord; you need not worry.

Prem Nandan. Prem means love; nandan means a garden. Love makes a garden in your heart. Love brings the spring into your being, and as one becomes more and more love-filled, a thousand- and-one flowers start blooming. Without love one is a desert – dry, with no juice, with no life, dead. Just to breathe is not enough to be alive.

Physically one is alive through breathing; spiritually one is dead. What breath is to the body, love is to the soul. It is only through love that the soul starts growing, becomes a manifest force. Ordinarily it is latent, asleep, dormant; it is only love that wakes it up, and then one certainly becomes a garden. My sannyasins have to become gardens with all kinds of flowers, multidimensional flowers and multidimensional colors. My sannyasin has to be a rainbow, all colors and full of the beauties of life. Nothing has to be denied, all has to be absorbed.

Anand Chaitanyo. Anand means bliss; chaitanyo means consciousness – bliss consciousness. We are made out of consciousness, out of bliss; we are born out of consciousness, out of bliss.

God is nothing but ultimate consciousness and ultimate bliss. Consciousness and bliss are two aspects of God. We come from that source. And the source is the goal also; we have to go back to it, then the circle is complete and one is perfect.

But ordinarily we live in unconsciousness, and with unconsciousness comes misery; that is another aspect of it. Unconsciousness and misery exist together; they cannot be separated, just as consciousness and bliss cannot be separated. They are inseparable. If one is in misery, that simply means one is living in an unconscious way: one is living mechanically, robotlike, one is simply dragging one’s life. One is simply going through empty gestures, not really alive, not really alert.

People are somnambulists, sleepwalkers. Sannyas means learning to be awake. It can’t be done as a part of your life; it can be done only if it spreads over twenty-four hours each day of your existence. Walking, walk consciously, with full alertness. Breathing, breathe consciously, watchfully: the ingoing breath, and you should be aware; the outgoing breath, and you should be aware.

Slowly slowly bring awareness to all your acts and activities. Then it becomes a great pool of energy, and one day a miracle happens: one can sleep and yet remain conscious.

That is the moment when meditation has come of age, when one can sleep and yet be conscious. That is the first proof that meditation has reached to the very core of your being.

So these two things – which are not really two, but two aspects of one phenomenon – have to be remembered: be more and more conscious and be more and more blissful. Don’t miss any opportunity of being conscious or being blissful, and avoid all possibilities of being unconscious and miserable, and you will be moving in the right direction. Then God is not far away, maybe just by the corner.

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