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‌CHAPTER 22

23 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem Patrizia. Prem means love; patrizia means of noble birth.

Love comes from God; it is not only noble, it is divine too. Love is not something human, it is not something of the earth; it comes from the beyond. Hence the uplifting force of it: the moment it starts touching your heart it gives you wings. Then you start moving into a totally new dimension, the dimension of upwardness. You are no more bound to the limitations of gravitation; gravitation pulls you downwards, love pulls you upwards. Gravitation is earthly; love is very unearthly. It is a ray of light in the darkness of matter, it is a ray of spirit in the physical body. With love begins the journey of the soul, with love one becomes noble. With love, grace is inevitable.

Love beautifies, love makes your life significant. For the first time one starts feeling gratitude towards God. Without love, life is a desert, without love one is not really born. One lives but then life is nothing more than existence. Existence plus joy, existence plus bliss... then life is born. Hence even more important than life is love, because without love there is no life. One can drag oneself – seventy years, eighty years – but if those days are loveless, then one existed in vain.

My message is love, my religion is love, and there is no higher religion than love and no higher truth either.

Satyo Cornelis. Satyo means the ultimate truth; cornelis is a name of a tree. The full name will mean the tree of truth. ’. Truth is not a static thing; it is a process. It grows like a tree: it brings new leaves, new foliage, new flowers; it is always expanding. It is never in a state of dormancy. It is never dormant, hence truth cannot be contained in any dogma, because the dogma cannot grow and truth is always growing. Truth is like a small child: each year the clothes will not fit him. He will be growing and the clothes will remain the same; each year he will need new clothes.

Truth needs new words; every day, in every age, a new Bible is needed – a new Jesus, a new Buddha, a new Koran – because all old clothes and dogmas and theories become small and truth goes on growing. Knowledge always becomes out of date, it falls short. Truth is a transcendence, it is a surpassing; hence it is significant to use a tree as a symbol for it. In the biblical story, it is said there were two trees: one was of knowledge – and God prohibited Adam and Eve to eat from it – and the other was of life. The other tree is of truth, the tree of life. The tree of knowledge is the tree of dogmas, beliefs, systems of thought, philosophies. The moment a man is caught in a dogma, he is imprisoned. The moment he starts believing in words, he is no more a seeker of truth.

The real seeker will always know, “Whatsoever I know is not enough.” The real seeker will slowly slowly understand the tremendous phenomenon of not knowing anything, because all knowledge falls short while truth goes on growing. It cannot be contained in anything. Hence a man like Socrates says, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” This is the state of a real seeker, of a real sannyasin: he functions out of not knowing. He does not function out of knowledge. Knowledge is the root cause of the original fall.

Become a tree of truth, a tree of being, a tree of life. But don’t cling to words. Words are plastic, manmade; don’t cling to dogmas, doctrines – they are all guesswork, inferences. Don’t conclude, never conclude; remain open. A man who has concluded becomes closed and to be closed is to fall from grace. To remain open, always open and available wherever truth leads, with no prejudice, with no a priori clinging to anything, the total availability to go with truth wherever it leads, is the greatest joy of life, and the greatest freedom One starts touching the highest peak of bliss.

Those moments of authenticity, those moments of being true only to truth and nothing else, are the moments of benediction. And truth will always surprise you, because new things will be happening. It will never conform to your old idea of it, it will always bring new surprises, it will open new doors, new mysteries, it will make you perceptive of new miracles... And it goes on and on; there is no end to it.

Prem Nicoletta. Prem means love; nicoletta means victory. There is no victory except love, all else is defeat. Even though it may appear on the surface as victory, finally it is bound to end in frustration, in failure, in futility. So those who try to be victorious without paying any attention to love energy are the losers. And those who think of love and never think of victory are the victors.

God functions in strange ways... and his strangest law is that surrender in love is the key to victory in life. It is very paradoxical: try to conquer and you will be defeated, surrender and all victory is yours. And love knows how to surrender.

Anand Gitama. Anand means bliss; gitama means a song – a song of bliss.

Sannyas simply means becoming a song of bliss. Man has been taught down the ages to be miserable, because the miserable man is easily oppressed, exploited. The miserable man becomes impotent. The miserable man cannot revolt: he has no spirit to rebel. He is so depressed, he cannot trust himself, he loses all self-confidence. And that has been the strategy of the politicians and the priests: destroy people’s confidence in themselves, then they are bound to be ready to be victims of leaders and priests. In fact they will be asking for leaders, they will demand to be led because they cannot stand on their own. They have no confidence in themselves.

Sannyas is a revolt, revolt against this cunning strategy. It is revolt against the whole of human past. And the best way to rebel is to be blissful; misery makes you a slave then bliss makes you an individual. The blissful person is ready, always ready to sacrifice everything for his bliss. He has something to live for and something to die for. He is rich. He is so rich that he can even afford death. But he will not yield; you can destroy him but you cannot enslave him. And only this new climate can bring a new man on earth.

Sannyas is not only something religious. It is something total. It covers your whole life, your whole being. It is a new vision of living, a new style. The most fundamental thing is: learn to sing, dance, celebrate. There is no need to think of God: one who can sing is bound to find him; one who can dance has already found him, because he comes as celebration. Celebration is his body.

Anand Devi. Anand means bliss, devi means goddess – goddess of bliss. And that’s how one has to think about oneself and others: only God exists, hence whomsoever you meet, you are meeting a god or a goddess. Those are the two aspects of divine energy. They are like negative and positive poles of electricity; they exist together. Hence love brings the greatest joy because it bridges these two polarities.

Without love one is half, something is missing. Something will remain empty in the person who has not loved, a place will function like a wound inside his being. It can be healed only by love, and love simply means bringing feminine and masculine energy together. It can happen in two ways: either you meet a man or a woman outside yourself – that is the ordinary way... The other way is to meet the man or woman inside your own being, because the same polarity exists inside too. Every man has a woman inside, and every woman has a man inside, and when the inner meeting happens, that meeting is Tantra. And my school is a tantric school.

The most secret teaching that I want to give my sannyasins is how to create the possibility of meeting the inner woman and man. When the inner woman and man meet you attain to an orgasm which never ends. That moment one comes to know oneself as divine. In that bliss, one knows one’s dignity. Before that we can believe that there is God, but a belief is only a belief, it does not make any difference in your being. It remains superficial. Unless something becomes your own experience, it is not of any value. My whole emphasis is on existential, experiential.

Religion has to be really a science of the within. And to be a sannyasin is not a formal thing – it is entering into a mystery school, it is entering into some secrets which cannot be made available to the common masses. In the first place, they will not understand them; in the second place, they will distort them; in the third place, they will harm themselves by these great secrets because anything that is very powerful is dangerous in the hands of those who are childish. It is giving a sword to a small child: there is every possibility that he will harm either himself or somebody else.

There are secrets which can be given only to those who are ready to receive. Sannyas simply means that you are showing your readiness, that you will not resist, that you will put aside all your prejudices, that from this moment you will be ready to hear what I am saying – and not only to hear, but to go into experimentation. It is a great exploration, the greatest adventure there is.

Gyan Shunyam. Gyan means wisdom; shunyam means total emptiness.

Wisdom happens only in total emptiness... when there is nothing in your mind – no thought, no desire, no memory – when all content is gone. When the seer is there but there is nothing to see, the witness is there but with nothing to witness, that moment is shunyam the observer without the observed, a contentless consciousness. That is the moment when the doors of the ultimate open and one becomes wise, one becomes a Buddha, one attains to Christ-consciousness.

The work that one has to do is of emptying all content of the mind. That’s what meditation is all about: slowly slowly dropping all luggage, all furniture, creating more and more space inside. When the space is total, not even a particle of dust is left, instantly one is transported into another world. Then one knows the eternity of life, the immortality of being.

The Indian mystics have called that state satchidananda; one knows truth, one knows consciousness, one knows bliss. These three faces are the real trinity – not God and the holy ghost and the son, that is not the real trinity. The real trinity consists of truth, consciousness, bliss; these are the real faces of God. But to know it one has to prepare and the preparation consists of being empty, more and more empty.

You have heard that the empty mind is the devil’s workshop – that is nonsense, that is utter nonsense. Nothing can be less true than that, because the empty mind is God’s workshop. The devil cannot function with an empty mind at all; the devil needs a very occupied mind, the devil needs a very crowded mind, the devil needs a very crazy mind, full of thoughts, pulling you... so many thoughts, such a conflict and so much noise inside that you cannot decide where to go, what to do. In those indecisive moments the devil becomes your leader. The devil simply represents your ego; it is not a person outside, but another name for the ego. The ego can function only when you are neurotic, and the neurotic mind is full of thoughts. The healthy mind cannot be crowded; it has space, and space has beauty, and space has innocence. And the totally healthy mind is utterly spacious. That is shunyam.

Attain to emptiness, and immediately something of the beyond starts showering on you – that is wisdom. Knowledge is of no value, but wisdom is tremendously significant.

Anand Nishanto. Anand means bliss; nishanto means the end of the night.

Sannyas is the end of the night and the beginning of a new dawn. To live in the ego is to live in darkness.

Sannyas means surrendering your ego, saying “I am no more,” becoming a nobody, dropping all nonsense about being somebody. Sannyas is a declaration that, “I am nothing, I am anonymous...” Just as rivers are, mountains are, stars are, animals are, birds are, with no name, with no fame.

To be a sannyasin means again becoming part of this infinite nature. Once you drop the ego, you become part of the whole. The ego keeps you separate, it keeps a boundary between you and the whole, a wall. To live behind the wall is to live in darkness, in misery; to drop the wall, to come out of the prison, which is your own creation, nobody can prevent you from coming out of it... It is your decision to be in it or to be out of it. It is nobody else’s business. So the moment you decide to come out you can come out, nobody is keeping guard on you. To come out of the ego is to attain to bliss, and bliss is the beginning of light. Bliss is the dawn, but bliss is possible only when you are

not. If you are, then you will create a hell around yourself. The ego cannot exist without creating a hen around itself; it feeds on hell. It lives on misery; misery is its nourishment.

And your inner being remains unnourished because it cannot feed on misery. Its nourishment is bliss. So one has to choose either between the ego – and with the ego comes misery – or the being, the real being, which is a state of non-ego. With it comes all bliss, the whole kingdom of God.

Let this moment be a decisive moment, let this moment be discontinuous with your past, let your heart rejoice that the night is over and you are entering a new phase, a new kind of life. It is only a question of your decision and declaration, and you enter the new world.

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