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‌CHAPTER 23

24 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem Joke. Prem means love; joke means God’s gift.

Love cannot be manufactured; there is no way to create it; either it is or it is not. Man is utterly impotent as far as love is concerned; it is beyond human creativity. We can only receive it from the above. There is no way to invent it, no way to make it. We can pray for it, we can ask God for it, with tears in our eyes, with tremendous longing in our heart, but it always comes as a gift, and it comes only to those who are really capable of being open.

If you are vulnerable it comes inevitably. It cannot Come to closed people because they are not ready to reCeive it. Even if it comes they will go on missing it. Their doors and windows are all closed, they live an encapsulated life. They are already in their graves.

Sannyas means the art of opening up, the art of dropping all armor, the art of dissolving all defense measures. To be undefended is to be a sannyasin, and then love showers in a thousand-and-one ways. Then God pours his heart into your heart.

Deva Oscar. Deva means divine; oscar means a leaping, bounding warrior.

Sannyas is a quantum leap. There is no other way to leap than sannyas. It means breaking away from your past totally. It is a jump into the unknown, and not only the unknown but the unknowable. It is going into the uncharted sea. The other shore is not visible... In fact, the other shore does not exist at all, because the sea of existence is infinite.

Great courage is needed to take this jump. Hence, your name is beautiful: a leaping, bounding warrior. Just one thing more I am going to add to it – that is: be a warrior for God.

People are warriors for their own egos; everybody is fighting tooth and nail, everybody is fighting hard to be the first, to be the achiever. But these are all ego trips. And each ego trip leads you deeper and deeper into hell, deeper and deeper into misery, deeper and deeper into darkness.

The moment you start fighting for God, not for yourself, your fight becomes qualitatively different. Then it becomes a beautiful phenomenon. It is no more an ego trip: you simply become a vehicle for the divine, just a medium; you simply allow God to function through you, you don’t have any say of your own. That surrender makes one a sannyasin. A sannyasin is a soldier for God.

Anand John. Anand means bliss; john means a gracious gift of God.

There are things which man is capable of doing – the world consists only of those things. But there are things which man is not capable of doing, but is still capable of receiving. Religion consists of those things which man is not capable of doing, but is still capable of receiving. Hence a man without religion is a half man. A man without religion lives a very mundane life. His whole life belongs to the marketplace; he knows nothing else, he knows nothing higher. His life consists of commodities. He is only a consumer; he consumes things, he consumes others and he is consumed by others in return. His life consists only of the very superficial.

He may have wealth, prestige, power, but all in vain, because he has no inkling, no idea, that a higher dimension is available to him that he has never groped for – a higher dimension where things are not to be done, where one has to be simply passive. Meditation, love, bliss, they all happen, they are not our doings.

And this is one of the greatest problems modern human mind is facing: we have completely forgotten the language of how to receive. We have completely abandoned that dimension. Prayer is a way of receiving, but we pray no more, or even if we pray, it is so formal – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan – it is so intellectual, it is so borrowed from others, it is so fear-oriented that it is almost pathological. It is not healthy and whole, it is not coming from your deepest core of being. It is not welling up within your heart.

Prayer is a way to enter into the other dimension, the dimension where we are simply passive receivers.

The world of commodities is masculine, the world of doings is masculine; the world of receiving is feminine. A religious person naturally becomes feminine. He starts growing a feminine heart in his being. It is not strange that Buddha looks so feminine. In fact, Friedrich Nietzsche condemned Jesus and Buddha as womanish. I don’t agree with his condemnation, but I agree with his observation; he is perfectly right in his observation. In fact nobody else had observed so clearly the femininity of Jesus and Buddha.

He is against it, he is against all that is feminine. He is a male chauvinist, hence he condemns it. But to me, the masculine is an outgoing energy, the feminine is the ingoing energy; they are part of one whole, like outgoing breath and incoming breath. If you depend only on one you will die, or you will feel suffocated – and man is feeling suffocated, and man is dying. We need the whole circle: the breath coming in, the breath going out. It is the same energy, but the direction is different.

I am not saying stop doing things: I am saying do as much as you can, be creative – but remember there is another part of your being which will remain unfulfilled. Give some time to the other part too. Give its due to it.

Each man has to be man and woman, and each woman has to be man and woman, and when both of these have mingled and merged into each other so that you cannot make any distinction in your being, what is what – when the feminine and masculine are absolutely one, when it is one energy, one complete circle, one perfect circle – then the perfect man is born. That is the ideal of sannyas, the perfect man.

Satyam Margaret. Satyam means truth; margaret means child of light – truth is the child of light. It is not a logical conclusion, it is not of the intellect. It is not your inference, your guess. It is a state of meditation when you are full of light, when your whole being is light, when you cannot find any darkness in any nook and comer of your being, when all is light, when you are dissolved in light. Out of that experience truth is born. It is the child of light

It comes not through thinking, but through a state of no-thought. It has nothing to do with philosophy; it is existential experience. And all that is needed is not an efficient mind, no; all that is needed is an overflowing heart. One can be very clever intellectually and yet remain in darkness. In fact one may fall deeper into darkness than before, because in his darkness he will now pretend, he will have great egoistic ideas: “Now I know;” he will lose innocence. Knowledge destroys innocence and the moment you lose innocence you lose contact with God.

It is the contact with God that can fill you with light. God is light. The moment we are bridged with God, we become full of light. The experience of being part of infinite light is the experience of truth that comes not through mind but through meditation – and meditation is a state of no-mind. It is just the opposite polarity: mind thinks, meditation is a state of non-thinking, a non-thinking consciousness. One is but without any thought. One simply is, with no disturbance of thought. In that state of isness, in that stillness, light arrives.

And to know light is to know truth.

Deva Pritam. Deva means God; pritam means beloved.

God is the beloved. Sannyas is a love affair. All true religion is always a love affair. It is not a question of formalities. People have reduced religion to formalities; they have reduced it to Sunday churchgoing. It has become a social phenomenon, a social utility. It has lost its passion, its intensity.

My effort here is to give you that passion again, that passionate search for God, as if nothing else matters. And in fact nothing else does matter; only God matters. Or you can say it the other way: that which really matters is God. Whatsoever it is, God is another name for that which really matters. But it can be found only with intense longing – such a longing that one is ready to sacrifice everything for it. Only love can do that, because love is mad enough to do that. Logic cannot do it; logic is very cunning and clever and calculating. Logic is always bargaining, trying to give less and get more.

Love is a non-bargaining phenomenon. It knows how to give, it knows how to give without withholding anything. It knows how to give unconditionally, with no strings attached; it knows how

to give totally and then forget all about it. It knows never to look back and never to repent, because in the very giving one is so much blessed that who cares whether anything comes back in return or not? The very giving is the greatest joy possible.

Let God be your beloved from this moment. Search, seek, in every possible way. Not in some other world has God to be sought, but in this here and now, in the trees, in the rocks, in the people, in the birds, in the animals. God has to be searched in this moment, because there is no other moment than now, and there is no other space than here. If God is, God is herenow. If he is not herenow, then he can never be anywhere else. God is this whole existence, this whole beautiful miracle of being. Be in love with it. Sing songs of love and joy. Dance as if you are dancing with God as a partner. He is always a partner with you; you may know, you may not know, but he is always your partner when you are dancing. He may not be with you when you are sad, but he is certainly with you when you are blissful.

Anand Gitamo. Anand means bliss; gitamo means a song – a song of bliss.

That’s my definition of sannyas: a song of bliss. A sannyasin has to change his life from prose to poetry – that is how one becomes religious. The transformation from the plane of prose to the plane of poetry is a great transformation. Look at life with the eyes of a poet, an artist, a painter, a dancer, and with that vision you cannot miss God.

The first step towards being a mystic is to be a poet. The journey is completed in two steps: the first step is the poet, the second is the mystic – these two steps and the whole journey is complete. Half of religion, the first half, consists of poetry, the other half consists of mysticism. But the other half can only be understood if you have followed the first half. If you have not followed the first half then the other half looks simply absurd. But if you have been moved by the first part, the introductory part, the world of poetry, if it has touched you, stirred you, then the second part is a necessary corollary; then it is no longer absurd, then that is the most significant, meaningful, dimension possible.

Many people study religion without the vision of a poet, hence they go on missing it. It looks like fantasy, it looks like a fairy tale: God heaven and hell, they all look like man’s wish-fulfillments, his imaginations...

Maybe for the man who has not passed through the first part it may seem that man is so childish that he cannot live without somebody to look after him, hence he has invented God. God then is just a father figure – that’s what Sigmund Freud says: he knows nothing of religion because he knows nothing of poetry. He is the most unpoetic person you can find anywhere.

Hence religion seems to be an illusion to him, abnormal, pathological. A religious person is ill according to Freud: he should be brought back to the normal world, to the real world; he has gone into the imaginary too much, he is lost in his dreams. The reason is because the bridge is missing, the rainbow bridge is missing. Poetry creates the rainbow bridge between the mundane and the sacred, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between the visible and the invisible.

Unless that rainbow bridge exists you cannot understand anything of religion; hence my definition of a sannyasin is: a blissful song. And when I say, “Be a poet,” I don’t mean that you have to start poetizing, that you have to start painting, that you have to start playing on a guitar – no. I mean that

you have to start to see in a poetic way. When you see a flower, don’t be bothered about what its name is – that is a scientific way of looking at it – what species it belongs to, from what country it comes.

I had a friend at the university who was really interested in flowers. He had collected so many flowers in his garden that his garden was almost a botanical garden, and he had labeled every flower. He invited me once to see his garden; I looked around and I didn’t say a single word. He was very much puzzled. He said, “Are you not impressed at all by my flowers?”

I said, “I am impressed by your flowers, but I am very much puzzled by the labels you have put on each plant. On the beautiful rose you have written, ‘It comes from Iran;’ the rose comes from Iran. And you have given the Latin name and this and that – this is all nonsense! You have not looked at the rose at all. You may have been consulting the Encyclopedia Brittanica, but you have not looked at the rose.”

He understood it. It was a shock, but he had not looked at the rose at all; he had not the eyes of a poet. When I say be a poet, I mean have the eyes of a poet; look at life lovingly, sympathetically; look at life not as an enemy, not with the idea of struggle, survival, but look at life as a child looks at it, look at life as a lover looks at his beloved, and then slowly slowly your heart will start spinning and weaving poetries. Those poetries become the introduction; they help you to sing, to dance, they help you to raise your eyes towards the stars. And far beyond the stars is our home.

Only a poet is capable of seeing beyond, only a poet is capable of surpassing ordinary categories of thinking. So be a poet, be a singer, be a painter, be aesthetic, be creative, and this is what ultimately becomes your meditation, your prayer. This will transform you, not from the outside, but from the inside. And any change that comes from within is true.

[A sannyasin says: I need your help.]

That is available! Just you have to be ready to reCeive it. You need not ask for my help, just be ready to receive it; it is already available. The moment you become a sannyasin, you become my responsibility. Then it is not only your life, it is my life too; it is part of me. Then if you are in darkness, something of me remains in darkness; if you are in misery, then something of me remains in misery.

All that is needed on your part is to remain available, and that is the most difficult part of the whole journey. People are so closed that they have become almost unaware of it. It has become their second nature, it seems natural to be closed. Opening seems to be hard because it goes against all your past practice. And if you want to receive the sun you will have to open the window.

With closed windows you can go on praying for the sun; the prayer is futile, the sun is helpless it is only a question of the window. Prayer is not needed at all; the sun is available without any prayers – but open the window, remain available. And that means many things: don’t resist, don’t argue, don’t go on in futile argumentations in the mind, don’t go on supporting stupid doubts. All doubts are stupid. Trust is intelligence. Any fool can doubt. It needs no intelligence to doubt, but to trust, great intelligence... and not only intelligence but courage, guts, are also needed.

Trust and see: miracles start happening. I am already there, knocking on your doors. Just open the doors. The fulfilment is not far away; it is never far away. It is always by the corner. Try trust.

Doubt you have tried your whole life, now try trust. Good!

[A sannyasin asks if one has to do immediately, whatever one is feeling to do.]

One has to be very conscious, very alert, and then one can do immediately whatsoever one feels. But remember the condition, that one is very alert, otherwise feeling can lead you into a ditch. Feeling is not reliable, feeling is as dangerous as thinking. Feeling in itself is not necessarily right: it may be right, it may be wrong, just as thinking may be right or wrong. Now there is a trend in the new generation around the earth that feeling is right, that feeling is synonymous with right – that is utterly wrong. Feeling can take you into very dangerous bypaths.

For example, anger is a feeling... And immediately you may feel like killing somebody! But you will repent your whole life for that. You may immediately like to jump into the sea and commit suicide... Feeling in itself is not to be the decisive factor, neither thinking nor feeling. But there is a third point in you: you can be a witness to your thinking and feeling. Let that witness be there, then do whatsoever you want to do and that witness will be the guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. So whenever you want to do anything first bring great alertness to yourself, shake yourself awake, wake up! – and out of that wakefulness, do, and you cannot do anything wrong. To be aware is to be right.

If feeling is followed by awareness, then there is no danger; otherwise feeling is as blind as thinking – sometimes even more blind than thinking. That is changing only your prison: from the head you go to the heart, then the heart becomes your prison. You have to transcend both, this duality of head and heart. I tell people to move from the head to the heart, so that they can be told in the next step to go beyond the heart. It is not the goal, it is just a station on the way; you are not to stay there forever. Just an overnight’s stay is enough, in the morning you have to move on.

So bring awareness to your actions, and then there is no problem, then no other commandment is needed. One commandment is enough: Be aware! Then all that follows is good, is virtuous. Unawareness is sin, awareness is virtue.

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