26

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‌CHAPTER 26

27 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand, Ria Anand means bliss. Bliss does not mean only happiness or joy; it is something more than that Happiness is a state of excitement; that excitement is missing in bliss. The ecstasy is there, but the excitement is not there. Happiness has something feverish in it; that fever is completely absent in bliss. And happiness, howsoever great, is always followed by unhappiness as a shadow. Bliss makes no shadow, it simply remains itself. It is not followed by anything else, there is nothing else to follow it; it is the ultimate.

Joy is momentary; it takes you to the peaks, but you go back to earth again. It is like jumping: for a moment you feel you are going against the law of gravitation, but only for a moment; next moment you are pulled back to the earth, with a vengeance. Joy is jumping out of misery: for a moment you are in the sky, but the next moment you are back on the earth, deeper in misery than before. Bliss is joyous, but not momentary. It is eternal; once arrived, it is forever.

Joy and happiness both have a certain heat. Bliss is very cool; not cold, remember, but cool. Hatred is cold, love is hot, bliss is simply cool – exactly in the middle. Joy is hot, sadness is cold, bliss is cool; neither cold nor hot, neither this nor that. Its beauty is its middleness, its balance, its equilibrium.

And ria is part of maria; it means a wished-for child...

Your full name will mean a blissful child. And to be a child spiritually is of great significance. There is one childhood which is physical, there is another childhood which is spiritual. The physical childhood is only a reflection of the spiritual childhood: a moon seen in the lake. It is bound to be disturbed; anything can disturb the lake – just a wind, a stone thrown and the reflection is disturbed and gone. The physical childhood is bound to be disturbed. It cannot remain your treasure forever; it has to be lost.

But there is another childhood which has nothing to do with the physical, which is spiritual innocence: a state of not-knowing, a state of wonder, a state of a constant feeling of the presence of the miraculous... just like a child. Each and everything surprises him; wherever he is, he is in a Disneyland.

And so is the case with spiritual childhood: wherever you are, you are in paradise. Remember these two things: bliss and innocence, and you can become the twice born you can attain to the second childhood. And that’s what sannyas is all about: an effort to give you another birth. It is a process of rebirth.

Anand Isabelle. Anand means bliss, isabelle comes from a Hebrew root “el”; el means God or divine. Your full name will mean: bliss is divine, bliss is God. It has been ignored for centuries; not only ignored, but positively rejected by the so-called saints. They have made religion a very sad and serious affair, and because of that millions of people have remained deprived of religion. Only unhealthy people are interested in being sad and serious. The healthy person is interested in being cheerful, blissful. The pathological, the one who is somehow abnormal, becomes interested in the old kind of spirituality which preaches seriousness as its fundamental.

In the old spiritual dimension, laughter does not exist at all; Christians say Jesus never laughed. Now this is utter nonsense! Only Jesus is capable of laughter; who else can laugh as beautifully as Jesus? But the Christian saints are depicting Jesus according to their idea of religion: a non- laughing God, utterly serious. That is not my vision of God. My God is a dancing God. He laughs, he loves, he sings, he plays... And I say to you, my God is closer to the truth; bliss to me is the most fundamental thing in religious life. To be cheerful is to be prayerful, to remain constantly blissful, rejoicing in ordinary life, in small things... because it is not a question of what you are rejoicing about, the question is that you are rejoicing. Then anything you can rejoice about becomes spiritual. Anything that makes you cheerful is spiritual. Then we can transform the whole of life into something extraordinarily beautiful and that’s what a man of enlightenment does: his walking, his sitting, his talking, each of his gestures, is full of bliss, full of great joy. His every breath is a breath of joy itself.

He lives as joy, he dies as joy. His life has the flavor of dance, the aroma of a song, the climate of unheard music.

So remember that my sannyas is an initiation into a very hedonistic spirituality, into a joyous religion. I am life-affirmative. Religion to me means nothing but a love affair with existence itself.

Anand Jannie. Anand means blissful, jannie comes from Hebrew, john. John was the most beloved disciple of Jesus, the closest one, the most devoted, the most surrendered – totally lost in Jesus. Hence his name became synonymous with the beloved disciple, it became a symbol. Literally the word means God’s gracious gift, but symbolically it means the beloved disciple. Both are good: to be a beloved disciple is God’s gracious gift. I would like to emphasize the symbolic meaning of it. Your full name will mean a blissful beloved disciple.

The greatest art in life is to be a disciple. It means love, but not only love, because love can quarrel, love can fight; lovers are continuously quarreling and fighting. The disciple has no quarrel at all. There has never been a quarrel between the disciple and the Master, it is impossible. It cannot happen in the very case, because a disciple by becoming a disciple dissolves his ego; then there

is nobody to fight, nobody to argue. The disciple is not obedient; the disciple is simply obedience. There is nobody to be obedient any more – or disobedient. The disciple is utterly absent, he has given his whole heart to the Master. Now the Master’s order is not coming from the outside. It comes from the disciple’s own heart. The Master starts speaking in the deepest core of the disciple. He becomes the disciple’s own voice.

Once George Gurdjieff did a great experiment with a few of his disciples in a faraway part of Russia, near Tiflis. For three months all the disciples had to remain absolutely silent. Not only they were not to speak with each other, they were not even to recognize each other. Thirty disciples living in one house, but each disciple had to live as if he is alone. In fact, in each room there were at least six, seven disciples, sharing, but each disciple had to exist as if he is alone. That was the condition.

Within three days twenty-seven disciples were thrown out – out of thirty! Only three remained to the very end. And the last day of the three months experiment, Gurdjieff took them out in the garden, he sat with them, and suddenly all three became very surprised, because he was not speaking and yet they heard him speaking. It was absolutely unbelievable. He was just sitting in front of them completely silent and they heard his voice so clearly...

That was the last day; they were allowed to speak now, so all three spoke almost simultaneously: “What are you doing? You are completely silent but we hear your voice coming from somewhere within our own being!N

Gurdjieff said, “Out of three months’ silence, it has become possible now; I can speak as your own self. Your surrender has been total. In fact, today you have become a disciple. Now you are no more, hence I need not speak from the outside.”

The outer Master becomes the inner to the true disciple. It is a great experience, but all depends on trust, surrender and such a total love that it knows no quarreling, knows no argument, knows no doubt... It is difficult, but worth achieving; there is nothing else which is more valuable.

John was really a true disciple. You can also become one. Let this journey into sannyas be a journey into true disciplehood. This is the first step of a long, long pilgrimage. But if one is ready to go, a thousand-and-one treasures are waiting for you, they are yours. One just has to go on dropping the mind and the ego, so one day one can exist without the mind, without the ego. That purity is the meaning of true disciplehood. That utter silence – no noise of the mind and no center of the ego – that egoless, mindless consciousness, makes one a true disciple. And it is the greatest achievement in life, because God is available only to the true disciple.

Anand Gaya. Anand means blissful; gaya is the name of the place where Buddha became enlightened. Since he became enlightened, the place has been called blissful, blessed. It is one of the most sacred spots on earth.

Many people have become enlightened, but the exact place of their enlightenment is rarely known. One does not know when and where Jesus became enlightened. One does not know where and when exactly Lao Tzu became enlightened. But Buddha’s place of enlightenment is absolutely known: the tree under which he was sitting, the spot, the place where he walked before he became enlightened, and after he became enlightened, the place where he remained for seven days after

enlightenment, sitting silently, doing nothing. The experience was such that he could not move even. He forgot all about hunger, thirst, sleep. He was in such an awe that he forgot that he belonged to the earth, that he had a body, and that a great responsibility had descended on him: to help others who are still stumbling in darkness towards light. He was utterly lost in the bliss that had descended on him. He had to be shaken out of it.

The story says that gods in paradise became very much afraid: if he does not speak, if he does not start awakening others, then a great opportunity for the world will be lost. It happens only once in a while – for thousands of years the earth has to wait for one single person to become enlightened. The opportunity is so precious it cannot be missed. And the gods came, the story says, they bowed down to Buddha, they shook him out of his blissfulness, they brought him back to the body and they begged him, “Don’t disappear like that! Don’t dissolve like that! You are evaporating. Your body is capable of living at least forty years more. This is a rare golden opportunity; thousands will be benefited. We have come with folded hands; we pray you to start teaching; you have to be a Master!” And they helped Buddha to come back to the body, to be rooted again in the body.

That place is called Gaya, because Buddha became enlightened there; it is called Bodh Gaya, Buddha’s Gaya. And I would like you to go there sometime, at least for one day, just to feel the vibe; the vibe is still alive there... and it will be of tremendous value to you. It will help you to go into meditation more easily.

Hug the tree. It is a direct descendant of the same tree. It is not exactly the same tree, but a child of the same tree. It still carries something, because whenever a man like Buddha becomes enlightened it is such an explosion of energy that everything that is around becomes permeated with that energy. And the Bo tree particularly is very sensitive.

Now scientists say this is the only tree which seems to have one ingredient which is necessary for intelligence, without which man cannot be intelligent, and this is the only tree which has that ingredient in it. No other tree has that. It is a very sensitive tree, very receptive. It must have become soaked with the explosion of Buddha’s energy, with that light, and the tree still carries something of it.

And I am giving you this name because your path is going to be the same. Vipassana is going to be your meditation – the way that Buddha discovered... It is one of the most significant ways ever discovered, and for a few people it is the way, the only way. And you are one of them.

So learn Vipassana, pay more and more attention to Vipassana, and go deeper and deeper into that meditation.

[The new sannyasin says: I’ve got a small child... I am breast-feeding him.]

But at least you have to learn Vipassana, mm? – you can learn it individually – you can go to [the Vipassana group leader] and just learn it, and then you can do one hour, two hours a day. That you have to learn.

Anand Mradula. Anand means bliss; mradula means softness – a blissful softness. That’s what one has to become, then God is not far away. He is far away because we are hard, because we are like

stones. We have to become more and more like flowers: open, ready to receive, and so soft, so vulnerable, that even the subtlest energy can penetrate us. We have to be porous, sponge-like, so we can be soaked to the very center with the energy of God that surrounds us.

We exist in the ocean of God, but because we are hard we remain far away. God is not far away from us, but we are far away from God, and the only reason is our insensitivity.

The art of meditation is nothing but helping you to become more sensitive. One has to be more and more feminine, womblike, one has to be a host, then God is always ready to knock on your door. He wants to be a guest, he has been waiting long and he has not yet lost hope. And we can become sensitive. In fact to become insensitive is hard and difficult. We have done the difficult thing and we have become incapable of doing the natural, the easier thing.

It is only because we have been brought up in a wrong way. Each child is born like a lotus flower, but as the child grows, we start making him harder, stiff, uptight. We start teaching him to fight, to compete, we start poisoning his mind... that the world is a struggle. We teach him the way of the ego – and the ego is bound to reduce you into a rock.

I teach the way of the lotus, and because it is our very nature to be soft and open, it is only a question of decision. The day you decide deliberately, “No more of this insensitivity”; the day you decide that life is not a struggle but a celebration; the day you decide not to compete but to remain in a let-go, the transformation happens immediately.

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