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CHAPTER 28
29 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Anand Brigitta. Anand means bliss; brigitta means bridge.
Bliss is the bridge to God. To be blissful is to be prayerful. To be blissful is to be religious, although just the contrary is the prevalent idea: religious people look very sad, they go on carrying long faces, they are haughty, egoistic. You can look in their eyes and you can see the holier-than-thou look. They think to be cheerful is to be profane. Laughter is sin for them, love is a crime. They are life- negative; they deny whatsoever is beautiful. And because they deny life, love, laughter, they are living-deads: they breathe but they are not alive, they are walking corpses. But these people have been praised as great saints.
I stand against this whole tradition, against this whole nonsense. Religion is not serious; it is playful. And cheerfulness is not shallow; it is very profound. In fact laughter goes deepest into the heart, nothing penetrates so deeply as laughter. When you are really gripped by laughter, the ego disappears, the mind spins and weaves no thoughts any more. After laughter there is a great silence, the silence that follows the storm. Laughter can only be in the present, that is its beauty; it cannot be in the past, it cannot be in the future – and the present is the bridge to the God.
To be present to the present is all that is needed to be a sannyasin.
Deva Maurizio. Deva means divine; maurizio means dark, dark-skinned, darkness. The full name will mean divine darkness.
It has been said again and again in almost all the scriptures of the world that God is light, but I say to you, God is both: light as much as darkness. God is the whole of existence, the totality of it. He cannot only be light – then who will be darkness? Then where will darkness come from? Where will it exist? There must be a space in God’s heart for darkness too.
But man has depicted God as light, because man’s God is more or less man’s invention. He creates God out of his fear and he is afraid of darkness, hence he cannot call God dark.
It is out of fear that men have called God light. God is all: he is life and he is death; he is the flowers and he is the thorn too. A really religious person has that tremendous acceptance... where polarities can be accepted and nothing has to be denied, the positive and negative both can be accepted. The religious person has that much open heart, a wide heart; he is not small minded, he is not small hearted. He does not choose; he simply accepts whatsoever is.
And life is as much true as death. Death cannot be denied. The people who deny darkness are bound to deny death too, that’s why death has always been depicted as dark. The people who deny death are bound to deny all that is negative. Anger has to be denied, repressed, anything that has any flavor of negativity in it has to be dropped. And you cannot drop it so at the most you can push it deeper into the unconscious.
And then they had to invent a devil too, because who will take care of all these negativities? So they created two gods. One was god of light and one was god of darkness. They were themselves split, schizophrenic; because they were split they had to create two gods. They may not call the devil God, but the word devil comes from the same root as divine. It comes from “deva”, the same Sanskrit root. In fact, there is no God separate from the devil and there is no devil separate from God; devil is only the shadow of God, his negative part, the other aspect, the other side of the coin.
And when one starts understanding that both haVe to be accepted, a great silence arises; all conflict ceases, all antagonism, all civil war within you disappears. For the first time you become whole and healthy, because nothing is denied. For the first time you are no more schizophrenic. Otherwise the whole of humanity is schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is not a disease that happens to a few people: our whole past has been schizophrenic. It was very rarely, once in a while, a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, a Moses, escaped from this schizophrenia – otherwise the earth has remained insane, split.
And this is the root cause of the split: we can accept only one thing, and we cannot accept its opposite; we are ready to accept love but we are not ready to accept hate. We are ready to accept the friend but we are not ready to accept the enemy. But they both exist. In fact the friend cannot exist without the enemy, and love cannot exist without hate, and compassion cannot exist without anger – just like day and night, they are together, like summer and winter they are together.
Let this vision deepen in your heart so nothing is repressed. And a non-repressive person is a religious person. If acceptance is total, you become total, you are no more fragmentary, and that totalness brings bliss, brings benediction.
So I say to you, darkness is also divine. Your name will remind you again and again that the night is as beautiful as the day and death is as beautiful as life.
Prem Nartano. Prem means love; nartano means dance.
Love is the greatest dance there is – invisible, intangible, inexpressible, but the ultimate in celebration. It is a dance of energy; it is not material. It can happen when you are alone, a partner
is not a must, one can simply be loving. It need not always be a relationship, one can sit alone and be in tremendous love.
Relationship is only one of the expressions of it, relationship is only one of the materializations of the immaterial; hence relationship is a little gross. That’s why nobody is ever satisfied by a relationship: the reason is one knows deep down the heights of love, but when you bring it to a relationship those heights start disappearing, it becomes something ordinary, it loses its sacredness, it becomes mundane. And when relationship becomes marriage, it becomes almost a commodity in the marketplace. It loses even that quality which existed before the marriage.
All the heights are gone, now you are on the plain ground. It can be comfortable at the most, but comfort is not the goal; convenient, safe, but just to live conveniently and safely is not to live at all. Life becomes sharp as you move towards the heights, as you go beyond the material.
Marriage is the lowest form of love. Relationship without any marriage is a little better because the law has not entered yet: the magistrate and the policeman are still out of it. Marriage means love is no more just love, it is law too. Now it is not only a private phenomenon, it is public. You are sanctified by the society, you are sealed by the government; now it is not your freedom to love or not to love, it is duty. When love becomes duty it is the ugliest; deformed it is, crippled, paralyzed, and one wants to wriggle out of it, but it becomes very difficult because it gives many comforts and many securities and many safeties. And the mind clings to those comforts and safeties, and the mind says it is dangerous to go out of it.
Relationship is a little better because it is still private, intimate, a sharing of two individuals. It is not yet a social thing. It still has some poetry in it, some dance in it still.
But the highest phenomenon is when love is a state and not a relationship. Not that you are in love, but that you are love. Then love reaches to the highest peak possible, and at that peak it becomes prayer, at that peak it is meditation, at that peak it touches the feet of God. It becomes a dialogue with the whole of existence. Then you are in dance, and the whole of existence is the partner – the trees and the stars and the mountains.
Millions of people have decided to live at the lowest, that is marriage. A few try to get a little higher, that is pure relationship without any possessiveness. Only a few try it, and only a very few of those few succeed in it. It is a very rare individual who tries to live as love. That is the goal of sannyas: to live as love.
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