CHAPTER 29
30 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem Marjorie. Prem means love; marjorie means a child of light. The full name will mean a child of love and light
Light is the physical expression of the energy love; love is unmanifest light. The physicists say the world consists only of light and the mystics say the world consists only of love... and both are not denying each other; they are simply using different expressions, different languages. Their approach is different. The physicist goes through scientific processes; he can only find light, he cannot find love. That is beyond his scope and methodology. His very method prohibits him. He cannot allow any poetry. He is bound to remain prose, he is committed to prose – to mathematics, to calculation, to measurement – hence he cannot go beyond matter.
In fact, the root from which the word matter comes means measuring; that which can be measured is matter. And science depends on measurement, weighing, tangibleness. Unless something has weight, unless something is visible, unless something can be measured in some way or other, science cannot believe in it. And love is immeasurable.
It is subtle, it is not gross, but it is the very soul of light. We can say light is the body of love, and love is the soul of light.
Mystics can talk about love. They have a higher language, the language of poetry. But they also talk about love because the higher can see the lower; the lower cannot comprehend the higher. If somebody is flying in a plane, he can see everything that is happening below, on the earth, but we cannot see what is happening inside the plane. We cannot see the people inside the plane. From a higher altitude the lower is visible. The higher is not against the lower; it implies the lower in itself, but the lower is always against the higher, because the higher is inconceivable to it.
Science cannot talk about love, but religion talks about love and light both. So on the one hand mystics say “God is love,” and on the other hand they say “God is light.”
And you have a beautiful name... This name can become your whole journey. This is what has to be realized: light and love. This has to become your meditation: meditate on love, meditate on light, live as light and live as love. That’s what sannyas is all about: living life with love, with light, with a subtle celebration that goes on and on and knows no ending, in which each breath brings new surprises and new delights and new planes, new experiences. Once one starts opening up there is no end to it.
Deva Luiz. Deva means divine; luiz has three meanings. First: famous in battle. Second: glorious warrior. But I would like you to forget both these meanings; they are ugly – the very idea of war is ugly and inhuman. It is below man’s dignity. The third meaning is beautiful, it means wide. So your name will mean divine wideness, divine vastness, divine openness.
The third meaning is not known so much. The first two are well known because in the past we have praised war as the greatest art and the warrior has been respected tremendously, but now there is no future for war, or for warriors; war is finished. With the second world war the last world war has happened. Adolf Hitler is the end of a certain history; now a third world war is impossible, because a third world war will be a total war, it will mean total destruction: not only of man but of animals, birds, trees, all life as such.
Unless man really grows in madness, unless the whole humanity really goes utterly insane, war is impossible. The very inventiveness of science has made it impossible. Now we have such fatal weapons that war is simply out of the question. Nobody who has even an iota of intelligence can think of war any more.
The future belongs not to the warrior; the future belongs to the sannyasin. They are polar opposites: the warrior lives through fight and the sannyasin lives in surrender, in let-go. The warrior tries to go upcurrent, and the sannyasin goes with the river. He does not even swim, he trusts the river, he goes with it. And to be a sannyasin one needs a very wide heart. The heart of a Christian is not wide enough, the heart of a Hindu is not wide enough; they are confined by their concepts, ideologies. The heart of a German, the heart of an Indian is not wide enough; they are confined through political concepts, boundaries.
The sannyasin does not belong to any religion because all religions are his. And he does not belong to any nation because he belongs to the whole universe and the whole universe belongs to him. His heart has no limitations. He can contain all: all the stars, all the moons, all the suns. He can contain eternity.
And meditation makes one capable of that wideness, because meditation is nothing but dropping of all limitations, definitions, boundaries. When there is no boundary in your being you have arrived home.
Prem Antonio. Prem means love; antonio means inestimable, priceless, praiseworthy.
Love is the only experience in life which has no price but has infinite value. It is the only experience which happens in the world and yet is not of the world. Hence it is the only possible bridge between this and that, between the visible and the invisible, between the world and God.
Love is the rainbow bridge. It connects the earth with the sky. And to live in love, to live as love, is to be spiritual. I don’t give you any other discipline. Love is more than enough. If one imbibes the spirit of love, all else follows on its own accord.
Prem Ton. Prem means love; ton is a short form of antonio. It means inestimable, praiseworthy, priceless. Love cannot be measured. No estimate is possible. It cannot even be defined.
Man has loved, known all the depths of love and the heights of love, but nobody has been able to define exactly what it is. It remains inexpressible, it cannot be put into words; the moment we put it into words we falsify it. There is no way to account for it. Because it happens when it happens, you cannot manage it, you cannot manipulate it, it is not something that you can do or not do. It is not a possession; on the contrary, when it comes it possesses you. It comes like a storm and you are just a straw in it... a dry leaf in the strong wind.
Mind is so small, like a teaspoon, and love is so vast, like the ocean; hence it is inestimable, it is immeasurable. The teaspoon has no way to give an account of how much it is.
Mind exists on the surface and cannot go into your depth of being, and love exists at the center, the very core. Love knows everything about the circumference, about your mind, but mind knows nothing of love; hence it is said that the heart has reasons of its own that are not reasons of the mind. Mind is absolutely incapable of understanding them, they look absurd to the mind, they don’t fit with its logic.
Mind is one-dimensional, and love is multi-dimensional. Mind is like a single note, and love is the whole orchestra. Mind is like a single color, and love is a rainbow – all the colors.
Love is one of the spaces where mind feels so incompetent, so impotent, that the only way to defend itself is to deny it; hence mind goes on saying there is no such thing as love: it is all imagination, it is all dream, it is not a reality, it is childish... The whole effort of the mind is to bring you out of any possibility of falling in love, because the moment you fall in love, you are out of the control of the mind. And mind has become the master, and has reduced you to a slave. Only love can redeem, only love can liberate. Hence my whole teaching depends on love.
In these simple experiences of love between a man and a woman, or a love between two friends, or a love between the child and the mother, something immensely valuable is happening. If you can catch hold of the thread you will reach God.
In ordinary love experiences also, something extraordinary is present. Don’t stop there. Make it a stepping-stone, go beyond it. And always go on going beyond, always go on surpassing your capacity to love so that you can love more, and then ultimately and finally a moment comes when love is not something separate from you; you are it. That is the day of realization, the moment one knows one is God.
Anand Suresh. Anand means bliss; suresh means a king – a king of bliss.
People are living as beggars just because they believe that they are beggars; once you believe something it becomes a reality... at least for you, because you have to live in it.
And the greatest calamity that happens to every child is that we reduce him to a beggar. He comes as a king... each child is born as a king because he is born out of God – how can he be otherwise? He is born as joy, he is born absolutely free. He knows no bondage, he knows nothing of misery. He is pure bliss. But we start initiating him into our ways. Each society initiates the child into its culture, its civilization, education, politics, religion, and we start destroying the kingdom of the child. We take all that is beautiful from him: his wonder, his capacity to feel awe, we take away all his innocence.
Instead we go on stuffing knowledge into him, information, unnecessary, meaningless... we reduce him into an ambitious egoist and that’s from where the beggar is born: ambition means you are constantly asking for, ambition means, “I must have this, I must have that. I cannot be satisfied unless I have all that I desire.” And there is no end to desires, and you will never have all. So you will remain in misery. Ambition is the beginning of misery, is the beginning of beggarhood.
To be a sannyasin means regaining, reclaiming your kingdom, reclaiming your childhood, its innocence, its non-ambitious joy, the capacity to be in the present, to feel wonder, to feel utterly surprised at existence, to feel surprised at each moment, at each event. My work here consists in bringing you back to your childhood: whatsoever the society has given to you has to be withdrawn. You have to be emptied so that again you are born anew. That rebirth is sannyas. Then one starts feeling like a king, like a queen, like a god, like a goddess.
Anand Manish. Anand means bliss; manish means wisdom.
Bliss is wisdom. Bliss is not knowledge and knowledge is never bliss; knowledge brings more and more misery because it brings more and more ego. The idea that “I know,” is nothing but a projection of the ego. Wisdom happens when you have come to know that you don’t know at all. The first step into the world of wisdom is that, “I don’t know,” that, “I don’t know anything,” that, “I am utterly ignorant, all knowledge is superficial.” Then something tremendously valuable starts happening and it does not come from the outside.
Knowledge comes from the outside; it is from the scriptures, from the teachers, from the parents, from the society. Wisdom wells up within yourself. But it can well up only when you are in a state of bliss. If you are miserable, if you are depressed, you hold it, you don’t allow it to grow. It remains repressed in you, you go on sitting on top of it like a rock. A miserable person becomes a rock, he becomes very very heavy, serious; and wisdom is possible only when you are playful, non-serious. When you can laugh, when you can be a child again... when life is not taken seriously, when life is only a drama and the earth is a vast stage and whatsoever you are doing is nothing but playing a game... when life is acting, when life is an art – nothing serious about it, not a business – in those moments of cheerfulness, playfulness, something inside you starts growing. It is like a seed: we come with it, but it remains a seed.
Playfulness, cheerfulness, blissfulness, give us the right climate in which the seed can grow and become a sprout. Then much foliage comes to it and flowers and fruits. A man of wisdom is utterly fulfilled.
Remember not to fall into the traps of misery. They are old traps, well known; you are familiar with them, they have become your second nature. All your awareness is needed to destroy those old habits; great awareness is needed to de-automatize you; and that’s what meditation is, great
awareness which destroys all habits, slowly slowly, and makes you free of habits. When one is free of habits, one can act spontaneously, not out of the past but in response to the present. And that very spontaneity makes you cheerful.
Slowly slowly, cheerfulness deepens. When it has touched your very center it is called blissfulness. Cheerfulness is on the surface like waves, but if you continue to remain cheerful, it starts soaking in, sinking in; one moment comes when it touches your heart... then it is bliss. The deepening of cheerfulness is bliss, and bliss is the climate in which wisdom grows.
Prem Sudarshan. Prem means love; sudarshan means beautiful.
Love beautifies everything. Love is the only beautifying phenomenon in existence. The moment you are in love, you immediately become beautiful. I don’t mean by beauty something physical... beauty is always something spiritual. It expresses itself in physical ways too, but basically it is something inner. Even the body becomes luminous through it. The body also radiates it, but it is not part of the body. It filters through the body, but it comes from deeper sources. And those sources only become alive and flowing when you start being in love.
Don’t be a miser about love. Love as much as possible. Love as many people as possible – not only people, animals, birds, trees, rocks. The object of love is irrelevant. Love – that is the point.
Love poetry, love music, love painting; don’t miss any opportunity to love, so that love becomes slowly slowly your flavor, so you start living as love. Then even if you are sitting alone, you are radiating love. And when one can radiate love alone, in solitude, one has attained to the highest form of meditation, and it is only at that height that the door of God opens.
[A sannyasin says: I feel a connection and love with Christ... but do I belong to you? I don’t feel any adoration, or inner consciousness... ]
Continue to belong to Christ... because we are not separate. That is just a difference of name and form. No need to change; you continue to belong to Jesus. That is my other name – nothing... It doesn’t matter, so why bother unnecessarily? – you can just continue.