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‌CHAPTER 3

3 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand Inger. Anand means bliss; inger, in Norse mythology, is the god of peace. Your full name will mean god of bliss and peace, or goddess of bliss and peace.

Bliss and peace have to happen together, only then does one realize the totality of life’s significance. Bliss can happen separately from peace; that’s what we know as pleasure, happiness. But because there is no peace in it, it is tiring, exhausting; because there is no peace in it, it is a kind of tension and conflict. There is much noise but no music in it, no harmony.

Peace can also happen without bliss, but then it is cold, dull, dead. Then it is the silence of the cemetery, not the silence of a garden, not the silence that sings but the silence of a corpse. It breathes no longer. This kind of peace is not worth anything.

But that’s what monks have been trying to achieve in their monasteries, so if they look dead, dull, stupid, it is no accident. That is their whole effort and their achievement. If their peace gives no indication of bliss, then something has gone wrong.

Bliss alone becomes pleasure, peace alone becomes cold silence. Both together have a tremendous richness. Then the peace has a dance in it, and the bliss a center of silence – the center of the cyclone. It can dance, it can sing, and yet the silence is not disturbed. My sannyasin has to achieve both together.

That’s my whole effort: to create a new kind of man. In the past we have tried to live both ways, but both were half. It is easy to choose one, because there is no complexity in it. You drop all pleasures and you become peaceful, or you forget about peace and you run after all kinds of pleasures. Hence the worldly man and the otherworldly man divided humanity in two, because they divided their inner being in two: peace and bliss.

I would like an integration, a crystallization. You should be in the world and otherworldly. You should be in the marketplace and yet have the silence of the Himalayas in your heart.

Prem Pieter. Prem means love; pieter means rock. Love is the rock, the only rock on which we can build the temple of life, the temple of God. Everything else is just sand; except love nothing can become the foundation of life. And to make a house on anything else is to waste your time, energy; ultimately you will have only frustration in your hands and nothing else.

But just as the foundation of a temple or a house remains hidden underground, so does love. Love is an underground energy. It is very silent, it works in the dark, its functioning is not visible. That’s why science cannot take any note of it. Because it cannot be measured, it cannot be examined in a test tube, science is bound to deny it. The most essential human quality is denied by science. It is the most important phenomenon in the life of every human being, scientists included, but official science goes on denying it. Official science goes on denying everything that is significant, because all that is significant is invisible.

Love is invisible, meditation is invisible, awareness is invisible, God is invisible, life itself is invisible. What we see is only the body in which life lives, but never life itself. What we see is only the garment but never the spirit.

Science, in a way, has humiliated human beings very much. And once you deny the significant, people stop searching for it. Once you say it doesn’t exist, it cannot exist, it is not possible, people stop thinking about it. And man cannot be fulfilled without love without meditation, without God. Love is the beginning of the journey, hence I call it the rock, the foundation rock. The whole of life has to be built on it, around it, for it. And then only is one religious. When love is one’s very foundation, life has a fragrance, a joy, a blessing. That blessed state is religiousness. There is no other proof of God than blissfulness, and it never comes through any other way than love.

Deva Gerard. Deva means divine; gerard means brave, courageous – divine courage.

Courage is one of the most essential qualities of a religious person. Ordinarily it is not so, ordinarily you will find people who are religious absolute cowards, and because of these cowards, religion has become a pseudo phenomenon. These cowards gather in temples, churches, mosques. They worship out of fear, their God is nothing but their projection of fear. They are seeking security in God, safety in God. They believe because they are afraid. Not that they know: they don’t make any effort to know, they avoid all possibilities of knowing. They simply believe because belief is cheap, and cowards cannot risk knowing.

Knowing needs guts of knowing. The first requirement is that you drop all your beliefs. A knower has to be without belief; only then will he not have any prejudice, only then he will not have any concepts. God has to be perceived, not conceived. God has to be known, not believed in. God has to be experienced, not imagined.

And the coward finds it easy to imagine, to believe, because it takes nothing to believe – only fear is needed. Imagination we have more than enough of, we can dream every kind of thing. And the coward can dream about spiritual experiences very easily, he can hallucinate.

The world is not religious because religion has fallen into the hands of the cowards. My observation is that you will find more religious people in the section, the very minor section of humanity, which does not believe in religion. You will find more religious people in that section. The people who don’t believe in religion are more religious. In fact, their not believing in religion is a basic and fundamental step towards religion: they are dropping the belief. And you can drop the belief only if you are ready to drop your fears, because your belief is covering your fears.

Only the adventurous person who is ready to risk all his comforts, consolations, can be truly religious. Religion is an exploration, an exploration into truth. You cannot borrow it from somebody else, it has to be authentically your own. And the risk is great: dropping all consolations is almost moving into an abyss, falling into an abyss. Dropping all kinds of beliefs means that you are becoming ignorant. Forgetting all that you have learned from others means that you are becoming a child again. Nobody wants to drop knowledge, and the ego that knowledge brings, and the gratification, appreciation, that knowledge brings. Who wants to become a child again? But only those who are ready to become children again can enter into the world of truth.

A child is never a coward; cowardice is a learned thing. He learns it from the grownups; otherwise he is courageous, he has infinite courage. He can go into the dark, but he becomes afraid of the dark because grownups are afraid of the dark. He can catch hold of a snake, he can even play with a lion, with no fear.

All fear and all cowardice is learned from others. Slowly slowly he becomes enclosed in all kinds of pathological fears. And the greatest pathological fear is the fear of God, because it prevents you from knowing God. Fear is a barrier, a wall, you cannot see through it. It has to be demolished!

My sannyasin has to be courageous to the utmost, to the maximum. Only optimum courage can create the opportunity to know God; hence I call courage one of the most essential qualities of a religious being. It is divine. God has only been known by courageous people, only by very few people, because courage is so rare.

Prem Andreas. Prem means love; andreas means courageous. Love is courage; without love one is bound to be a coward.

Love and hate are not real opposites, but love and fear are real opposites. Hate can become love very easily: it is really love standing upside-down. It is not very far from love, it is love energy in a disturbed state. The energy can be calmed, stilled. It is only a question of rearranging the energy, and hate can become love. And we know – it happens every day in life – love can become hate, hate can become love. You hate the same person and you love the same person. One moment you hate, another moment you love. So love and hate are two sides of the same coin, they are not real opposites.

The real opposites are love and fear. Fear can never become love, there is no way. And love can never be fear, there is no way. Fear has to be dropped, then love arises; or love has to be forgotten, then fear is there. Love and fear are like light and darkness: love is the light and fear is the darkness. If you bring the light there is no darkness, you will not find any darkness.

The moment love arises in the heart, all fear disappears, light has come in and no darkness is found. And then there is a courage which is not a cultivated phenomenon: not practiced courage, not the

courage of a soldier, but the courage of a sannyasin. The soldier cultivates it, practices it. It is just a conditioning, he is trained to be courageous. Deep down he is afraid and trembling, but on the surface remains calm, quiet, collected. Years of training condition him: he fights in the war and remains afraid inside.

The sannyasin knows a totally different kind of courage, unpracticed, uncultivated. It arises from the very core of your being and spreads all over. The soldier is divided, he becomes two; he is two persons, he is a split personality. That’s why it takes years of training to create a soldier, and constant training, and training which is basically stupid: hours and hours of parade, for no reason at all! Morning, evening, the soldier is on parade: left, right; right, left; turn back, turn to the right, turn to the left – for no reason at all. Just to follow the order, just to be obedient! It is creating a reflex action in him, so when he is ordered to kill, he will kill because he cannot go against the order.

I have heard a story: a retired army man was carrying a bucket full of eggs, and somebody played a joke on him. He was going through the market and somebody shouted “Attention!” He dropped the bucket and all the eggs were destroyed! He was very angry, but the man said, “I did not tell you to follow.” He said, “But this is not a question of telling, it is automatic. For thirty years ‘Attention!’ meant attention. It is not that I have done it, it has happened. I am a poor man; you should not play such a joke on me. You have destroyed all my eggs. I was not even conscious of what I was doing, it happened unconsciously.”

That’s the whole training of the army. It creates the soldier: on the surface very brave, courageous, deep down carrying all kinds of fears.

The sannyasin has a totally different courage: it is out of love, not out of cultivation. Cultivation represses fear; love dissipates fear.

Anand Dhyano! Anand means bliss; dhyano means meditation.

Bliss has to be the meditation of my sannyasins. Bliss has to be imbibed in as many ways as possible. From nature, drink as much bliss as possible. From the stars and the moon and the sun and the trees and the birds, drink as much as possible. It is still available there in its pure form.

Man has become contaminated; but looking at the sky full of stars you again enter into a totally different dimension which is not human, which is divine. Watching a rose flower opening up is a totally different world. So through nature imbibe bliss, and then through the many beautiful things that human beings have been doing on the earth.

Man has not been wrong all along. The majority has been very very dull, stupid, but a few intelligent people have been doing really significant things: music, poetry, art, literature, sculpture, architecture, a Taj Mahal, a Khajuraho, a pyramid. Listen to great music. Meditate on poetry. Get lost in great literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Rabindranath. Imbibe bliss from these sources.

And then human beings – the last, because they are the most difficult people! Unless you become very very artful at imbibing bliss you will not be able to take it from human beings. But when you have become accustomed, attuned, to nature, to art, then there is a possibility of touching the human heart. Then love, relationship, friendship... even from strangers.

Think of yourself as constantly searching for new sources of bliss. And be thrilled by small things: the foam on the waves in the sea, shining in the morning sun... Then don’t just see: dance, participate in the joy of the waves! Seeing a bird on the wing, feel one with the bird. Create a kind of attunement, at-onement. Slowly slowly you learn the knack, and then, ultimately, bliss arises in your own being. These are just to create space all around you in which your inner bliss can bloom.

The real bliss is going to happen within you. It never comes from anywhere else: not from stars, not from rivers, not from mountains. But first we have to create the context, a space, in which your own bliss can open up. If you are surrounded by all kinds of misery, negativity, darkness, dullness, unintelligence, ugliness, insensitivity, then it is impossible because the context is missing; bliss will not arise in you.

Buddhas may go on saying that you are bliss, your nature is bliss; you will listen, and you will understand the words, but nothing will happen. In fact, deep down you will suspect, you will doubt: what these people are saying seems nonsense, because when you look inside you don’t find any bliss. These people go on saying “Know thyself” – and when you look inside there is nothing worth knowing. The reason is: you look inside without creating the context. That context I call meditation.

So whatsoever is helpful to make you blissful, ecstatic, use it. Different people find different things helpful. Somebody may find art, somebody may find nature, somebody may find love – because people are different. But one thing has to be remembered continuously: anything that triggers the process of bliss in you has to be imbibed, has to be lived with, has to be understood more deeply, more profoundly.

Then one day suddenly, something explodes in you – when the context is ready and ripe, when the space is created – something just like a lotus opening... and you have arrived. That arrival is enlightenment, that arrival is the experience of God.

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