5

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‌CHAPTER 5

5 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet Roberta. Veet means going beyond; roberta means bright fame. The full name will mean going beyond all fame.

The ego longs to be famous, to be well-known. The ego is afraid of being nobody, is scared of being anonymous, because if you are not known you don’t know who you are; if you are not known by others you don’t know who you are. You know yourself only by what people say about you. The ego depends on others’ eyes. It is dependent, it is a beggar. It cannot stand on its own, it needs all kinds of props.

If you are nobody, if nobody knows you, then suddenly the ego starts evaporating. Then the very earth underneath your feet is taken away. Then you start feeling empty, a nothingness – and that scares people. In fact that emptiness is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to a person, because it is only through that emptiness that one enters into God. All name, all fame, is futile: it is a deception, it is an illusion. But we live in illusions and we create beautiful illusions around ourselves.

To be a sannyasin means dropping the life of being in illusions and entering into reality, whatsoever it is. In the beginning it is painful because we have become accustomed to illusions. In the beginning when they are taken away, it is the same as taking away a toy from a child, his teddy bear. He cannot sleep without the teddy bear, he cannot move without the teddy bear. The teddy bear is his very soul; he believes in the teddy bear. And people never grow up, they remain childish. Their teddy bears change but they remain childish. Then they become attached to money, to fame, to name, to prestige, to power, respectability. Now they are their teddy bears!

If they are not famous they cannot sleep. If they are not famous they feel so hollow, they don’t know what to do with themselves. They have to be continuously on exhibition. Everybody should know

them and everybody should know who they are. They themselves don’t know who they are, and because they don’t know they substitute it with others’ knowledge about themselves.

Going beyond all name and all fame is going beyond all teddy bears. It is becoming mature. It is being ready to enter into inner emptiness. Certainly it is empty, but the door has to be empty, otherwise you cannot enter through it. It is not a wall, it is a door. The door has to be empty – the wall is not empty. And each being is a door to God, hence the emptiness.

Sannyas means starting to enjoy this anonymous nobodiness, being happy with one’s emptiness, rejoicing in it. And then soon the emptiness is no more emptiness. It becomes fulfillment;it starts overflowing with bliss.

Anandmurti. Anand means bliss; murti means an image – an image of bliss.

The sannyasin has to be a symbol of bliss. He has to be a continuity of joy, an undercurrent of rejoicing. Even in his sadness there is a joy, because he is capable of enjoying his sadness too. He accepts it as part of life, he is not resistant to it. He allows it, he befriends it. And that is the alchemical way of transforming the very nature of sadness; the very nature of sadness becomes luminous. Soon it is no more sadness, it is transformed into cheerfulness.

Sadness remains sadness if you fight with it, if you deny it, if you reject it. Sadness remains sadness if you are against it, otherwise sadness is pure energy. If you welcome it, if you embrace it, if you are not afraid of it, not angry with it, you will be surprised, immensely surprised: you have changed its very nature, it is no more sadness. Even tears start becoming laughter, and sadness becomes silence.

All that we have known as negative can be transformed into the positive. And the secret is simple: acceptance, total acceptance. Nothing has to be condemned, nothing at all. All that comes has to be received with great gratitude as a gift from God. And you will be able to make flowers out of thorns and ordinary pebbles turn into diamonds. The very ordinary life starts taking on the flavor of extraordinariness. Then nothing is ordinary because everything starts having a thrill. Nothing is ordinary – because you are so ecstatic about it, how can it remain ordinary?

The sannyasin lives in a totally different world, although he moves in the same world, moves with the same people – but he is not part of it any more. There is a kind of transcendence in his being. Even death is so deeply accepted by him that death loses all fear, that death itself becomes a dance.

Satyamurti. Satya means truth; murti means image – image of truth.

Man ordinarily lives in lies. He is not only insincere with others, he is insincere with himself too. In fact, unless you are insincere with yourself you cannot be insincere with others. Whatsoever you do to others, first you have to do to yourself. If you are destructive to others you have to be destructive to yourself in the first place. If you hate others, you must deep down hate yourself. So what you do to others simply shows what you are doing to yourself.

If a man lies... and that’s how people live, that is the normal way. And they have become so accustomed to lies that they think that these are truths. Somebody goes to the temple, bows down

to the statue, and thinks he is religious – and he is lying! He does not know anything about God, he has not encountered anything divine. He has had no revelation; he only believes that this statue represents God – and belief is a lie. Knowing is one thing, belief just the opposite. Belief only covers your ignorance, it does not dispel it.

It is as if you are living in darkness but you believe that you are living in light. But just by your belief, darkness is not dispelled. You will need real light – not belief in light but light itself, only then will the darkness go.

Somebody is a Hindu and somebody is a Christian and somebody is a Jew, and all are Lying, because they are simply repeating what they have been told. And those who have told you were Lying because they were simply repeating what was told to them, and so on, so forth.

People live in conventions, conformities. People belong to traditions, to past... and truth is herenow! Truth has no tradition; truth is not a convention, truth is not a conformity. Truth requires no belief at all; truth requires a very authentic inquiry. Truth requires you to be an adventurer; neither a believer nor a disbeliever but an inquirer, an explorer, open – without any prejudiced mind, without any a priori conclusion.

Unless one starts searching for truth outside and inside, in relationship and in aloneness, one remains part of a very very lying world.

Becoming a sannyasin means that you are becoming aware of the lie that the society is based upon. A sannyasin starts searching on his own. He is no more part of the mob, he does not belong to mob psychology any more. He is a dropout. He says, “Enough is enough! I am not going to be just a part of the crowd.”

A sannyasin becomes an individual. A sannyasin declares his freedom, and he declares that, “I will seek truth on my own; I am not going to borrow it from anybody else” – because truth cannot be borrowed and a borrowed truth is no more true.

Then truth is not very far away. If one can drop lies, all lies, truth wells up within one’s own being. You are truth then. Truth is not something objective; it is your very subjectivity, your interiority. It is your very consciousness. Not even a single step is needed to enter into it – you are already there! Just stop all the lies, just drop the whole load. Be finished with it!

It is as if a rock is stopping a fountain: you remove the rock and the fountain starts flowing. All kinds of lies have become rocks around our being, and the flow is stopped. Just remove the rocks! The whole work of sannyas is negative – removing. Once all rocks are removed, you are the flow, the flow of life. And that’s what truth is all about: the flow of life itself.

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