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CHAPTER 6
6 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem Kane. Prem means love, kane means beautiful. Beauty is not an objective quality; it does not belong to things. It is the loving eye that imparts it, that creates it. Beauty is a creation of love.
Ordinarily people think they have fallen in love because the other person is so beautiful. The reality is just the opposite: the other person looks so beautiful because they have fallen in love; love is fundamental. Beauty is a creation of love, not vice versa. Hence, when you are in love the person appears beautiful; when you are not in love, suddenly the same person looks very ordinary. He was ordinary before love; he becomes ordinary again when love has disappeared. But between these two he was tremendously beautiful – love was creating it.
Look with the eyes of love, and the whole existence becomes beautiful. Look with hate, and everything becomes ugly. It all depends on you, on what kind of world you want to live in. If you want to live in hell, create more and more hate and you will be in hell. If you want to be in heaven, create more and more love and you are in heaven, because love will go on imparting beauty to each and every thing that surrounds you. This same world becomes divine looked at through the eyes of love.
Hence the mystic can say existence is divine, because he is pure love. He can say God is, because he is pure love. God is a creation of his loving energy.
He cannot show his God to anybody else; it is impossible. You fall in love with a person, but you cannot prove to anybody else that he is beautiful. It is impossible, because it is not an objective quality. The mystic is in love with existence itself; that great love of his being creates God. God is his subjective experience, it is his creation.
God is not there available ready-made. Before you can know God you have to create God, and the way to create God is love. Love is the only creativity there is, the only dance there is, the only beauty there is, the only God there is.
Deva Moira. Deva means divine. Moira has two meanings: one is soft, the other is great – divine softness, divine greatness.
Man lives in fear, that’s why he becomes hard. It is fear that creates hardness. In fear we close up; we close all doors and all windows. We start living in a very small, dark hole. Our life already becomes death. And we create an armor around ourselves, hard, steel armor, so that we are protected, safe, secure.
This is not a way to live life; this is a way to commit suicide. This is real suicide. This is already entering into your grave, because this type of closed existence will not be able to know anything of truth, of beauty, of love, of bliss, of God. If nothing is allowed in, how can you know what surrounds you? And if you don’t know what surrounds you, you will never be able to know yourself. One can know oneself only in reference to the other. First you have to know the “thou”, then you can know “I”.
Psychologists say the child first becomes aware of the others: the mother, the father, the brothers, sisters, the family, the things that surround him, the room, the walls, the toys. Then slowly slowly he comes closer and closer... then he becomes aware of his body. And then one day he starts feeling himself as a separate individual. First he becomes aware of the other, and then in reference to the other he becomes defined. The other gives the definition.
A person who lives in possessions will not know his real self, because he lives surrounded in things and things can only define you as a thing; they cannot define you as a soul.
So only in deep love does one become aware of one’s soul, because in deep love one becomes aware of the other’s soul, and the other’s soul creates a response in you, creates a resonance in you. Suddenly you are aware of a new dimension, of something which is beyond time and space. The “thou becomes the mirror to know one’s own face. Love is the best mirror to show you who you are.
The closed person never knows who he is, he cannot know. And all that he knows about himself is false; he lives with a false identity. He thinks he is his name and his money and his power and his prestige, and that is all nonsense: he is none of those things. He is something divine, something that exists before birth and that will exist after death... but he will not be aware of it.
One has to become soft, vulnerable, open. One has to become almost like a sponge, so that the sun and the rain and the wind are all allowed, invited, accepted, welcomed, so that existence can penetrate you. And one has to allow existence to reach to one’s deepest core, because that is the only way – if existence goes deep into your being – that you will become aware of your depths. If it penetrates to the very core, you will become aware of your center. And that’s what is meant by self-knowledge.
But one has to learn how to be soft, how to drop all armor, how to open the doors and windows, how to cling no more with fear; how to be in love with the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the people... because love is the key that unlocks your doors. You open to somebody only when you are in love, because then fear disappears, you are no more afraid. You can allow the other to reach you, you can trust. You know he will not hurt you.
The day one trusts the whole existence, that “It is not going to hurt me because I am part of it – how can the whole hurt the part? Because my pain will be its pain, my misery is going to be its misery...” When you are miserable, a part of God is miserable. When you are crying, God is crying because your tears are his tears. All eyes are his eyes and all hands are his hands. He has no other eyes and no other hands. So when your eyes are full of tears and your heart full of pain, God is full of pain and full of tears. How can the whole hurt, wound, the part? It is impossible! It is an unnecessary fear.
The only thing that I teach is: drop this fear. It is absolutely unnecessary. And it is crippling you, paralyzing you. It is a slow kind of poison that kills people, destroys people. They live and yet they live not, they only die. They die over a long period of time: seventy years, eighty years, slowly slowly, part by part. They don’t commit suicide in a single moment, hence it is not known as suicide – but it is suicide.
My observation is that ninety-nine percent of people commit suicide. It is a very rare person who lives, who really lives. That person has to be courageous enough to open himself, to be open to all kinds of experiences, to be open unconditionally.
Become just a welcome to existence: that’s what sannyas is. And when one is soft, one is divine, because one starts soaking up divinity from every dimension and direction. And when one is soft and divine, one is great; there is no other way of being great.
Greatness is never a projection of the ego. Ego always remains mean, tiny, small, and suffers deep down from an inferiority complex. The ego can never be great. It can pretend, it can pose, but all those postures are false, and one knows deep down. Others may be deceived, but how can one be deceived by one’s own projections?
The real greatness happens only when you have known yourself as part of God, when you are no more an island but have become part of the continent of this great existence. Then you are also great, because out of the great only the great can come, and if the whole is great the part is bound to be great.
Keep it (a box) with you.
When are you coming back to live forever here?...
Yes, soon you have to come, because for me you have already arrived! This is your home, this is the home that you have been seeking and searching for. Now you have found it! So finish things soon and come back.
Anand Michel. Anand means bliss; michel means godly, divine. Bliss is godly; misery is ungodly. To be miserable is really to be a materialist, and to be blissful is to be religious.
Religion does not mean to belong to a particular church. It does not mean to believe in a particular dogma or belief system. It does not mean to perform a particular ritual. It does not mean being a Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jew.
To be religious means to be blissful, to be cheerful: cheerful because God is, cheerful because we are in God, cheerful because we are his extensions, cheerful because to be is a great blessing. Just to be is more than one can ask for. A single moment of being is so precious that there is no way to thank God for it, but because it is given freely and we don’t have to earn it, we don’t feel grateful.
The day that Alexander was dying he wanted his physicians to let him live at least twenty-four hours more, because he had promised his mother that he would be back. The mother was very much afraid because he was going on such a long journey to strange lands and he had this mad idea to conquer the world: he may be killed, he may never be back. His mother was very worried. He had promised his mother that, “Don’t be worried! I am a man of word – I will come back. Whatsoever happens I will be back.” And now he was only a few miles away from the mother, he had almost arrived: just twenty-four hours more were needed and he would have reached and fulfilled his word.
But the physicians said, “It is impossible, we cannot do anything.” He was ready to give half of his kingdom, but they said, “Even if you give the whole of your kingdom it can’t be done, it is impossible. Death has arrived, there is no more time left.”
It is said that Alexander wept and said, “If I had known this before, that you cannot extend your life even for twenty-four hours in exchange of your whole kingdom, I would not have wasted my life in conquering the world. Rather I would have lived, loved.” But it was too late.
And many people become aware when death arrives, but then it is too late.
This is good, that you are becoming a sannyasin while you have enough time to live creatively, to live intensely, to live passionately.
Remember one thing: it is bliss that brings you closer to God. Misery is the distance between you and God. Bliss – and the distance disappears; you are suddenly in God. Let cheerfulness be your prayer, let blissfulness be your meditation.
Anand Sagaro. Anand means bliss; sagaro means ocean – the ocean of bliss.
Man lives completely oblivious of his own inner kingdom. He lives as a dewdrop, knowing nothing of his being the ocean. He lives in a very limited world, completely unaware of his infinite potential. He has become identified too much with it: the body, with the mind. These are small things.
It is as if one is standing on the window looking out, and becomes identified with the window, the frame of the window, and starts thinking of oneself as the window. Our eyes are windows, our ears are windows; all our senses are only windows. We are standing behind the windows. These are our ways to connect and relate with the world, but we are not the eyes and we are not the ears.
The meditator slowly slowly becomes aware that he is not the body at all. He starts feeling himself bodiless, he starts feeling himself as consciousness: unconfined, unlimited. That is the freedom that meditation brings, and that is liberation, because if you are not identified with the body, then you were never born and you will never die. Then birth and death are just episodes happening to the body, not to you. You are a witness to it all.
And slowly slowly, as this witnessing deepens, becomes clear, becomes crystallized, life takes off; it starts soaring higher and higher. Then you are on the wing, then the whole sky is yours.
Never be satisfied with being a tiny dewdrop. The ocean is yours, and just for the asking. Jesus is right when he says, “Ask, and it shall be given. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and the doors shall be opened unto you.”
Prem Satyo. Prem means love; satyo means truth. Love is truth – not logic, but love. And these are the two dimensions: the dimension of logic and the dimension of love. The head is the dimension of logic and the heart the dimension of love.
Forget all about the head as if it exists not. Get down to the heart; that is where you belong, that is where our real home is. Let life become a song of love: not a syllogism, not an argument, but a dance.
It is not by arguing that one comes to know truth; truth has nothing to do with argument and proofs. Truth is revealed to those who are mad enough to be in love. Truth is revealed only to those who are drunk with love, who can dance and sing so totally, with such abandon, that they are lost in their dance, that they are no more. Only the dance is, and the dancer disappears. Only the love is, and the lover disappears. Only the song is, and the singer disappears.
In those rare moments truth is found.
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