8

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‌CHAPTER 8

8 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem Maryan. Prem means love; maryan is made of two words, mary and hannah. Mary means rebellion, hannah means prayer. Your full name will mean love, rebellion, prayer. That’s exactly my definition of the sannyasin: he has to be love, he has to be a rebel, and he has to be prayerful.

Love alone, without rebelliousness, is impotent. Love alone, without prayer, is mundane. Rebellion alone, without love, is destructive. Rebellion alone, without prayer, is political. Prayer without love is formal; it never goes deep in your heart, it remains a head trip. Prayer without rebellion is conformist, it supports the established values – and they are never religious. It supports the established church, which is a political phenomenon; it has nothing spiritual in it. A man like Jesus never belongs to a church, cannot belong.

All these three together create a symphony. Love with rebellion has a sharpness, an intelligence, about it. Love with prayer has the possibility of transcendence of all that is ordinary, of all that is mundane. It gives you wings to reach to the ultimate.

Be all three! It is easy to be one out of the three; it is difficult to be two together; it is almost impossible to be three simultaneously. But that impossibility is the challenge.

And when one accepts the challenge of the impossible, the impossible becomes possible: in that acceptance, in that very acceptance, the impossible becomes possible.

We are entitled to miracles, but we never try; we never accept the challenge of the mysterious existence – the existence calling us to be lovers, to be rebels, to be prayerful. The moment we accept the challenge – knowing its impossibility, in spite of the mind saying that it is impossible – when we go into it, the miracle happens; the impossible becomes possible.

Anand Rita. Anand means bliss; rita means a child of light. The full name will mean a blissful child of light. And my emphasis is on the quality of being a child.

The child functions out of no-knowledge, hence he feels awe, which is the most fundamental religious quality. He is surprised by each and every thing; he never takes anything for granted. He is wonder through and through. He is excited, ecstatic. A small flower or a small colored stone is enough to make him ecstatic, as if he was just waiting for an excuse. A butterfly is enough for him to give the sense of beauty.

He is overflowing with energy; he never seems to be tired. Even if he falls asleep, it is not out of tiredness, he is not exhausted. Sleep is not a need but a luxury for the child. That too is an adventure for him: to go into dreams, into beautiful dreams, to utterly relax and be part of the whole.

All these qualities have to be imbibed by the sannyasin. Be full of wonder! It is not knowledge that can become a bridge to God, it is wonder that becomes the bridge. Don’t function from the state of knowing, because if you start functioning from the state of not-knowing, then each thing brings great joy, then nothing is repeated. It is the mind full of knowledge that feels repetition.

The child never feels repetition. Tell a story to the child and he says, “Say it again!” – and he says, “Say it again!” And each time he becomes more excited. You will feel tired of saying it again and again, but he is not tired because he does not accumulate, he does not conclude.

And the greatest thing that can happen to man is to be a child again – to be a child deliberately, consciously. The first childhood was bound to be lost, but the paradise can be regained. It is natural for the first childhood to go; it cannot be protected in the nature of things. Adam and Eve have to leave the garden of Eden; that is a sheer necessity of nature, it is not a sin.

Each child has to leave the wonder world, the fairy world. He has to move out of it into the world of knowledge, conclusions, information. It is a great loss, but this is part of growth. We can enjoy a thing only if we have lost and regained it again.

Take the fish out of the sea, then it becomes aware for the first time that it was in the sea and that the sea is its existence, its life, its very life. Now it longs to be back; it is thirsty, it is dying without it. It has never been thankful to the ocean before. Because it was always in the ocean it had never felt the separation. If it can go back to the ocean, it will feel so grateful, so blissful, and it will never forget now.

The child has to lose his childhood, and it has to be regained again. To be a sannyasin means being initiated into a second childhood.

Anand Russell. Anand means bliss; russell means foxlike. Fox symbolizes intelligence, cleverness. Almost in all mythologies of the whole world, of every culture and civilization, the fox is a symbol for intelligence. So your full name will mean blissful intelligence.

Intelligence does not mean intellect; intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. Intellect is a pseudo coin: it pretends to be intelligent – it is not. Intellect is borrowed; intelligence is your own.

Intellect can be taught. That’s what goes on in the schools, colleges, universities: it is intellect that is being trained, because it can be manipulated from the outside. The state, the church, the society, can manipulate it, and they have been manipulating it for thousands of years.

But intelligence is absolutely individual; it cannot be manipulated from the outside. It makes you free. It is your own capacity to see into things. It is not teachable; you have to discover it. It is already there, hidden somewhere deep down in your being, covered by layers and layers of intellect, of information, knowledge.

One has to peel oneself like an onion. That’s the whole process of meditation: peeling yourself like an onion, layer by layer. And ultimately, what is left? – just nothingness. When all the layers have been peeled, nothing is found, that nothing becomes the explosion... of your intelligence.

In that nothing for the first time your own vision arises, your own capacity to see. You become an individual. And then one lives according to one’s own light, then one is a light unto oneself.

Anand Ginette. Anand means blissful; ginette means a white wave – a blissful white wave.

Man is part of an unknown, invisible ocean. We are all waves. To think ourselves separate from the ocean is to create misery for ourselves, because out of a lie only misery is born.

Bliss is the shadow of truth, misery a byproduct of some basic untruth. And this is fundamentally untrue: to think oneself separate from existence. To be an ego is the fundamental untruth. We are not separate; we are waves of one ocean.

Remember that one has to unhook oneself from the patterns of the ego. And the more you remember, the less is the possibility of the ego becoming your prison. Slowly slowly, as remembrance grows, as you become more and more alert that the ego is a false phenomenon, it loses its grip on you. And the day the ego is not found even for a single moment, you are out of its grip. You have tasted the divine, you have known the whole. Then you will never be the same again.

Think of the ocean and forget about the wave. The wave cannot be separated from the ocean; it exists as part. It is the ocean, the dance of the ocean. That’s what every being is: a dance of God. And there are different dances, different rhythms, different songs... and life is rich. A tree is dancing God’s dance in one way, the bird in another way, and so on, so forth.

This universe is really a universe; uni means one. It is not a multiverse, it is not many. Although many appear on the surface, just like so many waves appear on the surface of the ocean, but we know behind each wave it is the same ocean.

Remember it, don’t forget it; your name will remind you again and again. And as the remembrance penetrates in the heart, as it becomes your own realization, life is redeemed: redeemed from all fear, from all death; redeemed from all misery, from all darkness.

Joy is a function of the whole; when we are one with the whole, joy arises. Misery is in separation.

Prem Bettina. Prem means love; bettina comes from a Hebrew root which means God. Your full name will mean goddess of love.

Each man is a god, each woman a goddess, because only God exists. God is synonymous with existence. Hence the tree is a god and the mountain is a god and the moon is a god. God is not someone special; God is not a person but existence itself. The quality of being alive, that’s God.

And love helps you to be more alive than anything else. Without love, a man is almost dead, a corpse which breathes but is not alive. Life means overflowing love; only then do you bloom in thousand-and-one flowers. It is only love that will make you aware of what life is; and to know life is to know God.

To know life is not to know about life. To know life is to live life in intensity, with passion, with totality; that’s the only way to know life. By being more alive one knows life, and by being more alive one becomes more divine.

People live at the minimum, hence they go on missing God. God is found only when you live at the optimum, when the torch of your life is afire, from both ends together. In a total intensity of love, a single moment is enough to know God, because in total intensity a single moment becomes eternity. Otherwise one can go on dragging for lives and lives. And that’s what we have been doing – dragging and dragging. Life seems to be a great load, a burden to be carried somehow. Life should be a dance; it can be a dance, it is meant to be a dance.

That’s my message: love life, and with such intensity, with such fire, that you can reach to the optimum of your being. It is there that the meeting with God happens.

Prem Pratibha. Prem means love; pratibha means genius – genius for love.

Love is available only to those who go on sharpening their intelligence. Love is not for the mediocre... love is not for the unintelligent. The unintelligent person may become a great intellectual. In fact unintelligent people try to become intellectuals; that is their way of hiding their unintelligence. Love is not for the intellectual. Love needs a totally different kind of talent: a talented heart, not a talented head.

Love has its own intelligence, its own way of seeing, perceiving, its own way of understanding life, its own way of comprehending the mystery of existence. The poet is far closer to it than the philosopher; and the mystic is exactly inside the temple. The poet is on the steps and the philosopher is just outside. At the most he can approach the porch, but never the steps. He goes on round and round. He goes on moving around the temple, studying the outer walls of the temple, and becomes enchanted so much that he forgets completely that the outer walls are not the real temple because the deity is inside.

The poet almost reaches the door, but the door is so beautiful that he becomes hypnotized. He thinks he has arrived – what more can there be? The philosopher is lost in guessing what is inside. He never goes there, he simply thinks, philosophizes. The poet tries to penetrate into the mystery but gets hooked near the door. The mystic enters into the very innermost sanctum of the temple.

The way is love and the way is a loving intelligence. When love and intelligence meet together you create the space in which all that is possible to a human being can become actual. A loving intelligence is what is needed. Intelligence alone becomes intellectual, love alone becomes

sentimentality, but a loving intelligence never becomes intellectuality or sentimentality. It gives you a new kind of integrity, a new crystallization.

And that is where people become awakened: awakened to the truth of existence, awakened to the truth of their own being. That’s where one becomes a Buddha. The Buddha simply means the one who is no more asleep, who is no more dreaming, who is fully awake.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I’m still afraid of the emptiness, Osho. I fill it with food and drinks.]

Simply accept it. It is nothing wrong – it is the door to the ultimate. But the door has to be empty otherwise how will you enter? You cannot enter through a wall From far away the door looks empty and dark, and you are unnecessarily frightened. Come closer to it, accept it

Emptiness is not emptiness but the beginning of fullness, but you have to take a plunge into it, and you can take the plunge only when you accept. If you reject it from the very beginning you will turn your back towards it, and then you will be continuously afraid and escaping. And you cannot escape – nobody can escape from God. Sooner or later one has to come to face the reality, one has to encounter it. So why waste time in escaping and hiding and protecting yourself? – and protecting yourself from something which is going to be a bliss, a benediction?

In the East we have been searching for emptiness for centuries, and the day somebody finds it he is exhilarated. He has come to the door, now the meeting is not far away. Just a few steps more and one will be inside the temple.

Emptiness is one side of fullness, one aspect of fullness, the other side of the coin. You will have to accept it, respect it, love it. I can understand: in the West people are afraid of emptiness, hence they are continuously trying to be occupied with something or other. Any nonsense is okay if it keeps you occupied. Remain glued to the chair for five hours, watch the TV, or go to the movie and see some stupid film, or read some detective novel. But go on doing, don’t allow gaps, because whenever there is a gap you are reminded of the emptiness.

We in the East have done just the opposite: we have been in search of it and we have found that it contains the greatest treasure of life. And when I am saying this, I am saying it not because scriptures say so but because I know it is so.

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