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‌CHAPTER 17

17 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Baba has three meanings. One is: the small child, the innocent child, the child who cannot yet speak, because the moment a child starts speaking he is no more a child; he has become part of civilisation. Language is the world of civilisation; it is language that makes man different from animals. If language disappears then man will be just as one of the animals; there will be no distinction. It is language that creates civilisation, culture, philosophy, mind. It is out of the bricks of language that the mind is built.

So a child is innocent when he cannot speak. Then he lives in the world of the animals; he is still in the Garden of Eden. The moment he starts speaking he is no more a child. So baba is the small child who cannot speak; that is one meaning.

The other meaning is a very old man who has again learned how to be silent – the grandfather. In the East the grandfather almost always meant the person who has become a sannyasin, because in the East we had four stages of life.

If life is one hundred years, then each stage has to consist of twenty-five years. Twenty-five years for the student: he will be in the university and he will live a life of discipline. Then the next twenty-five years, for the householder. He will get married, he will have children, he will become part of the world. Then the third twenty-five years is getting ready to leave the world, turning towards the forest; twenty-five years in the world and then twenty-five years is getting ready to get out of the world. And by the time a person is seventy-five he will be a grandfather. He leaves the world, he renounces the world, he goes to the mountains. to the forest. Then he is again called Baba.

Now again he is back to being a child. He learned the language, the ways of the world, and now he has dropped them all. He is again a clean slate. Now he knows nothing. That is the state when Socrates says ‘I know only one thing: that I know nothing.’ Then Socrates is a baba; again he is

a child. That’s what Jesus means when he says ‘Unless you are like small children you will not be able to enter my kingdom of god.’

So ‘baba’ is really a very paradoxical word: the smallest child and the oldest man. The circle is complete: the old man is falling back into the source, again becoming a child. Hence slowly slowly the third meaning came out of it: the holy man. So it is beautiful.

Paritosha means contentment, infinite contentment... not just satisfaction but contentment. And there is a lot of difference between the two, not only difference; they are polar opposites to each other. It may not be so in the dictionary but in life it is so! In the dictionary contentment is satisfaction and satisfaction is contentment; they are synonymous. But in life it is not so: they are diametrically opposite.

Satisfaction is a false contentment; it is imposed. It is just a consolation. For example, one is poor. It hurts to be poor and so one starts creating a satisfaction around it of ‘Poverty is beautiful, poverty is spiritual,’ of ‘Look, Jesus says “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”’ He means something totally different; he does not mean poverty. ‘Look, Buddha renounced the kingdom and became a beggar.’ Certainly he renounced the kingdom because he attained to a higher kingdom, but he never became a beggar; in fact he became the real emperor.

But the man who is poor... And it feels very ego-shattering: ‘I am a failure. I cannot succeed. I cannot make money, have power, prestige. I am falling very short. Life is disappearing and I am just a failure. To hide this wound he creates a beautiful philosophy of satisfaction. He says ’Satisfaction is the real thing. Riches don’t bring happiness. It is satisfaction that brings happiness.’ He philosophises, he rationalises, he pretends that he is very happy. But all that is pretension; deep down he knows that it hurts.

If he has really understood then it is contentment. If he had understood that each moment is so joyous, wherever you are and whatsoever you are – poor or rich, successful or unsuccessful, famous or notorious, known or anonymous – wherever you are each moment is such pure joy, such sheer bliss... One who has known it is contented. Then there is no philosophy of contentment around it: it is simply your state.

Contentment arises out of meditation, and satisfaction arises out of the sense of inferiority; one wants to hide it, to cover it up. Contentment arises out of an inner well-being. And satisfaction. You know the wound and you don’t want to see it, so you cover it up with beautiful flowers. You paint it with beautiful colours; deep down the wound remains. In fact it goes deeper; the more you hide it, the deeper it goes. Slowly slowly it will poison your whole being, it will destroy your life.

I am against the philosophy of satisfaction but I am all for contentment, and the distinction has to be understood. The man who philosophises about satisfaction will start clinging to poverty. Even if a chance arises that he can become the emperor he will not become. It will go against his philosophy. He will become attached to his poverty. He has been proclaiming so many beauties about it, now how can he renounce it? That will be too inconsistent.

But the real man of contentment can be contented as poor, can be contented as rich. He has no attachment. He is not attached to riches, he is not attached to poverty either. He is not attached at

CHAPTER 17.

all, so whatsoever god brings he is happy to receive it. If he makes him a king, he is a king; if he makes him a beggar, he is a beggar, but deep down he remains the same, unaffected. His joy is not contaminated by anything. That is contentment.

Deva means divine, madhuro means sweetness. God is a taste: it is not an argument. You have to eat him to know him. It is not a hypothesis to be understood intellectually, it is not a philosophy at all; it is a taste on the tongue. And god has to be lived, loved, absorbed. Unless god starts flowing in your bloodstream, starts beating in your heart and becomes part of your marrow, you will not know him.

That’s why Jesus says to his disciples ‘What I am giving you is my body – eat it!’ Each disciple has to be a cannibal: he has to eat the master, and not only eat, he has to digest him. And then great sweetness spreads all over one’s being.

That sweetness is eternal. That sweetness has many facades to it. In one sense it is beauty, in another sense it is truth, in still another sense it is goodness, love, celebration. It is a multi-faceted diamond, but the basic thing is the taste: it is sweetness.

Deva means god, svagato means welcome – welcome to god. God is not a goal and god can never be reduced to Being a goal because god is not far away and god is not in the future. God is now and god is here, and god is within you. To make a goal out of god is to miss him. Because the goal has to be somewhere else; there has to be a distance between you and the goal. Time is needed, space is needed. If you create god as a goal, you will put him far away in space and time and that is the way of missing. Because he is already here – wherever you are he is there and he is always there. So the first thing to be understood is: god is not a goal but your very source of being, he is your very ground of being. One cannot search for him, one can only receive him. One can become an opening to him. One can drop one’s defences; that’s all that is needed. No other search, no other effort, just a total receptivity.

That is the meaning of svagato: a total welcome. In whatever way he penetrates you, you will not resist; in whatever form he comes, you will recognise him. You will not create barriers, you will not be walls; you will be all bridges. That is the meaning of welcome. You will be a multi-dimensional bridge. And that opening is sannyas.

Sannyas means vulnerability. It means surrender, it means trust, it means god is, and if you are missing then something is wrong with you. It is not that god is not; something is wrong with you. Maybe you are keeping your eyes closed. The sun has risen, it is morning but you are still keeping your eyes closed, hence you are in darkness.

Open your eyes – that is svagato, that is welcome. Maybe the wind is there but your doors are closed and you are unnecessarily living in a suffocated, stale room. Open the doors, that is welcome, and the wind comes in, the rain comes in, the sun comes in and god comes in millions of forms. These are all his forms, his ways of coming.

Slowly slowly as one opens up, more and more life starts happening. And when one is utterly open – not even a single door is closed any more, not even a window, when all the walls have disappeared, one is so open that one is under the open sky – then god is available from all the dimensions. He

starts pouring into you from all sides, and not only from without, he starts rising from within you too. Then it is all god, inside, outside; then god is the guest and god is the host. Then it is god in god’s embrace. This is what Christian mystics have called ‘unio mystica’, the mystic union.

Deva means divine, nirodh means cessation – a divine death. That’s what sannyas is all about: the end of all that you have been up to now and the beginning of something you have not even dreamt about the cessation of the known and the beginning of the unknown. It is a discontinuity with the past. This moment, the moment of initiation, is a death and a rebirth. It is a death of the old identity, the way you have always understood yourself, the way of the ego, the feeling that you are separate from existence, the identity with the body and the mind. With one stroke, one has to drop it, in one single blow. And one starts absolutely fresh, from ABC, as if one is born again. And it is very easy to become new, because the question is only of our clinging to the past; the past is not clinging to you. So if you drop it, it is dropped; it is just a question of decision.

And sannyas is that decision. It is suicide, and the true suicide, but out of this suicide begins the journey of the eternal. Out of this death arises a life that knows no end. That’s the meaning of your name.

Deva means divine, ushma means warmth – divine warmth. Death is cold, life is warm. Matter is cold, consciousness is warm. Hate is cold, love is warm. So drop all that is cold from your life and live more and more in warmth. The colour orange represents fire. It represents all that is warm, not only warm but hot too! Live in a hot way.

People are living at the minimum, hence they never come to know the significance, the meaning, of life. The meaning of life is revealed only at the optimum. When one lives really hot, when life is a passionate affair, when it is adventure and risk, when one is not just living half-heartedly, then only do the mysteries open their doors.

So avoid all that is cold, search for warmer dimensions of being, and you will be moving towards god, because god is the hottest thing in the world!

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