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‌2 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, samvega means feeling, emotion. God is available through feeling and only through feeling. It is not a question of thinking; and the people who start thinking about god are bound to conclude that there is no god. Their very method prohibits it. It is as if one is trying to listen to music through the eyes. If a person has decided that he will believe in music only when it is heard through the eyes, then there will be no music for him. Eyes can see but they cannot hear. And god is not a question of logic: it is a question of love. It is not through the head that one comes to know god but through the heart, and those who have hearts are bound to know god.

The modern man has by and by lost all track of his own heart. It has become only a physical thing, a pumping station for blood and purification. The spiritual heart is hidden behind the physical heart. Just as the brain is not the mind, so the physical heart is not the true heart. The mind is hidden behind the brain; the brain is only a vehicle of the mind. In exactly the same way, the heart, the real heart, the spiritual heart, is hidden behind the physical heart. The physical heart is only a vehicle for the spiritual heart, but the modern man is deceived, utterly deceived by the physical heart.

When Jesus talks about the heart he means something else. When Sufis talk about the heart they mean something else. Their heart is not part of physiology; it is something behind the physiology, transcendental to it.

So descend from the head deeper into the heart; and you can easily do it, hence the name. It will not be difficult at all – just a little effort and you will start hearing the heartbeat of the spiritual centre of your being.

Deva means divine, asmito means I-am-ness – divine l-am-ness. It does not mean the ego. The ego is a false self, created by the society; it is not your real centre. Your real centre is almost a no-self, but the feeling of am-ness remains. Even when the ego dissolves and the personality is dropped,

then too there is a feeling of am-ness. One still ‘is’ though one cannot say ‘I am a self.’ Self means separate from existence. One cannot say ‘I am separate from self, from existence’ but one certainly ‘is’. This is-ness is asmito. It is an experience of egoless existence. And this can be penetrated slowly slowly by becoming aware.

The process is awareness. Just watch your thoughts, your feelings. Everything changes; only I- am-ness remains permanent. One moment it is anger, another moment it is love, but they go on changing. One moment you are happy, another moment you are unhappy; they go on changing but one thing remains eternally there, and that is I-am-ness. That is never lost, not even in deep sleep; it persists.

It is as if I-am-ness is the mirror and on the mirror a thousand and one things are reflected and they go on passing. There is a procession, the whole traffic of the mind goes on by, but the mirror remains. It simply reflects: when it is confronted by anger it reflects anger; when sadness comes, it reflects sadness. One cloud moves, another comes and another, and it goes on reflecting all kinds of forms and shapes. Still, it is neither of them; it is neither happiness nor unhappiness. It is just a mirror reflecting.

That is asmito, that innermost mirror of consciousness, and to find it is to find god. It is the door into pure existence. But first one has to attain one’s own pure existence, uncontaminated by the idea of ego, and from there one can easily slip into the eternal ocean of god.

Sva means self, samvado means communion – to be in communion with oneself. That’s the whole process of meditation. People are divided against themselves; everybody is living a split life. The difference is only of degree, otherwise everyone on this earth is schizophrenic. Nobody is really healthy because health means wholeness and nobody is whole; everybody is divided.

For centuries the society has been using that strategy to destroy the integrity of the individual. It gives you ideals, it tells you how you should be. It never allows you to love yourself as you are. It creates division: you are one thing, the society says you have to be something else; you become two. Your ideal self creates a constant tension in you. Your real self also becomes a burden because you don’t want it; the society says that it is worthless: Drop it. The real is denied and the unreal is imposed. Now this is the whole misery of man: how can one ever be in bliss if the real is denied, rejected, condemned, and the unreal is appreciated, valued?

The unreal remains unreal but it hovers above your head continuously torturing you: You should be this. And you cannot be anybody else other than who you are, so it becomes a heavy burden. You constantly have to deny your reality. That creates a state of split; one is no more in communion with oneself. This conflict is the root cause of all neurosis, all psychosis, all madness.

The healthy and the whole person is one who has accepted his totality with no rejection, who has never condemned anything, who simply lives the w. ay he is, who has no ideals, who moves moment to moment with the reality that he is as he is. He has tremendous respect for himself, love for himself. He accepts all unconditionally. If he is sad, he accepts his sadness. He doesn’t say ‘I should not be sad’; he knows nothing of the language that consists of shoulds and oughts. He says ‘If I am sad, I am sad; I have to live it. This is me and there is no other me. This is the only me there is.’ And the moment you accept your sadness a great communion arises between you and your sadness. You are bridged, and even sadness becomes beautiful, even sadness starts making your life rich.

CHAPTER 2.

When there is anger the whole person respects the anger. He does not repress it, he does not condemn it, he does not pretend that he is not angry. Whatsoever reality is there, he is totally in communication with it, and he lives with utter acceptance.

This brings miracles in life. When you accept all you become integrated. When you accept all you don’t have any conscious and unconscious division in you; your house is no more divided against itself. When you accept all, through that acceptance a transcendence happens. You are not just the sum total of all that you have accepted; you are something more than the sum total, and that something more is divine.

Once that divineness is tasted then many things disappear on their own accord. Anger simply disappears; not that you drop it, it is no more found. The split person becomes angry. Sadness disappears on its own accord; not that you have done something to change it, to help it go: you have simply accepted. In that acceptance you are no more fighting with yourself. When the fight stops there is a dance, because the energy which was engaged in the fight is there. It becomes a dance, it becomes a song, it becomes a beatitude.

This is my whole teaching, this is what sannyas is all about: total acceptance of oneself and transcendence through that total acceptance. But transcendence is not the goal; it is just a by- product. You are not to attain it, it happens on its own; whenever It happens, it happens on its own. All that you need to do is to fight with yourself no more. Befriend yourself, fall in love with yourself and that brings harmony, accord, communion.

Deva means divine, nirvano means enlightenment. Man lives in darkness, but the capacity to live in light is there; light can be enkindled. Everything is there which can become light, utter light; but it is only a potential. It is like a seed: when you drop the seed in the soil it has the whole programme, it has the whole blueprint, of the tree. All the leaves that will ever be it has in the blueprint; the shape and the colour and the height... and the flowers and their colours and the fruits. In that small seed all is hidden. If you cut the seed you will not find anything there; it is invisible. But drop the seed in the soil, let the seed disappear, and a sprout comes and foliage and the tree starts growing. And whatsoever will happen – the tree may live thousands of years or hundreds of years and may bring millions of flowers – all was hidden in the seed, it was potential there.

God is man’s potentiality. We are just seeds but we have still not fallen into the soil. Sannyas is the courage to fall into the soil and disappear. Then great light arises, light that is eternal, light that is deathless, timeless. That light is god, and to know that light is to be blissful forever. Man’s destiny is great but he unnecessarily lives in a very impoverished state. Man carries all the treasures of the world within him but he remains unaware and remains a beggar.

So let sannyas become a resurrection. Up to now you have been dead. That’s how millions of people are; you will find them all walking around, dead people. They have not lived because they have not known who they are. Life starts only when you know who you are, never before it. Life is only when there is light inside and you have seen your own being and you have seen your own centre. Millions of people go on living only on the surface, oblivious of the depths and the heights, oblivious of all that they are meant to be.

There is a Russian story: A man died and only when he died did he find that he was alive. Death gave him the idea that he had been alive; death became the contrast. Suddenly he recognised the

fact that he had lived for eighty years, he was alive; otherwise those eighty years were nothing but flat boredom.

Sannyas has to become a resurrection. It is coming out of the grave, it is coming out of the flat life, it is coming out of the horizontal process of mundane life. It is changing the dimension from the horizontal to the vertical so that one can move to the heights and the depths.

You carry within you heights of the Himalayas and depths of the Pacific. And when one has known all the possible heights and all the possible depths, then only does one know what a gift life has been. One feels grateful and prayer arises out of that gratefulness.

[A sannyasin is back from the West. Osho suggests some groups for her.]

Much will happen. Just don’t resist and don’t fight. Be in a total surrender so much can happen, so no energy is wasted and no time is wasted.

People waste much energy in resisting. Things can happen very fast but rather than cooperating with me they fight, unconsciously, not aware that they are fighting. It is just their old habits. For their whole life they have been fighting with people; that’s what life is.

A deep trauma is also there because parents have been ordering you and the teachers and the priests and everybody wanted you to obey them, so there is a resistance to obeying. That has become almost built-in.

Here it is not a question of obeying, it is a question of surrender; and these two are totally different. Obeying means you are there, still there and deciding to obey. Surrender means you are no more, there is nobody to obey or disobey; you have simply become a let-go. And then things can move so fast, unbelievably fast. Things which ordinarily take lives can happen in moments.

So just remember this: for these three months put yourself aside; let me be your heart. Then three months can bring something tremendously significant in your being, and that is needed, and it is time. It is spring too, the season to bloom!

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