25

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‌CHAPTER 25

25 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, and pritam means beloved – a blissful beloved. and the beloved is hiding in our own heart. The whole search outside is utterly meaningless. God is within but we seek him in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques, and we go on missing him. God is not in the scriptures either. The scriptures are beautiful, but empty. They are only footprints of somebody who had known the beloved, beautiful footprints in themselves but they are not the real thing.

Jesus knew the beloved. Now his words are collected; they have become the gospels. Now people are pondering over those words, thinking over those words, guessing, speculating, philosophising, wasting their time. Those words don’t contain the beloved, can’t contain the beloved.

The beloved is contained within you. No word can take you to that space. Only when all words have been dropped and all philosophies abandoned, all scriptures burned, metaphorically not literally, when one is utterly alone and not a single thought disturbs one does the beloved emerge. It is a miracle, because he emerges out of your own nothingness. He emerges not out of your mind – because the mind is all that you know; he never emerges out of your knowledge – he emerges out of your heart, he emerges out of your feelings, he emerges out of your sensitivity. Out of your aliveness he emerges.

This is what I call the beloved, and to know the beloved is to be blissful. Not to know the beloved is to remain in misery.

Search within, seek within, because all that one needs is there; it is already provided. You have brought it with you, it is born in you, it is you in fact, it is not separate from you.

Love people, love trees, love animals. Never miss an opportunity to love. The more you love, the closer you come to god.

Veet means beyond, mano means the mind – beyond the mind. The mind is the original sin. The mind is the fall. To be in the mind is to be outside the Garden of Eden. To be in the mind is to expel oneself from the kingdom of god. Adam is not expelled; he himself has fallen. And the story of Adam and Eve is not a story of somebody in the past; it is the story of each single human being, and it happens again and again. It is not a historical event, it is a continuous happening. It is very existential. The world has many beautiful parables but there is no comparison with the parable of Adam and Eve; this is the most fundamental fact of life.

The mind is not your self, the mind is not you, but it is very close, and you can easily get identified; that is the fall. The self is a screen, a pure screen, on which all kinds of things arise, out of which they arise. For a moment they are there and then they disappear again like the waves of an ocean. You cannot call a wave the ocean; if you do, that is the fall. The waves come and go; the ocean remains. The ocean is the background of all the waves, the screen on which they arise, remain, fall, disappear. They are a momentary phenomenon, they are just events, with a birth, with a life and with a death. They are changing phenomena.

The self is like an ocean: thoughts arise in it and desires arise in it, and imagination and fantasy and all kinds of waves arise in it, but the self cannot be identified with any content that arises in it. The self is the context of all contents. It is always behind, beyond, it is always transcendental. In its purity it is only a witness: it only sees what is happening.

The moment you become attached to what is happening, the mind arises. The mind is an attachment. A thought moves and you become attached to it, you become identified with it. You say ‘I am it. I am a Christian.’ This is an attachment. ‘I am a Hindu.’ This is an attachment, this is the mind. The self is neither Hindu nor Christian. The mind is Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan and so on, so forth. The mind is Communist, the mind is Catholic, the mind is this and that. The self is a pure witness. There may be a thought which is Catholic or Hindu or Communist, but it is only a thought; the mind is a witness to it. Knowing it, remaining in this witnessing, the mind disappears. Then you are no more attached, and in that detachment is meditation. Meditation is a state of no-mind.

Adam is mind; Christ is no-mind. Adam is falling away from the self towards the content; Jesus is returning home. Christ-consciousness means the journey back home. The detachment is arising, the attachment disappearing. One is searching for one’s source. Jesus has called it repentance. He does not mean what it has come to mean. The original root simply means returning home; to repent means to return, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, an about-turn. You change your whole direction. You were rushing towards the content and becoming the mind; now you turn your back to the content, you start facing the self. And suddenly the revolution has happened, the transformation has happened! This is real revolution, the only revolution there is; all other revolutions are just pseudo.

The self is a matrix, mater, mother: everything arises out of it and everything dissolves back into it, but it cannot be identified with any particular content. It contains all, hence it cannot be contained by anything. It remains a pure matrix, mater, mother. It is space, pure space.

Buddha has called it zero, shunyam. Out of this zero arises all. That’s the mystery of existence, that it comes out of nothingness and then It disappears into nothingness again. The mystery cannot be solved but it can be lived, and to live it is to be a sannyasin.

Sannyas is a journey back. It is repentance. It is withdrawing one’s self from the fall. It is dropping the mind and becoming the self. And remember: the self is not personal. The mind is personal, the mind is an ego. The self is not an ego, the self is universal. Your mind is yours, my mind is mine, but my self and your self are not separate.

And this is the beauty of falling in love with a master: you can drop the mind, because the mind can only be dropped in trust and love. Otherwise one is afraid. The mind protects, the mind helps you to survive. You can drop the mind only when there is so intense a love that one doesn’t care; then one can risk even one’s survival. And the moment you drop the mind, suddenly you are part of the universal self.

The self is only one; minds are millions. The self is god or nirvana or whatever you will – any name will do. But the whole process is getting disidentified with the mind. Watch the mind and remember that you are not it

[The new sannyasin says she feels it is time for her to change her work and environment. She was a therapist in the West.]

So the change will happen – just wait – no need to think about it. Just being here the change will happen; it is going to happen. And the time has really come.

So just be here, do a few groups, feel me. Get more and more drunk – dance and sing and meditate. For at least one and a half months don’t think about it at all. Mm? just put it aside, and remind me after one and a half months. Things will have settled then, clarity will have arrived, and then things will be very easy.

I know already what is going to happen, but wait! Deva means divine, jivan means life – divine life.

Life is more than just to survive, but millions of people have decided just to survive and not to live. Their only value in life seems to be how to survive, how to survive for a long time. Survival has become their god, and because of it they have missed the whole opportunity of life. Because when survival becomes the goal you become afraid of living. Life is dangerous and one has to risk one’s survival again and again; only then can one live.

If one is too interested and obsessed with survival then one tries to be secure, safe, and in being secure and safe one becomes dead. One loses aliveness. Then one lives only superficially, with no depth, with no height. One’s life is very very dull, flat, boring. There is no adventure, no exploration, and no surprises, no mysteries; and nothing is ever revealed to such a person. He remains closed to existence and existence remains closed to him. They never meet; there is no communion.

Being initiated into sannyas means that from this moment survival will not be the goal, but life, not security but life, not safety but life. And to live intensely and totally even for a single moment is more valuable than to survive for a hundred years. That is not life; that is vegetating.

So the real man knows no other goal than life itself. Living totally is his goal; living moment to moment, intensely, passionately, hot, that is his goal. Then each moment becomes so precious,

such a gift. And only when you know those gifts can you be thankful to god, can you feel grateful, can prayer arise in you.

I see survival as one of the greatest calamities, the idea of survival and the obsession with it and the attachment with it. It is worthless, the whole idea is meaningless. We are not here just to survive and live long – one hundred years or one hundred and twenty years. We are here to live and to know life in its multi-dimensions, to know life in all its richness, in all its variety. And when a man lives multidimensionally, explores all possibilities available, never shrinks back from any challenge, goes, rushes into it, welcomes it, rises to the occasion, then life becomes aflame, life blooms. Life knows what spring is, and then the spring is something that follows you wherever you are; it becomes your very climate, your milieu.

Deva means divine, sagaro means ocean – a divine ocean. Man is not a wave, although he appears like a small wave. But the appearance is not the truth; behind the wave there is a great ocean. The wave is only a door to the ocean. We are not what we appear; we are more than that, far more than that. We are windows into infinity, and not to know it is to remain in unnecessary misery. To know it, one enters into a totally different kind of life, a life of celebration. Because in knowing one’s self as vast, like the ocean, as infinite, like the sky, as eternal as life itself, all fears disappear. And then there is no death, there is no old age! The body gets old, the body dies, but one remains young and one never dies.

But one has to know the real, not the appearance. And the real can. be known. In fact it is not difficult to know it, it should not be difficult to know it – it is real – but we have become too invested in the unreal, and we have lived with the unreal for so long that all our values have become topsy-turvy.

My work here is to make your values natural, to put things in their right place. And the first thing to remember, and the most fundamental, is that you are not the body in which you are, and you are not the mind in which you are. When this realisation becomes an established, experienced fact, your life is immediately part of the eternal. And then all misery disappears, all darkness disappears; the light is there forever.

[A sannyasin couple are returning to the West to open a centre. They say: We’ve lived an incredibly beautiful life while we have been here... it’s been marvellous!]

It will go on growing. It has started and now there is no preventing it. The greatest problem is the beginning. Once the sprout has come out of the earth then it goes on growing of its own accord. The fundamental has happened now wherever you are it will go on growing. Just find at least one or two hours to nourish it, to be with it. And your nourishing it will be of tremendous importance – not only to the new thing that is happening but to your whole life. The more you nourish this new plant, the more the plant will nourish you, and your life will start having a different flavour. The same world, and yet nothing will be the same. And the same work, but with a totally different, new, perspective, with new quality, with new vision. And much more is going to happen, so remain open.

[A sannyasin visiting for the first time is too overwhelmed to speak.]

Much is going to happen – just allow it. And that is the greatest thing to learn here: to allow. It is not much a question of your doing it. Much more important is your allowing it to happen.

All that is great in life happens; it can’t be done. And all that can be done remains mundane, ordinary, mediocre. ‘Happiness’ and ‘happening’ are derived from the same root, and it is significant. It means that happiness is a happening. It is not a question of doing it, forcing it, coercing it. It is more a question of becoming available to it, allowing it, being in a let-go. And in the same way love happens. You cannot do love – it happens! And in the same way beauty, in the same way grace, in the same way meditation, and in the same way finally, god. So learn more and more how not to interfere.

The greatest art in life is the art of non-interference. Lao Tzu called it wu wei: action without action, doing something without doing it. And my whole work consists of wu wei. You have to just be a participant, you have to fall in step with all that is happening and then you can ride on the great energy wave that is available. But it is available only to those who participate; it is not available to the spectators. It can’t be available to the spectators, it is intrinsically impossible for spectators to see it. It is an experience.

So for these four months just forget the whole world. I am your world for these four months; nothing else exists and nothing else matters. And you will go completely transformed... you will go a new man!

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