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‌CHAPTER 3

3 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, sambhava means possibility, potentiality – the possibility of the divine. God is not something that is available ready-made; it is your potential. You can actualise it, but you can miss it also.

Man is like a seed: the seed has the potential to become the tree, but only the potential. It is not yet the tree; it can miss also. And millions of people go on missing. They are born as seeds, they live as seeds, they die as seeds; they never bloom, they never become self-actualised people.

Religion is nothing but the science of self-actualisation. It is the method of transforming the potential into the real. It is the greatest art.

We call a man a great artist if he can transform a stone into a beautiful statue. We call a man a great painter if he can transform an empty canvas into a beautiful painting. But the greatest art is to transform your inner potential into actuality.

Man is born as a tabula rasa, empty, a canvas. The painting is possible, but it will depend on you what shape, what form, it will take. It is your choice, it is your responsibility. Don’t take life for granted. That’s how many people are missing, they think just being born is enough. It is not: it is only a beginning of a great journey. The real has yet to happen.

That is the meaning of your name. Become aware that you are a seed. Become aware that the seed has a great potential to become a tree, that it can bloom in a thousand and one flowers, and that unless it is attained the work remains unfinished.

And one cannot feel fulfilled unless it is actualised, unless all that is possible is actualised. When your whole potential has become the real, that is the moment of great bliss. Then one has arrived, and only then is there rest and contentment and fulfilment.

Deva means divine and bella means time – the time has come for the divine. It is the moment. Whenever one is ready god starts happening. God is already happening, we are just not tuned with all that is happening around us. Once we are ready the music starts entering into our being.

Sannyas means just entering into a different time and a different space. The name of the time is now and the name of the space is here. This is the moment – no other moment – when god is possible. It is either now or never, because all that happens always happens in the now. The mind goes on thinking about that which is gone and that which is not yet and remains in that unnecessary travelling, back and forth, back and forth, past and future. And between the two – past and future – is this little, small atomic moment from where the door opens into the divine, from where the divine enters in you. So the first meaning: the time has arrived, this is the time. Let sannyas become a new birth.

And the second meaning is a beautiful flower. Man blooms only when he is in contact with god. The presence of god, the remembrance of god, functions almost like the sun rising in the morning. When the sun rises buds start opening on their own accord. Just the presence of the sun is enough and something starts happening in the hearts of the buds; they start opening up, they bloom. The presence of god, once felt, becomes a flower in you, a golden flower.

Millions of people die without knowing what was possible, what their destiny was, what great treasure they were carrying within themselves. They never became aware of it and remained beggars all their lives.

No man is born a beggar: every man is born a king or a queen. That’s how it should be, because we come from god and we go to god. All is ours. Each being is a showering, ultimately valuable, but chasing after small things we become small. The man who is continuously obsessed with money becomes like money: a thing, a commodity. Whatsoever we desire, we become. Never desire the mundane. Desire the sacred and you become the sacred, desire heights and you become heights.

Modern man needs a great re-sacrilisation, because these three hundred years in human history, the past three hundred years, have seen a great de-sacrilisation of human consciousness. Religion has been destroyed. Man has been completely conditioned in such a way that even if he thinks he is religious, he is not; his religion has become at the most a social formality. It is a Sunday religion. He goes to church because he lives with people who all go to church and it is good to be with them, it makes him feel that he belongs. Otherwise there is no desire to go to church. He has completely forgotten the language of prayer.

My effort here is to re-sacrilise, to give you again a glimpse, a taste, of the sacred. And once that taste is there, one suddenly blooms. It is not a gradual growth; it is sudden enlightenment. One moment it was a bud, another moment it is a flower; and all is achieved. In that achievement one comes to know ‘I was simply foolish, that’s why I was missing. Otherwise this has been with me always; from the very beginning this has been the case. I was heir to all the bliss that is possible in life! That was my birthright.’ But one has to claim it. Let sannyas become that claim.

Deva means divine, rasika means a lover – a lover of god, a lover of the divine. Religion is a matter of love; it is not a question of thinking. It has nothing to do with logic, reasoning and the head, nothing at all. But it has all to do with the heart, with feeling, with emotions, with love.

Religion is closer to poetry than to mathematics. Poetry has something of the religious in it; mathematics has none. And unless one is a lover, one will never know; the knowing comes through loving. The knowing of god is not ordinary knowledge. It has a very mysterious way of happening. It does not happen through the conventional, orthodox way.

Science is orthodox: religion is rebellion. Science functions through the conventional method of experimentation, observation, analysis, logic, syllogism; calculation is its method. Certainly it arrives at some conclusions, but those conclusions only make us aware of the material. Only matter can be observed, only matter can be measured, and only matter can be calculated, so the very . method of science prohibits all that is mysterious. God is denied – not that science finds that there is no god, just the very method prohibits god. In that very method you have already decided that there is no possibility of any subjectivity emerging.

And god is subjectivity, god is consciousness. God is not an object: you cannot observe it, you cannot see it there confronting you; it is within you. You can feel it as a stirring in the heart, as a pulsation, a new pulsation of love, as a birth of new poetry, as an arousal of danceYes, those

are the ways of feeling god. Love contains all that: poetry, music, dance; it contains all that is non-calculative.

Become a lover and you will know! Love is the only way to know the real. Logic knows the objective, love knows the real; and the real is far more comprehensive. The real contains the objective but the objective does not contain the real. The objective is only a small portion of the real, the visible portion of the real, but the real consists of much that is invisible; and that invisible can only be deciphered, touched, by love.

Sannyas has to become a love affair with god, then only is it true. Deva means divine, samvedan means sensitivity – divine sensitivity.

Man has become very insensitive. Out of fear man has created great armour around himself, he is continuously defending himself. He does not open his doors, he does not open his windows, he does not allow the sun to come in or the winds or the rains; he lives in a completely closed world.

He has become a monad, windowless; this is the problem. And because of this he cannot know what life is, he cannot know what god is. He never comes out of his cell. He has lost contact with existence.

Sannyas is regaining contact, it is coming closer to existence, dropping your armour, defence strategies, opening your windows... although in the beginning it is painful. It is as if you have always lived in darkness and then you suddenly come into light and your eyes cannot open: it is uncomfortable for your eyes because they have become accustomed to darkness.

Man’s whole being has become accustomed to a closed world, although in that closed world there is no joy; it is all suffocation, it is slow suicide. But there is security, safety; and man has become ready to choose safety with suffocation. He is ready to pay the price of suffocation for safety. And the safety is only superficial because death will come and destroy all safety. Death is certain; there is no way to be safe against it.

Then why not live? Then why not move out? Why not dance and sing? Why remain suffocated? There are two possibilities: one can be miserable and secure or one has to accept insecurity and joy; these are the two possibilities. Security and misery come together, insecurity and joy come together; because insecurity is life and security is death.

The whole effort here is to pull you out from your closed, self-imposed imprisonments, and if you cooperate it is not difficult. Once you have seen the light and the open sky you will not be able to believe how you lived so long in darkness, and for what. There is nothing to fear! Life is not our enemy, it is our mother. Existence is our friend, we have to befriend it. And the miracle is that if you love life and you live life, then there is no death.

Loving life, living life, one comes to know that it is eternal. Death exists only because you live closed in security and you don’t allow life to give you the glimpse of the eternal. So this is a paradox: the people who are afraid of death are really creating death themselves. There is no death in reality. Fear of death creates death: love life and death disappears.

It means love-intelligence, love-wisdom. Love has its own intelligence. It is not intellectual but it is tremendously intelligent. It is intuitive, it is a totally different dimension of knowing, and far richer. Its penetration is very deep. Logic only goes round and round; love simply penetrates to the very core of the matter. Only love can penetrate to the core; logic remains on the circumference. You can know a person logically, then all that you know will be superficial.

You will know his name and you will know his colour and you will know his religion and his country, but all that is superficial. The person is not his name, the person is not his colour either and the person was born without any religion. How to know that person which is hidden behind all these facades and masks? Only love is capable of reaching there.

Love is like X-ray: it penetrates all the superficialities. It simply goes in and knows the person as he is, knows the person in his authenticity. So it is only in love that we come to know. Love is intelligence, and the world is missing love-intelligence very much. It has become very skilful in intellectuality but a totally different dimension, of love-intelligence, has been forgotten. So we are living with great technology, great science, but no religion at all, no poetry at all. We are using each other as if we were things. People have become commodities to be used and discarded. People are no more people; because a person becomes a person only when he is touched by love.

When somebody takes your hand with great love and care in his hand, have you watched one thing happen? Your hand becomes alive immediately; your whole consciousness becomes focused on the hand. Just a moment before you were not aware of the hand. Now somebody has taken your hand with great love and you have become aware of your hand. Your hand throbs with a new life! It pulsates with something which was not there just a moment before. Just a moment before you were completely oblivious of its existence. Now it is there so much! Your whole body has disappeared; only the hand is there.

When somebody hugs you your whole body becomes alive. Those people are very poor who have never been hugged; they are living in a dead body. Nobody made their body alive, hence so much hankering to be touched, the need to get some warmth.

People are living at a distance. Even if people are standing close by they keep a certain distance. The body becomes alive when love touches it and the soul becomes alive when love moves it. One comes to one’s total expression only in the moments of love, and that is love-intelligence!

That is the meaning of your name; and you have to live it, you have to materialise it in your life, it has become your being. There is nothing else: god is nothing except a person living totally in love-intelligence. That experience of loving in love-intelligence, living in love-intelligence, is the experience of god. God is the ultimate experience of love.

One can forget all about god. If one remembers love one is bound to reach god!

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