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‌CHAPTER 4

4 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Do you know what Joshua means?...

It is the same as Jesus; the real name of Jesus was Joshua.

It means for which the people have been waiting, the awaited one. Deva Joshua means the divine one for which the world has been waiting.

Prem means love; lalit means beautiful. Love is beautiful, and anything else, that which is not love, is bound to be ugly. Love is the basic ingredient of beauty. Wherever love is missing ugliness is bound to be there. Beauty is the body, love is the soul; beauty is the circumference, love is the centre. So whenever love happens, simultaneously beauty happens. It comes like a shadow following it; it comes necessarily, inevitably. It is not possible that there could be love with beauty missing, it is not possible. It is as impossible as your shadow missing when you are walking in the sun.

Beauty, if it is existing without love, is only an appearance, an empty gesture; it signifies nothing. It is just as if you have painted light, you have painted a candle, but it will not give you light in the dark night.

It only looks like a candle: it is a painting of a candle; It is not real. So whenever there is beauty without love it is only painted beauty. It will not give you solace; and it will not give you joy. It will not give you an insight into the divine. It will not give you any light when there is darkness, and it will be utterly cold because there will be no heart beating behind it which can keep it warm. And whenever beauty is cold, it is uglier than ugliness, became it is a corpse.

So remember that if love is allowed to happen life automatically becomes beautiful, and to live a beautiful life is to live a religious life. To me, aesthetics is synonymous with ethics. To be beautiful is to be moral and to exist beautifully in all possible ways is enough to come closer to god.

The beautiful man cannot lie; lying will make him ugly. You can watch it: whenever you lie, something goes ugly in you, in your eyes, in your face, in your presence. Something becomes restless, something immediately starts shrinking in you. You are no more the same person, flowing, alive, radiant. Guilt has entered, and guilt cripples, paralyses; guilt creates fear, and fear is a poison.

The moment you lie something immediately goes ugly in you, as if suddenly a wound has opened up in you and you are no more healthy, you are ill. That’s exactly the meaning of disease; it simply means disease. Whenever you lie there is disease. You lose your ease, you are no more easy, you are no more restful; you are tense, and tension is ugly. Relaxation is beautiful. The really beautiful person is totally relaxed, but to be totally relaxed one needs to be authentic. Only truth can be relaxing.

So to me ethics is not meaningful. All that is meaningful is an aesthetic sense, a sense for the beautiful, but that is possible only if you imbibe love; you cannot imbibe the sense of beauty on its own. I cannot imbibe your shadow alone; it always comes with you. If I want to invite your shadow I will have to invite you. If you become my guest, your shadow will become my guest.

[The new sannyasin asks: I have the feeling that love is missing and I don’t know how to find it.] It is missing but soon you will find it! Just pass through a few groups and meditations.

It is always there. When we miss it, it does not mean that we have lost it; it simply means that we don’t know the route to it. It is there, just the bridge is broken. The bridge can be made; it is not difficult. That’s what we are doing here: we make rainbow bridges. It is always there, it is at your very source. You cannot live without it, but you can forget about it, and that’s what has happened.

That remembrance will come – remind me after you have done (the group), mm? Good.

Prem means love, anagara means wild, uncivilised, raw. Love is alive only when it is wild. Love is real only when it is raw because only then is it natural.

The more man becomes civilised, the less loving he becomes, because civilisation is a discipline of calculation and love cannot exist with a calculating mind. Civilisation is an effort to improve upon yourself. There are a few things which can be improved, and there are a few things which are already perfect and cannot be improved; and love is that kind of thing.

The mind can be improved: one can go on improving the mind and polishing it, and one can go on accumulating information; there is no end to it. It is said that a single human brain can contain all the information that is contained in all the books existing on the earth this moment. A single human brain can contain all the libraries of the world. That immense possibility is there. Hence man can be educated as far as the mind is concerned.

But love is already perfect. It is a perfect gift, there is no way to improve upon it. If you try to improve upon it you may destroy it; that’s how it has been destroyed. You cannot teach a fish a better way of swimming – or can you? It is already perfect. You cannot teach a bird a better way of flying; it is already perfect. If you try to teach a fish how to swim and you send her to a school to learn swimming, every possibility is that you will kill the fish. The poor fish will be killed by your education; you will confuse her.

There is a famous Aesop parable about a centipede. A crab saw a centipede and could not believe his eyes. One hundred legs! – how could one manage? Which one to put first and which one next and next and next? You have to continuously remember otherwise they will get intertwined, entangled in each other, knotted into each other and you will fall! The crab must have been a great philosopher. He asked the centipede ‘Sir, can I ask a question? How do you manage? – one hundred legs! It must be a constant trouble and puzzle for you. I have been watching you. Just looking at you walking I became so puzzled: which one to put first and which one to follow?’

But the centipede had never thought about it. He said ‘I have never thought about it and nobody has asked me about it. I will think about it and then I will tell you.’

He started thinking; but then he could not take a single step! He wavered and fell. He was very angry at the crab and he said ‘You fool! Now I will never be able to walk, I will be worried which leg to put down first. It has never been a worry: things were being managed somehow, nature was doing the trick. Now you have made me self-conscious, you have destroyed my harmony!’

It is a beautiful parable. This is what has happened to man.

Love cannot be improved upon, it is already perfect. This has to be understood. You need not learn loving. All that is needed is: forget all that you have been taught about love and you will be able to love.

This is the meaning of your name, prem anagara: wild love, natural love.

Agni means fire, pariksha means examination – a fire examination, a fire test. And that’s what disciplehood is: it is passing through a fire in which you as you have known yourself up to now will be burned, utterly burned. Something will be born out of that death, something immensely superior, superb. But that birth is possible only if death happens first. Initiation means death in the deep trust that resurrection will happen. Initiation means crucifixion in the faith that resurrection will follow. Hence the orange colour has been chosen for sannyas: it is the colour of fire.

The ego has to be burned to ashes. Sannyas is really what the symbol in the West of the phoenix represents. When the phoenix is burned utterly in the fire, nothing is left; then a totally new life arises. Each death is a beginning; the greater the death, the creater will be the beginning. If the death is total then total will be the beginning. We have to pay by dying; that courage is needed.

To be a sannyasin is the greatest courage possible, because there is no greater adventure in life; all else is trivial and mundane. This is the search for the heights beyond our reach, this is the search for the impossible; but the impossible happens if there is passion enough. If the passion is intense then the impossible also becomes possible; it all depends on our passion.

The passion is there and it has been gathering and gathering. You have been getting ready for a certain great moment and now the time has come, so be ready for it! Sometimes it happens that one has been waiting for it but when the moment comes, although one has been longing for it, one becomes so frightened that one escapes. But to long for the height is one thing and to pass through the journey, the hazardous journey, is another. Longing is a dream, anybody can desire god, but there are very few people who are ready to pay the price. And the price has to be paid by one’s

own life; nothing less will do. So it happens many times that people who have been desiring and searching, when they really find the door, they escape.

There is a very famous poem of Rabindranath Tagore, it is a parable, in which he says that he had been searching for god for many lives. He was crying and weeping and his love was great, he was ready to do anything and was ready to sacrifice anything, but god was always far away, far away. He would see him sometimes near a star, but by the time he reached there he was gone! He was so elusive. But one day it happened: he reached the door where god lived. He was utterly exhilarated, he was ecstatic; he rushed, he ran to the door. He was just going to knock on the door, then suddenly the thought arose in him that if he was really there, then he would be finished! Then what would he do? The search for god had been his whole style of life for many lives! That was the only thing that he knew, that was the only skill that he had learned: how to search for god. If he found him, then what would he do? If he was really there and was found, he would be finished! Then there would be nothing to be done! He became so afraid, the very idea of succeeding was so fearful that he escaped, and he started searching for him again.

He still cries and weeps and prays and searches and asks people ‘Where does he live?’ although he knows where he lives, because he knows that if he goes in that direction he is finished!

The seeker will have to be dissolved in the sought; that is the death I am talking about, that is the fire one has to pass through. Once one has passed through that fire, that door, that frightening experience when one dissolves and starts falling into an abyss... if one has accepted that then one has passed the examination. Then immediately all is joy, all is ecstasy.

[The new sannyasin says: I’m just a little bit worried about when I leave here and I go back to Mozambique. There’s no Rajneesh centre there and no sannyasins.]

You will become my centre... you will become my centre. That’s how my centres start. Don’t be worried! And soon sannyasins will be coming – I will manage it!

[A sannyasin who is leaving says he is confused: Sometimes I think I know and I find I didn’t know at all; I just assumed I knew.]

Learn to live with the confusion. Don’t be in a hurry to conclude. Confusion is not something necessarily wrong. Don’t label it confusion. Labelling is wrong. Sometimes just a wrong label can create so much trouble. It is not really confusion: it is a state of transition, of change. You are uprooted from the old soil and you are searching for the new, and in-between the two there is bound to be this. It is not confusion, it is simply an unsettled, growing state. It is growth, and whenever there is growth one can label it confusion. But by labelling it confusion you have wrongly interpreted it; then you start somehow to solve it. If you call it growth then there is no hurry to solve it. In fact you have to support it: it is growth! If you call it confusion you have condemned it; now you have to find some way to come out of it.

There is no need to come out of it; learn to live with it. Learn to live with all kinds of states that will be coming. And if it is sometimes confusion, what is wrong in confusion? We have been wrongly taught that one should be absolutely clear. Only fools can be absolutely clear, only fools are certain.

It happened once: a great philosopher was saying to his disciples that only fools are certain. A disciple asked ‘Sir, are you absolutely certain about that?’ and he said ‘Yes.’

Confusion is natural: it is the creative chaos in you. It is out of this chaos that you will be born, it is only out of this chaos that creativity begins. Call it Creative Chaos, don’t call it confusion. Life is a mystery. How can one be certain about it? It is such a flux and everything is changing so fast and has always been changing. How can you be certain about a river? How can you be certain about the form of a cloud? How can you be certain about life? It is the form of the cloud, it is the flow of the river, it is the wind that passes invisibly through the pines. You simply hear the sound; you cannot catch hold of it, you cannot grab it, you cannot reduce it to a conclusion. All conclusions are false because all conclusions are about something dead. Life can never be enclosed in a conclusion, in a theory, in a hypothesis.

Enjoy it, love it, learn to live with it. I know from where the problem is arising: your ego cannot feel rooted, your ego is trembling because the ego needs certainties. With certainty there is safety. The ego is very much afraid of uncertainties; it goes into a panic. It is the ego that is going into panic, it is not you, but you are still identified with the ego, you still think in terms of the ego.

Learn to live with all kinds of things: sometimes it is sadness, sometimes it is joy, sometimes confusion, sometimes it is certainty! Let things happen as they happen and don’t be in a hurry to change them. Let them be as they are and be totally with them. Then confusion disappears but certainty never arises; and that is the most beautiful thing that can happen to anybody. Let me repeat it: confusion disappears; the moment you are not antagonistic to confusion it has disappeared. The moment you start loving it and enjoying it, it has disappeared; it has become mystery. You have transformed it, it is just a magical transformation. The moment you drop your judgmental attitude of ‘This is wrong, I should be certain. I am not certain and this is not good’ – it is perfectly good. It is far more beautiful than certainties, because certainties are non-growing and confusion is growing; confusion has a great value. And once you start enjoying it, the beauty of uncertainty, the openness of uncertainty, the adventure of uncertainty and the thrill of the insecure, once you start enjoying it, where is the confusion? It is gone! It was in your interpretation.

When confusion is gone I am not saying that certainty is arrived at. No. If certainty is arrived at you will fall into confusion again, because you will cling to this certainty. And life goes on changing; again there will be confusion. No certainty arrives; confusion disappears and there is no certainty. There is no confusion, no certainty either. That is the most beautiful state one can be in. That’s from where the doors of the mind open to the divine. Enjoy it and you will be tremendously benefited.

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