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‌CHAPTER 1

1 April 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, elli is Hebrew; it means goddess – goddess of love. In fact God and love are synonymous. To be in love is to be in God. To know love is to know God. There is no other proof for God except love, and there is no other worship either. All other temples and churches are false, pseudo, except for the temple of love. But that temple already exists in the heart. We are not to create it. We have forgotten it, we only have to remember it. The heart awakened, the heart again alive, pulsating with love, is what sannyas is all about.

The whole work here consists of helping you to get back to your heart. The society has helped you to go as far away as possible. The head is the farthest from the heart. The physical distance is not much between the heart and the head, but the spiritual distance is infinite, so much that they are unbridgeable. The man of the head cannot know God and the man of the heart only knows God and nothing else.

So forget concepts about God – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Listen to the heart, go according to the heart, and the heart will take you to the ultimate.

Prem Uwe. Prem means love, uwe means wellborn – love well-born. Man comes with the potential of love, but it is only a potential; it has to made actual. Only when love becomes actual is it wellborn, otherwise it remains a seed, and the seed is not going to be fulfilled. Only when the seed disappears and becomes a tree, and the tree blossoms, will there be fulfillment.

So there are two births: one is the physical birth – man is born as a seed; another is the spiritual birth – man is born as love, as a spirit. Sannyas is initiation into the second birth: it will make you twice-born.

Jesus says to Nicodemus: Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of God. He is talking about sannyas; he is talking about a revolution, a conversion. He is talking about changing

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the potential into the actual, dying as one has existed and being born in a new way, in a totally new way, with a new perspective, with a new vision, with a new life ahead.

Prem means love, elaine means light. Man is a darkness without love, just utter darkness, with not even a single star shining, not even a small candle of light. With love the whole sky of the inner becomes full of stars. With love you start becoming luminous. Love and light are made of the same stuff. Light is the physical expression of the same energy as love, which is its expression in the spiritual world. Love is spiritual light, light is material love, but they are expressions of the same energy. Light is the lowest rung, love is the highest, but the ladder is the same.

One who wants to become light will have to follow the path of love because only love can enkindle your being. And to live without light and to live without love is not to live at all. It is a pretension; it is a dragging. It is a slow suicide. but not life at all.

Each moment has to be devoted to love and then life becomes worship. Then one need not go anywhere in search of God; God comes to the person who knows what love is, God comes to the lover of his own accord.

Anand means bliss. naren means a king – a king of bliss. That’s what we are supposed to be, meant to be, but we have fallen into deep sleep and we have forgotten who we are. In that forgetfulness, emperors are behaving like beggars. This is the greatest insight that the East has attained in the inner mystery of human existence – that we are kings, but we have forgotten it. In that forgetfulness we exist as beggars, and we create all kinds of sufferings because of that forgetfulness. We are not to become emperors, we already are. We just have to wake up, to wake up to the reality of our being, and to wake up is to be meditative.

Meditation is the technology of waking up, of dropping dreams, of dropping sleep and coming back home. All that we can desire is already given. The treasure that we cannot even dream of is already within our being. Hence Jesus goes on saying again and again: The kingdom of God is within you. But people go on searching in the without, and if it is within, it cannot be found in the without; if it is in, it cannot be found outside. The more we search, the more we feel frustrated, because each effort fails, is doomed to fail, unless one is fortunate enough to turn inwards.

This moment can become one of the most fortunate of your whole life if sannyas becomes a turning in, a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn. It is possible; it is not difficult at all. It is our birthright.

Deva means divine, eva means life – divine life. Life can be lived in two ways: one – the mundane, the ordinary, the life of desires, possessions, things; the other – the sacred, the life of non- possessiveness, the life of consciousness, of love, compassion. If one lives life only in the outside it remains mediocre and it does not satisfy. It cannot satisfy unless one starts living from the inner springs. Then life takes a quantum leap. It starts having a new flavor, a new joy – a joy which is uncaused, and a flavor that comes from one’s own innermost core. It is not given by anybody so it cannot be taken away. Even death cannot take it away; it is yours forever.

Life has to lived from the within. I am not against the without, but the without is not enough. That’s why Jesus says: Man cannot live by bread alone. He does not mean that man can live without bread – bread is a must, but to live by bread alone is not to live at all. Then life will not have any

celebration, then it will not have any poetry. It will not have any beyond, any transcendence to it; and joy is in transcendence, in surpassing oneself again and again, in reaching to new peaks, in reaching to new heights, new plenitudes of being. Joy is always in that great adventure when you move from the known into the unknown. That moment, that movement, between the known and the unknown, is the moment of joy. Those rare moments are real moments, authentic moments. All else is dream stuff.

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