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CHAPTER 14
14 April 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem Lennart. Prem means love, lennart means brave as the lion. Love needs the heart of a lion – the courage. The greatest courage in life is to dissolve yourself in love; there is no other bravery greater than that.
Everybody is a coward as far as the death of the ego is concerned because the death of the ego seems to be, appears to be, our death. It is not, but there is no way to prove it unless you have known it yourself; hence courage is needed to step into the dark, into the unknown.
Love is the alchemy of dissolving your ego; and once the ego is gone, God is. God is only when the ego is gone.
Shraddho Yannis. Shraddho means trust, yannis is a Greek form of the Hebrew john; it means God’s gracious gift – trust, God’s gracious gift. Trust does not mean faith. Faith is phoney; faith is blind. Faith is superstitious; you have not known, you have simply believed. And all belief is out of fear; man believes only because he is afraid. He clings to beliefs so at least he can feel safe, secure.
Trust is a totally different phenomenon, diametrically opposite to belief, to faith. Trust is an experience. k can happen only with the help of God. You cannot create it. You can create belief; you can become a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. There are three hundred religions on the earth, you can choose any; but that will be your belief, and your belief is not going to help. Your belief will remain a prison for you. Your belief will be a sheer wastage of your life, because the more you believe, the less you enquire; and there is no truth without enquiry. Then how does trust happen?
Trust comes from God. All that is needed on your part is to be a welcoming heart, to be receptive, to be open. Belief makes you closed. So this looks paradoxical but this is how it is: the believing man never comes to know what trust is. Neither does the non-believer ever come to know what trust is,
because non-belief and belief are cousin-brothers, they are not different. Non-belief is also a kind of belief. It is anti, but a kind of belief; negative, but a kind of belief. Trust comes to the mind that neither believes nor disbelieves, that has nothing to do with belief or disbelief, that is simply open, that has no prejudice, that says “I am available – if truth comes, I will welcome it.”
That’s how my sannyasins have to be: neither believers nor non-believers, but open, feminine, vulnerable. And then it comes, it certainly comes, and when it descends on you, it transforms you. Then it is nothing of your own; it is from God, it is God’s gift.
Be loving and be open and one day you will be surprised that something has happened to you: a tremendous trust has arisen in you – trust in existence, in life, in everything that is. That trust is the true foundation of a religious consciousness.
Veet Dan. Veet means going beyond, dan means a judge. It can also mean: God is my judge. But my own observation is that God is never a judge. God loves – how can he judge? Love can never judge. Love only loves, it loves unconditionally .
The very idea of God being a judge is a fabrication of the priests to create fear and to create greed in people – greed for heaven and fear of hell. And once people are afraid they become slaves. They are no more human beings, they turn into sheep; and that’s what the priest has always wanted them to be.
There has been a conspiracy between the priest and the politician, and now, the professor has also joined in it. Religious institutions, educational institutions, the state – they have all joined in one conspiracy: to transform every human being into a machine, into a slave. The oldest strategy was to create fear: God is a judge, be afraid!
God is not a judge. God is a lover, and love can never judge. Judgment always means that you are impartial; judgment always means that you follow a certain code of conduct; judgment always means that principles are more important than people, that people can be sacrificed for the principles but never vice-versa.
If God is a judge then he cannot be a lover, because a lover means that you are no more impartial; you are a participant in existence. God is part of your being: whom is he going to judge – himself? Who is going to be judged? If he condemns you, he condemns himself. It is his existence, it is his expression. If you are this way, this is how he created you; he wanted you this way.
The very idea that God is a judge creates fear. You start living out of fear, and out of fear you can only slowly die, you cannot really live.
So go beyond that idea that God is a judge – one thing – and don’t be a judge yourself.
Jesus has a tremendous statement; nobody else has ever made such a statement. He says: Judge ye not evil. Even evil has not to be judged. The emphasis is: don’t be judgmental, because if you are judgmental you will remain in the mind, hung up there, because all judgment is of the mind. If you become nonjudgmental you will have to descend from the mind to the heart; the heart is a lover and the heart knows no judgment.
You become nonjudgmental and let your God be also not a judge but a lover. You be a lover and let your God also be a lover. That is my message to you, that is your initiation.
Prem Susan. Prem means love, susan means a graceful white lily. It is made of two words: the first part means white lily, and the other part comes from hannah, which means grace. Your full name will mean love, the graceful white lily.
Love is the flowering of the heart, and it is white. White contains all the colors – that is the beauty of white. It contains the whole rainbow; white means all the seven colors in symphony. White is multidimensional. No other color is so colorful, because in each color six other colors are left out – in white they are all involved. It is the richest color, but one needs eyes to see the richness of white.
And the lily is a very ordinary flower, but in its beauty, extraordinary. That too is very symbolic: once you have eyes to see, the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. If a poet looks even at a grass flower, the grass flower is so beautiful, so colorful, so graceful, that it can drive him into ecstatic dance. But it depends: if you have poetry in the heart then it transforms the world outside.
The lily is a poor flower but because it is poor it is very simple, innocent. Its richness is available only to those who can understand through the heart. Its richness is not on the surface; its richness is a secret.
It is tremendously graceful – graceful in its simplicity, in its unadornedness, graceful in its innocence – and so is love.
Love is the most ordinary experience of life because we are born with it; and it is also the most extraordinary experience of life if we can rise and soar to the ultimate heights of it. The moment love touches a heart, grace arises of its own accord; the lover is surrounded by grace. The non-loving person is dry, stale; the loving person has a juice flowing around him, a fragrance. And to me that fragrance is divine, the only proof that God is.
Veet Claudia. Veet means going beyond, transcending, surpassing; claudia is from Latin, it means lame. Go beyond all lameness. The mind is lame, and deaf and dumb and blind. The heart is just the opposite. It cannot only walk, it can run; it cannot only run, it can fly; and it has eyes to see, not only the visible but the invisible too. It has ears to hear the unheard. And the existence is full of unheard music, full of the intangible, full of the invisible.
The whole secret is: move from the head to the heart. Think less, feel more, and you will not be lame any more.
Dhyan Ian. Dhyan means meditation and ian means a graceful gift of God; it is a form of john – meditation, the gift of God.
“Meditation” is not the exact translation of “dhyan”, but the closest possible, because the word “meditation” still gives the idea that you are meditating upon something, as if there is an object. The word “dhyan” is an objectless consciousness – not meditating upon something but just being meditative. If you are meditating upon something it is a kind of thinking – maybe more focused, more concentrated, but still it is a kind of thinking; and dhyan is a state of no-mind.
The Japanese word “zen” comes from dhyan and the Chinese “chuan” comes from dhyan.
Just being with no thought in the mind, just being with no content in the consciousness, a mirror reflecting nothing, or only reflecting nothing – that is true meditation, that is dhyan. It is a gift of God. One has just to be praying, waiting, expectant but not expecting, not demanding... a silent, passive awaiting.
If one goes on sitting – that’s what Zen people do: year in, year out, they simply go on sitting, doing nothing – slowly, slowly the mind settles, the thoughts disappear. One day, maybe after ten years, twenty years, thirty years – one never knows – one day suddenly the mind is not found at all; it has gone. You are left alone, without the mind. That constant chattering, that mad state, is no more found; you look in and all is silent. And when the mind is not there, you are not there either, because you are nothing but your mind. The disappearance of the mind is the disappearance of your ego, your identity.
In the West people are too concerned with how to get an identity. Too much discussion goes on about the identity crisis.
In the East our concern has been just the opposite: how to drop all identities, how not to have any identity, how to become a nobody. That is dhyan: how to be nothing. But the purity of it, and the benediction of it, is infinite. Even a glimpse of it and one is fulfilled, fulfilled forever. Just a glimpse of it and one is grateful. For the first time gratitude arises: one bows down to the earth, to existence.
Deva Margot. Deva means divine, margot comes from Persian. The Persian word is “murwari”; it means a child of light. Your full name will mean a child of divine light. You have a really beautiful name!
That’s how everyone is: we are made of light, we are born out of light. We are made of the stuff called light. We are unaware, hence we don’t know who we are. The moment awareness arises, you will be surprised: even a thousand suns don’t have as much light as you have in the innermost core of your being. It is the greatest light in existence.
And it is very miraculous, because even the great sun will cool down, will die one day, because its fuel is being spent every day; it is not inexhaustible. But the inner light is without fuel; it is inexhaustible, it is eternal. From the beginning to the end – if there is a beginning and if there is an end – it will always be there. Not to know it is to remain in misery; to know it is to be in bliss.
Search for it; it is there. Grope for it; it is there. We are not children of darkness: we are children of light.
Prem Shivo. It means God of love. God and love are really synonymous, two names for the same phenomenon. And “love” is far better now because “god” has been used by the priests so long that it has fallen in bad company; the word has become associated with wrong people. The word is beautiful. It has to be saved from the priests, hence I go on using it.
In ancient Hebrew “g” means that, “o” means which, and “d” means is: that which is. That is the meaning of God – a tremendously beautiful word. And the only way to know that which is, is love.
Love the existence abundantly. Love the existence with your totality; love the existence with no conditions and you will come to know God.
God means that which is. It is not a person it is just this total existence with all its harmony, melody, celebration.
Prem means love, agar means house, temple, abode – a temple of love, a house of love. And that’s what each of my sannyasins has to become: a temple of love. If you can do that much then the remaining can be left to God. A single step in love from your side, and God walks at least one thousand steps towards you.
Let love become your secret mantra. Not that you have to repeat “Love, love, love”... you have to live it, in all kinds of situations, circumstances, good and bad, in failure and success. But never lose track of love. That small thread of love should always be remembered. In no circumstances should it be forgotten.
That is your work. And soon something of tremendous importance is going to happen; it is already on the way.
You just have to prepare yourself. Good.
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