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CHAPTER 9
9 April 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Anand Manuel. Anand means bliss, manuel comes from the Hebrew, emmanuel. Emmanuel means “God, be with us.” It is the essence of prayer; and blissfulness arises only when this prayer is fulfilled. When God is with us then there is bliss. To be without God is to be in misery; to be with him is to be in a rejoicing. And these are the only two alternatives: either be with God and let God be with you, or be alone and deny God and ignore God.
The first creates heaven around you, the second creates hell. heaven and hell are not geographical – they are psychological states. Heaven means when we feel that God is with us, and hell means when we feel that we are utterly lonely and there is nobody with us. Hell means that existence is alien, foreign, that we are outsiders, that we don’t belong to it, that it doesn’t belong to us. That state is isolation, is hell. But when you see that the trees are with you, and the moon and the stars, and the mountains and the people and the birds – all are forms of God – when you feel that existence is with you, when you start pulsating in oneness with existence, you are in paradise, you are in heaven. That’s what bliss is all about.
Sannyas is a prayer, a prayer to existence: Be with us. [Osho addresses a new sannyasin.]
You have been coming and coming for a long time – now you have come. It has been a long journey, arduous too, but the more the journey is arduous, the more fulfilling; and the longer one has to wait, the deeper is the ecstasy. It is through pain that we earn being close to truth, to God, to that which is. Pain is the price we pay for it. It is only through great agony that ecstasy is born.
But now you have come home.
Now your life will take a totally new turn. It will no more be a journey; it will become a rejoicing. It will no more be a search. From now onwards God has not to be searched for but lived. And the paradox is: those who seek and search will never find, and those who start living have already found. God is found by living him, not by searching. Search is philosophical; and philosophy is not a bridge between God and man: it is a wall.
Religion is existential. It has nothing to do with thinking, enquiring; it is not a question at all. Religion is a state of drunkenness, a state of being intoxicated with existence. It is something of the heart, and the heart has its own reasons that reason knows not.
So your sannyas is going to be a love affair; it has nothing to do with the mind. To be with me is going to be heart to heart, spirit to spirit.
Anand Samuel. Anand means rejoice. Samuel is Hebrew; it means God has heard – rejoice, God has heard, your prayer has reached. Rejoice, you are no more alone. Rejoice, you are at home.
Deva Julia. Deva means divine, julia means youthful, young – a divine youthfulness. God is always young, existence is always young. It is young because it is always in the present.
The child lives in the future; the old man lives in the past; the young mind lives in the present. That is the basic quality of youth: to be herenow. The child cannot be herenow. He has a great future, his time is to come. He plans, he dreams. The old man has no future; there is death and darkness and nothing else. But he has a great past. He goes into great nostalgia, he goes into memories. The child lives in dreams; the old man lives in memories. Between the two is the young man who lives herenow, in the present. And if a young man does not live in the present, then either he is immature and thinks of the future, or he is already old and has started thinking of the past.
There are very few young people in the world. It is very rarely that you find a young person – only once in a while a Jesus, a Buddha; these are the really young people. I am not talking about the physical age, I am talking about their spiritual approach to existence. The body may be young, the body may be old, that doesn’t matter; but if your consciousness lives in the herenow you will have a freshness to your being. That freshness is joy, that freshness is the door to God. That freshness has nothing to do with time, because the present is not part of time at all.
It has been taught for centuries that time has three tenses: past, present and future. It is utterly wrong. Time has only two tenses: past and future. The present is not part of time at all; the present is part of eternity. It is a penetration from the beyond. The past and the future belong to the earth; the present belongs to the sky. The past and the future belong to the mind; the present belongs to consciousness.
That’s why we cannot use any other tense with the word “God”. We cannot say “God was”, we cannot say “God will be”. We can only say “God is”; God always is. In fact to say “God is” is a tautology, a repetition, because God means is-ness, is-ness means God.
So this is the key for you. You have a beautiful name – make it part of your lifestyle: remain in the present. The moment you catch hold of yourself going into the past, cut that thread immediately,
then and there, not waiting for even a single moment. The moment you catch hold of yourself, red- handed, moving into the future – plans and dreams and this and that – raise a sword and cut it then and there, and always bring yourself to the present again and again.
In the beginning it is difficult – one goes on missing, one goes on forgetting – but slowly slowly one starts settling. The day that one has really settled in the present moment, not lagging behind it, not heading ahead of it, is the moment of great benediction, because in that very moment you are transported into another world: the world of eternity, the world of deathlessness, the world of God.
Prem Damien. Prem means love, damien symbolises friendship. In ancient Greek mythology Damien sacrificed his life for his friend, Pythias, hence the name has become a symbol of loyal friendship.
Friendship is the ultimate flowering of love. Love has something earthly about it because love has something of passion in it. But friendship is pure fragrance; it is unearthly. If love moves in the right direction it becomes friendship. If it does not move in the right direction it becomes enmity. Love is a dilemma. If you love, then only two alternatives are possible: either you will turn into enemies or you will become friends. You cannot remain in between; one has to be either this or that.
Millions of lovers turn into enemies, the majority of lovers turn into enemies, because they don’t know how to transform love into friendship. Enmity is easy – it is falling down, and the fall is always easy. Friendship is rising high, soaring high, climbing high, and the climb is always hard. And friendship requires great transformation in your inner alchemy.
Jealousy has to be dropped, possessiveness has to be dropped; the very idea of dominating the other has to be dropped; clinging has to be dropped. All kinds of dependencies have to be dropped. Friendship demands great sacrifices, but if all these things are dropped love is purified and soon love remains just a fragrance. Then love brings not only friendship, it brings freedom.
Friendship is a spiritual phenomenon. In the world friendship is almost disappearing. There are acquaintances but not friends any more. In fact the modern man cannot understand the idea of friendship at all; it has become so unknown. We read the ancient stories about friendships, great friendships, but we think they are just stories. They cannot happen in fact, because those things are not happening at all in our lives. In our lives love is turning sour, love is turning bitter, love is turning poisonous. We have forgotten how to make nectar out of it.
My effort here is to help you to know how to love and how to purify love. Love contains the greatest treasure there is, but it has to be purified. If you don’t purify it, it is dangerous; it will kill you. It kills many people.
If love does not become a flower it becomes a cancer. k is playing with fire, hence many people have decided not to move in the world of love at all. They are satisfied with having a sexual relationship, not a love relationship. They are afraid, and in a way they are right too, because out of one hundred, ninety-nine cases are just proof that love ultimately turns bitter and poisonous. The exception only proves the rule. It should not be so if the art of love is understood rightly; and sannyas is the art of love.
Love is the greatest object of meditation. Love has to be contemplated, meditated on. Love has to be experienced, watched, witnessed, so that we can sort it out, so that we can take the weeds out. Once the weeds are taken out, roses start blooming. Those roses are the roses of friendship.
In one sense you can call them friendship; in another sense they are the roses of prayer, because the person who knows what friendship is, is bound to know how to befriend the whole existence. If you can befriend one person, you know the art. The tacit understanding has happened; you can befriend the whole existence. That’s what prayer is: feeling at home with existence.
And remember one fundamental law: whatsoever you are to existence, existence is to you a thousandfold. If you are a friend to existence, existence is a friend to you a thousandfold. If you are an enemy, existence is inimical to you a thousandfold. And because the modern mind has been conditioned to conquer nature and to fight nature and to be victorious over nature – all rubbish, all nonsense – we have destroyed nature, we have destroyed humanity. Now something has to be started again from abc, otherwise humanity is doomed.
Sannyas is just an effort to create a new man, to bring a new humanity, to give birth to a new idea of a human being... full of love, friendship, trust, prayer.
Prem Kaj. Prem means love, kaj means rejoicing. Rejoice in love – that’s my whole message. If this much is understood, then nothing is left to be understood; all is understood. Rejoice in love because love is the door to God; and you can love only if you rejoice in it. Love should not be a burden to be carried; it should be a dance to be danced, a song to be sung. Love should not be serious. If it is serious, the point is missed; you have already gone astray.
Love should be fun, a playfulness. God is closest to you when you are in a mood of playfulness, because when you are in the mood of playfulness you are like an innocent child. My own experience, my own observation, of thousands of people, of thousands of seekers, is that man is never more playful than when he is in love.
Love is a kind of playfulness, and when you are playful you are relaxed. When you are playful there is no anxiety, no tension. When you are playful you are capable of wonder, awe. And those are the really religious qualities: to be able to feel wonder, to be able to feel awe, to be able to be exhilarated with the beauty that surrounds you, with the existence that has been given to you, to be able to dance with the trees and with the wind and with the rain and with the sun.
These are the qualities of the religious person – not of the person who goes to the church or to the temple and performs a certain ritual. Those reflect the qualities of stupid minds; they have nothing to do with religion. Religion is innocence, a new childhood, a new birth, a new playfulness. Then the head simply disappears; you have no head any more. Then the heart has full power over your being.
That’s what love is. When the heart is the master then you are in love. And if you rejoice, love grows. They help each other: the more you love, the more you rejoice; the more you rejoice, the more you are able to love. And closer and closer you come to God and God comes closer and closer to you.
Rejoice in love!
Prem Satsang. Prem means love, satsang means communion – a loving communion. Language is incapable of communion. It can communicate, but it cannot commune. So whenever there is something of significance, language falls short; it is felt to be inadequate.
You see something beautiful – the last morning star disappearing or just a lonely unknown flower by the side of the road – and you want to say how you feel, but you cannot. You are dumb, because that beauty cannot be reduced to words. If you say something you will feel a sort of guilt because you will know you have not been able to say it, that in saying it you have destroyed something of immense value.
When one is in love, language falls short. Then only silence... that silence is satsang. To be in silence is to be in communion. The first silence has to be learned with the Master. That is the purpose of becoming a disciple, a sannyasin, an initiate. The basic purpose is to learn the abc of communion – how to be in deep silence with the Master.
He is utterly silent in his being. His inner talk has stopped. He is just a total emptiness: there is nobody inside him, no clamor, no noise. If you can also be silent with him... it will be difficult in the beginning – the words will come, thoughts will go on chasing you – but slowly slowly, if you love enough, if you trust enough, if you are sincere enough in your search, you will learn the knack of being silent with the Master. Then his silence will pour into your being. Like a flood it comes and it takes all the garbage.
Once you have learned how to be silent with your Master. then you can be in silence with the Master of the world, you can be in silence with God. It is only through that silence that truth comes. It is only through those moments of silence that the first glimpses of the splendor of existence arrive, that windows open, that walls disappear, that your eyes are open for the first time and your ears hear for the first time. Then it is really incredible – how much we have been missing.
Each moment is so precious and so ecstatic, and we go on missing because we are insensitive. Communion means becoming silent, becoming sensitive, becoming open, becoming receptive. The real prayer is not to say something to God; the real prayer is being able to listen to God, to hear if he has something to say.
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