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‌CHAPTER 3

3 January 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, bodha means awareness – divine awareness, an awareness that cannot be cultivated; it can only be received as a gift. Man cannot create it, man can only become a receptacle. There is another kind of awareness that man can create by friction, by struggle, by conflict! but that remains very ordinary, naturally, because man-created things cannot be very extraordinary. It is very difficult to create it but very easy to lose it; years of work can be lost in a single moment.

In the West Gurdjieff was working on those lines; that was man-created awareness. He knew nothing of prayer, he knew nothing about how god can shower awareness on you. All that you have to do is to be open – you just have to be an open door, you have to be a host – and it comes, it comes unmistakably! And I see the possibility in you.

So I am giving you the name of awareness but your path has to be that of prayer. Awareness will come through prayer; that will be a by-product of prayer. You have to create moods of prayer. Whenever you have time, sit with raised hands, be in a receptive mood, open your heart and be filled by god! If something starts happening in the body – any moving, shaking, trembling – allow it. If some gibberish – what the pentecostals call ‘glossolalia’ – starts coming to you, allow it. You can become a great glossolaliac!

It is allowing tongues, speaking in tongues. In the beginning it looks like baby-talk, but by and by it becomes very intricate and complex. You don’t understand the words that are coming. They may be of some language that you don’t know, they may be of some language that is no more in existence, they may be of a language that is going to happen in the future, they may be of a language that exists on some other planet or they may not belong to any language at all. They may be a hodge-podge of many languages or may not be language at all; it may be just pure sound arising. You have to allow that; that will be your prayer. And don’t be afraid! Because when it starts coming one feels fear – ‘What is happening? Is one going mad?’ But you will attain to great sanity through it.…

So start this from tonight. Just sit in your bed with raised hands, feel that energy is falling on you, feel it deep in your heart. Start swaying and allow anything that wants to surface in you – any words, any sound, ‘Ahhh...’, anything – and that is prayer. You are not to correct it, you are not to make it right, you are not to put it in any form; it has to be unstructured, a chaos. Within three, four days it will start flowing. By the time you leave you wil] have something beautiful with you.

Deva means divine, punit means purity. The purity that resides in the heart is uncorruptible; what you do does not affect it at all. Even the greatest sinner remains pure at the deepest core of his being. So even the deepest sinner remains a saint; the sin can only touch the periphery, the circumference. It cannot go to your core because doing remains on the surface; only being is at the core.

And when you start looking at people’s being, then nobody is a sinner, nobody has ever been a sinner. That is impossible, that doesn’t happen because it can’t happen. Purity is so absolute that all that we do is not more than dreams; that is the eastern approach. The western religions have been bothering too much about the periphery, hence the idea of sin and guilt. And it has been very destructive; people have been unnecessarily condemned for small things which don’t matter and they have become guilt-ridden. They have become self-condemners. And they cannot be happy because how can you be happy if you are continuously condemning yourself? They cannot permit themselves to be happy; that looks outrageous. Happiness is not allowed on earth, only in heaven where pure souls gather together.

But the eastern approach is totally different; it doesn’t bother much about your doing. It says whatsoever you have done, you can simply go in and have a contact with the being which is always crystal-clear and always pure, and that source remains unpolluted. It is only a question of going deep into your own being and the nectar is always available.

On the periphery are just faces – saint and sinner, good and bad, the famous and the notorious. They are just acts, as if we are playing on a stage, a drama is enacted. Somebody has become a jesus and somebody has become a Judas. Both are needed: Jesus cannot be without Judas, and what will Judas be without Jesus? They are both necessary for the whole Christ story to happen. But behind the stage they sit together and drink tea and smoke. That’s the reality. This whole world is a vast stage, a great drama is enacted.

But don’t be too worried about it. Whatsoever part has been given you, fulfill it as joyously as possible and always remember that deep down you remain pure, you remain always in god. That is the meaning of ‘deva punit’.

Deva means divine, dakshina means gift – a divine gift.

And sannyas is a divine gift. Don’t think that you are taking sannyas but think that I am giving it to you.

Rather than taking it, receive it, and the quality will be totally different. When you take it, you take it; when I give it, I give it!

And let that be the attitude about your whole life: don’t think that you are born; god has given you birth. Don’t think that you have fallen in love; god has made you fall in love. Think about each

and every thing, about each breath and each heartbeat as a gift from god. Then naturally gratitude arises. And to live in gratitude is to be religious.

All is a gift; we have not earned it. Life is not a right; we cannot claim it. It is simply given out of god’s abundance.

[A sannyasin says she is unhappy in her marriage to a german lawyer, but does not want to leave because of the child.]

In a better world people will be changing everything – their job, their wife, their husband, in fact even their children; that’s my vision of the future. One gets fed up with the children also; why not change? Give your child to [the groupleader sitting in the front row] and you take [his] son, and again feel happy: a new relationship! Why bother to have the same child continuously? If the child is bothered, if you are bothered, exchange! (laughter)

There will be great joy and the children will become richer because they will know many parents. They will know many women and many men, different kinds of daddies and different kinds of mummies, and they will become more and more enriched. By the time they become daddies and mummies they will have known a lot of the world. lust getting acquainted with one woman is so dangerous for a child; we are not aware of the consequences and the implications.

A child knows the mother; that is his basic understanding about a woman. But his mother is only one woman amongst millions, and they are all different, but he will carry that idea in his mind. Even when he gets married he will look for his mother in his wife and he will not find her, so he will be unsatisfied.

When he falls in love he will fall in love with a woman who looks in some way like his mother or resembles her in some way. Now he has become fixated. This is a fixation; in the future it will be thought of as being a neurosis. He is not liquid and fluid.

If he had known many women, many men, as mother, as father, if he had lived in many families, if he had been mobile, not in a static structure, then he would have known much more about men and women, and there would be more possibility of his being happy.

One should be ready to slip out of things easily, so don’t create any guilt or any prick of the conscience that this is not good; this is perfectly good. A relationship is good only as far as it creates joy; that is my definition of a relationship. The moment it stops creating joy you have no obligation to be in it. In fact, it is immoral to be in it. It is destructive to you, destructive to the person, and destructive to the child too, because the child will also see a stuck, dead thing.

Get out of it! Start moving and let the man also move. Even lawyers and germans have a future. One never knows! He may fall in love again and things will start flowing for him. People should not get stuck and be obsessed with things. They should be moving.

So whatsoever the problems, they are secondary; don’t make them excuses to remain in it. If you want to remain in it then who am I to tell you to get out of it? I am not telling you, I am not ordering you to get out of it. I am simply saying that if things are not flowing any more then there is no point: it is simple courtesy to get out of it.

And whatsoever risk is there has to be taken. I don’t think that you will repent; you will be happy. Find another man; start living again, be young again! Fall in love as many times as you can. The more times you fall in love, the more you will become young again and again and again. The moment you fall in love you again become young. lust see, watch: when people fall in love ... even an old man falling in love starts feeling young. His eyes have a sparkle, his walk has the quality of dance. He is again young; he dreams again, hopes again. Again there is meaning. Again he has forgotten about death; again life is cherished, welcomed.

Think it over. My feeling is: if you feel that it is no more a celebration then just unobtrusively, unpretentiously, without creating any trouble, get out of it. If the father wants to keep the child, let him; don’t go to the court. There is no need; that is ugly.

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