16

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 16

16 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, giri means mountain – a divine mountain. It is a metaphor for absolute meditation. When one is utterly silent, still, and there is no movement in the mind, one starts feeling like a great peak of the mountain... snow-capped.

The mountain has always attracted meditators. There is something in the mountains – the silence, the stillness, the absolute unmoving... almost timelessness. The mountain remains almost permanent, and the way the mountain sits represents a kind of centering... as if the mountain is in deep centering; all is centered within-wards. Buddha sitting under a tree looks like a mountain. And it is no accident that the first statues ever made in the world were made of Buddha and they were made of stone – just a rock, unmoving, timeless, deathless, centering in its self.

And that is going to be your work. The movement of the mind creates misery. The movement of the mind is thought, desire, imagination, memory, and all these create misery. When there is no movement of thought and desire, the mind has disappeared. You are, but there is no mind in it. That state of no-mind will give you the glimpse of the inner mountain.

[Madhu Vidya means the science of the soul... ]

That is the most ancient name of metaphysics... metaphysics not in the Western sense of philosophy but metaphysics in the Eastern sense – that which taxes you beyond the physical.

Meta means beyond. Physics is not all, matter is not all, and those who think matter is all are satisfied with the circumference of life. They will go on moving round and round but they will never come home because the home exists at the centre; it doesn’t exist on the circumference.

Metaphysics means coming home, knowing that you are consciousness, knowing that the whole existence is full of consciousness, that consciousness is not a by-product of matter. It is not. Matter

is only the body of consciousness – its clothing, its shelter, its abode, its temple – but the deity is consciousness. And the temple is created for the deity, not vice-versa. Matter exists because consciousness exists, not vice versa.

Matter is consciousness asleep; consciousness is matter become awake. Ultimately there is only one thing – call it x, y, z, or god or truth or what you wish. Ultimately there is one thing, but that one thing can have two states: one of sleep and one of awakeness. When matter becomes aware of itself it is consciousness. When consciousness forgets itself it is matter.

So those who think matter is all remain asleep. And their lives remain just a groping in darkness. They never know what light is, they never reach the dawn. And naturally in darkness they stumble much and hurt themselves and others too, and their whole life consists only of conflict, friction, violence, war. They never come to know what love is, because love is possible only when you are full of light. They never know what creativity is either because creativity is also possible only when you are full of light. Millions of people never know what it means to be creative, and so whatsoever they do is basically destructive. Even their so-called love is destructive and destroys.

Parents love their children – at least they say so – but if one looks around the world it doesn’t seem to be a place where people have been loved. Parents only believe that they love; in the name of love they are doing something else. They are imposing their ambitions on their children. They are projecting themselves. They are exploiting their children’s lives; they want a kind of immortality through them. They know they will die but their children will live and will do what they have not been able to do, and the same is repeated again and again. Their parents did the same with them and they are doing the same with their children and their children will do the same in their own turn. So it goes on and on and everybody remains unfulfilled, hoping that somebody else will do it – a kind of vicarious fulfilment, indirect.

The father wanted to become the president of the country and could not.He will poison the child

and will make the child a politician and will instill the idea in the child’s mind that this is something sacred – he has to do it. If he is not going to do it he is betraying his father. And this is called love. And love creates ambition. How can love create ambition? Ambition is destructive. Ambition is violence.

Husbands say they love their wives and the wives say they love their husbands and you look around and no family seems to be releasing the perfume of love; otherwise the sky would have been full of clouds, love clouds, love perfume everywhere. But the sky is full of violence and war and destructiveness. After each ten years a great world war is needed; so much gathers that it has to explode in violence. And people are continuously struggling in so many ways.…

This is not love, because love is possible only when you are full of light. It is just the label ‘love’ that you go on sticking on things which are not love. On jealousy you put the label ‘love’; on possessiveness you put the label ‘love’; on ambition you put the label ‘love’; on ego you put the label ‘love’. And then words deceive, remember. Words are very deceptive. They have a kind of hypnotic power. When you call something love you start believing it is love

Metaphysics means matter is okay – there is no need to deny it – but it is only the outer part of reality; the inner has to be searched for. These two words ‘madhu vidya’, literally mean.madhu means

sweet, vidya means wisdom. Metaphysics is a kind of sweet wisdom. Logic is bitter, quarrelsome; philosophers continuously quarrel. The man who has known himself is sweet... his very presence is like honey. That is the literal meaning of madhu – madhu means honey. He is love and he is all sweetness.

And vidya means wisdom. Knowledge is a burden; wisdom is weightless. Knowledge is acquired; wisdom comes out of your innermost core. It is yours. Knowledge is always of others, borrowed – borrowed hence ugly.…

Anand means bliss, vedamo means scripture – scripture of bliss. The Bible is only a representation of something inner, so is the Gita and so is the Koran. They are just reflections in the outer world of something that is inner. The real Koran happened in Mohammed’s heart. He tried to express it, although it is inexpressible, but when it happens there arises a great urge to express it; it is irresistible. It has to be said, knowing perfectly well it cannot be said. One is helpless. One has to say it.

Just as the flower has to bloom, a Mohammed has to sing whatsoever has happened in his heart, knowing perfectly well that it is going to be very inadequate, because words have limitations and words are mundane, and the inner experience is so vast: no word can contain it. And words are only shadows. Your shadow is not you, although it is yours. In exactly the same way the truth is inner but the shadow can be caught by the words. But the shadow is not the truth itself. That’s how scriptures are born; the Vedas, the Gitas, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, the Koran and many others. But they are all shadows; they don’t have any substance. It is good to read them – but don’t be caught. If you are caught in the words you will miss the substance and you will always remain tethered to the shadow. Read the Koran, sing the Koran, then go in, because that is where the real Koran is waiting for you. And the beauty is that the inner is the same – whether you read the Bible or the Koran or the Gita, it makes no difference. From any door you enter, when you reach to the realm you will be surprised that shadows are many but the real is one.

That is the meaning of your name: bliss scripture. That is everybody’s heart; it contains all that is worth knowing, worth living, worth being.

One should try to find clues from outside but the goal remains the inner journey, because the ultimate scriptures exist in you, as you. And once you have found it, once you have read it, only then will you know that all outer scriptures are true; they reflect the truth. Before that all that you gather from the scriptures are just words, mere words, and no word can satisfy. The word ‘god’ is not god. The word ‘love’ is not love. The word ‘bread’ is not bread. But once you have tasted the real bread then you know that the word indicates something; it is meaningful.

Meaning comes through experiencing. No word has the meaning. Meaning is not in the dictionaries – meaning exists in existential experience, and that’s what sannyas is all about: an experiment in the inner pilgrimage.

And I see that you are ready... you were just waiting to be provoked, to be called forth.

Deva means divine, pragyan means knowing – divine knowing... not knowledge but knowing.

Knowledge is always a conclusion – knowing is a process. Knowledge means you have arrived, you have concluded; the journey is over. But life is not a journey which can ever be over. It is an eternal pilgrimage; it goes on and on, that’s its beauty. It is deathless, it is timeless; it never began and will never end. So the person who thinks he has arrived, who has concluded, becomes closed.

The moment somebody says that he knows, he has stopped growing, and to stop growing is to be dead, is to lose contact with life and all its processes. Life is continuously flowing. The moment you say that you have known, you get out of the flow, you sit by the side of the river, at the bank, you are no more part of this beautiful drama. You have lost life... the joy of living.

Never become knowledgeable. Always remain in a state of knowing, learning, living, loving, but never arrive at any conclusions, because there are no conclusions possible. God is inexhaustible. You cannot exhaust life – you cannot say one day ‘I have known all.’ This is the mystery, and the splendour, because nothing can be exhausted. Doors upon doors go on opening. The moment you have climbed one peak and you were thinking ‘That is the last’, suddenly you see that another peak is waiting for you ahead, another challenge, another call of life. And the journey continues.

Pragyan does not mean knowledge; it means knowing. My observation is that all nouns are wrong; only verbs are right. Knowledge is wrong; knowing is right. Love is wrong; loving is right. Life is wrong; living is right. Because everything is open-ended, and one day if we are going to make a really authentic language, true to life, it will have only verbs; it will not have nouns at all. Become a process and enjoy the very movement of this great universe.

Eddington is reported to have said – he was one of the greatest scientists of this age – ‘I have found one word absolutely irrelevant, because it collaborates with no reality in life, and that word is “rest”’... because nothing is ever at rest. Even while you are asleep things are moving. Your food is being digested, your blood is circulating, your breathing continues; a thousand and one processes go on.

When the tree is fast asleep in the night it is still growing. New leaves are coming, old leaves are falling. There is never a moment when you can say ‘This is rest.’ Life is a dynamic energy, constantly flowing. And one who understands it becomes part of this great flow... then life is a dance.

Anand means bliss, devamo means god – god of bliss. Man is not just man, that is only appearance; but hidden behind the appearance is god himself. And it is not so only with man; it is so with animals, birds, trees, rocks. God is hidden everywhere. God is equivalent to existence.

And this is the whole search of religion. Religion is not worshipping in the temples or worshipping some stone statue or praying in the church. Those are all rituals. Real religion is an enquiry into your own being. It is digging into your own self to know who you are. And the day one knows ‘Who am I?’ one has known god.

One starts as man; one ends as god. One starts as a seeker; one ends as the sought. And then there is really great laughter, because we have been thinking that we are in search of god and all the time we have been god himself. The very search was preventing us from knowing. We never gave enough time to be quiet and to see who we are. The search was too engaging and we rushed from one place to another, one life to another, one form to another. We were in such a hurry that we never found a time to look within: ‘Who is this seeker?’ We became too interested in the object

of the search and we forgot the subject of the search. And it is there in the very subjectivity that the object is hidden.

God is not to be found somewhere else – god is to be found in you. Whenever you are silent, not going anywhere, no movement of any desires disturbing you, no ripples in your mind, suddenly, it is there... it is you! And then there is great bliss. Then one regains the paradise lost.

Deva means divine, nisango means aloneness – divine aloneness. The most fundamental state is that of aloneness. Everything else is later on, everything else is an addition, but the foundation of our being is utter aloneness. We come in the world alone; then of course many kinds of relationships arise which are beautiful. We form many friendships, love affairs – that is all good – but one should not forget the basic aloneness, otherwise one gets lost in the crowd. And one day we have to leave alone, again, and then nobody is going to be with us. Alone we come, alone we go.

That aloneness has not to be forgotten. One who remembers that aloneness remembers god. One who keeps constantly rooted in that aloneness remains in the world and yet remains unaffected by it. Then there is a kind of centering which continuously remains. One can be in the marketplace but the meditation continues. One can move in a love relationship but the relationship does not become a confusion, a cloud, a darkness – never: the inner light goes on burning.

And when you know that you are alone your love has a totally different quality to it; then you are never dependent. You can share, you can give, you can take – you are free to take and to give and to share – but you are never dependent. Whenever love becomes dependent, it becomes ugly; then one starts clinging. Whenever love becomes dependent, one is afraid that if one loses the other, one will be alone. And one is afraid of being alone: so cling, be possessive, be jealous, close all the doors so the other cannot escape. That kills the other, and you cannot love a dead person.

This is the dilemma of love: we can love only a free person, because whenever out of his freedom he gives love there is beauty. But we don’t leave him free; we close all the doors to his freedom. We make him a prisoner, and then we are surprised – where has the love disappeared to? Even if he loves it is the love of a slave; it is a kind of duty to be fulfilled. Then there is no joy in it, no thrill. You don’t feel enhanced, ecstatic about it. That’s what all lovers go on doing: they want the other to give love with total freedom and yet they don’t leave the other free. This is a double-bind.

To come out of it only one thing can help and that is to remember one’s absolute aloneness. If you really start remembering it and being it, you will be surprised: no love can be so fulfilling as this experience of aloneness is. It is not scary... in the beginning of course it is, but the deeper you go into it it becomes more and more beautiful, more and more peaceful. And whenever out of that rootedness you come and share your love, it is a tremendous gift. Whosoever will get it will feel blessed, and in return love showers on you a thousandfold.

The real lover is one who knows how to be alone... who not only knows how to be alone but who celebrates his aloneness. That is the meaning of ‘nisango’. It is one of the most beautiful words, because aloneness is pure, uncontaminated – not even the shadow of anybody there; simply you, the mirror, not reflecting anything, not even a reflection to disturb. And that is meditation.

I teach you to be alone and I teach you to love out of that aloneness. Then love does not bring misery

into the world; otherwise it does bring misery, pain, shame, suffering. If it comes out of aloneness, it brings only blessings.

There are two kinds of energies in every human being. One is moon energy, another is sun energy. Moon energy is passive, sun energy is active. And there are two possible ways to go into meditation. One is through the moon energy; then meditation is just a silent sitting and doing nothing. That’s what Zen people do: sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. They simply sit and they wait – whenever the spring comes the grass will grow. They don’t make any effort; they are using moon energy.

The sun energy is used by the yogis, by the tantrikas. The sun energy means that you have to make all possible effort that you can, that you are not to simply sit but dance, sing. Active meditation, Dynamic Meditation – is the way to provoke the sun energy, and that is going to be your way. If one goes into silence, sitting silently, then too one day when it happens, one becomes active, but the active part comes as a result.

Even Buddha, when it happened under the Bodhi tree, had to become utterly active. After that, for forty-two years he was continuously in action, moving, waking people. He did all that is possible to do. He made thousands of people enlightened.

Action comes out of inaction. In the same way inaction also comes out of action. If you use sun energy, then you go into action. There comes a peak of action, a climax, and from the climax, suddenly all action disappears. Then you are.

This is the way it is going to happen to you. Dancing, singing, one day suddenly the dance is no more there; neither is the dancer. All has stopped... time and space disappear. That is god – that moment.

So your name indicates your method that you have to follow. Don’t leave any stone unturned, bring your total energy into your meditations – don’t hold back!

< Previous | Contents | Next >