24

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‌CHAPTER 24

24 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, dwabha means twilight – divine twilight... and that is the situation where you are. The past is gone, and the future has not come yet. The old is disappearing and the new has not come yet. Hence there is a chaos inside, a great confusion.

You cannot go back to the old – the old mind is no more relevant – and you don’t know what the new mind is. You cannot go on repeating your past, old pattern, and the new gestalt is not yet clear. But this is a beautiful situation – if understood well it is the chaos out of which stars are born; then it is not destructive. If one does not understand it becomes destructive. One can be split, one can start falling into pieces.

But if one understands it – that this is the moment of transformation, a transitory period, and the pain is a blessing in disguise, sooner the morning will be coming closer and soon the sun will be on the horizon – if one is hopeful and moves into it with understanding and with a confident step, the chaos turns into creativity. And this is what sannyas is going to do to you.

Veet means beyond, bhavati means becoming. The mind lives in becoming; it lives in the future. It is always hankering to become this, to become that. It is never in the being, it is never now, and hence it remains miserable. k does not know how to be here. It is always there, it is always somewhere else; it is never where you are.

And because of this constant chasing after shadows misery is created. You cannot attain those shadows, hence frustration. And meanwhile life is slowly slowly passing out of your hands and nothing is happening through all the efforts of becoming this and becoming that.Becoming is the

enemy of being, and to know who you are you have to drop all ideas of who you would like to be. To know what the case is, one has to drop all ideals, all future-orientations.

‘Bhavati’ means future-orientation. Tomorrow is the day, not today; tomorrow everything will happen – and that tomorrow never comes. You waste your today waiting for tomorrow, and when it comes it is always today; you again waste time in waiting for another tomorrow. And this is how the whole of one’s life becomes a wasteland.

Life can be a beautiful garden... a paradise. That is the meaning of the word paradise. It means a walled garden where trees are green and birds sing and flowers bloom. Fruitfulness is paradise, flowering is paradise, greenery is paradise, life is paradise. But life is always now and here. And now is very psychedelic; it inebriates. But the mind never allows you to be herenow. It always takes you on unnecessary journeys; it takes you away from yourself, away from reality.

This whole journey of going away from reality is ‘bhavati’. That has to be dropped. In dropping it one becomes a sannyasin. Sannyas means living in the being, living this moment, living today, living now. And then a totally different life arises. If you have lived your today tremendously, ecstatically, then tomorrow is going to come out of it; from where else can it come? And if your today is ecstatic, full of juice, tomorrow will be more juicy, more ecstatic; it will be a continuity of today. So one can forget all about tomorrow. Take care of the moment and the next moment will be born out of you, out of this moment. Take care of today and tomorrow is taken care of. Take care of this life and the next life is taken care of.

That is what sannyas is – living moment to moment with no desire to become anything, utterly contented with whatever one is.

Deva means divine, dwariko means the door – the door of the divine. Man cannot go to god – it is always god who comes to man; and that’s logical too. The part cannot seek and search for the whole; it is beyond the comprehension of the part. Only the whole can seek and search for the part.

It is like Jesus again and again uses the parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep. The sheep cannot find the shepherd – it is the shepherd who has to find the sheep. That is the parable of man and god. If a small child is lost in the market it is the mother who will search for the child. At the most the child can cry and weep. What else can the child do? It is better for the child to stay wherever he is rather than to start searching, because the mother will come first to the place where she has lost the child; it is better for the child to remain there. And that is the situation with man. Man can weep, man can cry, man can pray, man can sing and dance, and wait! It is always god who comes, and whenever one is ready, god comes. And only when one is ready will one be able to recognise that god has come.

So man need not become an active searcher. Man has to be in a passive waiting, trusting ‘When I am ready and worthy it will happen. Meanwhile I should become more and more quiet, more and more innocent, less and less burdened with unnecessary luggage. I should become more and more pure, quiet, still, blissful, cheerful, and wait!’

... And then you become the door from which god enters.

Deva means divine, nimitto means a sign, a symbol – a divine symbol. Man is a divine symbol. He has to be understood, he has to be explored. He contains infinite treasures within him; he contains the whole. The deeper you go into yourself, the deeper you go into existence, into god. Man is just a passage; a very symbolic existence is what we call man. The symbol has to be decoded.

If one takes it for granted that this is all then one remains outside one’s being. The symbol is not the truth. The symbol only indicates the truth; it is an arrow pointing towards the truth. Man is an arrow pointing towards the cosmic consciousness. Man is not complete in himself – he is only a beginning. The end is not contained in man; the end is in god. Man is the first step of the journey. Man is like a milestone – that is the meaning of ‘nimitto’. On the milestone the arrow shows you that you have to go ahead, that you have to go ahead... then you will reach to the destination. But many people have believed in the milestone and they have started worshipping the milestone. They are sitting there worshipping and they think they have arrived.…

Man’s life has to be a great exploration inwards, and no outer explanation is as significant, as valuable, as the inner one. The outer exploration will also take you to beautiful experiences. The person who goes and climbs Everest certainly has a tremendously beautiful experience, but it is nothing compared to the inner depth or the inner height. And the man who walked for the first time on the moon must have felt ecstatic, but it is nothing compared to that experience when you move inwards and reach the centre of your being.

And the joy that one can get by walking on the moon is lost within five minutes. All over the world people were sitting glued to their TV’s, watching the first man walking on the moon but within five, seven minutes they were tired; within fifteen minutes it was finished. They started talking about other things or they started searching for another programme. Just within fifteen minutes such a great exploration about which man has dreamt down the ages, for centuries, was no more news; within fifteen minutes it was gone.

But the inner exploration is such that once you enter into your being it abides; the joy of it is eternal. Think of yourself as only an arrow pointing towards an inner centre; follow that arrow and you will find many more milestones on the way. And the closer you come to your inner centre, the more and more peaceful you will become, more and more serene and calm; more and more bliss for no reason at all will be happening. Those are good omens – they show that you are coming back home.

Veet means beyond, mano means mind – beyond the mind. Truth is not part of the mind, truth is not a thought. Truth is an experience in thoughtlessness. Nobody can arrive at truth by thinking. Truth is not a conclusion of thought. It is an experience when an thoughts have disappeared, when there is no thinking going on and the mind has completely stopped, when there is no mind. In that silence, in that quietness, truth is felt, experienced. Truth arises in that emptiness, and that emptiness becomes full, fun of truth.

All that is needed is the art of slowly slowly dropping the clinging to the mind, not cooperating with the thought process, not going on giving it nourishment, just being a watcher – unconcerned, seeing thoughts move just as one sees clouds moving in the sky without any concern, no liking, no disliking. This watching choicelessly is the whole art.

The whole science of religion is based on this simple phenomenon: the more you become a choiceless witness, less and less do thoughts arise in you because your cooperation is withdrawn; you no more invite them, they become uninvited guests. Slowly slowly they start disappearing and gaps happen. A moment comes when there is no thought and a window opens into truth. A drop of that nectar falls on your tongue and slowly slowly it becomes more and more easy. One day one has learned the knack; any moment one can simply be without thought. Just the very knack makes

one capable of putting the mind aside any time. One can use the mind when needed; one can put it aside when not needed. You have become master of your own mind, and the mastery is possible only when you have seen something that is higher, beyond the mind. That’s your reality, that’s your truth.

Veet means beyond, passika means seeing – that which is beyond seeing, that which cannot be seen, that which is invisible... and that is god! God can never be reduced to an object of seeing because he is always the seer. He exists in you as the seer. k is he who is looking at me. It is he who watches the sunrise. It is he who looks around and experiences all kinds of experiences, so he himself cannot be seen.

That has to be remembered always, and then one starts dropping all the objects of knowledge, seeing, and becomes more and more concerned to know who the seer is within. One day when all objects of seeing have disappeared and there is no content in the mind, the seer is felt. And that is the moment when one comes to know ‘I am god.’

[A sannyasin says: I find myself being very strongly against the ashram. I don’t quite understand it either. It’s not very clear – it’s hazy, it’s very hazy. I don’t understand it.]

It comes to everybody. Doubt is as much a part of you as trust. Doubt is the other side of trust, the darker side of your being. It has to be accepted. If you deny it, it will always remain there like a wound, and whenever there is an opportunity it will surface and will disturb you. Accept it too.

The great trust means that it accepts the trust, it accepts the doubt too; then it is great trust. It knows that the mind says yes and the mind also says no, but the great yes contains both; the great yes is not disturbed by no. It is great enough to contain it, to absorb it.

The real physician knows how to use even poison as medicine... and that’s how one has to learn. Because it is not only a question of doubt and trust... it will be everywhere. If you love a person, one day you will find that you hate the same person; that is another side of the love. If you are feeling very ecstatic about something, sooner or later you will fall from that height and there will be depression; that is another side of it. Each mountain has a valley by the side; no mountain can exist without valleys. So one has to learn that the valley and the mountain go together. There is nothing to be worried about... there is no need to get disturbed.

Seeing that they are together, one accepts both, and in that very acceptance there is transcendence. It is a small trust that gets disturbed by doubt. One has to learn the way of being in such trust that doubt is just a shadow of it.

Don’t be worried by it – just watch it and it will be absorbed, and you will come more whole out of it.

You have been denying it, that’s why it is coming. And everybody denies it in the beginning, not knowing what to do. When people trust, they simply deny the doubt, but sooner or later it will catch hold of you. Nothing can be denied, nothing has to be denied; everything has to be absorbed, and then life is richer.

In a man who cannot doubt, his trust will be very impotent. Because he cannot doubt, he trusts. His trust has no value at all. But when a man can doubt and yet trusts – his doubt is great but yet he trusts – then his trust is also great, greater than his doubt.

When a sannyasin comes to me for the first time he simply trusts; he puts all doubts aside. But I cannot leave your doubts there – I will provoke them.

This whole ashram is a device to provoke all kinds of doubts. I can make the ashram in such a way that nobody will ever doubt – that is very simple – but then I will not be of much help to you. Your doubt will remain. It has to be provoked, it has to be brought to the light. So all kinds of things will be done here which will provoke your doubt, which will bring it to the surface, which will not leave it hidden somewhere in your unconscious. And then the real work starts – the work of transforming poison into nectar.

Just watch it, accept it – that is also part of you. Don’t be worried by it, don’t be troubled by it, and you will be surprised: if you are not troubled, not worried – you simply take note of it and you say inside ‘Yes, doubt is there. Just as trust is there, doubt is there’ – if you can see and say it deeply, simply ‘Doubt is there, doubt is there...’ you have already transcended; you are neither. And that is grace.

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