25

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‌CHAPTER 25

25 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, nishkamo means desireless. Love with desire is lust. Love with a motive keeps one tethered to the body, to the mundane. Love without desire immediately frees you from the mundane and the door to the sacred is opened.

Love without desire is no more lust; it is prayer. That is the only difference between lust and prayer. Both are love. Love plus desire is lust; love minus desire is prayer.

To have a certain kind of motivation means falling from the height of love. To ask something in return, to make love conditional, makes it ugly. Not to ask anything, not to make love conditional but simply to give for the sheer joy of giving... then love starts soaring high. And my whole effort here is to help your love to become desireless.

It is very easy to be desireless and without love. It is also very easy to be with love but with desire. The greatest problem arises when one wants to be loving end desireless. But that is the challenge, that is the challenge of sannyas – that we will love but for no reason at all, that we will love only for love’s sake. And once it starts happening, life has tremendous beauty and eternal joy. Then there is no death, because death is a by-product of desire. When you are free of desire, you are free of death too, because when you are free of desire you are free of the future, and death is always in the future. Right now you are always alive. Death is only something that will happen.

When there is no desire, there is no future; one lives in the moment. Hence there is no death either. And to know love without desire is to know the very core of existence. It is deathless, it is eternal, it is timeless.

[A sannyasin asks about her illness: I know where the illness is coming from and I know that medicines will not help me... and I felt this deeply at home. But here I forgot. I’m confused about it and scared.]

In fact there is no need to have any attitude against medicine; there is no need. Let the medicine do its own work and you meditate too. I have given you the medicine: love as much as you can. If you can love totally, that is your medicine, because deep down, at the very core of all illness, is lack of love...

Bring it out! Express it! And this is the whole situation for it; bring it out. Rather than becoming too concerned with the disease, pour your whole energy into love. But I am not saying don’t take medicines, because you are body and soul both. The medicine can work on the body. It cannot change your totality, but it can help; why not take its help?..

So, the body should not be neglected, but one should not continuously think of the body either, because in a way it is going to go one day. Whether you are healthy or ill, whether it is this illness or that it doesn’t matter – the body has to goA few years before or a few years afterwards, that is in

fact irrelevant. Whether you die at sixty or fifty-five or seventy doesn’t matter. All that matters is that before you die you have seen something eternal, that’s what matters. And that I will make possible... that much I can guarantee...

Yes, that is happening and it is going to happen more and more. But still I am always in favour of medicine. No need to drop it. Whatsoever medicine can do, let it do, and whatsoever I can do, I will do.

And your focus has to change from illness to love. Rather than thinking continuously of the illness, think of the few days that you have and share as much as you can. In fact when death is close one can become more loving than ever. Just think: if there was no death there would have been no love in the world, because people could have postponed. Why be in a hurry? – tomorrow is always there. And that’s how people go on postponing, even though death is there!

So death has not to be taken as an enemy; it is not. In fact it is a challenge to love. And love more totally because tomorrow you may not be, so this is the only day that you can share your love and sing your song and dance your dance. So don’t miss any opportunity. If others want to postpone they can, but you cannot postpone because tomorrow may not be. And this is really the situation.

Those who think that there is a certain tomorrow are in an illusion; a perfectly healthy person can die the next moment. Death does not need illness to happen; it can happen to a perfect body. It is to happen. Everything else is just an excuse; death is absolutely certain. So there is no problem about it; when it is so certain no problem about it remains. Then all that remains is that the time we have, we have to live totally.

So take care of the body through the medicine. Your work is to be more and more loving; meditate, dance, sing. Leave everything else to me and I will take care. But you forget about.And it will be

easier to forget about the illness if all care has been taken: for example, medicine has been taken care of, so that part medicine will do.

[She says she cannot do groups because her thirteen-year-old son is not accustomed to being left on his own.]

He will become accustomed, mm? and he can make friends now – so many children are here and he can go to the school and play with the children and he can meditate and be in the ashram – no problem.

Just try a few groups. First do a few non-residential groups so that in the night you will be with the child, mm?

The first group that you do is Centering and the second group is Gestalt – that too is only in the day, so in the night you can be with the child. And the third group you do is Let-go. Do these three groups and then I will give a few more.

[Prem Nimitta – symbol of love]

Life has to become a symbol of love, only then is it true life. It has to be lived as love, then only has it been lived. All living people are not really living; many of them have been long since dead. In fact by the time the child is seven he is already on his deathbed. He starts forgetting ways of love. He starts forgetting how to wonder, he is no more capable of feeling awe. He is no more surprised by existence and its immense beauty. He starts becoming knowledgeable. Rather than becoming more loving, he becomes knowledgeable. His heart starts shrinking, his head starts swelling. Then slowly slowly he is only the head; the heart has disappeared. That’s what happens to people. Then they only go through empty gestures of life without ever feeling the thrill and ecstasy of it.

The ecstasy of life is contained in love; it is a heart phenomenon. It has nothing to do with what you know. It has nothing to do with your information, it has nothing to do with your education. It has nothing to do with your culture, with your civilisation. Only a heart wildly throbbing in ecstasy is needed to feel life – a wild heart ready to die for love, ready to die in love. Then life explodes in all its splendours. Then life is a rainbow. Then each moment is such bliss, unbearable bliss, uncontainable bliss.

Deva means divine, anupo means unique, uniqueness – a divine uniqueness. God creates only unique persons... god never repeats; he is a creator, not an assembly line. You will not find two flowers alike on the whole earth; not even two grass leaves are alike. You will not find two pebbles alike in the whole world. Each phenomenon has its own uniqueness, has its own individuality.

But man has fallen into a very wrong attitude towards life; man has become a victim of the idea of imitation, comparison. Everybody is trying to be like somebody else, which is impossible. And that can only bring misery and nothing else, because that will only bring frustration and failure. You can only be yourself and you can never be anybody else.

If one tries hard, one can act like somebody else, but the acting is not being. The act remains only on the surface and deep down you continue to be yourself. And because of this idea – that you have to be like Christ or like Buddha or like Krishna – because of these ideas people become hypocrites. They are one thing within and they are another thing on the outside; anger may be boiling within and they are smiling. They become schizophrenic.

This is the fundamental neurosis that the whole humanity is suffering from: that each person has become two. Instead of being one, integrated, there has come a split, and because of the split there is constant war going on within yourself; you are fighting with yourself. And a house divided against itself cannot stand long. And this is a wastage of energy. The same energy can become creative, but it simply leaks, dissipates, and all that it creates are hypocrites, pretenders, ugly human beings, imitators. That is why man looks so dead, dirty, unintelligent.

The reason is that we have been taught to be like somebody else. Nobody can be like Jesus and nobody can be like Buddha... and there is no need to be either. You can only be yourself, and you have to be only yourself. Learn from all but be yourself; love all but be yourself. Never feel the desire to be somebody else. If the desire comes, drop it immediately. Become alert that that desire is the root cause of neurosis; it has not to be cooperated with, it has not to be strengthened. It has not to be carried in your heart, otherwise it starts growing roots.

And remember that it is good to learn from every place, from everybody, but never make an image in your mind that you have to be like. You have to be only yourself, and you cannot know what that is, because you have never been before, so you will know only when you have become it. So life has to be a discovery – a discovery of an uncharted land, an unmapped land, an unknown territory. We cannot figure it out before we have explored it.

In your inner exploration, use all that you can use, learn all that you can learn, but never make an image which you have to be like. The moment you create the image you have started becoming false. You have betrayed your being; you have gone astray from god.

That is one of my essential teachings – that each of my sannyasins has to be a unique flowering... juSt like himself, herself, not like anybody else.

Deva means god, vihara means dwelling in – dwelling in god. God is the ocean – we are the fish. We may know, we may not know, but we are dwelling in god; there is no other way to be. To be is to be in god, because god is the only space and the only time. God is nothing but another name for the totality of existence. God is not something separate from existence; it is just another name for existence. We are in it, but we can be in it in two ways: one, unconsciously, the other consciously. If we are in it unconsciously, we go on missing so much which was easily available. It is like you have fallen asleep in a beautiful garden. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and there is great fragrance... the sunrays are passing through the trees and making tremendously beautiful patterns. But you are asleep, you are missing all although you are in the garden. For you there is no sun and no beautiful patterns of its rays. For you there is no fragrance, no birds singing, no trees dancing, no flowers, no butterflies, nothing. You may be seeing a nightmare... you may be suffering in your dreams. You may be in hell. This is how millions of people are living: being in god, still fast asleep, creating their own nightmares. One has just to become awake.

The difference between you and a Buddha is not much. Both are the same garden with the same trees, with the same sun and the same birds and the same flowers... but Buddha is awake. His nightmare is finished – he is no more dreaming. He is living the reality as it is; he is no more inventing his own reality. That is the only difference; otherwise both are in the same ocean

Up to now you have dwelt in god in an unconscious way. Now as a sannyasin make efforts to dwell in the same god but a little more consciously. Slowly slowly bring more and more consciousness; whatsoever you are doing bring more consciousness to it. If you are looking at a rose flower, become the look – intense, aflame – as if you have become just your eyes and everything else has disappeared. You will be surprised that even an ordinary rose flower is so psychedelic. It can turn you on as no drug can ever do. Any small thing can create great ecstatic dance in you. All that is needed is to be totally alert about it. You have just gone for a morning walk; be alert to each step that you are taking and your morning walk becomes utterly intoxicated.

Remember only one thing: more and more actions have to be transformed from unconscious states to conscious states. That is your work – that you have to do.

Deva means divine, vimukta means freedom – divine freedom. Freedom is the ultimate goal – everything else is secondary. If it serves freedom it is good; if it goes against freedom it is bad. Freedom is the very criterion. One has to constantly check: is whatsoever one is doing going to make one more free? If it is going to make one more free it is good; if it is going to make one more of a prisoner, unfree, then it is not good.

This is the real criterion of morality. Morality has nothing to do with others – it has to do with your freedom, something to do with your freedom. And the strange thing is that whatsoever makes you free is good for others too and whatsoever makes you unfree is bad for others, because the more a person becomes free, the more he becomes loving, the more he becomes blissful. And naturally his bliss starts overflowing and starts reaching to others. He becomes a climate and whosoever comes in his climate enters spring, starts blooming. The man who is unfree and is going more and more towards unfreedom becomes so paralysed in his being, so crippled, so poisoned, that he is constantly in rage. He becomes destructive; he wants to destroy, he wants to take revenge.

He thinks that others are creating his bondage. He is never happy with anybody; he is constantly annoyed, irritated. And because he is unfree he creates unfreedom for others. Whomsoever he can grab he will exploit, he will destroy, he will poison. So the person who is free is naturally good, and the person who is not free is naturally bad. Freedom makes one a saint.

But I am not talking about your so-called saints. They are not free people at all – they have created a very complicated priSon for themselves. They live in their own self-created prisons. Sometimes your so-called sinners are more free than your so called saints. So when I am saying that freedom makes you a saint, I am not talking about your Christian saints, Hindu saints; I am simply talking about the real sainthood – a Jesus, a Buddha, a Bahaudin – those few rare people who lived their life as freedom and in freedom they flowered. Only in freedom can one flower.

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