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‌CHAPTER 26

26 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, samagro means totality. Perfection is not the goal of life, although the whole past of humanity has been teaching people that perfection is the goal. And because of that teaching they have driven the whole of humanity neurotic; nobody can be perfect. Except for the total, the whole, there is no possibility of anybody being perfect... neither Jesus is perfect nor Buddha.

Perfection is not possible in life because life is always an on-going process; it never stops, there is no full-stop. It goes on and on, so how can there be perfection? Perfection means that now there is no possibility for growth, that all is finished, that all is complete. Perfection will mean absolute death. Perfection cannot be part of life. Life remains imperfect, beautifully imperfect. I call it beautifully imperfect because it is through imperfection that it moves, it grows, it enters into new territories of being, it reaches to new levels of consciousness. It goes on and on, and when you have reached one peak, suddenly another peak is waiting for you as a challenge, a higher peak. It is an infinite journey.

But man can be total; perfect he cannot be. Totality has a totally different connotation. It means that whatsoever you do, do it whole-heartedly. The direction of perfection and totality are different. For example, the man who is after perfection will like to make his love perfect. Now he is chasing something impossible. In chasing the impossible he will miss even the possible. He will remain loveless. Rather than gaining perfect love, he will miss all the opportunities of imperfect love too.

But the man who thinks of totality, whenever he is in love, he is totally in it. He dissolves himself into it, he is lost in it – it becomes his very soul. He has no idea of how love should be. He has no image with which his love has to be synonymous. He has no idea of love. His approach is that when he is in love, he should be totally in love; nothing should be left behind.No withholding, because

when you withhold something, you become divided. Then your energy moves in a conflict: a part of you wants to go into love; a part goes on holding back. It is like one foot moves ahead, another foot

moves backwards. You will be in a chaos. Both feet have to move in the same direction; then it is totality.

When a person is totally in love, love is not only spiritual, not only psychological, not only physical, it is all; it is physical, it is psychological, it is spiritual. That totality brings bliss, and that totality brings you closer to the total existence.

The old religions teach perfection – I teach totality, and that you have to work out in life.

Deva means divine, raso means juice. It is a special word.In India god is thought to be a taste, a

taste on the tongue. God is not thought to be a thought but a very tangible taste, and because it is a taste it cannot be expressed in words. It is impossible to reduce it to words.

One of the most famous statements of the Upanishads is ‘raso waisah’: god is juice. It has tremendous meaning – it means that god has to be drunk, it means that god is like wine, that one has to become a drunkard, that only by drinking god does one come to know god – not by thinking about him, not by contemplating him, not by reading about him. The people who go on about and about, go on round and round.

One has to be thirsty for god.just as a man lost in the desert is thirsty and for whom even a single

drop of water will look like nectar. When one is thirsty for god then things start happening. Then it is no more an intellectual question – it becomes an existential quest. Then it is a question of life and death, not a curiosity only. All that is implied in the word ‘raso’.…

And certainly when god descends into one’S being it comes like nectar pouring from the beyond. It satisfies every pore of your being, every cell of your being. All thirst disappears, and forever.

Think of god as taste, as experience, as something to be drunk, as something to be eaten, digested, so that it becomes part of you. Thoughts never become part of you; they remain undigested food. They may gather as fat in your being but they don’t make you more vital; they dull people, they make people unintelligent.

It is a strange phenomenon but you can watch it everywhere: the more knowledgeable a person is, the more unintelligent you will find him, because he does not need intelligence; he has a substitute. His knowledge works for him. He can afford to lose intelligence. Knowledge starts pretending to be intelligence. Knowledge is cheap and intelligence is an arduous effort. To grow into intelligence is to go through a fire.

So thoughts never make one intelligent, never make one more alive, never bring one closer to god or reality. In fact the more thoughts you have, the farther away you are from reality. So never think of god as a thought, never think of god as a word. It is not! And because we have been thinking of god as a thought, as a word, as a concept, great misunderstanding has arisen and people go on wasting their whole life in theological studies, in philosophical nonsense.

God is like loveexactly the same juice as love is. One has to fall into love to know it – there is no

other way – and sannyas has to be a falling in love with god, for god, not a question but a quest.

And if the heart burns, longs intensely, passionately, the cloud of his nectar starts gathering around you and one day when you are really thirsty, it showers. And a single shower of his energy, and you are no more the same. It washes from you all impurities that you gather down through so many lives; it simply cleanses you of all dirt that naturally gathers on the mirror of consciousness. Suddenly one is reborn, fresh, young, totally new, and only those new eyes are capable of seeing the beauty and the benediction of existence.

Deva means divine, santosha means contentment. Contentment is not only satisfaction. Satisfaction is a poor substitute for contentment. Satisfaction is man-managed. It is somehow consoling oneself that all is good, because if you don’t think that all is good then the mind remains in turmoil. You know deep down that nothing is good but on the surface you go on believing that all is good. It keeps you calm in a certain way. It does not create too much chaos in you but the chaos remains underneath.

And this so-called satisfaction remains only very thin... just skin-deep. Scratch a little and immediately discontent comes up. But that’s how people are living: on the surface everybody is smiling, everybody seems to be happy, and nobody is happy; all those smiles are false, political. People deceive others by smiling and deceive themselves too. When others start believing in their smiles they also start believing. This is a very mediocre way of living one’s life.

A sannyasin should not live like that. A sannyasin has to seek and search for real contentment. So contentment has not to be imposed upon oneself; it has not to be cultivated, it has not to become a character trait. One has to go deep into one’s heart. Through meditation, through love, through silence one has to move towards the heart. When we have reached the very core of the heart there is an explosion, and that explosion is contentment. One suddenly feels at home, and all is absolutely good as it is. Not that you believe it is good. Even if you want to believe that it is not, you cannot. It simply becomes your realisation that all is good, it has never been otherwise and it will never be otherwise. All is good because god is! But first one has to find the god within one’s soul. That experience, that encounter, is contentment.

[A sannyasin says he has been sick, intermittently, for a long time.]

You just do one thing: start exhaling deeply. As many times in the day that you remember throw the whole air out, exhale very deeply and pull the stomach in, mm? – so the whole air is thrown out. But then don’t inhale; let the body inhale. Simply exhale and then leave it, and let the body inhale on its own; it will inhale. With inhalation you should not interfere. With exhalation force as much as you can. The deeper the exhalation, the deeper will inhalation become on its own. But whenever you do it, at one time don’t do it more than seven times – seven breaths at one time – but you can do it many times in the day.

The second thing to remember: don’t do it immediately after you have eaten: at least two hours should pass. Remember these two things and within three, four weeks the stomach problem will be completely gone. It is just some tension there that needs relaxation and exhalation is tremendously helpful.

You have been storing energy there; it is nothing physical. The stomach is the place where we go on storing our emotions – anger, jealousy, hatred, negativities, all kinds of things. The stomach is the only empty space where we can go on forcing things. They are there – exhalation can throw them out.

So just do this and after three, four weeks, write a letter to me to explain how things are going. It will be gone – nothing to be worried about. Good!

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