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‌CHAPTER 3

3 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin says: I always have so much to say to you, but I have nothing to say!]

That’s right. When there is so much to say, it is always difficult to say it. Only small things can be said, only trivia can be said, only the mundane can be said. Whenever you feel something overwhelming it is impossible to say it, because words are too narrow to contain anything essential. Words are utilitarian. They are good for day to day, mundane activities. They start falling short as you move beyond the ordinary life. In love they are not useful, in prayer they become utterly inadequate. And this is a relationship of love and prayer, so it will be difficult, but it is good that one has so much to say that one cannot say it.

Sooner or later all sannyasins are bound to reach this point, and then the real communion starts which is beyond words, which is more of energy, less of intellect, which is more existential and total. Then there is a communion which is not through language but through the music of the presence. Then the very presence conveys... then it is heart to heart and soul to soul. And only then is one contented that one has said that which was worth saying. It has not been said at all, but still it has been conveyed... through silence, through feeling.

All that is great is beyond language, and when a person finds that nothing can be expressed, then he has arrived. Then life is full of great beauty, great love, great joy, great celebration... Life is full of god!

God is the name of all that which cannot be expressed... just a symbol, a metaphor. That is exactly the meaning of the word ‘metaphor’. It consists of two words ‘meta’ and ‘phor’. It means that which takes you beyond:‘meta’ means beyond and ‘phor’ means that which takes you. Metaphor means: that which takes you beyond. God is a metaphor – it simply takes you beyond that which can be said.

So all that is inexpressible is divine, and all that is expressible is human. And whenever any relationship starts becoming divine, it goes beyond words. One would like to say so much and yet nothing can be said!

Prem means love, yuganaddha is a special technical term of Tantra. It means the meeting of the opposites – the meeting of man and woman, the meeting of life and death, the meeting of body and soul, the meeting of the inexpressible and the expressible... all the possible meetings of the opposites; that is the meaning of ‘yuganaddha’.

Through yuganaddha, through the meeting of the opposites, one arrives at the truth, because truth is neither this nor that; truth is both/and.

Man is half, woman is half; so is life and death, negative and positive, summer and winter. And to know only the half is the whole misery. It cannot satisfy – something remains missing; the other half remains missing. Unless the other half has joined and one has become whole, there is never bliss. Bliss is really a by-product of yuganaddha, of the meeting of the opposites. They have a technical term in Christianity also, ‘conjunctio oppositorum’; that is exactly the translation of yuganaddha.

Life consists of opposites and truth consists of one whole. And the opposites are not to be taken as opposites but as complementaries; only then can they be joined together. The whole process of Tantra is how to join the opposites together, how to help the polarities dissolve into one being. And when one is whole, one is holy.

Now, man cannot meet with the outer woman eternally; it can only be momentary. That is the misery of love and the joy too. The joy, the ecstasy, is because of the momentary meeting. At least for a moment one feels whole – nothing is missing; everything falls into one harmony. There is great joy, but soon it is lost. As it comes, it goes... only for a moment a glimpse, a fleeting glimpse, of union. In that union there is joy, there is orgasmic ecstasy, but then the dark night follows. Again you are half and more so... more than before, because before you had not tasted the joy of meeting. You had lived in darkness and you became accustomed to it. Now you have seen the light, now the darkness looks darker than ever because there is something to compare it with. And now great desire arises to be in that light again and again. But each time you are there it is only for a moment and you are thrown back into the darkness and each time into a darker dark.

Hence the ecstasy of love and the agony too; they go hand in hand. The more you love, the more you suffer, the more you celebrate too. The deeper your celebration, the deeper will be your suffering. Hence many people have decided not to be in love, or, even if they are in a relationship, to avoid love as much as possible, to avoid the agony, to avoid those dark moments that will follow... and they are longer! The moments of joy are very few and far in between, and the dark nights are very long.

Tantra says ‘Use this as a key – that the meeting with the outer can only be momentary. But there is an inner woman, an inner man; the meeting with the inner can be permanent, eternal. So learn the secret from the outside and apply it inside.’

No man is just man and no woman is just woman. This is one of the greatest insights of Tantra. Now modern psychology agrees with it, but this is a five-thousand-year-old insight – that man is both, has to be... because man is born out of man and woman, out of the meeting of these two polarities. He

carries something from the father and something from the mother. So is the case with the woman, so deep down we are the opposite too. If the conscious mind is man then the unconscious is the woman, and vice versa.

Unless you learn the art of meeting with the other inside, love will remain a misery, and joy a vicious circle, and you will be torn apart. That inner meeting is possible just as the outer meeting is possible. But the inner meeting has one thing special about it: it need not end... it can be a real marriage.

No outside marriage can be a real marriage because the other remains the other, even married. Two egos are tied together, that’s all. For certain purposes it is good, but as far as experiencing truth is concerned, not enough. Learn the secret: that meeting with the outer gives you such a great joy; how much more millionfold is going to be the joy if the meeting happens inside! – because it can become a permanent state of affairs.

The line that divides your conscious and unconscious can be dropped, the line that divides your man and woman inside can be dropped, the line that divides the left hemisphere of your brain from the right hemisphere can be dropped. You are in some moments very male and in some moments you are very female. But you have been brought up, as everyone has been, by a society which insists on sex roles. You have been told ‘Just be a man because you are a man’ so you have been avoiding all that is feminine in you. Because you have been avoiding, a meeting is not possible. And the woman is avoiding all that is male in her. So we have made fixed roles which are unnatural. There are moments when a man is feminine, and there are moments when a woman is masculine; they have to be accepted, relished. They are also you – they have not to be denied; they have to be absorbed.

And if you can start absorbing all those tender moments in you which are feminine, you are moving towards yuganaddha. Then a moment comes when all the barriers have been dropped and suddenly you are one inside. That experience of one inside is the greatest experience possible to human consciousness.

Prem means love, ashisha means blessing – love, the blessing. God has no form. God comes as love – that’s his way of coming. He showers on us as love, so when love starts moving you, know perfectly well that god is very close by. Love is the first experience of god, the first blessing. And those who are incapable of love are incapable of knowing god. Nobody is intrinsically incapable, but people have become incapable of love because of a wrong education, a miseducation, and everybody has been miseducated.

The society is very anti-love. It depends on hatred, it functions through violence; its whole structure is ugly. It is a military society, notwithstanding all the pretensions. We live in a concentration camp; the whole earth is a concentration camp. It is very subtle; you don’t come across it. It is everywhere – the military is there, the police are there, the bombs are there; the whole structure is of violence. It cannot allow love – love is dangerous. To allow love this whole society will have to disappear.

It cripples love in very cunning ways. It brings up children in such a way that they become unloving. By the time they are a little older they have lost track of love. Not knowing what to do they become victims. Then they start running after money, power, prestige. These are just their haphazard ways of finding some love object, because they have forgotten the language of love and they have become afraid of love because they have been taught against it. But love is such a natural necessity that they cannot live without it; they need some object.

If they cannot find a woman, they will find a car. It is love misplaced – this is miseducation. If they cannot find a man they will find money or power, and that becomes their love object. The money-mad person is sexually perverted – money has become his sexual object: he is copulating with the idea of money – and so is the power-hungry politician. Now power has become his woman. And these are not going to satisfy because no substitute is possible. Love can be fulfilled only through love; nothing else can work instead of it. All else is just ‘as if’. One can pretend, one can waste one’s life but finally one comes to realise that the whole effort has been in vain. Then people philosophically conclude that man is a useless passion.

Man is not a useless passion, but miseducation makes man a useless passion. Then people conclude that the world is just accidental, that there is no meaning. There is meaning – it is just that you missed it. But because you missed the meaning it hurts – to recognise the fact that you have missed it. It is better to say that there is no meaning in life itself; what can one do? It is more consoling, more soothing. Then people develop philosophies which are just soothing, consolatory. Their whole life has been a wastage... not because life has to be a wastage but because their love has been misplaced. They were made incapable of loving persons. And the society makes the whole thing in such a way that the pattern is very subtle and very unconscious.

For example, people are made egoistic. The moment a person becomes egoistic, he will be unloving. To love, one has to dissolve the ego. Now he will protect his ego, so even if he falls in love that is going to be only a partial affair – it will never be total, and unless it is total it is not fulfilling. Hence the conflict between lovers, the continuous fight, because each is trying to dominate the other. Two egos trying to be in love, but the whole effort proves to be futile and ridiculous. Egos cannot be in love; egos can only be in conflict. Love happens when there is no ego left. Only in those rare moments when two persons are egoless, empty of the egos, does love bloom.

The society gives you ambition, ego, and great ideas of possessing things, and great fear about persons. It provokes lust for things through all the advertisements and other subtle ways. Have more – the more you have, the more happy you will be. This seems to be the message coming from every nook and corner. But by having, nobody is happy. Having can bring only more and more anxiety. Being brings happiness, but being happens only through love. Love is the alchemy that brings your being into existence, that gives you birth as a soul. It is through love that one is reborn.

Let sannyas be a love affair. The rebirth is possible. And there is no need for anybody to go empty- handed from the earth – one can go like a monarch. There is no need for anybody to remain a beggar, but only love is the treasure. And love is the only blessing there is worth searching for, worth asking for.

Jesus is right when he says ‘Ask and it shall be given, knock and the door shall be opened unto you.’ Just for the asking, the blessing starts descending.

Deva means divine, meeto means friend – a divine friend, a friend to all that is. But the first friendship has to be with oneself, and very rarely will you find a person who is friendly towards himself. We are enemies to ourselves, and we are hoping in vain that we can be friends to anybody else. We have been taught to condemn ourselves.

Self-love has been thought of as a sin. It is not. It is the foundation of all other loves, the very foundation. k is only through self-love that altruistic love is possible. Because self-love has been

condemned, all other possibilities of love have disappeared from the earth. This has been a very cunning strategy to destroy love.

It is as if you say to a tree ‘Don’t nourish yourself through the earth; that is sin. Don’t nourish yourself from the moon and the sun and the stars; that is selfishness. Be altruistic – serve other trees.’ It looks logical, and that is the danger. It looks logical: if you want to serve others, then sacrifice; service means sacrifice. But if a tree sacrifices, it will die, it will not be able to serve any other tree; it will not be able to be at all. It will never bloom. Fruits will never come and flowers will never come to it. The only way that the tree can serve the earth and others is by showering flowers on the earth, giving great fruits to the earth, shade to the pilgrims... but that is possible only if the tree is in a tremendous self-love.

Man has been taught ‘Don’t love yourself’. That has been the almost universal message of the so- called organised religions... not of Jesus but certainly of Christianity, not of Buddha but of Buddhism. Of all organised religions that has been the teaching: condemn yourself, you are a sinner, you are worthless; you deserve hell and nothing else.

And because of this condemnation the tree of man has shrunk, has lost lustre, can no more rejoice. People are dragging themselves somehow. This is not life; this is very pseudo, very superficial. People don’t have any roots in existence – they are uprooted. They are trying to be of service to others and they cannot, because they have not been even friendly to themselves. So they pretend to be friendly to others, but a pretension is a pretension; it creates a very false society. Hypocrisy becomes the foundation of such a society... very formal, with no relationship at all.

You see people in crowds but people are alone in the crowds, utterly lonely, because there is no relationship, there is no possibility of relationship. Friendship is not possible; how is relationship possible? So people relate only in a formal way. You love your wife because she is your wife. Love has to be done – it is part of your duty, your duty as a husband. She has to love you – her duty as a wife, but the persons are no more there. These are only two functions, husband and wife, two functionaries – pretending, going through empty gestures, but the hearts never meet, they cannot meet; the very foundation has been destroyed.

My message is: the first love is self-love. One should be utterly happy to be oneself. One should rejoice in oneself, one should celebrate one’s being. Nobody is a sinner, you are not condemned. By giving you birth, god has already appreciated you. By giving you birth, he has already respected you. A poet writes a poem because he loves it, and a painter paints a certain painting because that is in his heart. Man is possible only because man is god, in god’s heart. This existence is possible only because it must be somewhere deep down in the very centre of the whole – from there we come.

Jesus says ‘I and my father in heaven are one.’ He is saying that the son is in the deepest core of the heart of the whole, so is the whole existence – men, women, trees and animals and birds. Nothing has to be condemned, but that is possible only if you don’t condemn yourself. The person who condemns himself is ready to condemn anybody. He will not miss any opportunity to condemn. He has been condemned – he has to take revenge, he is boiling. He wants to send everybody to hell. He has a great grudge, and I can understand why he has that grudge, he has not been accepted and welcomed.

The first love is self-love; and to be in love with one’s self is not selfishness. Self-love is not selfishness. In fact this is a paradox of life: that the selfish people are the people who are not in love with themselves. Hence they are selfish, because they don’t know self-love. Their selfishness is just a poor substitute for self-love. They are selfish in hoarding money, they are selfish in hoarding possessions, because they don’t know how to love themselves. They go on doing something else, somehow to feel worthy, meaningful, significant.

The man who loves himself is never selfish, he cannot be. In that very loving state he becomes unselfish. This is the paradox: the man who loves himself is unselfish. He loves himself so much that he can give, and by giving he is not poorer but richer. He knows now that the more he gives, the more he has. By loving himself he has come to know the joy of loving. Now he wants to love everybody else too, because as love spreads he will be going deeper and deeper into joy.

So my message to you is: become a friend to yourself, trust yourself, love yourself, and then slowly slowly let that love and trust and friendship overflow. Let it spread to as many people as possible in as many directions as possible. Even rocks have to be loved! And then you will suddenly find that they are not dead. The moment you touch something with love it becomes alive; the moment you touch something without love it becomes dead. The people who love live in an alive existence and the people who don’t love live in a dead existence.

[A sannyasin says he is very anxious about going to the West.]

No need to be worried. That’s the anxiety, mm? – that you will be so strange-looking there and people will think ‘What has happened to you?’... and it is difficult. But if a few sannyasins are there things will be simple. People have known this kind of madness already so you will not be worried! They will be acquainted with Rajneesh freaks – nothing to be worried about.

You just go happily, continue to meditate and come back!

[A sannyasin says: I feel guilty about my mother... and I can’t give her any love, no attention and since she is living in the same house it has got worse and I don’t know what to do with her.]

A few things.… First: mothers, fathers, demand too much, more than is possible for the children to give, because the natural course is: they love you because you are their children; but you cannot love them in the same way, because they are not your children. You will love your children, and the same will happen again: your children will not be able to love you in the same way, because the river moves onwards, not backwards. The natural course is that the parents will love the children and the children will love their children; it cannot move backwards. But the demand seems to be natural. Because the mother has loved you, she thinks you should love her in the same way, and the more she demands, the less you will be capable of returning the love and the more and more she will create a feeling of guilt in you. So drop that idea – completely drop it; it is natural. You cannot love her in the same way that she has loved you, and nothing is wrong with you, nothing at all. That’s how it happens to every child; that’s how nature intends it to happen.

If children love their parents too much they will not be able to love their own children. That will be more dangerous – then the survival of the species will be at risk. Your mother has also not loved her mother. At the most one can be polite, formal, but love does not flow backward. One can be

respectful, that’s true – one should be respectful, but love is not possible. Once you understand that love is not possible the guilt feeling will disappear; then you are just being normal. If it is possible, you are abnormal; you need some treatment.

There are a few people who become too attached to, too obsessed with, their parents; they are psychologically ill. If a woman loves the mother too much she will not be able to love a man because she will always find that her mother will suffer, that it will be creating a kind of conflict. If she loves a man her love will flow towards that man and she will feel guilty. So there are a few women who remain attached to the mother and the father, and a few men who remain attached to the parents. They are ill people – they will never enjoy life. And because they will not enjoy life, they will be angry also at their parents. Deep down they will be murderous; they will hope ‘Some day if the mother dies or if the father dies, then I will be free,’ although they will not tell it to anybody – not even to themselves will they tell it. It will just be there lurking in their unconscious, because that seems to be the only possibility to be free. That’s not good – to think of your parents as dead – but that’s how it happens if you become too attached.

There is no need – just be respectful, that’s all. Take care, whatsoever you can do, do, but don’t feel guilt at all. It is because of the guilt that you behave horribly. Just see the point: because you feel guilty, certainly you feel it is her presence that is making you feel guilty and destroying your happiness. She is a disturbance, so when you come to see her you start behaving horribly – that is a natural by-product. And when you feel horrible back home you will feel more guilty. This-is a vicious circle: you will feel more guilty, next time you will behave more horribly and so on, so forth; there is no end to it.

Drop the guilt. You are perfectly normal; this is how things should be. And if parents are understanding they will understand this. This happens in animals – in animals there is no question: the moment the child is able to stand on his or her own, the child leaves the parents. The parents don’t go after the child saying ‘Listen, where are you going? We have done so much for you.’ That

is not asked in nature at all.

And it is not that the mother and father have not done anything; they have done much – particularly the mother has done much, but it was her joy. To carry you in her womb was her joy. To nourish you, to bring you up, was her joy. She has been rewarded already. Nothing more is needed to be given to her; there is no question of giving. She enjoyed those moments – when she was pregnant she enjoyed it – when she gave birth she was happy, because she became a mother, she was fulfilled. Then she brought you up and she was happy: she is bringing up a child.a natural happiness. She

has been rewarded already. Nature always rewards immediately; it never keeps files hanging.

So don’t feel guilty – that’s where you have to change your mind. Drop the guilt absolutely and then you will feel a great transformation happening: you will feel sorry for the poor woman. She has done much – you will feel respectful to her; it is because of her that you are in the world. But then there is no question of guilt. And whatsoever you do you will be doing because of your simple happiness. You would like to do something.out of sheer joy! You would like to share something with her; that’s

okay.

And you will not be horrible any more. It is the guilt that creates horrible behaviour, and when you are not horrible you will feel better and another circle will start. Whenever you go to her without guilt,

you will feel good, you will be happy that she is still alive, that you can still do something for her, and when you come home you will feel very very good. And that will create again a better, deeper relationship, and respect. All that is needed is: drop the guilt feeling. It is absolutely unnecessary but I understand how it happens.

Parents have been creating it – down the ages they have been teaching children ‘You have to do this, you have to do that and if you are not doing it, you have betrayed us, you are a traitor.’ Directly or indirectly they start making you feel guilty, and they don’t know that if you are guilty, you will behave badly with them. But this is simply ignorance. So drop the guilt and then see the change coming.

And there is no need, if you don’t feel good, to go to her. Go only when you feel good! There is no need to go unnecessarily. Never go because of any duty. Never go because you have to. No. Only go when you feel really happy and you would like to be with your mother for a few moments. It is better to be happy and there only for a few moments rather than to be horrible and be there for hours and create misery for her and yourself. Be a little more aware...

Whenever possible, come back. Help my people, mm? And don’t feel guilty if you can’t! (MUCH LAUGHTER)

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