CHAPTER 31
31 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Deva means divine, astiko means one who trusts. Trust does not mean belief. Belief is of the intellect – trust is of the heart. Belief is always in a certain kind of doctrine. A person who believes in god really believes in the belief of god.
Trust is not in any philosophy – it is in something existential. The man who trusts god feels his presence all around. It is not a question of knowledge; it is his feeling. For the person who trusts, god is not a theory but a very tangible presence. For him life is god and everything that is alive is god. The man of trust is a pagan; the whole existence is divine.
That is the meaning of your name: search for trust, drop all beliefs – they are the barriers that prevent trust from growing. Learn to live through the heart, through love, through feeling.
Churches cannot make anybody religious... and sometimes just a rose flower can convert.
Veet means beyond, nishkarsho means conclusions. Truth is not a conclusion. It is not arrived at by logical thinking. It is an experience but not a conclusion. The people who think that truth is a conclusion never come close to truth. They go on wandering in thoughts. They think much about truth, but to think about truth is one thing and to know it is quite another.
And knowing is the real thing; knowing about is just a self-deception. To know means to experience. And experience is not a conclusion at all, because experience always remains open. Experience always goes on growing... it is a constant flowing river. Experience begins but it never ends. Conclusion means one has come to a full stop. In life all that is. beautiful is always a movement. It is a dance, it is a process, unending – eternal is the pilgrimage of life.
So the person who experiences god or truth or himself does not arrive at a conclusion either. He knows, but his knowing makes him more humble because now he knows that much more has to be
known. Now he knows that he knows nothing. Now he knows that whatsoever he knows is so tiny, and the unknown and the unknowable is so vast.As if I am holding only a small grain of sand in
my hand and the whole earth is full of sand grains.
The man of real knowing remains non-conclusive. He remains open. He is always ready to move, he is always ready to change. He is not a fanatic, he is not stubborn; he is not a fascist. He does not create an ideology out of his experience. He shares his experience but he does not indoctrinate people. He has no doctrine, so how can he indoctrinate people? At the most he provokes people towards experiencing.he inspires. He goads people towards their own experiences. He is a light
pointing a way, but he does not give you ready-made knowledge.
So in the first place truth is never arrived at by logical thinking, hence it cannot be a conclusion. In the second place it cannot be a conclusion because the experience is always an open experience, open-ended, and always growing and one can never say that one has arrivednever, never. One is
always arriving but one never arrives. And that is the beauty of it: the journey knows no end, hence the journey knows no death.
Conclusion means that a death has happened. No conclusion means life is still growing, moving – there is still much that is to happen, and many more surprises to come across. That is the very thrill for the seeker, and the adventurer – the exploration is unending, the mystery is infinite.…
Deva means divine, sansarga means contact – divine contact, in the contact of the divine. It is a question of plugging in. God is available; we are just not plugged in. The whole question is how to plug oneself in.
We have become disconnected, and only we are responsible for the disconnection. We have started living a separate life. We don’t want to depend on the whole. We want to be independent, we want to be centres of our own being; that’s what the ego is all about. And the ego prevents contact – it does not allow you to come into contact with god. It surrounds you like a China Wall and keeps you separate from the whole. And because you remain separate, you remain miserable.
Bliss is with the whole. Bliss is nothing but merging and melting into the whole. Whenever you melt and merge even for a single moment, suddenly there is bliss. Even if you can forget your ego for a few seconds you are flooded with bliss.
That’s what happens when you see a beautiful sunset and you forget yourself. What happens in that moment? Between you and the sunset there is no wall, no separation. You are plugged in. Suddenly the sunset and you are not two separate phenomena – you are connected, joined together. And that’s what gives the joy.
Whenever you feel joy, watch: you will always come to know that the ego disappears in those moments. It may be beauty, it may be love, it may be music, it may be anything but whenever you find joy, watch. You will suddenly become aware that the ego always disappears whenever there is joy. And that is so absolute a law that it is a strange phenomenon that people don’t become aware of it.
And then watch the opposite: whenever you are miserable you will find your ego very present. The quantity of the ego is the quantity of misery: the more the ego, the more the misery. The totally egoistic man lives in utter hell and the totally egoless person is already in paradise.
And the art that I teach you – the art of sannyas – is the art of plugging in with god. And there are a thousand and one opportunities, every day, every moment.Seeing a beautiful flower you can plug
in, you can drop yourself; the observer can become the observed. You can be with the flower, not separate, not as a spectator but as a participant. You can become its colour, its fragrance, its dance in the wind, and suddenly you will see a great uprush of energy. You are no more the same.
In the beginning it will happen only for moments. Sometimes listening to beautiful music, plug in. Sometimes watching the stars, sometimes holding the hand of a friend, plug in. Remember this word ‘plugging in’ – that’s all meditation is about. And slowly slowly the knack is learned. Slowly slowly you become more and more capable of contacting god, and then a day arises, the ultimate day, when you drop your ego; there is no need to forget it. You disappear as a separate being. That is the day of ultimate celebration.
Deva means divine, samvado means communion – divine communion. Truth cannot be communicated but it can be communed. Communication is verbal; communion is non-verbal. Communication is through words, thoughts; it is a conversation. Communion is silent.it is silence
itself.
Science can be communicated, religion cannot be communicated. It is a transmission beyond scriptures. It is saying that which can be said so it can be said only though silence. Even if words are used, they are used only to emphasise silence. They are used only to create a background for silence. Buddhas have spoken, and have spoken more than anybody else, but all their speaking functions only as a contrast for the silence that they want to deliver.
When somebody comes here and he is just an outsider, a spectator, and is here out of curiosity, all that he hears is what words can say. So there is a communication between me and him, but only a communication. He will become more knowledgeable but he will not gain anything in his being. He will have something added to his memory but not to his being.
Becoming a sannyasin means that now the world of communion starts. Now you will not only be hearing my words but my silence too. And slowly slowly the gestalt changes: words become a background and silences become the real thing. One starts reading between the lines, and that’s how a master has to be read and understood.
So let this be the beginning of communion – a heart to heart relationship, a melting, a merging, and then something that has happened to me can start happening to you too. It is contagious, it is a kind of infection. Truth can only be delivered like an infection; there is no other way.
So all that is needed is that the disciple should start coming closer and closer to the master, closer in the heart, dropping all defences, dropping all rationalisations, growing into trust. Then, at a certain point, when the trust has grown, the flame jumps from the master to the disciple, and suddenly the candle that was unlit becomes lit. This is what Zen people call ‘satori’, and in India we have been calling ‘samadhi’.
It is the most miraculous thing in the world – the communion between the master and the disciple. It is almost magic, unbelievable, because just a moment before the candle was unlit and all was dark, and in a split second all is light, and the darkness has disappeared and disappeared forever. Just a
moment before it was all noise and now there is no more noise – all is melody and all is music. Just a moment before all was hell and now there is no hell at all, nowhere. One is back home, one has entered into paradise again.
This is not possible through communication; it becomes possible only through communion. Communion is the whole art of being with a master. That what Sufis call ‘adabh’.
[A sannyasin says: It often happens that when I am together with people I become very silent and I’m just watching and listening. It feels so unimportant – what is said – and I also doubt that it is true. I feel perhaps I am losing interest in people... ]
The truth is that what people say is all nonsense. The more you go deeper into meditation, the more it becomes apparent that it is all a kind of gibberish. People are simply vomiting – whatsoever is rambling in their minds they are vomiting; they are using you just to cathart. And if you are silent you will become more and more aware of it – that what they are saying makes no sense; it makes much sound certainly, but makes no sense – it is all irrelevant.
And if you don’t say anything to them in response they will feel offended because they will also suspect that you are becoming aware of the nonsense. So it is a kind of mutual arrangement in the world: they pour their nonsense into you, you pour your nonsense into them, so both are happy, both are feeling unburdened. But nothing has really happened – only garbage has been transferred from here to there. But for a while it feels good for a change.
It happens to every meditator – don’t be worried about it – but your apprehension is also true that if you go on doing it, you will lose people. They will not talk to you, they may become even afraid of you. If somebody remains very silent and very solid and integrated when they are being foolish, they will avoid that person. His stare will be avoided, his silence will be avoided, because his silence will become a mirror to them. They will see their ugly faces in him.…
So you have to do one thing: just be polite with them and talk a little nonsense deliberately! Socialise but let it all be acting. They will feel good and you will not be losing anything. But don’t forget that all that they are saying is nonsense tool It is just a formality so you will not lose people. Rather, on the contrary, they will be very happy with you, because you will be so deliberately nonsensical – you will make good conversation!
[A sannyasin says: I love to play music, I love it more than anything else, and there are times when it’s just starting to happen and then my ego comes in. I see it coming and it kills the music. I wonder if you could say anything about that.]
It is not really the ego that kills the music – it is the idea that the ego, if it comes, will kill the music; it is not the ego itself. The ego is just a shadow; it has no substance. It can’t do anything, it is utterly impotent. It doesn’t exist in the first place – it is just an empty idea. How can it kill music? Music is so substantial, music is so solid, so real; how can it kill music? Nothing to be worried about. It is just the idea that if the ego comes it will destroy the music. Drop that idea, and even if you feel the ego coming, let it come; you continue your music. Tell the ego ‘Wait!’ or ‘come later on’ or ‘I am engaged right now.’
Don’t be too serious about the ego... be a little more playful. Let it be there! If you become too attached to the idea that it should not be there, then you are disturbed. It is not the ego that is distracting you; it is the idea that the ego should not be there.
Now this becomes a great disturbance. Let the ego be there! What can the ego do?
When you are playing music, so many people are passing, everybody has an ego, so many egos are there, and they are not disturbing you, so why can only your poor ego disturb? Let it be there! Just allow it. Say ‘hello’ and forget about it.
No need to become obsessed with it. It will go. It is nothing to be worried about. The ego is such a poor thing that sometimes even killing it one feels much compassion for it – it is such a poor thing.
[A sannyasin says that he has a pulsation on his forehead when he does the Gourishankar meditation and Sufi dancing, which frightens him.
You need not do anything that disturbs it again, mm? – don’t do the meditation that started it. It was the Gourishankar?...
It can do that sometimes, mm? You have a very sensitive third eye, too sensitive; it is not good for too sensitive a third eye, mm? because it is a very hard method to penetrate the third eye. But if it is very sensitive then the penetration can go to the heart and it can disturb your whole heart beat; it can disturb your stomach too. It was not fear – it was just the disturbance from the third eye that penetrated you.
You have a very sensitive third eye – a good phenomenon. Very few people have that sensitive a third eye. It is a good indication – you can go into deep meditations very easily. But you need not have such hard methods, so never do that again. Mm? just do soft methods – they will be enough – Sufi dancing, Music, Nadabrahma... anything. Always remember, if anything disturbs your third eye, don’t do it; immediately stop. It can disturb your whole nervous system.
The third eye centre is the controlling centre.
If it is disturbed then the whole thing is disturbed. But it has been a good experience – that you have come to know that you have a very sensitive spot there.
Sahaj means spontaneity, svada means taste – taste of spontaneity. And that is the greatest taste in life. It cannot be compared with anything else: it is incomparable, it is unique. And this taste of spontaneity is the beginning, the initiation into god.
The mind lives in past and future – god lives in the present; that is why the mind cannot have an encounter with god. It is impossible. Their dimensions are different; they don’t criss-cross. The mind goes on living in the past and in the future – it always by-passes the present; and god is always now. Now is his other name. So only one who becomes spontaneous can have the taste of god.
To be spontaneous means not to live out of the past, not to live out of yesterday. To be spontaneous also means not to live for tomorrow either. When one lives utterly in the present moment,