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‌CHAPTER 4

4 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, sankirtan means holy singing, holy song. Life is sacred song; that’s what Jesus means when he says ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ The bread represents the business-side of life, it represents the calculative mind. And if life is only bread, then it is meaningless; the bread cannot give meaning to it. It is needed – it is a necessity, you cannot drop it out of life – but to earn a living is not to attain to life. Life needs something more significant than bread. It needs love... which is not part of the calculative mind, which is irrational. To be meaningful life has to be a song, a poem... which has no utility. Poetry is non-utilitarian, but only the non-utilitarian gives significance to life: life becomes life only when there is poetry. And that’s what has disappeared from human consciousness.

The modern man is living by bread alone. Life has become equivalent to living. That’s a degradation, that’s a fall, and hence man is crawling and creeping on the earth; he has forgotten the language of how to soar high into the heaven. He is afraid of that quantum leap. He has become afraid of all that is irrational... and all that is beautiful is irrational, all that is significant is irrational. To reduce life to reason is to reduce it to meaninglessness. Then Sartre is right, that man is a useless passion. If you reduce life to bread, to calculation, to arithmetic, then Sartre is right.

But Sartre is wrong, because life is more than logic; it is love. It is more than body; it is soul. It is more than mathematics; it is meditation. It is something mysterious, indefinable. It can only be experienced. It is very elusive as far as language is concerned. It can only be touched by the heart; the head is inadequate.

That is the meaning of your name: let life become a sacred song. Bread is needed, but man cannot live by bread alone – something more – something of the irrational, something of the heart – is needed to bring colour to it, to bring celebration to it, to make it a rejoicing. And that is what sannyas is all about. k is an effort to open up to the unknowable, to the mysterious, to the miraculous.

[A sannyasin says he is going to the Himalayas.]

Be in the Himalayas, mm? – enjoy the Himalayas as totally as possible, because the Himalayas are still something of the wild. They are still natural; just a small part of the world in the Himalayas has remained unaffected by the so-called human progress. It is still part of the ancient world, still silent.

Go there, meditate, sing, dance, be. And allow the Himalayas to overwhelm you. Don’t go there as a tourist – go there as a lover, because only to a lover can the Himalayas reveal their mysteries. The tourists simply miss. It is not something to be seen but something to be felt deep in the heart. So be there – just don’t go on rushing from one place to another; that is not the way to be acquainted with the Himalayas. Find a place and when you see that you have fallen in love with some place, remain there as long as you can, because only slowly slowly does an intimacy arise; it cannot be a hit-and-run affair. You have to absorb the spirit. And it takes time for you to open up, for the blocks to disappear in you.

To be in the Himalayas is a natural meditation, so find a place and then be there. There are many places in the Himalayas still part of the Garden of Eden, where the world is as god made it, where man has not yet touched. There it is easier to come in contact with god than anywhere else, but only if you allow the spirit of the Himalayas to have a dialogue with you.…

Anand means bliss, vigyano means a science of – the science of bliss. That’s what sannyas is all about: the method to remove the hindrances that are preventing the bliss from happening. Bliss cannot be created – it is already the case; only the hindrances have to be removed. So the science of bliss is a very negative science. It has nothing to create; it has just to remove the barriers.

It is as if the sun has risen and you are sitting with closed eyes. All that is needed is to make you aware that you are unnecessarily sitting in darkness. Open your eyes – the sun has already arisen. The sun is there waiting, it is showering all around you, it is all over the place. And you are still in darkness, you are still in night, just because you are keeping your eyes closed.

Or, the sky is beautiful and the clouds are there and it is raining and the wind is there and you are sitting with closed doors inside your room... with stale air, in a stagnant existence. We cannot create the clouds and the rain and the wind and the dancing treesAll that is needed is to open your

doors and the wind starts blowing, the sky enters and you are suddenly transported from a closed, dead existence into an open alive existence.

The science of bliss is absolutely negative – it has just to remove barriers, and the greatest barrier is the mind, the constant chattering inside, the inner talk. That’s what is keeping your eyes closed, that is the curtain that is dividing you from reality... just a thin curtain of thoughts, very insubstantial. It can be removed very easily; a little effort and it can be removed. And once you have seen something without any thought in between, you are a totally different kind of man – you are born again. And then you know what has been preventing you from knowing life, from knowing love, from knowing god. And once you know, it is just within your capacity; any moment you can put the whole mind aside. Any moment you can say to it ‘Shut up!’ and suddenly it disappears, because it is just a mechanism; you are the masteralthough in the beginning it is very difficult, because for centuries,

for many many lives, it has remained the master. You have given it total control of your being. You have believed up to now that mind is the master; it is not.

The master of the house is your consciousness. The mind needs the thought contents, the thought process, and by ‘you’, I mean the witness that can see the thoughts moving by. The witness cannot be the witnessed, the observer cannot be the observed, the seer cannot be the seen. You can see the thoughts moving. That simply shows that you are separate from the thought process. That experience has to be strengthened, nourished. That’s what Buddha means by mindfulness; Gurdjieff used to call it self-remembering or Krishnamurti calls it awareness.

Whatever name is used – meditation, awareness, mindfulness, consciousness – it doesn’t matter. The real thing is: we have to find the witness which is lost in the crowd of thoughts. And once it is found, we have to focus upon it more and more, and slowly slowly little glimpses will start happening. Suddenly the window opens – you are transported into another being; another door opens one day and a vision is revealed to you. Slowly slowly miracles start surrounding you. But the whole science consists of removing the barriers, and the greatest is the mind.

All other barriers are contained in the mind. There is no need to fight with each barrier separately; that is again a wastage of time. For example, a few people fight with sex; that is just a part of the mind. A few people fight with greed – another part of the mind; a few people with anger, and so on, so forth, but these are just parts. Why not cut the root? Why go on cutting the branches? That is not going to help. You cut one branch and three will arise, and the tree will become thicker than ever. To cut the mind is to cut the main root; then the tree withers away on its own.

[A sannyasin says: I’ve become very happy since I’ve been here.]

Good! It will go on growing. This is a kind of happiness that if it starts, then there is no preventing it. It is something that is growing within you, not something that is happening outside. It is not caused by the outside; maybe provoked, but not caused. It is your own growth, it will go on growing; so help it to grow, remain available to it, and don’t become afraid of it. Whenever you have time just sit silently and enjoy it. All that it needs is enjoying it more and more.

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