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‌CHAPTER 9

9 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, shravano means listening – the art of divine listening. And that’s what meditation is. If one can learn how to listen rightly, one has learned the deepest secret of meditation. People hear but they don’t listen. Hearing is one thing – listening, altogether different; they are worlds apart. Hearing is a physical phenomenon; you hear because you have ears. Listening is a spiritual phenomenon. You listen when you have attention, when your inner being joins with your ears.

And once you have learned how to join your inner being with your ears, you can join it with any sense. It can be joined with the eyes or with the nose or with the sense of touch or taste, and slowly slowly you can join it with all your senses simultaneously. In that moment, god is available. But it is easier to start with the ears... particularly for you it will be easier. So start on a journey of divine listening.

Listen to the sounds of the birds, the wind passing through the trees, the river in flood, the ocean roaring and the clouds, the people, the far-away train passing by, the cars on the road – each sound has to be used. And listen without any imposition on what you listen to – don’t judge; the moment you judge, listening stops. If you say ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘I like it,’ ‘I don’t like it,’ you are no more listening; you have taken an attitude, and whenever one takes an attitude attention disappears. Attention lives only when you have not made a conclusion.

The really attentive person remains without conclusions; he never concludes about anything. Because life is a process – nothing ever ends. Only the foolish person can conclude; the wise will hesitate to make conclusions. Conclusion is possible only when everything has come to an end, and nothing ever comes to an end: it goes on and on forever. So listen without conclusion. Just listen – alert, silent, open, receptive. Just be there, totally with the sound that surrounds you.

And you will be surprised: one day suddenly the sound is there, you are listening, and yet there is silence. It is true silence that happens through sound. Escaping to the mountains is of no help;

that silence is false. The real silence has to happen in the marketplace, surrounded by all kinds of sounds and yet silent within, utterly silent. That pregnant silence becomes the door to god.

[Deva Jivana means divine life.]

To live surrendered to god is to live a divine life – to live as if god is living through you, to disappear as an ego and function only as a passage for god, to become a hollow bamboo so that god can make a flute out of you. The song has to be hisAnd that is the greatest transformation possible.

Man can live in two ways. One is the egoistic way – then your ego is the centre of your life. The other is to live without any ego, utterly empty inside. Then god can become a guest in you, then he lives through you.

To live with the ego is to live a worldly life. To live without the ego is to be a sannyasin; that is the true religious life. The whole art consists of dying as a person so that the impersonal and the universe can flow through you. It is just like a seed dying in the soil; then god starts growing like a tree.

To live in the ego is to live in misery, in hell, because it is small. It is almost like living in a dark cell, hence it is suffocating, it is nightmarish. Man’s being is vast and the ego’s confinement is very small. The ego is very very limited and the being is infinite. To force the being, which is infinite, into a finite thing is to create misery. It is imprisonment. Hence the desire to be free.

Every heart is burning with the desire to become freedom, but freedom is possible only if you disappear. You cannot be free – you are the imprisonment itself. When you are not, freedom is, and in that freedom there is no worry, no fear, and in that freedom, because there is no fear, love arises.

Once god starts living through you, you are eternal. Then there is no death, then time is irrelevant, then bliss is continuous; it is a continuum.

Prem means love, dharmo means religion. Love is a by-product of religion, love is the fragrance of the flower of religion. But to understand religion one has to understand what religion is not, because religion has become contaminated with so many things which are not religion at all. Hence the fragrance of love is missing. On the contrary, just the opposite has happened; religions have created much hatred in the world. Rather than bringing human beings closer to each other in a loving embrace, they have created conflict, war, violence. Religion has become something ugly, and the reason is: it got mixed up with something which is not religion.

Three things which are not religion but which have become religion have to be understood. The first is: ritual. Ritual is not religion at all; in fact, ritual is a way of covering up your neurotic tendencies. It is neurosis. Giving a beautiful facade to it, giving it a religious garb, does not help. Neurosis remains neurosis; you only change the name. The neurotic mind moves in habits, routines – it is repetitive. It moves in a groove, it goes on doing the same thing again and again and again. Once it becomes religion then many neurotic people are thought to be religious.

That’s why in the East there are not so many mad people as there are in the West, and the reason is that in the West the ritual has disappeared, almost disappeared. So every neurotic has come out

naked into the light. In the East the ritual is a protection. If somebody is doing a ritual you respect him: you think something significant is being done. All that he is doing is hiding his anxiety, keeping himself occupied with something. He is afraid of himself. He cannot face himself; he is afraid of coming across himself, he keeps himself occupied. Maybe he goes on turning the beads of his mala or he repeats ‘Ram, Ram, Ram...’, or he does something repetitively every day. His ritual is not different from other, secular, rituals.

Smoking is a ritual – it keeps you occupied. So whenever a person feels nervous he starts smoking to avoid that nervousness. It becomes a beautiful occupation, but it is a religious ritual: taking the smoke in and then throwing it out, and taking it in and throwing it out. k is a mantra, it is a repetitive process. It makes one feel good – nervousness becomes occupied. When people are happy they forget smoking; when they are unhappy they immediately remember it.

So ritual is not religion – that has to be understood – and that is almost ninety percent of religion. And once you drop all rituals you are standing naked in the sunlight, and that is the beginning of the inner journey one has to face. If one is neurotic, then that neurosis has to be faced, one has to become aware of it, because only through becoming aware of it is it going to dissolve. Hiding it, keeping it somewhere in the basement, giving it a beautiful covering, is not going to help; it is not going to change it at all. So the really religious person is non-ritualistic.

The second thing: religion is not belief. To believe is to avoid enquiry. The person who believes, believes out of fear, not out of understanding. There is no need to believe if there is understanding. Understanding needs neither belief nor disbelief. It is the fearful mind: out of fear one wants to cling to some belief system. It gives solace, consolation. It makes one feel as if one knows, and one knows not. It gives you a false notion of knowledge, and deep down remains ignorance and darkness. It hides people’s stupidity. Only stupid people believe... and disbelieve, which are the same. It doesn’t matter whether you believe or disbelieve – it is stupid.

The intelligent person enquires. He will not believe in god, he will not disbelieve in god. He will not take any standpoint. He will say ‘I will enquire, I will remain open. I will not move from an already accepted conclusion because then there is no movement, no possibility of movement. If I have already accepted something as true, the enquiry is finished. It is an abortion; now there is no point in enquiry. One has already taken a conclusion, a priori.’ The intelligent person enquires, he goes into enquiry. Enquiry is arduous but it is beautiful too, because it is only through enquiry and the suffering and the pain and the ecstasies that come out of it that one grows.

And thirdly: religion is not morality. That is another deception. People become do-gooders. That is not true virtue – it is a camouflage. It brings respectability, it gives you a good ego feeling. It makes you feel that you are somebody important, significant – not only in the eyes of the world but even in the eyes of god – that you can stand upright, even encountering god; you can show all the good deeds that you have done. It is egoistic, and religion cannot be egoistic.

Not that a religious person is immoral, but he is not moral; he is amoral. He has no fixed character. His character is liquid, alive, moving moment to moment. He responds to situations not according to a fixed attitude, idea, ideology; he simply responds out of his consciousness. His consciousness is his only character, there is no other character.

If these three things are understood then one can understand what religion is. Religion is sanity – going beyond the neurotic mind. Religion is enquiry – going beyond belief systems and disbelief systems. And religion is consciousness – going beyond the confinements of character.

Character is an armour. It is given by others to you, it is imposed on you by others. It is part of the social politics; the society wants you to be in a certain way because that is how you will be more useful and you can be exploited more easily by the society. The society wants you to be mechanically efficient. That’s what the society calls ‘a man of character’ – one who is just a robot, who is predictable. The society is very much afraid of people who are not robots because they are unpredictable; you cannot depend on them. You may send them to the war and they may not kill the enemy. They may say ‘Why? This man has not done anything to me – why should I kill him? He must have kids at home. His old mother and his wife will be waiting. I cannot do it.’ And all that nonsense of the country and the fatherland and the motherland, that is just stupidity. A man who is not a robot will always be a rebel. He will function out of his consciousness, but then he will create constant difficulties for the so-called status quo. The society wants you to become a character, not a consciousness.

My whole effort here is to create consciousness not character. And once these three things are fulfilled – that you are no more neurotic, that you have learned how to be out of the neurotic mind, that you have become a watcher, that some meditation has started growing in you, that beliefs have been discarded because they were borrowed, they were not yours, because character is no more relevant and you only depend on consciousness, wherever it leads – then suddenly one of the greatest surprises happens uninvited, unsolicited: love starts happening... love starts overflowing. That love is god. How long will you be here?

Prem means love, dhyano means meditation. Let love be your meditation. Nothing else is needed – love is enough unto itself. And god comes to the loving heart of his own accord; one need not seek and search. And in fact there is no way to seek and search for god. Where is one going to seek and search? He has no name, no form, no address; he is not somewhere. Either he is everywhere – then too it is very difficult to search for him – or he is nowhere; then too it is very difficult to search. And everywhere and nowhere existentially are synonymous; they mean the same thing.

Man cannot search for god because we have no knowledge about him. There is no way to begin the search, and whatsoever we do will be out of this stupid mind, will be out of this confusion, this mess that man is. And out of confusion whatsoever is done will bring more confusion, and stupidity will simply strengthen itself by whatsoever is done through it. All that is needed is to fall into a silent, loving space.

One has to be silent, still, and loving. And then one day, suddenly the eyes change, the gestalt changes; the world is the same and yet not the same. Yes, it is the same world – the trees and the birds and the people – but now everything is a manifestation of god. It is god who is green in the trees and red in the roses. It is god who is beautiful in people, singing in birds, flowing in rivers.… That is a change of gestalt within you. Not that you have gone anywhere – this is the only world there is, there is no other world, all other worlds are just imagination. This is the only world, but there are two ways of being in this world: one can be loving or one can be unloving.

If you are unloving you will know only matter. If you are loving you will know god. It is the same world. The materialist simply says ‘I don’t have any loving energy in my heart’, that’s all that he is

saying. He may say that there is no god and matter is all, but in fact what he is saying is ‘I have no tenderness in my heart.’ And without tenderness and caring you cannot feel god. One has to become sensitive. Love is the art of becoming sensitive.

And let this be your meditation: become more sensitive, become more tender, warm. Don’t miss a single opportunity to be loving, and don’t do anything that goes against love. Then one need not worry. Then it is god’s worry – whenever he feels the time is right, he comes. And that’s the only way he comes; not by chasing but by becoming still, silent, loving.

[Veet Aikrago – means beyond concentration.]

I am here to help you to celebrate life in all possible ways. I am here to help you to dance deeply with life, to sing the song that is in your heart and to flower to your optimum. Then there is joy, because there is fulfillment. Then even death is beautiful, because one has lived, one has known, one has loved, one has suffered, one has felt the moments of great ecstasies. One has lived in all possible ways. One has experienced what life is in its pain, in its pleasure, in its dark moments, and the valleys, and the sunlit peaks. One is ready to die with a great thankfulness in the heart. And to die with gratitude is the only proof that one has lived.

So I teach how to live and I teach how to die, but everything is based on one fundamental, and that fundamental is celebration.

Prem means love, pagalo means mad – love mad, a loving madness. Truth is available only to those who are ready to be mad for it, because truth cannot be attained through the business-like mind. The calculative person is bound to miss it, because truth is not a bargain – it is a gamble, and only a madman can gamble, can risk, can give all that he has for something which may happen, may not happen. Who knows? That is the risk.

One has to give all that one has to attain that which we have not even been able to dream about. Truth is something unimaginable. So is god... so love. All that is great and beautiful is beyond the logical mind. It is beyond man’s cleverness, hence the clever people go on missing.

One needs to be daring enough, and that is possible in you. I can see the quality of daring, and that’s a beautiful capacity. If used consciously, it can bring a great pay-off; if used unconsciously it becomes suicidal.

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