CHAPTER 29
31 March 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Deva means divine and aranya means wildness – divine wildness, divine chaos. Chaos is the source of all, and the moment we become capable of entering chaos we become capable of entering god. God is wild: he is more like a forest than like a garden. The very disorder of it is its order, the very chaos of it is its cosmos. There is a subtle discipline but that discipline is not imposed from the outside; it grows from the innermost core.
By becoming a sannyasin one enters divine chaos. Then all that is man-made becomes irrelevant and all that is man-imposed has to be dropped by and by. To be free of the human is to be ready to receive the divine, so an utter transvaluation is needed.
A really divine person is neither good nor bad because all good and bad are human concepts. A really divine person simply is. He is no more either moral nor immoral and his action is out of his spontaneity. His action is not manipulated, his action is not controlled by the mind, his action comes out of nothingness. Hence it is beautiful, unpredictable.
Even the person himself is surprised, even he is not capable of predicting what is going to happen in the next moment, what he will say, what he will do; it is impossible to say beforehand. Unless it happens there is no way to say anything about it.. and then action is naturally total.
When you think in terms of good and bad, action is never total, cannot be; it is always partial, and the partial is the problem. You do something but only a part of you is doing it and the other part is constantly against it, fighting it, resisting it. So the action comes out of conflict and when the action is out of conflict it is ugly. That’s what in the East we call karma. When action is out of conflict it leaves a hangover; it leaves a hangover even for lives.
When action is without any conflict you are totally in it, wholly in it; then the action is holy, it leaves no trace on you. When it is over it is over: you are cleanly out of it, absolutely out of it. You don’t look
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back, it leaves no psychological memory. You don’t think about it. Not that you cannot remember it: you can remember it but the memory is not loaded, you are neither for it or against it. You don’t feel any repentance for why you did it, you don’t feel any elation about how beautifully you did it. There is no repentance, no elation, there is no load on it, no psychological memory is created.
Memory is there but that is just mechanical. If it is needed you can remember it but your remembrance will not have any impact on your emotions. It is apart; it does not hang around you, it does not cloud your mind.
When action is total it creates no karma. Then one remains free; from one moment to another moment one moves into freedom.
The word ‘aranya’ means many things: one thing, wilderness, wildness, another, a forest. It means a forest, not cultivated, not managed by man, just grown-up out of god, out of nature.
So remember this – that by and by one has to drop all distinctions of good and bad, moral, immoral, what should be done and what should not be done. The very idea of ‘ought’ has to be dropped slowly, slowly, so only ‘is’ remains and there is no ‘ought’. When there is pure ‘isness’ one is free.
That pure ‘isness’ we call enlightenment. It is not an achievement, you are already that. These clouds that surround you just have to disappear.
Deva means divinity, god, and ajata means unborn. Everything else is born and dies; only god remains. He is unborn, undying, he is eternal, and we carry that eternal element in our souls.
The body is born and will die. Whatsoever is born will die: birth implies death. Once you are born there is no way to avoid death; that’s why the death rate is one hundred percent, notwithstanding all the medical inventions, medicines, new techniques to help man. The death rate remains the same: one hundred percent.
And it will remain one hundred percent forever because one who is born is going to die. We can prolong death – if we don’t die at seventy, then eighty, not eighty then ninety, not ninety then a hundred – but the death rate is not going to change. It will never become ninety – nine percent or ninety – eight percent; it will remain one hundred percent.
Only god is not born and will not die.
So the whole search is how to find that element in our being which is undying... and it is there! It is in everything. When a tree dies only the body dies. The vital, the really vital element, jumps into another tree. When a man dies, only the body dies, when a flower dies, only the flower dies but the essential being of it survives, goes on surviving.
Mm? that is the meaning of your name, ‘Deva Ajata’.
[A sannyasin says: I was away from Poona for a long time... there were no sannyasins around. After a while I felt I didn’t want to be a sannyasin... Then I came back here on Enlightenment day and I felt I did want to be a sannyasin. I fear losing it again.]
The mind goes on playing these games and if you are too attached to your mind sooner or later sannyas will have to go: you can choose either sannyas or your mind. If you want to cling to the mind it is only a question of time; sooner or later the mind will convince you. Because sannyas is against the mind, it is a fatal blow to the very roots of the mind, so the mind tries to subvert, to sabotage it.
Sometimes when you are flowing with me... that’s how it happened on the twenty-first: when you started flowing with me and you put aside the mind a little bit it was perfectly beautiful. When you take hold of your mind and the mind takes hold of you, again there will be trouble.
The mind never allows anything to become permanent: it is always afraid of the permanent because the permanent is the beginning of the eternal. So the moment you start settling into anything permanently, the mind starts seducing you, tempting you. And once you start moving into new things, the mind is okay. If you change things every day the mind is perfectly happy, there is no problem for the mind – because the eternal means the timeless.
The mind exists in time, it is temporal, and the temporal means momentary. It can exist beautifully in the momentary but whenever something starts going so deep that it has a taste of becoming permanent, fear arises.
The mind will never allow you to love a woman in a way that the love becomes eternal; it will not allow, it will distract you. The mind will not allow you to meditate in such a way that it becomes your very way of life; no, it becomes afraid.
Dallying with things one day and changing another day, the mind is not worried; you can go on playing with things and the mind is perfectly okay. If you go on changing things it is in tune with the mind. That’s the problem; you have to choose!
If you are very happy with your mind drop sannyas. If you think your mind is something very valuable that you have to cling to, if you are identified with it, if it is giving you something blissful, then it is perfectly right to listen to it. But if it is not giving you anything, is just giving you a fever, a restlessness, is just troubling you, giving you anxiety and anguish, then there is no need to listen to the mind. Say to the mind, ‘Stop!’
If you become capable of saying ‘Stop!’ to the mind, soon you will see that you attain to a certain mastery. You will see that you are becoming aloof and then the mind cannot tempt you so easily.
All the old parables about the devil, satan, are nothing but about the mind. When Jesus is meditating in the wilderness and the devil comes to tempt him it is nothing but the mind! Jesus shoves him aside and says ‘Go behind me, satan!’ That is his own mind; there is no other devil that can come.
It is your own mind that will come many times and you have to shove it aside, you will have to go in spite of it. If it goes with you, good, if it doesn’t go with you, that too is good. It will drag behind you, it will follow you because it cannot leave you. It is your mind, it is your shadow; where can it go? It cannot find any shelter anywhere.
So whether it comes, willingly or unwillingly, don’t be worried: simply go and you will find that it is coming and soon it becomes a very very obedient slave. And that’s how it should be. The mind is
a slave because it is a mechanism you have to use but it is not the master! Don’t allow the mind to use you, otherwise the slave becomes the master and the master becomes the slave and things go topsy-turvy.
[The sannyasin answers: Is it possible to use the mind to get closer to you?]
Yes, you can use it! If you use it as a servant there is no problem. Any instrument can be used but it should remain an instrument. Yes, it can be used but you have to be in a position to use it. Ordinarily the mind uses you: it goes on saying ‘Do this, this is not right’. So don’t listen, just learn not to listen to it.
Make it feel that you are taking charge of your being and the slave is no more allowed to pretend to be the master. Soon you will have a very very deep feeling of freedom and a great benediction comes out of that freedom.
Continue to meditate and come back whenever you can manage!
[A sannyasin says: I came here with a lot of confidence and now I feel very shattered. I was in the Tao group and I found it very very difficult – being old and there being a lot of young people – but I think I got through a lot of things.]
It is good that the so-called self-confidence is shattered because it is nothing but the ego parading in different names. What you call self-confidence has nothing to do with confidence.
A real man of confidence needs no confidence at all. Think about it deeply: a real man of confidence never needs confidence. It is simply there, one need not think about it. One is not even aware that it is there. When there is no confidence we put on a show to hide that lack of confidence, and we call that show self-confidence. It is just a camouflage, a mask.
That mask is shattered – you are not shattered...
But we all have those masks and we are identified with those masks, so when they are shattered it hurts, it hurts badly, terribly, but all those masks have to be shattered.
My work is almost a thankless job. Only at the final stage will you understand what has happened to you. When all the masks are gone and suddenly you recognise your original face – the face that you had when you were not born, the face that you had when not even your parents were born, the face that you will have when your body is gone and you are dead, the face that you will always have, always have – when that original face comes into your vision you will understand that all that shattering was a blessing.
[A sannyasin who participated in the Leela group says: I feel that I don’t want to do any other groups afterwards; it would be such an anti-climax. [The groupleader] said just to celebrate. I don’t know how long I can go on doing that.]
One can go on and on! There is no end to it; one can go on celebrating forever because celebration is just an attitude.
If you have the attitude then everything is a celebration. If you don’t create misery, misery cannot exist; it has to be created. Celebration has not to be created: it is there. Misery has to be created: it is not there; misery is our work! We have to do great work for misery! It is not a simple phenomena, only man is capable of doing it.
When you don’t make misery, celebration is. Celebration is just how things are, the way things are.
The whole existence is celebrating, but when we create too much misery we are clouded in it and we cannot see what is going on.