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‌CHAPTER 14

15 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, iman means faith. Man can either live in belief or in faith. Belief is man-made: faith is a grace that comes from beyond. Belief is a thing of the mind: faith, a stirring in the heart. Belief is superficial, it never transforms anybody. Rather than transforming it only consoles. It is convenient to be a Hindu, to be a Christian, to be a Mohammedan, because the crowd is there, surrounding you in every way. But to be with the crowd a certain compromise is needed; that compromise is belief. One submits to the crowd and its demands; that is belief. Belief is a subtle slavery: faith is a freedom. Belief is collective: faith is individual. And faith has no name: beliefs have many names.

Faith is something that happens in you, and when it happens, the very happening becomes a total change. But you have to understand one thing, that you cannot create it; you can only be receptive towards it. You can pray for it, you can invite it, but you cannot create it. You have to just remain waiting, in a prayerful mood, for the right moment. When you are worthy enough it will come as a gift from god. It always comes, but it comes only when you are ripe, and your ripening means silence, prayer, infinite patience.

One day the light enters you and then your life is totally different, discontinuous with the past; that is iman.

Deva means god, islam means surrendered – surrendered to god. One can live a life of struggle or one can live a life of surrender; both the alternatives are there. The ego chooses the path of struggle because it can exist only through struggle: the more struggle, the better, for the ego. But the ego is a false entity. You create it with great effort and finally it is going to disappear, so the whole effort is futile; death will take it away. Those people who go on working for their egos are just making castles in the air. It needs tremendous effort, a total devotion, and yet the end result is nil. You live empty, you die empty, and meaninglessness is writ large all over your life.

The other alternative – living a life of surrender – makes you religious. Then the ego immediately dies; it cannot exist with surrender, there is no co-existence possible between surrender and ego. By surrendering you come to know a totally different kind of self, a self which is not an ego, a self which is not a self at all, a self which is equivalent to no-self. You are, but there is no idea of I. You are a pure am-ness, a pure existence. That purity is bliss and that purity is truth.

Let surrender become your life, your very style of living. And you are not going to lose anything by surrender; you will lose only that which you don’t have, you will lose only the false. You will lose only the notion of the ego – because the ego is not a reality and can never be a reality – but you will attain to your authentic self. And to know one’s own reality is sheer joy.

Deva means divine, atosh means discontent. A great discontent is needed to attain to god. Be contented with the world but don’t be contented with your inner being. People are doing just the opposite: they are contented with their inner being, they are discontented with the outer world. Hence we have been progressing as far as the outside world is concerned – we have better cars, we have better houses, we have better gadgets, better planes, better bombs and everything: we just don’t have a better man.

If Jesus comes to the world he will be surprised at seeing our materialistic growth, progress, but he will be very frustrated at seeing our human beings. Humanity has not grown at all. Everything else has become better, only man has remained stuck. And the reason is that we are discontented with the outside world so we go on improving upon it; science goes on searching for new ways to improve the world.

A great discontent for the inner is needed, then religion grows; and only then is religion possible. Religion has disappeared from the world for the simple reason that nobody is interested in god, nobody is interested in themselves, nobody is interested at all in that which is invisible, hidden. Truth has become a disvalue. A divine discontent is needed. One has to become a total thirst for god. It should not be only an intellectual question, it should not just be a curiosity or a philosophical enquiry: it should be passionate, it should be a question of life and death. Only then does something happen because only then are we aflame, afire.

To be a sannyasin means getting initiated into a totally different kind of discontent. To be worldly means the ordinary discontentment with your money, with your house, with your wife, with your husband, with your children; it is a search to improve the circumstances outside.

To be a sannyasin means a discontent with one’s inner state. The inner world is so dark, it needs light. The inner world is so poor, it needs to become more rich. The inner world is so empty, it needs to be fulfilled.

And the potential is there, just the fire is missing. The potential is there, just the impetus, that momentum, that can change the potential into the actual, is missing. That is atosh, that is discontentment as one is. Then immediately things start happening.

[Veet Diti – Beyond limitations] All limitations are false, arbitrary, not real – utilitarian of course, but not real. Existence is one. Things that appear to be separate are not separate. The tree is not separate from the earth, so you cannot think of the tree in a limited way; the earth has to be included

in it. And the tree is not separate from the sun; you have to include the sun in it too. The tree is not separate from the stars and the moon and the air and the water. If you go on searching, you will be surprised: a small tree contains the whole universe; there is no limit to it. The whole existence is one single phenomenon. To understand this is to understand god.

The mind loves limits. It wants to categorise, define, but because of its definitions and its categories it creates a very arbitrary world around itself. Once you stop seeing limits, the mind starts disappearing; and the disappearance of the mind is the appearance of god.

The day it happens that you cannot see any limit anywhere and all seems to be involved with everything else and each thing is just the whole existence, you are transported into a totally different dimension: the dimension of the infinite – unlimited, unbounded.

And remember: that is the case with you too. The tree was just an example; you also include the whole. Each single drop of water contains all the oceans of the world. When you start seeing it without, you have seen god manifest in the world; when you start seeing the same within, you have seen god as unmanifest. And these are the two aspects of the same reality: the manifest and the unmanifest. Both are unlimited; no beginning, no end, no boundary is possible.

Just to contemplate it, to see it, is liberating. Then life is never the same again. Then you cannot die, because the whole never dies! Fear disappears, and the same energy that was becoming fear in you becomes love.

So think of yourself as being beyond all limits and think of everyone else too in the same way. See limits disappearing, evaporating, and see the unlimited in every form – behind every form the formless and behind every name the nameless – and closer and closer you will be approaching the truth, the ultimate truth.

Gyan means wisdom, raj means secret – secret of wisdom. And there is only one secret of wisdom. Knowledge comes from many sources. There are millions of sources of knowledge – so many scriptures, so many people, so many experiences, the whole accumulated past of humanity. Science gives you knowledge and theology gives you knowledge and literature gives you knowledge and.… You can go on searching for knowledge; there are many many sources.

But for wisdom there is only one secret: it wells up within your being, it arises in you; it doesn’t come from the outside. It cannot be transmitted or transferred: it has to happen in your deepest core, in the recesses of your own being. The seed is there but we have never cared about it. We have never prepared the field, we have never watered it; we have not been good gardeners to it. Hence wisdom is missing.

Lao Tzu says that to know the truth you need not go outside your room, you need not ask anybody, because truth is given to you from the very beginning. You are it. The only secret to be learned is how to go in, how to be there where truth is already. And that’s what meditation is all about. Meditation is the secret of wisdom.

Meditation simply means a state of no-thought, awareness without the process of thought, just pure, mirror-like awareness, with no thoughts passing in the mind. And when there is no thought,

you immediately become unhinged from the world. You are no more focused outside, because there is nothing to see, and the focus starts turning inwards. When there is no content to know, consciousness starts knowing itself, and that is wisdom.

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