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‌CHAPTER 22

23 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, darpano means mirror – mirror for the divine. And this is the whole art of meditation. God is; we just have to mirror him. Our mirror is covered with layers of dust. We are not to go anywhere to search and seek because god is everywhere, as much here as there. So the journey is not from here to there; the journey is from here to here. And all that is preventing us are the layers of dust on the mirror. The mirror is incapable of reflecting because of the dust; and by dust I mean the thought process.

Whenever you are thinking, your mirror disappears behind the smoke of thoughts like a sun behind the clouds. Whenever there is no thought going on, the clouds have dispersed and you can see the sun; the dust is no more there and the mirror immediately reflects that which is.

God is only another name for that which is.

Deva means divine, arpan means surrendered to surrendered to god, surrendered to the divine. The search for truth is not really a search but only an invitation, a prayer. It is not a search in the sense that science uses the word. It is a totally different kind of search – the way a woman waits, prays, for her lover. It is not aggressive; it is receptive.

Arpan means so surrendered that one is just a receptivity and nothing else: open, available, not expecting anything but tremendously expectant. When you expect something it is in the head – a thought, a projection. When you are simply expectant it is not a question of the head; you are totally involved in it. It is not a thought, it is not intellectual; it is existential. And only a surrendered man can be expectant.

This is the secret of the secrets. Search can be an ego-trip, and if it is an ego-trip, one is doomed from the very beginning. But receptivity can never be an ego-trip; that is the beauty of it. Surrender

can never be an ego-trip. To have an ego and to be surrendered is not possible. Surrender means egolessness, ego means non-surrender; they can’t co-exist.

That’s why the person who is surrendered immediately becomes transformed. The moment you open your doors, the sun and the wind and the rain, all enter; god rushes from all directions towards you!

Prartho means prayer. The word ‘prayer’ comes from the same root as darkness. Prayer is a state of being; it has nothing to do with praying. One can pray and may not be in prayer.

You can go and watch thousands of people around the earth praying in the churches, mosques and temples, and nobody is in prayer. They are simply acting, repeating parrot-like; their heart is not in it, their words are empty. They are moving through the gestures but they are not in them; they may be somewhere else. The person may be kneeling before Christ and he may not be there at all: he may be in his office, with his wife, in the market-place. It is not a question of being in church and repeating the right kind of words.

Prayer is a state of being, a state of feeling, a state when words disappear and one is simply possessed by the divine. You cannot do prayer; you can only make yourself available to god, and then many things happen.

And I can see the potential in you. If you simply allow god to take possession of you, you may start saying something which you had not planned saying. You will be surprised from where it is coming. You may start moving, dancing, swaying, kneeling, but you will see that it is not that you are doing these things; it is as if they are being done through you. You are possessed by something higher and bigger than you. That state is prayer: to be possessed by something higher and bigger, to be pulled upwards.

All that is needed is that we should not hinder, we should not obstruct, we should not close our doors.

So make it a point, every night before you go to bed, to just sit in the room and allow things to happen. Feel possessed by god. Then your hands start moving, certain gestures come, your body sways or you stand up or you start dancing or you start singing, or sometimes just sounds come which have no meaning, or you start speaking in tongues. Nobody will be able to understand what language it is. You will not be able to understand what you are saying and why you are saying it, but still, when it has been said, you will feel a great silence permeating you, the silence that comes after the storm.

Just fifteen to twenty minutes availability to god is enough to nourish your very roots. And slowly slowly you will feel the quality of your acts changing, the quality of your relationship changing, the quality of your twenty-four hours changing. They become luminous, they become graceful, and one is simply bubbling with some unknown source of joy. That is prayer.

Deva means divine, anito means amorality. There are moralists, there are immoralists. I am neither a moralist nor an immoralist; I am an amoralist. And that is the highest point to live from. Amoralism means dropping all duality of good and bad, dropping duality as such, not thinking in terms of opposites but living in a kind of transcendence.

God is amoral. He cannot be moral, obviously he cannot be immoral. And because many religions made it a point that god is moral, god is good, they had to create the devil; it was a necessity of thought. Once you make god equivalent to good. then you will have to create the devil, otherwise where will the bad go? Then the conflict is eternal, it can never end. Between those two poles man is crushed. Both are false: the idea of god being synonymous with good is false. It is just a theological idea; it corresponds not at all with reality.

This is the way of thought, that it always creates the opposite. Without the opposite the mind cannot think, there is no possibility of thinking. The moment you say darkness, immediately you have to create the idea of light. Without light, darkness loses all meaning. Thinking as such is dual; non- thinking is non-dual.

And when all thinking disappears, who are you? – good or bad? When there is no thought in the mind, who are you? – good or bad? You are nobody. That state is amoral – it is beyond morality, beyond immortality and that state is divine!

The real god is just transcendental. We cannot say of him that he is beautiful and we cannot say he is ugly; we cannot say he is light and we cannot say he is darkness. He contains both, and because he contains both, he is beyond both. When you contain both, they cancel each other. If you have fifty percent light and fifty percent darkness, they cancel each other. The dualities balance each other and disappear, and in that disappearance for the first time truth as it is, is known.

The real meditator has to go beyond all kinds of distinctions, and the basic distinction is that of good and bad; all other distinctions are based on it. The basic duality is that of the sinner and the saint, and all other dualities follow it; they are by-products.

My message to sannyasins is: you are not to become good against bad, otherwise you will never be good. The bad will always be hanging around you, somewhere lurking in your unconscious; it will remain repressed. One has to go beyond good and bad, then real goodness happens. So I use three words: the sinner, the bad; the saint, the good; and the sage; the sage is beyond both. Jesus is a sage, not a saint. Lao Tzu is a sage, not a saint. Mahatma Gandhi is a saint; Adolf Hitler is a sinner.

And the sinners and the saints are two aspects of the same coin. They are not different; they only appear different. Somewhere deep down in Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi is hidden, in the unconscious – the other side. And it is not an accident that he was a vegetarian, just as Mahatma Gandhi was an absolute vegetarian. This is strange, that the man who was the greatest murderer in human history was a vegetarian. He never smoked, he never drank any alcohol, and he was very very disciplined. He was exactly like Mahatma Gandhi in his discipline. Early in the morning he would get up.… He was almost a saint! You cannot find anything bad in his character. This was his unconscious asserting itself. Consciously he was a sinner, unconsciously he was a saint.

Just the reverse is the case with Mahatma Gandhi: consciously he was a saint, unconsciously he was a sinner. He was constantly bothered by sin; it was a constant obsession. Even if he saw a woman in his dreams he would go on a fast – because he had seen a woman in his dreams! And of course he was seeing women in his dreams; it was bound to be so. If you avoid, if you repress, those repressed thoughts are bound to come in the night. To the very last he was having sexual dreams; he was utterly disturbed and was feeling very guilty.

He talked about non-violence but he was very violent in his approach, very violent – violent with himself, violent with his disciples, for small things. A disciple was caught drinking tea. He had not committed any sin; all the Buddhist monks down the ages have been drinking tea and yet becoming enlightened, in fact more of them have become enlightened than anybody else in the world. But in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram tea was a sin, and if somebody was caught, much fuss would be made out of it. He would be condemned, and condemned in such subtle ways, in such holy ways, that nobody could say that he was being condemned. Gandhi would go on a fast! He would not torture the person; he would torture himself.

Now, this is a more vicarious way of torturing the person. If you slap the disciple, this is simple; finished! But you go for a twenty-four hour fast... Now for twenty-four hours the disciple is being tortured and is in hell: it is because of him, and just because of a cup of tea, that the master is hungry for twenty-four hours. Now he is condemning and condemning himself. You have condemned him forever, you have made him feel very guilty. This is violence!

I have been studying Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi side by side; they are each other’s reflection. You will find one’s conscious is the other’s unconscious, and the other’s conscious is the first one’s unconscious; but there is no qualitative difference.

A sage has no conscious, no unconscious; he is undivided. He simply lives moment to moment. He has no idea of good and no idea of bad. He simply lives, and he lives so consciously that whatsoever happens is good, but that good has nothing to do with our ordinary so-called good. It is not virtue because it is not against bad. It is a transcendence. It has its beauty, tremendous beauty, but it is amoral.

That is the meaning of anito: divine amorality.

Deva means divine, ashika means lover – a lover of god. And god is not a question of logic; god is a question of love. Those who think about god will never find him. Thinking is a barrier, not a bridge. God can only be felt, not thought about.

It needs the heart of a lover, and you have it. You have not allowed it to function because in the society it does not pay; in fact it creates troubles. The society feels perfectly okay about the logical mind; it fits. The logical mind is created by the society. The society in its turn is created by the logical mind. They fit together, they are made for each other.

The heart is something asocial. It is not created by the society; it comes from god. It has no responsibility towards the man made world; its responsibility is towards the whole. Hence the society is against the heart. It cripples it in every way, paralyses it, does not allow it. And even if it allows it a little bit, it is such a partial phenomenon that rather than fulfilling it, it creates more frustration. It is like giving a little food to a hungry man or just giving a dewdrop to a thirsty man. It would have been better if he remained thirsty. Now this one dewdrop is going to make him more miserable.

The society is against the heart and that’s why the society has to create false gods – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan to substitute. The society is very clever in creating substitutes, plastic substitutes; all the churches and all the temples are full of plastic substitutes.

The real god can be found only through individual love. It has nothing to do with society; it is something absolutely private, intimate. It is far more private than the love that happens between a man and a woman, because in that love at least two persons are present.

When you love god, only you are; god is an invisible presence. When you begin the journey, only you are; the other is not visible. When you end the journey, the other is; you have disappeared. But it is always one: in the beginning you are, god is not; in the end, god is, you are not. The meeting never happens in a sense; two are never there, only one; first you, then he. This unity is possible only through great love.

Love is going to be your meditation. Let it become your life. Love as totally as possible, love unconditionally. Share your love with each and everybody with friends and with strangers, with man and with animals; just go on pouring your love. Don’t miss a single opportunity where you can pour your love, don’t ask anything in return, and you will be surprised: if you can pour your love and don’t ask anything in return, god comes in return. If you ask anything in return you have missed an opportunity; you did not allow god to enter in. You asked for something small.

That is the meaning of ashika: one who loves and expects nothing in return, one who simply loves, one whose joy is in loving itself, one who loves for love’s sake. Then one day the incredible happens, the impossible happens: when you have poured all that you have and you become utterly empty, in that emptiness the unknown penetrates, the sky descends to the earth! That is rebirth, resurrection; but first one has to die in love.

So love is both the cross and the resurrection.

Veet Lakshen. Veet means beyond, lakshen means goal. There is no goal to be achieved. The very idea of the goal creates tension and anxiety in life. If you have a goal to achieve you will go on missing the present moment. With the goal in your head you cannot be herenow. The goal has to be in the future, and life is in the present, so all goals are anti-life. And if one really wants to live, one has to be anti-goal.

Try to understand this basic arithmetic; everything else depends on it. If one is goal-oriented, one will live in misery and die in misery. It is not just accidental that you see so many miserable people walking on the streets all around the earth. They are caught up with goals, obsessed with goals. They are all ambitious, they want to achieve something in the future. And the future is that which never comes: it is always coming, always coming but it never comes.

Nobody has yet seen tomorrow, and it is so close by! By the morning it will be here. It is always arriving but never arrives. We go on thinking about it and planning it, and meanwhile life is slipping out of our hands. The goal-oriented person only dies, he never lives.

I teach a non-goal-oriented life. I teach you this moment, I teach you herenow. That’s what sannyas is all about: a life lived each moment with utter joy and celebration, a life which knows no postponement. And when you don’t postpone, your life takes on such intensity because you have only this moment to pour your whole energy into. You cannot spread it out thin. The person who has a big future can spread it out. The person who has no future cannot spread it out; it becomes so intense, so passionate, so one-pointed, and in that very one-pointedness of life-energy there is joy. In that concentration of energy there is bliss.

Then one knows the real taste of life. The name of that taste is god. [A sannyasin says that he has a problem with his navel.

He can’t allow anybody to touch it. He also cannot touch it himself.]

We will change it don’t be worried! (LAUGHTER) I will tell everybody, whoever sees you (MUCH LAUGHTER).… It will be gone; it is nothing to be worried about. But there is a reason why it has happened: in your very early childhood, somewhere, you became very much afraid of death.

The navel is the centre of death. Just behind the navel is a point which is the most vulnerable point in life. If somebody becomes very afraid of death then this problem arises. Very rarely is there this much fear, but if you become very afraid of death then you will not allow anybody to touch your navel. Once the fear of death disappears, this problem will be solved. And we will make it disappear!

Do a few individual sessions of shiatzu and hypnosis. Then do these groups: the first is Intensive Enlightenment, the second is Centering, the third is Massage and the fourth is Tantra.

You have a beautiful problem!

Deva means divine, deep means lamp – a divine lamp, a divine light. It has not to be created; it is already there: it has to be discovered, or rather re-discovered.

Each child born knows about it, feels it, sees it. Each child in its mother’s womb remains full of light; that is an inner light, an inner glow. But as the child is born and he opens his eyes and sees the world and the colours and the light and the people, slowly slowly the gestalt changes: he forgets to look within, he becomes too interested in the outside world. And there is a reason, because the outside world has so much variety.

The inside world has no variety; it is simple, silent, light. In a sense it is monotonous: no change ever happens there, no movement ever occurs, it is always the same. And naturally the child becomes more interested in things that are changing. Everybody is interested in change because change brings something new. The child is enquiring, curious, and the world is really tremendous – so many colours and trees and birds and animals and people and so much noise. He becomes so engrossed with it that slowly slowly he forgets to look within; he becomes oblivious of it.

In meditation one has to re-connect oneself with that inner source of light. One has to forget the whole world and go in, turn in and tune in, as if the world has disappeared, as if it doesn’t exist. At least for one hour every day one has to forget the world absolutely and just be oneself. Then slowly slowly, again that old experience is revived. And this time, when you come to know it, it is tremendous because now you have seen the world and all its variety, you have seen all the noises. Now to see the inner silence and the purity of light is a totally different experience. And it is so nourishing, so vitalising; it is the source of nectar.

Once you have known it, consciously.… The child knows it unconsciously; the meditator comes upon it consciouslyOnce you have known it consciously the fear of death disappears because

you know, you know absolutely, without any doubt, that this light is eternal, that the body may drop

but this light will continue. It is so indubitable that even if one wants to doubt it, one cannot; doubt simply disappears. The certainty is absolute, and with that certainty comes a transformation in life. Then all values change: things that were important up to now become unimportant and things that you have not even thought about become important. One goes through a revolution.

So this has to be your meditation, every night or in the early morning or whenever you can find time, when it is easier to forget the world, either late in the night when the traffic has stopped and people have gone to sleep and the whole world has disappeared on its own accord – then it is easier to slip out – or early in the morning when the people are still fast asleep. But once you have started seeing it then it can be seen any time. In the market-place, in the middLe of the day, you can close your eyes and you can see it. And even to see it for a single moment is tremendously relaxing.

But start in the night: for one hour just sit silently looking in, watching, waiting, for the light to explode. One day it explodes. You are not to create it you are only to re-discover it.

Prem means love, parvati means daughter of the mountains; it is just a metaphor for a river – a river of love.

Love is not a static thing. It is a process, it is a movement, it is a dance. It is not like a rock, it is like a river, it is always flowing. And whenever it stops anywhere it dies; to remain alive it has to go on flowing. Life and flowing are synonymous as far as love is concerned. So one has to go on loving, one has never to become satisfied; in satisfaction is death.

And one has not to make love a routine. If it becomes routine, it has become a stagnant pool. It has to go on moving into new territory; one has to be very creative about love.

So, many people start perfectly well in the world of love but soon everything goes wrong, and the reason is: people are very uncreative, unimaginative. They don’t know how to go on creating new surprises, how to go on exploring new territories. So sooner or later all is finished and then they are stuck. And in that very experience of being stuck, things start becoming stale and things start stinking.

Love has to be a river till it reaches to the ocean. Love has to remain flowing till it reaches to god. Until it has reached god never allow it anywhere to become a stagnant pool. That is the message in your name. Love has to reach to the ocean. Unless love becomes oceanic, don’t settle, don’t say ‘I have arrived.’ Go on moving and keep the movement alive. And with that movement prayer is born automatically.

In fact when love moves tremendously it is prayer. The very phenomenon of the movement of love creates the fragrance called prayer.

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