23

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‌CHAPTER 23

24 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, anando means bliss. Love and bliss are two aspects of the same energy. They always happen together: if one happens, the other follows, has to follow. They cannot be divided, they are indivisible. And just like that, hate and misery are two aspects of the same phenomenon: the person who is full of hate can never be blissful; and the person who is full of love can never be anything else other than blissful. One has to work from both sides.

If you love you become blissful, if you become more blissful you become capable of more love, and so on and so forth; it is a dialectical process. And the ultimate crescendo is when love and bliss are no more separate. When love means bliss and bliss means love, one has arrived.

Prem means love, anurodh means an invitation. God cannot be searched for. You cannot seek him because he has no name and no form and no address. Either he is everywhere or nowhere. The seeker goes astray; wherever you seek, you will miss. God can only be invited, not sought. God is not an object somewhere that you can go to. God is a presence that enters you when you are in a state of welcome. When you are an invitation god enters you. And he does not enter from one direction; he enters from all the directions simultaneously. The moment you have given the invitation, god seeks you.

The seeker is still an egoist. The search is an ego project. The person who invites, bows down: he is in a state of surrender, he opens up, he is simply vulnerable. That vulnerability is prayer, that invitation is prayer. He says ‘I am available. Please come to me!’ Slowly slowly that becomes his very breathing: ‘I am ready – come to me!’ And one day, when you are really open, immediately it happens: god is!

Prem means love, sangita means music – love music. Man is a musical instrument, but we don’t know how to play upon it. Great music is hidden in everyone, but it has to be struck. The instrument has to be set right, tuned, and one has to learn the art of playing it. That art is love.

Love teaches you how to become more and more musical, harmonious, a melody. It is love that brings all that is hidden in you to the surface. It is love that gives you exquisiteness, grace, beauty. It is love that fills you with some unknown, invisible grandeur. And when love has arrived, music arises on its own accord.

That music is our only offering to god; we don’t have anything else to offer. All else is meaningless. Unless you can offer a loving, singing heart, a dancing, melodious soul, you are not offering anything to god.

The flowers that people offer are not your flowers; they were already offered on the trees. You have to offer your own flowering. That flowering I call the inner music, and the way to it is love.

Prem means love guha means the cave of the heart. The heart is a hollow phenomenon, it is utterly empty: it is a cave. And because it is empty, it can become full. To become full the first thing is, the first requirement is, to be empty. The head is very full, hence it remains empty. All kinds of rubbish is gathered together there. The heart remains utterly empty unless god arrives. And god cannot be a guest in the head; he will not find any space there. The only space available is in the cave of the heart.

Because we are too much in the head, we have completely forgotten our own inner cave. If we go into that cave it is meditation. Meditation is nothing else but a search for the inner cave where we can be absolutely alone, where the world disappears. It is not a question of going to the Himalayas and finding a cave there: everybody has the cave in the heart. It is a question of going into the inner Himalaya; and the outer Himalaya is nothing compared to the inner: it is just a poor reflection.

The path to that cave is love. If you love, you start moving towards the heart. If you don’t love you start moving towards the head. The head knows nothing of love; it knows only logic, calculation, business. The heart knows nothing of calculation, mathematics, logic. It simply knows how to share, how to give.

Giving in itself is a joy if you are in the heart. If you are in the head you don’t want to give. The head is very miserly, it clings to everything. If it gives, it gives only to get more; it is always bargaining. It does not know how to give. It is a beggar. The heart is an emperor.

Open the door to the inner cave by the key of love.

Prem means love, avinasha means eternal, indestructible, immortal. Love is the only experience in life which is not of time, the only experience which happens in time and yet does not belong to time, the only experience which knows no death, the only experience which is part of eternity and yet penetrates time – the only miracle, the only paradox. That’s why whenever you are in love you are unafraid of death. Lovers are utterly unafraid of death, but the people who don’t know what love is are continuously afraid of death.

Lovers are ready to die because they know that something will go on living, that there is no death; they may disappear but their love will live. And the certainty is so absolute that not even a single doubt ever arises. When two persons are in love, time simply disappears, the clock stops. You start soaring above time. You reach some plenitudes which are beyond time.

Love is the natural experience of meditation.

[A sannyasin says: I wanted to work here and I applied for a proofreading job. The lady said it would depend on you.]

First do a few groups, first feel at home here. Mm? because the work that is being done here is not work; it is worship. Unless you become very very tuned into the whole energy that is happening here, it will remain work. And if it remains work it is not going to help. It has to become your prayer, your love: you have to utterly dissolve into it. From the surface it is the same work as everywhere else, but from the inner it is a totally different experience.

You will be able to – just wait. Do a few more groups, meditate, feel me more. Soon you will be working, there is no problem in it!

Prem means love, divyo means divine. Love can be earthly, love can also be divine; it depends on you. Love is earthly when it is a projection of your ego. Love becomes divine when love is there but you are not. When the ego has disappeared, evaporated, and only the energy of love is left behind, then it is divine.

Down the ages people have not rightly understood this simple phenomenon. In fact because it was simple they missed it. They thought love is dangerous because in ordinary cases love is always an ego projection; it is always earthly. earthbound, mundane, physical, something gross. It is almost always so. So the logical mind started thinking that there is something which pulls you downwards. If you want to go upwards you have to renounce love.

Thousands of people renounced love, became monks, moved to the monasteries outside the world so that there was no opportunity to fall in love. But they missed the whole point: it is not love that pulls you downwards; it is the ego behind the love that pulls you downwards. They dropped love, they forgot all about the ego, and the ego remained with them. Now the ego was in the garments of a monk; it was still earthly.

The ego is heavy. It cannot soar, it cannot fly into the sky. It has no wings; it is a rock. The ego always follows the path of gravitation; it cannot follow the path of grace. It is not love that brings you downwards; it is the ego.

So my whole process is different: love has not to be renounced; love has to be rejoiced in. The ego has to be renounced. Once the ego is dropped love has wings, love is free, love is freedom. And then you can go higher and higher. Love is a weightless experience.

So remember these two things: love can be earthly if it is associated with the ego, hence the ego has to be renounced, not love; second, if there is no ego and only love remains, it is prayer, it is meditation, it is how god arrives in your life!

Prem means love, dwaro means a door. Love is a door to god. Whoever has entered into god has entered through love; there is no other door. People have created many false doors. They are only painted doors, you cannot enter through them; they are just walls painted as doors.

All the rituals of all the religions are painted doors. Real religion is non-ritualistic. It consists of the spontaneity of love. And love means not only loving the idea of god in your head; love means to love all that exists around you: the people, the animals, the birds, the trees, the rocks. Love all that is, and soon you will see a door opening. That door opens within your own being, and from that door you enter into god and god enters into you.

Prem means love, dasen means a servant, a slave – a servant of love, a slave of love. The paradox is that in love, to be defeated is to be victorious, to be a servant is to be a master, to be conquered is to conquer.

This is what Jesus means when he says ‘Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of god’... because only the meek know how to love. Love can happen only in a humble heart; it cannot happen when the ego is too strong. The state of surrender is needed for love to happen. And the whole existence belongs to one who is ready to surrender in love.

Prem means love, madir means wine – the wine of love. Love intoxicates, it is the ultimate in intoxicants. One who has drunk out of love, for him all other drinks are just meaningless. In fact people have been searching for other intoxicants because they are really searching for love. They may be searching in wrong directions but the desire is not wrong. And unless they find love and the wine of love, they cannot stop their search. All intoxicants will disappear from the earth if the earth becomes a paradise of love. Alcohol, LSD, marijuana – all are poor substitutes for love.

The ego is heavy, burdensome; one wants to forget it, one wants to get out of its yoke sometimes. In love you forget all about the ego, its worries, its tensions, anxieties. That’s what happens when you drink something alcoholic: for a few moments you forget all the worries, for a few moments you drop all your agony, for a few moments you are ecstatic. But it solves nothing; again you will be back in the same old rut. It gives you a relief but it does not transform you.

Love gives relief and also transforms. It is a non-chemical psychedelic. It gives a new vision, a new poetry to your life, new eyes to see the world and a new heart to feel existence.

And once love has taken possession of you the ego cannot come back. They cannot exist together; they are just like light and darkness. Bring light in and the darkness disappears; bring love in and the ego disappears. And with the ego disappear all the worries and the anxieties and the anguish.

To live in love is to really live. Others only pretend to live: lovers really live.

Anand means bliss, abhishek means initiation into. Sannyas is an initiation into bliss. My religion is that of celebration. My worship is to be in a festive mood, to be constantly cheerful, to always be in that mood of rejoicing in the existence.

The old sannyas used to be an initiation into something serious, heavy, because it was renouncing the world. My sannyas is totally opposite, diametrically opposite. This is neo-sannyas, a totally new vision of sannyas not of renunciation but of rejoicing, and not of the spirit of seriousness but of the spirit of festivity, of light-heartedness, of taking life as fun, play.

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