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CHAPTER 25
26 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Deva means divine, bhadrena means grace. There are things which man can achieve by his own efforts and there are things which he can never achieve by his own efforts. The things that man cannot achieve by his own efforts are the really valuable things. The things that man can achieve will be lost sooner or later, death will take them away; they are momentary. Man’s efforts cannot give birth to the eternal: man can manufacture only momentary soap bubbles. They may look very significant for the time being, but they are only for the time being. And out of them richness is not born. One simply deceives oneself that one is rich; one remains poor. They create a facade, but if you look behind it there is just a helpless human being – empty, hollow.
The things that cannot be created by man are really valuable: love, prayer, truth. They all come through god’s grace. One needs to be ready to receive them, that’s all. One has to be on the receiving end, prepared, ready, open. Man can do only one thing about great things, etemal things, and that is to remain in a state of welcome. Then something starts descending which no death can take away. And that is real richness: you will carry it beyond the body, it will be with you forever.
That is the meaning of your name: think of things which man cannot create, think of things which only god can give as gifts, and think of how to receive them.
Deva means divine, pujano means prayer. There is a prayer that cannot be leamed, and that is the true prayer. The prayer that can be learned will be Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, but it will not be true prayer. The prayer that can be learned will not arrive out of your own being; it will be imposed from the outside. Your parents, your teachers, the church, will impose it on you, and anything imposed is always false and remains false.
The real has to arise, not be imposed; the real has to be expressed. It has to be your own. Millions of people are praying every day, yet their prayer has no meaning; it is a formal gesture. They have
been taught, they have become afraid, they have become greedy; they pray. They pray out of fear, they pray out of greed; but real prayer arises out of love, it has no concern with fear or greed.
So drop all prayers that you have learned. That is the first step, the negative step; negate all that you have leamed about prayer and then start watching life. Sometimes the sky is full of stars. Lie down on the ground and look at the stars and wait. Sometimes lie down on the earth, your hands spread as if the earth is your mother – it is – and feel the earth. Sitting by the side of the tree, just feel the presence of the tree, and one day you will be surprised: prayer is arising. You will feel like kneeling down on the earth, you will feel like saying something to existence. And when you say something on your own, whatsoever it is, it has tremendous value. The dialogue has started; now you are in communion with god.
That prayer will never be a flxed thing that you can do at a particular time; it will come any time. It may not come for a few days and then suddenly one day it is there. But don’t falsify it, don’t try to bring it; just wait. Whenever it comes, go into it. If it doesn’t come, wait, wait for the right moment; it will come.
Slowly slowly you will go deeper and deeper into real prayer, and that real prayer transforms, enlightens. And then god is not just a theory; then it starts becoming your experience. Then your prayer is no more a monologue as it is ordinarily; it becomes a dialogue. You know for certain that there is a response from the other side. It is not only that you are saying something: you will start hearing something also. And when prayer becomes not only saying but hearing too, you have arrived.
That is the meaning of deva pujano.
Pari means absolute, pumo means perfect absolutely perfect. Existence is absolutely perfect as it is, it needs no improvement, and each being is as perfect as he can ever be. All that is needed is the recognition of the fact, a kind of awareness and respect for the fact. Man is perfect, just as trees and stars are perfect, but he is asleep, not aware, not aware of the truth. And in that sleep we go on planning how to improve, how to be this and how to be that, and we get into unnecessary troubles. All our efforts are like putting legs on a snake. Then life becomes very miserable, unnecessarily miserable.
Sannyas means simply one thing: a declaration of ‘I am perfectly good as I am,’ and a great acceptance, a great self-respect, dropping all ideals and desires to be somebody or somebody else, and just living moment to moment the simple, ordinary life. And slowly slowly, a clarity arises that nothing has ever been missing. From the very beginning things are perfect.
Everybody is a Buddha, just asleep, dreaming that he is not. One need not become a Buddha; all that is needed is a little shaking so that one wakes up. And that’s what I am doing here: a little shaking. You are it already – you just have to be shocked a little bit, shaken a little bit, so you become aware of who you are. And that awareness is liberation.
The moment it dawns in your consciousness ‘I am already at home; there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve,’ each moment becomes a celebration. It is bound to become, because all the energy that was involved in desiring, ideals, reaching – that ambitious mind – all that energy is released.
Now that energy cannot do anything except sing, dance, laugh, cry, love, pray. What else is left? There is no future left, and when there is only present left, life becomes utterly intense because the whole energy moves into the present moment. Life becomes aflame and one lives at the optimum.
Ordinarily we are living at the minimum, and the reason is that we are hoping for a better future, in this life or maybe in the next life, here or maybe in paradise, but all our utopias are in the future. And my whole message is: we are in paradise. This very earth, the paradise, and this very body, the Buddha. That is the meaning of your name.
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