29

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‌CHAPTER 29

30 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, sahaja means spontaneous. Love is true only when it is spontaneous, unplanned, unpracticed, uncultivated, unthought. Whenever you plan for love, whenever deliberateness enters into it it becomes phony and false. And that’s why people go on loving yet it never satisfies, because no phony food can be nourishing.

True love has to be spontaneous, it has to happen without any preparation preceding it. It has to come out from nowhere, out of the blue. Suddenly it is there; you were not rehearsing for it. Anything rehearsed is bound to become false. Then later on you are acting it, in the mind you rehearse and then you act. If you are waiting for your lover and you are rehearsing in the mind what you are going to say and what you are going to do, that won’t allow you real love. When he comes you will simply be repeating the ready-made idea, it will be acting.

But people are unaware that that’s how they go on missing the opportunity that love gives. And then rather than a contentment, a fulfilment, love becomes a frustration. But the root cause is in its being false. And why is it false? – because it is ready-made, it is not spontaneous, it is not out of the moment.

Learn to love spontaneously, out of the moment, and you will be surprised: it liberates!

[Deva Takashi – divine love for one’s own parents] To love one’s own parents is one of the most difficult things in the world. But if one can manage it, it is of great importance. If you are at ease with your parents, you are at ease with the whole existence, because existence is the ultimate parent. And because the parents have to give guidance, the child resents them. As the child grows and becomes powerful, a natural rebellion happens. Then one only goes on paying respect to the parents, that’s all, but love disappears.

It is also not in the nature of things to love one’s parents, that’s why it is very difficult; it is going upstream. It is very natural for the parents to love their children; the flow is downstream. It is a natural thing, there is nothing special about it. Every mother loves the child and every father loves the child. It is plain, ordinary, and the people who brag about it are simply being stupid.

But to love one’s parents is going beyond nature, it is transcending your biology. It is an uphill task, but if you can do it, it becomes a door to god.

Satyanando. It means truth and bliss. Truth is naturally followed by bliss. Bliss is a shadow of truth – misery, of untruth. One cannot drop misery unless one stops being untrue. Everybody wants to drop misery but nobody wants to drop the untruth, hence it becomes impossible to get out of it. You cannot drop the shadow. If you want to do anything with the shadow you will have to do something with the original.

If I want to cut the head of your shadow, I will have to cut your head, then immediately the shadow loses its head. Otherwise one can go on fighting with the shadow and nothing is ever going to happen. And that’s what goes on and on: people go on fighting with their misery but they cannot succeed; in the very nature of things they are doomed, their efforts are doomed. And people also go on trying to find bliss; that too is not possible. I cannot invite your shadow: I have to invite you. When you come the shadow comes automatically.

Bliss is the shadow of truth, so the whole thing hinges upon one thing: drop all that is untruthful in you, false, pseudo. Drop all masks. Don’t pretend, there is no point in it. Just be the naked self you are, even if in the beginning it creates inconvenience. It is going to create inconvenience, because to live with people who are untrue and to start becoming true creates discomfort. It is like in the city of the blind one person starts seeing or as if in a madhouse one person suddenly becomes sane; he will be in great trouble.

One of my friends was in a madhouse. That was not a problem at all: he was mad. Three months went perfectly well, in fact he enjoyed those three months. He had great company – there were at least eight hundred madmen – and it is always beautiful to have people who are just like you. Then one day, through some accident, he drank a bottle of phenol; it had come for the bathroom – he drank it.

For fifteen days he had great diarrhoea, vomiting. Somehow that cleansed his system. He became sane, as if the whole of the poison went out of his body. For those fifteen days he couldn’t eat, he could not hold anything: anything he ate he had to vomit immediately and he had motion after motion; the whole system was cleansed. On the fifteenth day he suddenly awoke as if out of a nightmare. then the trouble began, because there were eight hundred mad people and you alone sane. The real nightmare begins! Somebody is pulling your hair and somebody is pulling your leg and somebody is beating you. All kinds of things were going on but now he was sane!

He went to the chief. He told him ‘Now I am sane.’ The chief said ‘But this is what everybody says. You just go away. Every madman says “I am sane”.’ Nobody would listen to him. The more he insisted, the more they denied. He had to live out the whole term; for six months he had been sentenced to live in a madhouse.

So when you start becoming truthful in a world which is basically untrue, phony, inconvenience is bound to be there; that is part of growth. One has to take it easily, accept it easily. But it is worth it, because great joy starts arising in your being. As you go on dropping your masks, misery disappears, layer upon layer, and the sun rises above the horizon – the sun of bliss. But it always comes after the truth.

To be utterly nude in the world, to be as you are, to be as god has made you, is to be blissful. and that’s what sannyas is all about.

Govindo is a name of god. All names are names of god, all forms are forms of god, because nothing else exists; only god is.

Let this feeling sink deep into your heart: only god is! And it will bring a great transformation. Go on remembering it. The sound of the insect65s: only god is. The darkness of the night: only6 god is. Somebody laughing: only god is. Somebody weeping: only god is. Sadness surrounds you: only god is. Great excitement and happiness: only god is. In all moods, in all climates, in all seasons, go on remembering the is-ness of god, and slowly slowly it becomes an undercurrent of your consciousness. You need not remember then, it is always there: it is like a fragrance that surrounds you.

And when this starts happening, that without remembering the remembrance persists, it is prayer! Prayer means that the door has opened. Prayer means that the revelation has started happening: god has started arriving in you; you have been accepted. Prayer is an indication that god is very close by. That’s why you are feeling so cool, so collect5ed, so silent, so joyous, for no reason at all!

So this is going to be your meditation: god is, only god is – not that you have to repeat the words, but allow the feeling.

[A sannyasin asks about an esoteric group he visited in the West.]

Just be here for a few months... and all these things are games: they will disappear. You can play beautiful games, and you can play games which look very spiritual and you can give those games the colour of esotericism, occultism. But in any experiment, unless at the centre there is somebody who is enlightened, everything remains a game. Howsoever sophisticatedly played and howsoever cleverly arranged, it remains intellectual gymnastics.

Unless there is a Buddha at the centre, at the core of the group, nothing is possible. People can meet together, they can discuss and they can talk and they can create great systems of thought – appealing, logical – and they can create an aura, as if something mysterious is happening; but neverDown the ages millions of experiments have been done but only those experiments succeed

where there is a man who has arrived.

It is as if you are in a gaol. You can make a club of the prisoners inside the gaol. They can discuss things, they can meditate, they can pray together, they can do a thousand and one things, but still they are in the prison. They can decorate the prison, they can make the place beautiful, they can make themselves believe that now it is no more a prison but a home. they can create that quality of cosiness, but still they are in the prison.

Unless they become connected with somebody who is outside the prison, who is no more p0art of the prison, their efforts will remain futile. They are beautiful, and good in a way, because what are you going to do in the prison? Something is better than nothing. Their whole purpose is one, that if you go through such experiments, sooner or later you will become frustrated. If you go through so many things like these, the frustration will become so much that you may start looking for somebody who is outside the gaol, with whom you can have some connection. That is the only purpose of all these experiments, otherwise there is nothing.

If you can come across a master, if you can fall in love with a master, then nothing else is of any importance. I will send you back to them to trap them, just wait! We cannot leave those nine people so easily. and they must be good people: the idea is good, but it is just an idea.

So be ready. After four months go and bring them all here! (much laughter)

Deva means divine, arhata means one who comes to know truth utterly alone. there are people who can grow only as part of a school; they cannot grow alone. There are people who can only grow alone; they cannot grow as part of a school. You belong to the second category: you will have to learn how to be more and more alone.

And to be alone is not loneliness. In fact when one is alone one is with oneself and when one is with somebody else one is not with oneself. It is paradoxical, but in crowds people are very lonely, and when they are alone they are not lonely at all.

Aloneness means solitude, not solitariness. When you feel solitary you are hankering for others. When you are in solitude you have forgotten all others; there is no desire to go out of yourself, you are utterly contented.

That is going to be your path. I am not saying not to relate. Relate, love, but remember that you are not to lose your inner space, that you are not to become utterly lost in others. If you can keep your inner space intact then all relationship is good; in fact it will enhance your growth. But don’t allow people to encroach on your inner space. That is sacred, that is only for yourself. and whenever you can find time, move into it, be in it, be it!

[A sannyasin says: During the last few days there were so many questions but now... ]

That’s very good! Questions should disappear when you come in front of me and then you can learn a secret: whenever some question is disturbing you, just think of me and slowly slowly you will become capable of dissolving any question. Just think of me and feel that I am present there and the question will go. So you are very close to a secret.

Try it when you are back home. If some question arises just sit silently, think of me, as I am sitting here right now, and immediately you will see that the question is disappearing.

I don’t answer questions: I simply kill them!

Prem means love, prabhat means morning, dawn – the dawn of love. Sannyas is a small beginning, the first step, the first ray of the morning sun. But with a single step the journey of thousands of miles starts. From a small seed the great tree arises.

Sannyas is not the ned but the beginning, the beginning of a pilgrimage that knows no end; it is eternal. But the first step has to be of love, only then are you in the right direction. Be love more and more. and while you are here remember only one thing, that if you have learned how to be love – and I am not saying ‘loving’, I am deliberately saying ‘how to be love’.It is not a question

of relating. Even if you are sitting alone and there is nobody, you have to be love. It has nothing to do with the object: it has something to do with your subjectivity, your interiority. In your interiormost core love has to become a flood, overflowing.and that will become the end of the night and the

beginning of the day.

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