9

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‌CHAPTER 9

9 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veeto means transcendence; and that’s the secret of all meditation. It is the very foundation of all religion. That which we know as the world is only the periphery; the centre is hidden. The centre is transcendental. It cannot be seen by the eyes, it cannot be heard by the ears, it cannot be touched by the hands, yet it is, yet it can be experienced.

The way you experience it is not through the senses; hence it is called the transcendental. We seek the world through the eyes, through the ears, but god comes to us not through the eyes, not through the ears. In fact he does not come from anywhere: he arises in our being. He is felt there at the very core.

God is like the silence in the heart of a rose flower: it is already there. Even when the flower is closed, is a bud, it is there. It does not come from anywhere; it is your nature. Hence senses cannot help. That’s why the mind is impotent to know god, because the mind is nothing but the super-sense.

The mind is nothing but the accumulated experiences of all the senses. Each of your senses goes on pouring its information into the mind. The mind is a coordinator. it cannot know anything that is beyond senses, hence the mind has to become silent, utterly silent. It has to cease to be, then the transcendental is felt, experienced, realised. It is not an object: it is your very being.

Sampurno means absolute perfection. It is not a goal. If it is a goal it creates neurosis. I am not saying to you to become a perfectionist. All perfectionists are bound to go neurotic because they are trying to do something which cannot be done.

Giving you the name ‘absolute perfection’ means you are already perfect. It is not a goal to be achieved, it is a reality to be recognised; it is already the case, because all is god, all is perfect. All is perfect as it is, no improvement is needed at all; all programmes of improving man are dangerous.

They have been a kind of paralysing, crippling, poisoning. They have created great ideals to improve man, and all those ideals have done only one thing: they have created hypocrites.

I don’t give you any ideal; all ideals are nonsense. I want you to become aware of reality as it is: all is good, beautiful, perfect. To live in this feeling is to be religious. To live with this feeling is to be prayerful. When all is perfect, gratitude is natural. And when you know you are perfect you know that everything else is perfect too. Then there is no question of feeling superior, inferior. The person who feels inferior suffers; the person who feels superior suffers. Only the person who does not feel any inferiority, any superiority, does not suffer. He enjoys the bliss of existence.

Navino means the absolutely new. Existence is new every moment. Only man’s mind becomes old because it accumulates memories and those accumulated memories in the mind create a burden, heaviness. One should live like a mirror: one should never accumulate any dust.

So think of each day as new and forget the past, never remember the days that have gone. And if you can do it from right now, you will have a totally different life. You will have a life of benediction and beauty. People are missing because they have been taught to accumulate the past. Forget the day that is gone; it is no more. Live in the moment and don’t think of the future either. If one can live here and now, god becomes available. And children can live in the here and now more easily than grown-up people. The so-called grown-up people are already poisoned.

So this is my message to you: don’t lose your innocence, your childhood, ever. Always remain like a child: fresh, young, fresh like dewdrops, fresh like the morning sun, fresh like the stars. This is what I call religion. Religion has nothing to do with the church and the Bible. It is a way of living life so lovingly, so consciously, that each moment becomes joyful.

So sing, dance, celebrate!

Prem means love, dhyano means meditation love meditation. Love without meditation is blind, love without meditation is a dark night. One gropes, one stumbles; one hurts oneself, one hurts others. It is natural in darkness, it is natural in blindness. And because love is blind without meditation it is frustrating too. Because it is blind it cannot soar very high: it remains crawling and creeping on the earth. It is afraid to soar high. A blind man cannot go climbing the mountains; he is even afraid to walk on plain ground. To go to the mountains, to climb the peaks, is going to be suicidal.

Meditation without love is lame, dull, cold. Meditation without love creates the ugly phenomenon of the monk and the nun. They are ugly because they don’t live at all. They are ugly because their lives are loveless. They are ugly because love is the only phenomenon that gives you beauty and grace.

Love without meditation is full of juice but blind. Meditation without love has eyes but has no juice; it is dry, it is a wasteland. Love without meditation is hot, passionate, but it knows nothing of silence. Hence it is a kind of turmoil, a feverish state of consciousness. It is a restless state. Meditation without love is silent, but the silence is that of the cemetery, the silence of death, not the silence of life, because the silence of life is a song. Meditation without love is empty silence. It is not full, it is not overflowing.

And both these things have been done down the ages: either people have chosen love – they are called the worldly people, they suffer – or they have chosen meditation – they go to the monasteries, become monks and nuns, and they suffer. Both remain incomplete.

To be a total man one needs both together. One has to become love/meditation; that is the highest synthesis. One becomes a perfect circle. Then there is joy of love and there is silence of meditation. Then there is a life of love and the peace of meditation. Then one can dance, yet the dance never becomes feverish. One can sing, but the song is never tiring. Then one is at ease with both. One can live in the marketplace and yet be far away in the mountains. And one can be in the mountains yet be full of love and compassion for the world.

This is going to be the future religion of man, the synthesis between love and meditation. And this is my work here: the effort is to create a new kind of total man, a whole man, and I call a whole man, holy. This is the whole alchemy: create both together – be loving and be meditative.

Prem means love, gyano means wisdom. Knowledge is part of the mind; wisdom is part of the heart. Wisdom comes through love; knowledge comes through logic. Knowledge is good as far as the outside world is concerned, because about the objects of the world, knowledge is enough; more than that is not needed. But knowledge is absolutely inadequate as far as one’s own being is concerned.

Knowledge is good about the known: knowledge is absolutely useless about the knower. Knowledge cannot know the knower; that is impossible. It is just as your eyes cannot see themselves. At the most you can see your eyes reflected in a mirror, but that is a reflection, not your real eyes.

You can read in scriptures about wisdom, but that is about wisdom: a reflection, not real wisdom. Jesus can be a mirror, Buddha can be a mirror, I can be a mirror, but we will be only mirrors, and whatsoever you come to know will be a reflection; it will not be the truth. The moon in the sky is one thing and the moon reflected in the lake is not the same thing. In fact there is no moon in the lake; it is an illusion.

So people who search for wisdom in the scriptures, in the books, remain entangled with reflections. About and about they go, round and round they go, never touching the centre.

The centre can be touched by only one way, and that way is of love. One has to become more of the heart. One has to slip down from the head. One has to hear the heart more and one has to ignore the head. And that is my message to you: you have heard enough of the head – enough is enough. Now listen to the heart. God speaks through the heart, he whispers through the heart. His messages come through the heart-beats. His messages are not logical: they are certainly full of love. That is divine logic, love is divine logic.

Satsango. It is a very special word. It has no equivalent in any Western language, because nothing like it has ever happened or existed in the West. But it can approximately be translated as: in loving communion with a master; but that is just approximate.

Truth can happen only in loving communion with someone to whom it has already happened; there is no other way. Truth is contagious, it is a kind of infection. It is like a flame jumping from one lamp into another unlit lamp. It is a continuum. It is given in deep intimacy.

Satsang simply means sitting with the master silently, not doing a thing, not even thinking, because thinking will be a barrier; just being with the master, open, vulnerable, available, just being in a kind of let-go. And the miracle of miracles happens: one day, suddenly, doing nothing, just being there with the master, the fire has entered you. You are no more the same: the old man is gone and the new has arrived.

In the East that has been the surest way for the seeker. The seeker will search for a masterAnd

the only way to know is to listen to your heart. Wherever you fall in love, wherever your heart starts beating a little faster, wherever you feel ‘This is the place!’, wherever you feel suddenly possessed by something unknown – something mysterious, something miraculous, you know you have found your master; this is the criterion. Then the seeker will sit with the master. Days will pass, months and years will pass, and slowly slowly, sitting there continuously, the disciple will start disappearing.

That is the whole art of disciplehood: to be able to disappear, to become absent, not to be. And when the ego is completely gone – any moment the ego is gone – instantly, something from the heart of the master jumps into the heart of the disciple. It is not that the master gives it; it is not a thing to be given. It is not that the disciple takes it; it is not the thing to be taken. It simply happens!

The master is aflame with god and the disciple has dropped the ego. In that very vulnerable state, in that opening, the fire enters the disciple. That moment is called ‘satsang’. The communion has happened. The disciple is pregnant now. Now the seed will grow. Now, even if the disciple is thousands of miles away from the master, he is not away, he cannot be away. He may be on another planet but there is no distance.

And this is the way it is going to happen to you. To remind you I am giving you the name. You need not think about truth, you need not practise anything in reality. You have a very Eastern heart; you may have lived many lives in the East. It can happen very easily to you. You are just on the verge: a little push, maybe only one step, and you can disappear!

Sannyas is nothing but a gesture from your side of ‘I am ready. I will not hinder. I will not resist.’

Jayesh means victorious – not victorious over others but victorious over oneself. That is true victory. The very idea of being victorious over others is ugly, it is violent, it is destructive. But to conquer oneself is beautiful, it is creative; and by conquering oneself I mean becoming more integrated.

Ordinarily man is fragmentary. In one man you will find so many people; each man is a crowd. There is not a single integrated individual: many voices, many desires, many minds, many selves, and they are all clamouring, fighting, competing.

This state, which is thought to be the normal state, is not normal. If it is normal then what can be abnormal? The so called normal state of man is very abnormal. It is a kind of madness, under control, but still madness is madness, and it can go beyond control any moment. Anything can trigger the process and it can go beyond control. One can go berserk any moment; any straw may do. This is not a normal state. Something is essentially wrong with humanity as it exists. People are not helped to become integrated. They are not helped to become rooted, centered; they don’t have centres.

To have a centre is to be victorious. Then small selves with small, lower case ‘s’, disappear and the Self with a capital ‘S’ appears. All the small selves disappear into a capital ‘S’ Self, the supreme Self. That is the master. That is the meaning of Swami: Swami means one whose master has appeared.

Mouliko means the original, the authentic, the true, the non-imitative. Man is brought up to be an imitator. Every child is taught to be somebody other than he is. And every child has to learn this hypocrisy because he is so helpless, he is so dependent; he cannot rebel. There is no way to protect himself against the parents; they are so powerful.

Slowly slowly his mind is manipulated. Slowly slowly he is given a false character that doesn’t belong to him. He starts wearing masks, he becomes a good imitator, but he loses his self. And once you lose track of your self you are lost. Then you may accumulate much wealth, you may become famous, you may be respected by the society, but you will never be able to be blissful, you will never know the joy of life.

Bliss happens only to authentic individuals, to those who stick to their original being, to their original face, only to those who are ready to risk all, to risk all for being themselves, whatsoever the cost.

And that’s my message to my sannyasins: be original, be yourself. Never compromise, because all compromises are suicidal. And never become an imitator, because you are unique: there has never been any individual like you and there will never be. Assert your individuality, but remember: this should not become an ego trip, otherwise you are again into another trap.

By asserting your individuality I don’t mean that you have to assert your ego. The ego is part of your personality. The personality is that which is given by others to you: individuality is that which you have brought with yourself. Individuality has no idea of the ego; it is very innocent.

So one has to be aware of two things, otherwise on both sides there are traps. Life is like walking on a tightrope: lean a little too much to the left and you fall, lean a little too much to the right and you fall. One has to continuously balance oneself. One has to be original and without any egoistic nuance to it.

And that is the state of a religious person, that is sannyas.

Nirjanando. It exactly means what Jesus means when he says: The kingdom of god is within you. We go on searching in the outside and we go on missing, because it is not there. And we never search within, where it is. This is the dichotomy man lives in: the treasure is within and the search is without. If one continues this way one can continue for lives and lives and there will never be any possibility of arriving, of reaching, of attaining.

The treasure cannot be brought without; that is impossible. But the search can go within. The treasure is your consciousness – that’s why it cannot be brought out – but the search is only your attention. One can close one’s eyes and give a turn to the attention, so that which was looking out can start looking in. It is just a re-focusing of it. It is a one-hundred-and eighty-degree turn. It is as if I was looking at you with a torch and then I turn the torch towards me and the light falls on my own face. exactly like that.

And that’s what meditation is: turning your attention inwards. Once the attention is turned inwards there is a great surprise waiting for you: all that you always needed and were never finding is available there. It has been always there: it is just that you were not looking at it.

That is the meaning of nirjanando: bliss is within.

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