14

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‌CHAPTER 14

14 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem Satish – god of love and truth.

These are the two most significant things in life. Truth has to be realised and love has to be lived. Truth happens in the innermost core; love is the flow outwards of the same energy. When you are full of truth, you can’t help being loving; love starts overflowing, but the energy is that of truth. Without truth there is no love; all is just pretension.

With truth, all is love. Love follows truth. Truth happens in your inner space; and once it has happened, it starts relating with the outer space. That’s love. Truth relating with existence is love, truth communing with existence is love. Truth is alone and in aloneness; love is a togetherness.

There are a few who try to be loving without truth; their love is false. There are others, a few, at the other extreme, who try to know the truth but who are afraid of love. Their truth remains stifled, just a seed; it never becomes a tree.

The ultimate synthesis only happens when love starts flowing from the experience of truth. When truth starts transforming itself into love, when one aloneness starts having a dialogue with another aloneness, when truth becomes communion, then it is love. Truth is the beginning, love is the fulfilment. Truth is the seed, love is the flowering.

Prem means love; fritjof is from the Teutonic, it means peace – a peace that is full of love, a love that is full of peace. Both are possible without each other, but then something remains missing. Love is possible without peace, but then love tends more towards lust than towards prayer. Then it is downgoing; then it is a fall, not a rise in consciousness.

If love is full of peace it starts soaring high, it grows wings. It becomes more and more free from matter, free from the body, free from the gross. It becomes more aesthetic, more musical; it attains more and more spiritual qualities.

At the lowest it is nothing but pure animality, at the lowest it is nothing but a biological urge. At the highest peak it is prayer – it is communion with god, it is meaning with the universal soul, it is dissolving into the ocean of the divine. But love can go high only if it contains peace in it. If the peace is missing, love becomes a fever, a disease – tiring, exhausting – and creates a thousand and one miseries. It gives great hopes but never fulfils them – cannot fulfil them. Those hopes can be fulfilled only through peace.

Without peace, love is like fire: it burns, but it only burns – it cannot give you a resurrection. With peace, another dimension opens up: love becomes cool with peace, it is no more a hot fever. It is a silence - - full of love, overflowing with love, but with no fever at all; there is no lust in it, no desire to get something, but a sheer joy of giving, of sharing.

Peace is also possible without love, but then it is dead; it is the peace that is found in the cemetery. It does not pulsate, it has no heart-beat, it does not breathe; it is without heart, it is mechanical. A peace which does not pulsate is of no use at all. Maybe it can protect you, it can become a defence, it can make your life more comfortable, convenient – because it will rub off all the corners of your life; you will be more round, there will be less friction with people, less fight with life. That much it can do, but slowly slowly it turns into your grave.

Both of these things have been tried. People who have tried love without peace are called worldly people; people who indulge, sinners. And there have been people who have tried peace without love – monks who have moved away from the world to the monasteries, to the deserts, to the mountains, to live alone so that there is no possibility of love. Because who knows? – in certain moments of temptation.…

And love is tempting; it is something very intrinsic in you. It certainly fulfils something tremendously important in yom being. So there is fear that if the other is there, a dialogue may start, the energy may start moving, and you may fall into the trap of love. Hence the monasteries, the mountains, the desert: escape, escape as far away from people as possible, be alone. That too has been tried, but monasteries become cemeteries.

People who escape from life become dull, stupid, lose all intelligence, sharpness of life, zest to live. All that they are doing in the monasteries is waiting for death, praying for death, asking god to deliver them from life – as if life is something wrong, as if life is not a gift but a punishment. Both these experiments have been done and both have failed.

My sannyas is a new experiment: love plus peace. Both have to be balanced – one has to be full of love and yet utterly peaceful, and one has to be full of peace, yet overflowing with love. Then life is a miracle. Then one feels grateful to god, then of one’s own accord one starts bowing down to existence. Then a humbleness is born which is uncultivated.

To me that consciousness is a truly religious consciousness.

Anand means bliss. Ruth comes from Hebrew; it is a very significant word, with many significant meanings. The first is beauty, the second is compassion, the third is the capacity to see – and they are all joined together. It may not be so apparent how beauty, compassion and the capacity to see are related at all, but they are related.

Beauty does not mean the physical form: beauty means the quality of the inner energy, the inner music, the inner poetry. Whenever the inner poetry is there, it creates a physical beauty also, but the physical beauty is secondary. Physical beauty depends on many accidents – the accident of birth, the accident of a certain way of upbringing – it depends on so many things; it does not depend only on the inner.

For example, people who were born before the vaccine for polio was invented were unfortunate. Now if they are born they are fortunate, no problem. People who were born when there was no cure for, no prevention of, smallpox suffered much; they still suffer in poor countries. Their faces can become very ugly, their eyes can go blind.

Physical beauty is a very very arbitrary phenomenon: one day it is there, the next day it may not be there. It is accidental, it does not matter much. What matters is the inner beauty.

Ruth means inner beauty, the beauty of a soul. And the beauty of the soul is expressed as compassion. A beautiful person is, out of necessity, compassionate; he cannot be otherwise. He cannot be cruel; cruelty is a by-product of inner ugliness, compassion the shadow of inner beauty. And the person who has a beautiful soul and has compassion in his relationship with people, is bound to grow eyes that can see, that can see the truth, that can see that which is.

So, on the surface, in the dictionary, it may not be so apparent how these totally different meanings are attached to a single word, but deep down there is a relationship.

The ancient languages – Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, Greek – were not just languages. Behind the words, great truths were put; only those who would be able to, would see them. So all the ancient languages have double meanings: one meaning that is apparent, and another meaning that is latent; one meaning that is for day-to-day use, another meaning that has some metaphysics in it, some philosophy in it, some vision of deeper things, of deeper mysteries. Hebrew particularly has that quality: each single word has some mystery in it. It is not only linguistic, it is not only grammar. Some keys are hidden – those who are perceptive enough wi]l find those keys.

Ruth is a beautiful word. Contemplate on these three things: the inner beauty, the outer compassion. and between the two, the insight that is capable of seeing god happen.

Veet means going beyond, transcending. Robert is Teutonic, it means fame. The fun name will mean transcending the desire for fame, going beyond the desire for fame.

The desire to be famous is nothing but ego, and it is a very futile desire. It fulfils nothing. The whole world can know about you, still you will be the same – with the same problems, with the same miseries, with the same darkness.

Becoming world-famous is not going to bring any light to your being or any insight or any transformation. It may bring riches to you, but those riches will remain without, and your inner poverty will remain untouched by them. It may bring much attention, but even if you are standing with the whole world staring at you, nothing will be fulfilled by it. In fact, on the contrary, you will feel more empty than ever, more stupid than ever, more hollow than ever.

That happens to every person who becomes very famous – a great author, a great poet, a great politician, this and that. When a person becomes famous he simply sees the whole pointlessness of it all; but now he cannot go back either. He is stuck. He knows the futility but he cannot even confess, because if he says that it is all futile, that means he is saying that for his whole life he has been stupid – searching for it, seeking for it, struggling for it. It is better to keep quiet.

If all famous people really confess, the world will be a totally different world – but they cannot confess. They go on pretending as if they have attained, as if they have come. It is just ‘as if’. They die in that ‘as if’: empty, hollow, utterly meaningless, is their life.

One of the greatest steps towards inner enlightenment is to drop the idea of being known to others. That is an ego-trip, and a sheer wastage of time, energy, opportunity – and an opportunity that is tremendously meaningful. If you can use it, if you can turn in, you can be utterly contented. Life has so much to give, but it gives only to those who turn inwards. And the person who is after fame never turns in, because his whole point is to catch the attention of others. He is really childish, still saying ‘Daddy, Mummy, look at me, pay attention to me.’ He is still searching for somebody to pat him, appreciate him. Deep down he feels he is nothing; he wants to be patted, appreciated, so that he can feel some worth. But even if the whole world pats you and the whole world appreciates you, you will remain the same. This is not the way to attain to worth.

Worth is attained only when one turns into one’s own sources and suddenly finds the treasure, the inexhaustible treasure of god. Jesus calls it the kingdom of god, and he says again and again ‘The kingdom of god is within you.’

So your name will mean: go beyond fame, go beyond the ego, go beyond all that nonsense that people hanker for. Be a nobody! And I am not saying... sometimes nobodies also become famous. A Buddha becomes famous, a Christ becomes famous – but there was no desire, it was just accidental. There was no motivation, it was not the search.

When a nobody becomes famous it is totally different. It doesn’t matter; whether a Buddha becomes known or remains unknown doesn’t matter. He will be as blissful remaining anonymous, a nobody, as he will be if he becomes known all over the world. That is another thing.

Dropping the desire for fame does not mean that you will never become famous – you may, but then it will have a totally different quality. It will be a sheer accident, and you will remain the same: silent, at ease, fulfilled, contented.

Prem means love. Linda has two meanings: one is Latin, it means beautiful; another is Teutonic, it means a serpent – the symbol of wisdom.

Jesus says, ‘Be ye as wise as serpents.’ For centuries the serpent has been the symbol of wisdom, both in the East and in the West. Both the meanings are beautiful. The full name will mean: love that brings beauty, beauty that brings wisdom.

Love can bring many things into existence. Love is alchemy, pure alchemy; it transforms everything that it touches. Baser metal becomes gold, poison becomes nectar, ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and an ordinary person is transformed into a god or goddess. Love is magic, pure magic. It creates its own world; it is the only creative force in existence.

Love gives you beauty because it gives you grace. Love gives you beauty because it gives you a feeling of worth, that you are needed – that you are not useless, that you are not just dirt, that you are respected, that somebody depends on you, that somebody will miss you; if you are not there, then somebody is going to cry for you. This is the ordinary love.

If love takes wings and becomes universal, then it gives you tremendous beauty. Then you know that this existence will not be the same without you. It gives you tremendous confidence, trust in yourself – and that trust brings beauty, that trust brings a settlement, a relaxation, a centering. You are no more desiring; all that is needed is already there.

Desire makes one ugly, beggarly. Love makes one desireless: one is suddenly an emperor. If love is there, the whole kingdom of god is there. In those moments of love and beauty. in those moments of the feeling of meaningfulness, wisdom arises. One knows, not through the mind but through the heart; one knows, not through logic but through love. Logic is a very indirect way of knowing: it goes round and round, about and about, and still it never comes to the point. It goes on and on; it is a vicious circle.

The heart penetrates into the reality directly, immediately, without any mediator. It simply faces reality as it is, without any screen of intellectuality, rationalisation.

Love is really the true way of knowing the truth. Logic is the untrue way of guessing the truth; it is never knowing.

Anand Jennifer. Anand means bliss. Jennifer is Celtic, it has three meanings: one is white lady, the second is fair lady, the third is white wave. I choose the third: a blissful white wave. That’s actually what we are, waves in the ocean. Being a man or a woman is very superficial, it is just on the surface; deep down we are just white waves of an infinite ocean.

One can think oneself separate from the ocean, then misery arises. One can feel oneself one with the ocean, then peace comes. Bliss is really nothing that comes: bliss is the understanding of the truth. And misery is a misunderstanding: misery is living in a lie and thinking that it is true. Because it is not true and you believe it is true, you remain in a state of limbo, neither here nor there. You cannot make the lie true – and unless it is true it cannot be nourishing, nurturing; it cannot give you health because it cannot make you whole.

People are living on lies, a thousand and one lies. And the most fundamental lie, the foundation of all lies, is the ego – the idea that ‘I am separate from existence.’ The wave is not separate from the ocean, the wave is part of the ocean. To see it is to be transformed – because then all misery, anguish, simply disappears, is not found at a]l. One is surprised: ‘Where have all those things gone? Where is my anxiety? I have not solved it – where has it gone? Where are the problems? I have not found the answers, but the problems have disappeared!’

There are no answers. If the problem is a lie, there cannot be any answer to it. If the problem is false, then there is no way to solve it. And the problem is false. Hence I don’t teach how to solve your problems, I teach how to dissolve them. By seeing the truth they are dissolved, not solved.

And this is the truth: be a blissful wave, alert, aware that ’I am just part of the ocean: one moment I arise, another moment I disappear. My coming and my going does not make any difference. My

birth is not a birth, my death is not a death, because before birth I was there in the ocean, after death I will be there in the ocean.’

Seeing the truth, one becomes disidentified with the part and becomes identified with the whole; and to be one with the whole is to live a vast, infinite life. We are unnecessarily living in small, dark tunnels, for no reason at all – the whole sky is ours!

Anand means bliss, sudharm means true religion – bliss, the true religion.

For a long time, religion has been very sad, serious, sombre; and because of its seriousness and sadness, millions turned away from it. Even those who remained part of religion remained only formally so, because sadness is not the natural search of human consciousness, bliss is the natural search.

To propound sadness as a goal is pathological, but that is what has been done down the ages. It has been done for a particular reason; it was not just an accident, it was a cunning strategy of the priests. Early in the history of humanity they stumbled upon the fact that you can control only if people are sad; you can exploit only if people are sad. If they are blissful, it is impossible to control them; if they are blissful, it is impossible to reduce them to slaves. If they are blissful, it is impossible to force them to follow the authorities, the state and the church.

A blissful person is a rebellious person. And a blissful person need not go to the priest. For what? Why? When you are psychologically ill you go to the psychiatrist, the psychoanalyst; when you are not psychologically ill you don’t go.

The priest came to know that people have to be made spiritually ill, only then can his profession prosper. The priest lives on people’s spiritual poverty, spiritual illness, spiritual turmoil, anguish. Naturally he created a structure of ideology in which it is bound to happen that you will become sad, you will become afraid, you will become guilty, you will become so shaky that you will have to seek advice, that you will have to go to some expert. The priest was the expert; he had all the keys. In fact he was the cause of the disease, and he was pretending he was the cure.

My work here is to make you aware of all the damage that has been done by the priest down the ages, and not only to make you aware but to help you to heal those wounds. Hence, to me, true religion will mean bliss, will mean freedom, will mean individuality. It will not mean imitation, it will not mean following, it will not mean obedience; it will mean intelligence.

Of course if something appeals to your intelligence follow it. But follow it because it appeals to your intelligence – not because it is dictated by the authorities, not because it is written in the scriptures, not because those who propound it have a long long tradition, credit, prestige, power. Follow a thing only if it strikes a chord in your heart; then you will be moving into the true direction of god. As one goes closer and closer to god, one becomes more and more blissful.

If one becomes more and more serious, then something is wrong; one has gone astray, one is not moving towards god. That is an absolute criterion: if you are coming closer to truth, your being will have more and more fullness of joy, well-being, overflowing love. You will be a singing, a dancing.…

[A sannyasin says that when he does Vipassana meditation he becomes drowsy and has low physical energy. Mostly when doing dynamic he feels pretty good.]

Pretty good?

My feeling is that at least for six to nine months you should do Dynamic meditation. Your energy seems to be low. The Dynamic meditation will help the energy to rise higher. Only then will Vipassana be helpful. Otherwise this happens: energy is low, Vipassana brings it even lower, because it is a very silent process. Then wherever energy is too low you will feel drowsy, sleepy, and you may start dreaming, and then the whole point is lost.

Vipassana can be done only when the energy is very high, so high that even if Vipassana brings it low, it cannot bring it so low that you start feeling drowsy. Otherwise in Buddhist monasteries that is almost the normal routine: out of one hundred monks, ninety-nine are drowsy, sleepy. That’s why the Zen master has to move with a stick to hit their heads – they are all drowsy! In fact it is natural, mm ? it is not their fault! They have to get up at three o’clock, early in the morning, and then start meditating; and it continues the whole day. Unless somebody really has very high energy, he will fall into sleep.

So my approach is: first bring the energy to such a high level that even when you do Vipassana.… It will go down a little: your heart-beat will be slower, your pulse will be slower, your blood circulation will slow down – everything slows down in Vipassana. You already look drowsy... so in Vipassana you will fall asleep; it will not be of any use to you.

For nine months concentrate on Dynamic meditation, and after nine months start Vipassana.

[A sannyasin asks about her relationship which is difficult because most of her energy goes into looking after her two-year-old twins.]

Don’t be worried. Things will settle. Just be here for a few days. Just feel me more, mm? and things will settle. I don’t see a real problem, mm? – just the ordinary problems that always arise in relationship. But those problems keep the relationship going on. If there are no problems, what will you do? If there are no problems then you will be at a loss: what to do with your life?

Problems keep life interesting. One remains occupied and great things go on happening. Nothing is great, and nothing is happening!

Just wait a few days, listen to me carefully, and this will go.

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