15

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‌CHAPTER 15

15 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine; petra is Greek, it means rock– divine rock. The temple of life has to be built on the rock of god. People build their houses either in the air or at the most on the sands. If one makes one’s houses in the air, one is simply wasting time, energy, life. Or if one makes one’s houses on the sands of time, then too death will come and all will be taken away.

Only god is the rock; and sannyas is an initiation into finding the rock on which the temple can be built. And it is not far away, it is within one’s own being; we just have not looked for it. It needs only a little knocking inside, a little hammering inside.

Deva means divine, bruno is Teutonic; it means of dark colour. In the East, particularly in India, god is painted with a dark complexion. The word ‘krishna’ means the black one. If you have seen the pictures of Krishna or the pictures of Rama you will be surprised: they are all dark–and there is a reason in it. Darkness has depth, whiteness is shallow. And darkness has something mysterious in it; whiteness is so clear-cut, mathematically comprehensible. Darkness is like the dark night, you cannot even see your own hand; everything is incomprehensible, mysterious. And god is a mystery. To represent that, in the East, god has been painted as having a dark complexion.

Bruno is a beautiful word: divine dark complexion.

Veet means going beyond, transcending; richard is Teutonic, it means hard. The full name will mean: transcending hardness, going beyond hardness, becoming soft.

Hardness is part of struggle. We have learned hardness because we have been constantly fighting; and if one has to fight, one has to be hard. Man has been fighting with nature, with animals, with trees, with man – with himself. For centuries and centuries, life has been nothing but a struggle.

Naturally, one has learned how to be hard, how to be like a stone wall, so that nothing can penetrate one; but this has created side effects of tremendous importance.

Because man has become too hard, he cannot love, he cannot allow love to happen. He cannot relax. He cannot go deep into meditation, he cannot go into his own being, because they need totally different qualities: they need softness.

Hardness is masculine, softness is feminine. If you want to go out into the world, into the world of ambitions, you have to be hard, very hard, otherwise you will be crushed. If you have to compete, you have to be aggressive and violent. Yes, it pays to be hard in the world of competition, ambition, but it is a hindrance in the inner world. If you are hard, you cannot take even a single step inside your being. If you are hard, your life loses all grace. It can’t be a flower, it remains a stone. It can’t have that velvety softness of a rose; it remains rough, it remains ugly.

Sannyas is the beginning of an inner journey. You will have to change the whole gestalt of your life: you will have to learn the ways of being soft. As much as possible, you will have to learn the ways of being vulnerable, open, available. You will have to learn the ways to bend, surrender.

Lao Tzu says: When great winds come, big trees fight, but they are uprooted, they are thrown on the ground. And the grass? – it simply bends, with no resistance. Once the wind is gone, the grass is back up – but the big tree cannot be back up; it is dead.

The secret of the grass is the secret of tao, the secret of religion: learn to relax, learn to surrender, learn to cooperate. In one word: learn to love!

Veet means beyond; and tetsuya, you say, means to be philosophic. Veet tetsuya will mean: going beyond philosophy. That is the game that sannyas is – going beyond philosophy, going beyond thinking, going beyond guessing.

Man cannot think about the unknown. Whatsoever you think remains the known. You can chew it over again and again, but it is the same thing that you already know. You can make a few new combinations out of old toys; they may appear new but they are not.

There is no way to come to the new by thinking; thinking is totally irrelevant for the new. The new can be known only when thinking ceases. Truth can be encountered only when the mind is no more there. Truth needs no mediator, Truth needs direct experiencing. One has to see to know, not think to know. One has to experience to know – and experience is a totally different dimension. You know love by being in love, not by studying love. If you study love, that is philosophy: if you fall in love, that is sannyas.

Sannyas is existential, not philosophical. And those who have ever known were not philosophers. Philosophers go on missing. They know much but their knowledge is all rubbish, because their knowledge goes about and about; they beat the bush around and around. They never reach the centre, they never reach that point which becomes a revelation.

The only way that your arrow can reach the target of truth is meditation, not thinking. And let me remind you: meditation is not another kind of thinking. It is not thinking about god, it is not thinking

about truth; it is not thinking at all. It is a state of no-thought. One simply is, utterly empty of any thought, desire, dream. In those lucid moments, truth comes to you. In those open moments, mysteries start revealing themselves to you.

One has to learn to be still, to be silent; it is not a question of logical acumen. The greatest skill in the world is the skill of being silent, utterly silent.

In silence is the door to god, to truth, to nirvana.

Prem means love, rechan means catharsis. Catharsis can be negative, it can be positive. If catharsis is negative, there is no end to it; one can go on catharting. That’s why many cathartic therapies can never be completed. For example, Primal therapy can never be completed. Even Arthur Janov is not post-Primal; nobody can be post-Primal.

If catharsis is negative, it is endless. And many Western therapies are caught up in negative catharsis: Encounter groups, Gestalt groups, Bio-energetics, Primal therapy, and many more. Yes, it unburdens you, but you are constantly creating energy. Man is a dynamo: the energy accumulates again, again you have to cathart. It does not change your basic life style. It does not change the fundamental of your life. It only helps you to release energy; it does not transform you.

Catharsis has to become positive, sooner or later. It is not only that you cathart anger, hatred, aggression; another step has to be taken which in the West has not yet been taken: you have to learn how to cathart love, compassion, joy.

If positive catharsis is learned, then there is an end to the negative catharsis, because the same energy starts moving into positive channels. Hate becomes love, anger becomes compassion, aggression becomes softness–just the opposite. Otherwise the negative path is endless and creates much hell. Once in a while, you will have a few glimpses of heaven. When the energy is released, the new energy takes a little time to arrive: between these two, you will have a little beautiful experience, but those beautiful moments will disappear sooner or later.

Unless we learn the art, the alchemy, of transforming all negative emotions into positive emotions, therapy remains incomplete. Therapy can be complete only with love, in love.

Prem means love; carmelita is Hebrew, it means garden – a love garden. Love is a garden: much care has to be taken of it. It is not just weeds that grow on their own – if you want rose bushes and lotuses, then much care and attention is needed.

A garden has to be created. It is an art, and the greatest art about it is that it should not know that it has been created, that the hands of man should remain hidden, that the hands of man should only be instruments in the hands of God. They should not interfere; they should only bring the message of the divine. They should in no way hinder; they should only be silent, co-operative, empty vehicles.

A tree has to be helped, watered, taken care of, but allowed to be its own. It is not to be tampered with; it has to be allowed to grow in its own natural way. The most beautiful garden is that which looks like a forest. It is not a forest, it is a garden; it has been created with great tenderness. It is poetry composed of trees, but composed in such a way that the poet is invisible. If the poet is too

visible, he has destroyed the whole thing. The garden has to be made but it should not be – at least not on the surface – man-made. It should be natural, not artificial.

There is a great story of a Zen master who was a great gardener; the emperor used to learn from him. The emperor was creating a big garden so that one day the master could be invited to see. If he approved, that meant that the king had learned the art – that was going to be the king’s examination.

The master came. The king had really prepared hard; thousands of people were involved in the garden. Everything was so clean, so perfect, that the king was absolutely certain that the master would not be able to find any fault. But when the master came, the king became afraid, scared. The master wouldn’t smile; he looked at the whole garden and he was very serious.

That was rare; he had never been seen so serious. Finally he said ‘I don’t see any dead leaves in the garden. Where are the dead leaves?’ The king said ‘We have thrown them out, just to keep everything clean.’

The master went out, brought back many dead leaves and threw them in the garden. The wind started taking those dead leaves all over the place... and the rustling sounds of the dead leaves. The master smiled, and he said ‘Now it looks like something divine! Without these leaves it was so dead, it had no sound. And how can a garden be without dead leaves? How can life be without death? They are partners together. If green leaves are there, then dead leaves are to be there on the ground. To remove them is artificial.’

Love is a garden. It has to be spontaneous, natural – and yet one has to be very artful. It is a paradox: to be artful and to be spontaneous.

In Zen they say that one should learn painting for at least twelve years and then throw away all the brushes and the paintings and forget all about it. For twelve years one should not touch the brush, should not paint. And then after twelve years one should start painting again. Now the art has been learned and forgotten; now one can paint naturally. The art will be there but it will not be visible; it will be something like a hidden current, something invisible.

Great art is always invisible; and love is the greatest of arts. No music, no poetry, no painting, can be compared to it.

[A sannyasin, arriving, asks: What does it mean to live?]

It means nothing! It has no meaning. Life has no purpose, it simply is. And that’s the beauty of it and the profound depth of it – that it simply is. You can make anything out of it; it is just pure availability. It is an empty canvas: you can paint anything on it. You can paint a nightmare or a beautiful dream, you can create hell or you create heaven, but life gives you no directions. It simply gives you total freedom to do whatsoever you want.

Life is freedom, hence the great responsibility. If you miss, you cannot make somebody else feel guilty for it; you and only you will be responsible. And there is no intrinsic meaning in life, so you cannot find any readymade thing. Life is creation. You will find only that which you have created; first create and then you can find it.

This is the tremendous mystery of life. People ask ‘Where is God?’ and they have not created God yet; they cannot find him. People ask ‘What is beauty?’ First create it, and then you will know. First give birth to it, then you will know.

Life is simply available in all its multi-dimensionality. No meaning is imposed from above; you have to create meaning. Each one has to be a creator, a god in his own right. We live in the world we create, and we live the life we create. So whatsoever meaning you prefer, you can create. The ultimate is to be able to live without any meaning, not to hanker for meaning, not to be obsessed with purpose, not to think in terms of goals; that is the ultimate. Once a man is able to live life for no reason at all, he is a Buddha, he is enlightened.

Enlightenment means to live life without any hankering for meaning. Then whatsoever is, is good, and whatsoever is not, that too is good. Then each moment becomes so radiant, so luminous, so fun of fragrance, but still there is no meaning.

Science searches for meaning and finds none. And because people are trained in science, everybody is feeling very disappointed. Art finds no meaning, but creates it – through poetry, music, painting. Religion also finds that there is no meaning, but it starts living the very meaninglessness of it. Art creates an illusion, it creates a beautiful illusion. Art is magic; at least it helps you feel that there is meaning. Science knows the truth, but is incapable of living it: it creates despair. Religion also knows that there is no meaning, but is courageous enough to live that meaninglessness of existence and finds great bliss and joy in it. These are the three approaches possible.

Science is the lowest approach, religion the highest. So if you ask the scientist he will also say that there is no meaning, but he will say it very sadly – he wanted there to be a meaning and it is not there. Ask the artist: he will say ‘Don’t be worried; meaning can be created.’ Ask the mystic: he wilt say ecstatically ‘There is no meaning – and because there is no meaning there is freedom, and because there is no meaning there is no bondage.’

If it is possible, become a mystic. If it is not possible, at least become an artist. Don’t fall below that! If you fall below that, you are committing the original sin.

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