16

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‌CHAPTER 16

16 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, carina has two meanings; one is a star, a star of the constellation Orion–a love star.

Love is always a possibility, always a potential, and the potential is such that it cannot be actualised absolutely; it is inexhaustible. So it is always a far-away distant star; you are always arriving closer and closer, but you can never say ‘I have arrived.’ And that is the beauty, that one can never arrive, one only goes on arriving. The adventure remains an adventure, the pilgrimage remains a pilgrimage; it never ends.

Love is something that we can go on and on moving into deeper and deeper, but still it is unfathomable, it is immeasurable. We are very small; it is huge. We can only be possessed by it, we cannot possess it. Love is a whole universe; we are just a ripple in the ocean.

And the second meaning is the Italian meaning of the word ‘carina’ – and I am changing it from carin to carina. Carina is softer, has more beauty of sound, is more feminine. In Italian, carina means the little beloved one, the beloved.

Love is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it makes you a lover, on the other hand it makes you a beloved. It is not one-way traffic, it is not only that you give. The more you give, the more you get – in fact you get a thousandfold. What you give is small, what you get is tremendous.

Keep in your heart a single seed of love. Help it in every possible way, and drop all that can be a hindrance to it. Then there is no other need for anything else. Love is enough unto itself.

Deva means god, magdalena is Hebrew; it means elevated exalted – exalted by god.

In the very fact that we are, we are exalted by god. The very fact that we exist is enough proof that god has loved us. What more exaltation can there be than to be created by god? And life is not a single gift; it is a chain of gifts, gifts upon gifts. But man is so ungrateful and so blind that he cannot see what has been given to him. Rather than being thankful, he is continuously complaining. The complaining mind is the irreligious mind, and the grateful mind is the religious mind.

Religion does not consist of going to the church, to the temple, of following certain rituals, formalities. Religion consists only of one thing: an immense gratitude, gratitude that one is, because there is no reason why one should be – or is there?

It is a miracle that we are; we might not have been. It is a sheer miracle that existence has been showered on us that being has been given to us. We are already exalted: to feel it is of tremendous importance. In that very feeling you start losing your anxiety – because if god has created you, he is taking care of you. Then let-go becomes possible, surrender becomes possible. Then you need not worry about yourself, you need not carry yourself on your own shoulders; you can relax, you can be, you can enjoy.

That’s what my teaching is: feel exalted, feel tremendously gifted, and feel gratitude for all that has been given to you. The more grateful you become, the more will be given; and the more you have, the more you attract.

The law of outer richness is applicable to inner richness too. Money attracts money: if you are rich outwardly, more money will be flowing towards you. And so is the case with inner richness: the more rich you feel, the more richness will be pouring into you from all directions. If you feel poor, you will become more poor. Whatsoever you feel will be magnified, strengthened – because each time you feel something, you are strengthening that very thing; you are giving it energy, you are supporting it, you are co-operating with it. So why be poor? Why be a beggar? Be a god or a goddess.

It is not that only Jesus Christ is the son of God: everyone is!

Prem means love, and this is just guesswork: Nikki possibly comes from a Greek word ‘nicolette’ which means victory. Your full name will mean victory through love; and that is the only true victory there is. Every other victory is ugly, every other victory is violent, barbarous. Every other victory is only superficial. You can silence people, but you cannot win their hearts by violence; and they will wait for a time when they can take revenge. There is no way to destroy the enemy by violence. It is only the miracle of love that the enemy evaporates, it is only through love that hearts are won.

But it is a very paradoxical process, the process of love: you have to surrender to become victorious. You have to allow yourself to be defeated to become victorious. It is very strange illogic, but of tremendous significance. Once one has learned the logic of love, the grammar of love, one has come to know the greatest key that can unlock an the doors of all the mysteries.

Surrender to win, disappear to be, die to be reborn into a life abundant.

Deva means divine, joyce is old French; it means joy or rejoicing. The full name will mean: a divine rejoicing. Rejoicing is better than joy, because joy means that something has ended, is finished, completed; the full stop has been put there.

Rejoicing is on-going, riverlike; it knows no stopping, the full stop never comes. And life is more like rejoicing than like joy, because the moment joy ends, you will fall into its polar opposite. You will become sad, you will be in despair, you will start longing for joy again. You will start remembering the beauties of joy, the nostalgia, and the despair that it is no more.

Rejoicing – that is closer to life; that’s how life is and should be. One goes on flowing from one peak to another, and the flow is a continuum. It is possible only to make your life a continuous flow if sadness is also absorbed in your joy, otherwise not. If sadness is against joy, then joy will end and sadness will have its say, will have its time. Just as night follows day, joy will be followed by sadness.

Rejoicing is an art. It means that the dance continues. Whether it is day or night doesn’t matter: one enjoys the day and the sun and the light; and when the night comes, one enjoys the darkness, the depth of it, the velvety touch of it. But the dance continues. In success, in failure, young, old, alone, together, in life, in death, rejoicing continues.

So my emphasis is more on rejoicing than on joy. Rejoicing is far more comprehensive: it contains the polar opposites in it, hence it has more totality. And whatsoever is total is divine, whatsoever is partial is no more divine.

Anand means bliss, subudha means awakened – bliss awakened. Bliss is our intrinsic nature, but it is fast asleep. It is in a state of unmanifestation, in a state of latency. It is like a seed which is waiting – waiting for the time, for the right opportunity, for the right soil, for the right climate, to die, to be reborn. The small seed contains so much that it is incalculable. Scientists say a single seed is enough to fill the whole earth with greenery – in fact not only the earth but the whole universe, all the earths and all the planets and all the stars. A single seed is capable of that miracle. It is not as small as it appears.

Appearances are deceiving; beware of appearances.

Sometimes things that look very big are really very small and things which look very small are really infinite. Who would have ever thought about atomic energy ? Who would have ever thought that atoms which cannot be seen with one’s eye would be able to destroy cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

What to say about the seed of consciousness that exists in every being? It has infinite potentiality. God is simply another name for that infinite potentiality, nothing else. God is not somewhere out there, sitting waiting for you to discover it. God is hidden in you; it has to be grown, it has to be awakened, it has to be brought to manifestation. It is your future, it is your destiny.

Once this becomes a conscious effort, things are simple. Once it becomes a dedication – ‘I have to attain to my full potential, I am not to waste my life in trivia; my basic concern, my ultimate concern, will remain my inner growth’ – once this decision possesses you, things become very easy. Life takes a direction, energies start becoming channelised. And in that very channelisation of energies, in that very direction, life starts having a new flavour, a new quality, a new dance, a new meaning, a new poetry.

Sannyas means a conscious decision that nothing else t matters than spiritual growth, that everything has to serve L it, that everything is important only if it serves it, otherwise it is worthless.

And that moment has come, the spring has arrived; now it is up to you to use the opportunity or to miss it.

Deva mean divine. Edda is Anglo-Saxon, it has two meanings: one is happy the other is rich. Both really mean the same thing. To be happy is to be rich; anything else is just pseudo-richness. Unless one is happy, one is poor; one may have all the riches of the world but one is poor. Drowned in riches, one remains poor, became poverty is something inner and no outer riches are able to fulfil that inner vacuum. They can’t reach into your interiority. You can pile riches around yourself: others may think that you are rich, but you will know, surrounded by all your riches you will know even more acutely, that you are poor. In contrast with the riches, the poverty will be even more loud.

Real richness has nothing to do with outer riches. And remember, I am not against outer riches, I am not against anything. Outer riches are perfectly good; as far as they go they are perfectly good. Use them, but remember continuously that life becomes rich really only when there arises an inner well-being, an inner sense of Joy, uncaused by anything from the outside. If it is caused from the outside, it will disappear: once the cause is gone, it will be gone.

We have to seek and search for something inside, which is not dependent on the outside. That brings freedom, independence, and that brings a joy that is yours forever. That is real richness.

Deva means divine, bhaven means feeling. God is available not through thinking but through feeling. The door opens into reality not through the mind but through the heart.

The greatest problem that modern man is facing is that the mind is trained too much and the heart is completely neglected – not only neglected but condemned too. Feelings are not allowed, feelings are repressed.

The man of feelings is thought to be weak; the man of feeling is thought to be childish, immature. The man of feeling is thought to be not contemporary – primitive. There are so many condemnations of feeling and of the heart that naturally one becomes afraid of feelings. One starts learning how to cut off feelings and slowly slowly the heart is simply by-passed; one goes directly to the head. Slowly slowly the heart becomes nothing but an organ that pumps the blood, purifies the blood, and that’s all.

In the history of man, for the first time the heart is reduced into something utterly physiological – it is not. Hidden behind the physiology of the heart is the true heart but that true heart is not part of the physical body, so science cannot discover it. You will have to learn about it from the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors. And finally the secret key is kept by the mystics. But once you know that there is an inner chamber of your being – absolutely uncontaminated by education, society, culture; utterly free from Christianity, Hinduism, Islam; completely unpolluted by all that has been happening to the modern man, still virgin – once you have contacted that source of your being, your life is lived on a different plane.

That plane is divine. To live in the mind is the human plane, to live below the mind is the animal plane. To live beyond the mind, in the heart, is the divine plane. And with the heart we are connected with the whole: that is our connection.

All the meditations that we are devising here are meant for a single purpose: to throw you from your head into the heart, somehow to pull you out of the mire of the head into the freedom of the heart, somehow to make you aware that you are not just the head. The head is a beautiful mechanism; use it, but don’t be used by it. It has to serve your feelings. Once thinking serves feelings, everything is balanced.

A great tranquillity and a great joy arise in your being, and not from anything outside but something from your own inner sources. It wells up, it transforms you, and not only you – it makes you so luminous that whosoever comes in contact with you will have a little taste of something unknown.

[The new sannyasin asks about her seventeen-year-old son who is at school but very closed to everyone.]

It will be the best thing if you can send him here for a few weeks.…

He will simply relax here. It will be the best thing, because if you have been pushing him, then in your presence it will be very difficult for him to relax. Send him alone, Arup will take care. If you bring him with you, it will still be difficult. In fact whenever one member of a family has some problem, the whole family is involved in it. And you cannot change the problem within the context of the family, it is very difficult, because the moment he sees you, he will shrink back.

That’s why many psychotherapists have come to recognise the fact that to treat a single individual you have to treat the whole family; and so family therapies are in vogue. But these are just amateur attempts. If you logically follow it, it means that if you treat the family you have to treat the neighbourhood, and then it becomes more and more unmanageable; if you treat the neighbourhood, then the whole town.

So the logical conclusion is: to change a single individual you have to change the whole universe. That cannot be done. But something else can be done, and that’s my approach: for the time being, the individual can be taken out of the family and given a totally different kind of family. We have created here... a totally different kind of family where it is impossible to remain closed, impossible: he will be dragged out of himself.

He would like to come out; it is just a habit that is preventing him. He has invested in it so much that now he must be frightened to come out of it.Just doing a few groups, meditations, living with new people who are all open, flowing, he will simply get the feel of it, he will catch it. Once he has caught it, once he has lived openly for a few days, then even in the old situation he will not fall back, because he has tasted something so beautiful that there is nothing that can pull him back.

It is like a person who has lived in prison for seventy years and then you take him out: first he will hesitate, he will be afraid, he will be frightened of the strange world. But once he has started moving in the strange world and has seen the stars and the moon and the sun and the trees and the people, and feels the joy, even if he goes back into his gaol he will never be the same person; he cannot forget the stars and the moon and the sun.

So my suggestion is: if you do something, you may make him more closed. It is not for you to do anything. Just send him here for a few weeks; for not less than six to eight weeks let him be here.

After eight weeks you will find him totally different. Then just remember one thing: don’t try the old things on him again. Help his new freedom. It is time that he gets out of it, because this is the time when things become utterly solid.

Eighteen years old is the peak of sexuality. At the fourteenth year is the beginning of the sexual being. After three and a half years, that is at seventeen and a half, nearabout eighteen, sexuality touches its peak. One is never so potential again; then things start declining. So this is the time, before he starts declining sexually. The more sexual energy is there, the more possibility of change, because sexual energy has something in it which helps rebellion. That’s why at the age of thirteen, fourteen, children start rebelling, disobeying. It is part of the sexual energy, it is a biological built-in process, to revolt against the parents, against the family, against the structure - - because sexually they are ready to have their own families. They want to be cut off from the old so that they can create the new.

But if more and more time passes, then it will become more and more difficult to help him to come out of his closedness. But he can come out. Thousands of people come here closed, and sooner or later – and it is more sooner than later – they come out.

Just send him; and when he is back there, you will have another problem, that he is too open.

Prem means love. Sandy is Greek, it comes from Alexander; it means a helper of mankind. The full name will mean: love, the helper of mankind. Only love helps. Love is therapeutic, love is the essential therapy. If you touch somebody with immense love, it is a healing force. Just to feel love for somebody is to nourish him; it is an invisible energy.

People who are not loved start shrinking. People who don’t love start feeling the meaninglessness of life. The people who love and are loved are the fortunate ones. They see the grandeur of life, the significance, the incredible ecstasy of it, and they live a healthy, holy, sacred life.

But everything should arise from love. One should not start serving people because it is virtuous, no; then it is no more virtue. One should not serve people because it is what the scriptures seek; then it will be phony. One should not serve people because that is the way one reaches to heaven; that will be an investment, business. Service should come out of love – for no other reason, for no other motive. Then in love all is found, all is fulfilled.

My teaching can be reduced to a single word: love.

[A sannyasin wishes to have a name for a meditation centre.]

Yes, I will give you a new name. You have to work for me there now.

This will be the new name: Utsava. Utsava means celebration, and that is the keynote. Religions have been teaching people to renounce: I teach people to rejoice. There is a renunciation that comes out of rejoicing, but there is no rejoicing that ever comes out of renunciation. Renunciation brings sadness, dullness. Renunciation is in the service of death; it is life-negative. It is against life, hence it is against god. Those who escape from life are condemning god in their escape; they are rejecting god’s world. And if you reject god’s world, deep down you have rejected god himself. If you

reject his world, how can you be grateful? How can you be grateful for this great gift of existence that has been given to you?

You can only complain; you can have a grudge, but not gratitude. And your prayers will not have joy; your prayers will be dull, dusty. Your intelligence will not be sharp either, because it becomes sharp only when you face all the challenges of life. When you live in the world and yet you are not of it, then intelligence takes wing; it starts flying, soaring high.

My emphasis is live in the world, because it is god’s world. Love the world, because by loving the world you are loving god. And yet remain above it, don’t be lost in it. Celebrate, dance, sing.

So this is my message for your friends. Your group has to become more and more celebrating – and you will be surprised how celebration of its own accord becomes prayer. One need not do any other prayer.

A box for you: and whenever you need me, just put it on your heart and I will be there – don’t be afraid!

Come back again !

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