17

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 17

17 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss; giglio is from Latin, it means a lily flower. A blissful flower – that’s what man has to become. All the potential is there; it only has to be challenged, it only has to be remembered. It is a forgotten treasure. We have not lost it, it is still with us. It cannot be separated from us, because we are it. But just as the seed is asleep and knows nothing of the flower, so are we – seeds, utterly unaware of the possibility.

Unless a seed becomes a flower, it remains frustrated. The frustration is not very clear, it cannot be clear; it is not about something in particular, it is simply a general climate of frustration. Only when the seed has become the flower will it be able to know what the reason of frustration was.

Become a flower! And only when one is a flower can one be offered to god.

Peter is from Greek, it means a rock. Premanando is Sanskrit, it means love and bliss. Become a rock for the temple of love and bliss. These are the only two things worth achieving, worth desiring, worth dreaming about; all else is just futile. And these two things are not really two, but two aspects of one experience, two facets of one phenomenon.

When meditation ripens, matures, one aspect is felt as bliss; that is the inner aspect of it. One feels full of bliss – too full, infinitely full. inexhaustibly full. For the first time, fullness is tasted, what it is. And then one knows ‘Up to now I have just been empty.’

The second aspect is felt because the fullness is too much; it has to be shared. To contain it becomes a pain, a very blissful pain; only very few are blessed with that pain. But it is too much and nobody can contain it; it has to overflow.

The moment your bliss starts overflowing, it becomes love. When it reaches to other people, it is understood as love. Bliss overflowing is love. Bliss is the inner aspect, love is the outer aspect of

the same experience – the maturing of meditation, coming to the point where no thought exists and only consciousness is.

Anand means bliss; lazarus is Hebrew, it means grace. Bliss is through the grace of god; it is not man’s effort. We cannot cause it to happen, it can’t be manufactured; there is no way to achieve it. The achievers go on missing it – just for the simple reason that they are trying to achieve it, they miss it.

Grace is not something that one can do, it is something that one can only allow. We have to be on the receiving end, utterly feminine, passive, womblike, ready to absorb. Man has to become just a welcome for the infinite to visit; and not only to visit, but to become a permanent guest in his being.

And the name Lazarus is also beautiful because of the story in the New Testament. Lazarus seems to be one of the most intimately related persons to Jesus, far more intimate than the official apostles. His trust must have been tremendous, because it is very difficult to hear and understand a man like Jesus even while you are alive, and he heard him when he was dead. When he had already been dead for three days he heard him – the moment Jesus came to the cave where his body was kept, and shouted ‘Lazarus, come out! What are you doing there?’ Nobody was ready to believe that anything was going to happen, the whole thing was so ridiculous. Everybody was waiting: ‘This will be enough, this will be the end of this madman Jesus.’ But Lazarus stood up, came out of the cave.

If love is total, then even death is not a barrier. Even in death, the voice of the master will reach . If one is just hearing with one’s ears and not listening with one’s heart then, even while alive, one goes on missing.

Lazarus coming out of death is also symbolic of each disciple who has really to go into the search, who has to die and come back again, who has to disappear as the old and to come as the new. There has to be a gap between the old and the new. That is the meaning of those three days: it is just symbolic, symbolic of three states of the mind – waking, dreaming, sleeping. Beyond these three is the fourth, which is not a state of the mind, which is the state of no-mind. Those three days simply represent three states. Lazarus had disappeared into the fourth. Only Jesus could have called him back, because in the fourth state the mind has simply disappeared. You can hear only that which comes from no-mind. Only a no-mind can communicate with another no-mind.

The story of Lazarus has been missed by the Christians.

It is not just a miracle – then you make a very small thing out of something very significant. The whole emphasis of Christianity has been that Jesus did a great miracle, that he raised the dead. In fact the miracle is done not by Jesus but by Lazarus – that he heard his master even while he was dead, that he heard his master even when he had regressed beyond the mind, beyond recall. Even when no language communication was possible, something reached him, something non-verbal. Jesus’ presence provoked him back to life.

And that is the function of the master. The disciple is dead, every disciple is dead, and the master has to call him forth: Lazarus, come out! What are you doing there?

And once you can come out from your death, which is called life in the world, then for the first time you are really alive.

[The new sannyasin says he has felt alienated and separate off and on for his whole life.]

Just wait, this will disappear; nothing to worry about. Just go through a few groups. It will disappear, because it is a very artificial, created thing.

To feel alienated means that you have created it; it is not the natural state. In the natural state we are one with existence; there is no question of alienation or separation. Just meditate, go through a few groups and go on reminding me; soon it will disappear. Good.

Prem means love. Miriam is Hebrew, it has two meanings: one is bitterness another is rebellion. Both are significant in relationship to love.

Love is sweet, but it contains much bitterness too; it is not just pure sweetness. And the bitterness enhances its sweetness, it functions as a contrast. It is not opposite to sweetness but complementary. A love that has no bitterness in it will miss something. It will not have tone, it will not have salt, it will not have sharpness; it will be a little too syrupy. There is an intrinsic necessity for some bitterness in love; that gives it flavour, makes it richer.

Once we look at things in that way, then the whole of life has a different meaning. Then death is not against life, but complementary to it. Death defines life; without death, life will be very vague, cloudy, it won’t have any definition. So is the case with every opposite: whatsoever appears opposite on the surface, is not really so in the depth; in the depth they are together, enhancing each other.

The second meaning is rebellion. Love is rebellion too. In fact only love is rebellion, because love can risk all, because love is never orthodox – it cannot be. It cannot be conventional, it cannot be conformist. Love is the beginning of individuality, of the assertion that ‘I have to live my life in my own way, whatever the cost and whatsoever the consequence.’ Love is a rebellion against the mob psychology, the crowd and its demands.

The crowd consists of the lowest. But it is very powerful it is the majority, hence millions of people simply surrender to it. They start following the ways of the crowd, and the crowd gives them respect, prestige, power. They will be known as saints, the crowd will worship them.

Just see: the pope is worshipped and Jesus is crucified. This seems so illogical. The pope must be something else: the pope must be against Jesus. If he was also part of the being of Jesus, he would be crucified: but he is worshipped and Jesus is crucified. They are opposites. Jesus is rebellion, pure rebellion, love, and the pope is just a conformist. The pope is a Christian, Jesus is not a Christian. The pope belongs to a church,Jesus belongs to no church.Jesus is alone – and to be alone is possible only when you are in tremendous love with existence. When god is with you, only then can you be alone.

Love is the way of rebellion. Hence all the societies of the world are against love, they all destroy love. They create false substitutes for love – marriage, this and that – but they don’t allow love to function in its total naturalness. They make so many conditions on it that they kill it. Once love is killed, rebellion is killed.

My effort here with my sannyasins is to rekindle your love so that again there is that fire of rebellion.

Veet means beyond. Christine is Greek, it means Christian. To be really religious, one has to go beyond being Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; one has to go beyond all structures, creeds, dogmas. A Christian can never know Christ, a Buddhist can have no communion with the Buddha; the very ideology of Christianity prevents it, and the very expectation of the Buddhist becomes a barrier.

We have to go into reality by dropping all expectations, all ideologies. Ideologies are like garments, and truth has to be faced in utter nudity. We cannot go to truth hiding behind theology, philosophy, so many words, systems of thought. We have to encounter truth without any prejudice – and Christianity is a prejudice, Hinduism is a prejudice, any ‘ism’ is a prejudice. It means we have already decided what truth is. Without knowing, we have decided; this is arrogance. Without knowing, we have decided; that means we have fallen victim to mass hypnosis. Without knowing we have decided; it means we are not really enquiring after truth, hence we have settled for cheap beliefs. All beliefs are cheap. We can get beliefs just by being born in a particular home.

If you had been born in a Hindu home, you would have been a Hindu; if you had been brought up by a Mohammedan you would have been a Mohammedan. This is just conditioning by the parents and the society. The real seeker of truth has to renounce all conditioning; he has to come to a moment of unconditioning, of utter silence, purity. In that silence, truth descends.

So your name has a message for you: go beyond Christianity. And by Christianity I mean go beyond Hinduism, Buddhism, go beyond all isms. Don’t trust in ideologies. Trust only in truth, not what is said about truth. Experience it, don’t believe in it.

Veet means beyond. Richard is Teutonic, it has three meanings – all wrong! One means rule, domination, another means hard, and the third means a great ruler. You have to go beyond all these things.

There is no need to rule anybody. The very idea of ruling somebody is immoral; to dominate somebody is inhuman, to possess somebody is murderous. But that’s how man has lived up to now. This has been the philosophy we have been brought up with; from our very childhood we have been spoon-fed on ugly ideas.

Down the ages it has been thought that one has to be hard, strong. Hardness has always been thought to be strong – it is not. Real strength is in flexibility, not in being hard. Real strength is in liquidity, not in being rocklike. Real strength is in the way water flows, not in the way rocks prevent it.

Become more and more liquid. Follow the watercourse way, don’t be a hard rock, and you will have infinite possibilities opened for you. If one is hard, one remains closed. That is the only way to be hard – not even a window should be left open, everything should be completely closed. One should live a windowless existence, then only can one be hard. But that means that you are living in a grave. You are no more in communion with life and its joys; you don’t allow the sun and the wind and the rain to reach you.

The third meaning – the great ruler – is even more ugly. The idea of becoming great is a projection of an inferiority complex. Anybody who wants to be great suffers from an inferiority complex; deep down he feels that he is nobody. He has to prove that he is somebody. But even if he becomes Alexander the Great it makes no difference: deep down, the same emptiness, the same hollowness, and the whole of life is wasted. Nothing ever is achieved that way.

No achievement ever proves to be an achievement. The real work is inwards – and the inward work has nothing to do with achievement: it is a spontaneous, natural blossoming of the soul. It is not an achievement, it is not a goal to be striven towards. It is something that is there if we relax. If we open up, if we are no more madly obsessed with ruling people, possessing people, dominating people, then suddenly the lotus in the heart starts opening its petals.

So, go beyond hardness, go beyond the idea of ruling, go beyond the idea of becoming great, and then the miracle: one becomes great. One simply becomes great, because one is great, everyone is great. And when there is no idea to rule anybody, one becomes a ruler. One’s very presence becomes a discipline for others, one’s very presence creates obedience in others – not that one wants others to obey one, but wherever one is, a great desire arises in people to obey.

Lao Tzu says that the real ruler is one who has no idea that he is a ruler. The real ruler is one whose presence itself creates obedience. We have known such rulers – a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu: these are the real ones, the salt of the earth. Not Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible, not Tamerlane, Nadir Shah – these are not the real people. They are the most degraded human beings; they are inhuman, they don’t know what humanity means.

They have not even looked up into the sky full of stars. They are crawling in the mud, the dirty mud of the earth.

Jutta can have either of two meanings.… One is old German, it means war. So many German names mean war that I am surprised! So forget about it – the German meaning is not right.

But there is a Latin meaning, it means just. That is beautiful. So your name will mean: just love. Love can also be unjust: whenever it is possessive, jealous, it is unjust. It is no more love; it becomes war, it turns poisonous.

Love to be just, love to be true, love to be really love, needs to be completely free from jealousy, possessiveness. Then it is the energy that makes you aware for the first time that you are not the body but the soul, that you are not born and you will never die, that you are eternal, that your real home is god. Love is the only key in our hands which opens the doors of god. But first we have to purify love. It is very much polluted, contaminated, by ugly things which pretend they are love.

Be watchful. If you can purify your love of jealousy and possessiveness, then nothing else is needed. That love will become the bridge between you and the divine. That love will be transformed of its own accord into prayer.

Prem means love, parijat is a beautiful flower. The full name will mean: a beautiful flower of love.

Man can flower only in the climate of love. Love is the basic nourishment for the soul. Just as the body cannot live without food and the mind cannot exist without oxygen, the soul cannot exist without love. There are millions of people on the earth, but very few have souls. What I mean is: their souls are still potential; they have not become actual yet, because they have not provided the right food for the soul to grow.

Hence the hankering for love. Everybody hankers for it, desires it, everybody wants to be loved – but the problem is that everybody only wants to be loved and nobody wants to love. And love comes

only to those who love. The beginning has to be from your side: you have to take the initiative, you have to start pouring love into people, into existence, and then the whole existence returns your love in many many ways, in a thousand and one ways. The existence is an echo point, whatsoever you give is echoed back: sing a song and millions of songs will shower on you.

Learn the secret of loving, so that you can have as much love as is needed for the soul to grow.

Anand means bliss; robin is Teutonic, it means bright. Bliss is always bright, misery is dull. Bliss is always intelligent, misery is stupid. Bliss is always shining, radiant. Misery is dark, with no light in it – a long, long, dark night, with not even a single star; it is like moving in a dark tunnel. But people have decided to remain miserable because to be intelligent needs work. To be stupid, nothing is needed. To be in light needs search: to be in darkness no search is required.

And people are afraid of light – afraid because they may see things in themselves which they don’t want to see, they may see things in others which they don’t want to see. It may shatter their whole world. They have lived in darkness, in illusions, in dreams; and they have somehow managed, consoled themselves, and created beautiful ideologies that support their darkness and console them in their darkness. They are afraid of the light; if they come into the light, all that will be gone. Hence they are very much against people who make all efforts to bring them to the light: they crucify Jesus, they poison Socrates, they murder Mansoor. But to live in darkness is not to live at all; it is to miss life.

The only way to live is to live in utter intelligence, in the full light of intelligence, because only then are you sharpened, sharpened every day. Your soul becomes a sword. Your life starts having significance, meaning. You are not just accidental then; you are part of a significant universe – and an essential part, a significant part. It is not only that you need god, god also needs you. The day it is realised that god also needs you, a great explosion happens in consciousness: you are accepted, welcomed in existence, this is your home!

Deva means divine; charles is Teutonic, it means man – divine man.

Man has a dual existence, because in man the earth and the sky meet, in man the mind and no-mind meet. On the outer, man is just material; in the inner, he is spiritual. That’s why Jesus says many times “I am the son of man” and many times “I am the son of god.” For Christian theologians, that has remained an insoluble problem. Why does he repeat such a contradiction? Either he is son of man or son of god. But he is really pointing at the mystery of man himself. Man is both: a part of him belongs to the earth, and a part to the beyond. And that’s the beauty of man! That is his agony, but that is also his ecstasy too. He is not simple, he is complex; he is torn apart between two polarities.

Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that man is like a rope stretched between two infinities, a tightrope walker – just a single step and he will be gone forever.

The pull of the past is great, because it is the pull of the known, of the familiar. But the pull of the unknown is not less great, because it is the pull of the unknown, of adventure. And it is always a wavering, a trembling: where to go, what to choose, what to be? To be or not to be? Those who choose to go backwards miss the whole grandeur of manhood. The grandeur grows deeper and deeper as you forge ahead.

That’s what sannyas is all about: risking the known for the unknown, the familiar for the unfamiliar, risking that which you have for that which you don’t have – not only do you not have it, but it may not exist at all. Who knows? There is no guarantee.

But blessed are those who can take such a risk, who can gamble such a gamble. Their life becomes the life of insecurity – but anything that ever grows, only grows in insecurity. Anything that ever integrates, crystallises, crystallises only when impossible challenges are accepted – not only accepted, but welcomed.

< Previous | Contents | Next >