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‌CHAPTER 2

2 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss; sue is Hebrew, it means white lily. The full name will mean a blissful white lily. The lily is a strange flower, the poorest and the richest at the same time. Hence Jesus’ statement to his disciples: Look at the lilies – even Solomon was not so beautiful, attired in all his grandeur, as these poor flowers are. And the reason for their beauty is that they think not of the morrow; they live in the moment.

To be in the moment is to be beautiful. To miss the moment is to fall into anxiety.

The only anxiety, the only anguish, is not to be herenow. The whole existence, except for the human mind, is herenow. Drop the human mind and you are a white lily, and as beautiful as even Solomon was not, attired in all his grandeur.

Prem means love, and hannah is the original root of hanneke. It is Hebrew; it means grace, mercy, prayer. Your full name will mean: love and grace.

Love brings its own grace.

The moment one is in love, one is surrounded by grace. And that grace is not cultivated at all, it is spontaneous. Because it is spontaneous it is beautiful, and because it is spontaneous it is divine. It is something from above, as if the beyond has penetrated into the world.

To be in love gives you only a glimpse of grace, but to become love is to become grace itself. Start by being in love and end in becoming love.

Prem means love; ingrid comes from Norse mythology, it means the god or goddess of fertility. Your full name will mean: love, the god of creation.

It is love that brings creativity to existence. It is love that tries to beautify it. It is love that is a constant urge to explore, to invent, to discover. Love is creativity, and it is only through creativity that one comes to know the creator.

The best way to come close to god is to participate in some creative act, whatever it is – painting, poetry, dance, music. Whenever you are bringing something new into existence you are close to god, because the new is born only when god is close to you.

But in the past, religion became very uncreative, very inactive, unfertile. It has made the whole world almost a wasteland; it has been anti-life.

We have to change it. We have to create a new concept of religion: a religion that does not renounce but celebrates, a religion that is not against life but for life, a religion that worships life as god.

Prem means love, taro means a star – a star of love. Love is the only light in the dark night of the soul, the only star; otherwise everything is dark inside. Those who don’t know how to love remain afraid of going inwards, because the very idea of going in means going into a dark night of the soul where not even a distant star exists. It is frightening, the inward journey.

So Buddhas go on saying ‘Go in.’ Nobody listens. Socrates goes on saying ‘Know thyself.’ Nobody wants to know, and the fundamental reason is: it is so frightening to go in. Then what has to be done ?

My approach is that before you can go in, you have to go out in love. It is paradoxical, but the inward journey begins with an outward journey .

If you can love, if you can start feeling love-energy, then going in will be a totally different phenomenon. You will have a distant star of love there in the dark night, and that light is enough to take you to the ultimate goal.

So your name is a message to love so that you can meditate. Let love become your meditation. Next time come for a longer period. This is just the beginning of the beginning.

Anand means bliss, alexis is a form of alexander. It has two meanings: one, the helper of mankind; the other, one who drives evil away. Both are beautiful meanings.

Bliss can do both. The blissful person is naturally a helper of mankind, and only a blissful person can be a helper. In fact he never thinks of helping people; he helps just out of his blissfulness. It is not a deliberate effort, it is not a contemplated act; it is as natural as the fragrance of a flower.

And the blissful person naturally drives evil away. It is only in misery that evil can get roots; misery is the right soil for evil. It is impossible for a blissful person to be evil; out of bliss no evil can ever happen. Evil is a negative phenomenon, evil is destructive. And bliss cannot be destructive, bliss cannot be negative. Just as in the light there can be no darkness, so when you are blissful there can be no evil; they cannot co-exist.

So both the meanings are basically connected. The man who cannot do evil is the man who helps; the man who helps is the man who cannot do evil. But both arise out of a blissful state of consciousness.

Deva means divine, punit means purity – divine purity. By purity I mean innocence. Ordinarily purity means something that is against the impure – good against bad, right against wrong, moral against immoral. That is the ordinary meaning of purity, but the true meaning is innocence.

Innocence means one who is unaware of good and bad, unaware of right and wrong; one who is like a child, one who has not yet chosen, one who is in a kind of choiceless awareness – just like a mirror reflecting whatsoever is, with no judgment, no evaluation. That is true purity, that is divine purity.

If we cultivate purity, it is something human. It makes you moral, it can even make you a saint, but it will not bring you close to god, it will never make you a sage.

The saint is constantly struggling with his sinner; he is not innocent. He is in a constant civil war, he is divided. He is living in a nightmare. Each moment is a struggle: he is fighting with his body, he is fighting with his mind, he is fighting and fighting. His life knows no peace, no silence, no harmony. This can make a man very respected, it can be a very ego-fulfilling trip – that’s why so many people have tried it – but it does not bring you close to God; in fact it takes you farther away.

Sometimes sinners are closer than your so-called saints, because they are more innocent.

The true saint has the quality of a child. That is the meaning of the word ‘sage’: one who has gone beyond duality, one who makes no distinctions, one for whom the whole of existence is beautiful. He denies nothing, rejects nothing, condemns nothing. He has no will of his own to impose on anything. He is just a dry leaf in the wind, and wherever the wind blows, he goes with it; he resists not. That is true purity.

Anand means bliss, doris is Greek. In Greek mythology, Doris is the goddess of the seas, of the oceans. So your full name will mean: bliss, the oceanic goddess. Bliss has the quality of the ocean in it.

Man can exist in two ways – either as an ego... then he exists as a small wave and thinks himself separate from the ocean. He lives in an illusion, because that is utterly false – the wave cannot exist without the ocean. The ocean can exist without the wave but not vice versa. The idea of being separate from the ocean is the root cause of all misery. We are not separate, we are one with the ocean.

That is the other way of life, the way of a sannyasin: to live as the ocean, to cease being separate, to drop the idea of any identity, of any ego, of any definition, to just dissolve into the ocean and be one with it. And that’s how we really are. Only the illusion is there; once the illusion disappears, the wave finds itself as the ocean. And that is the beginning of bliss

The more you expand, the more blissful you feel. When you become one with the infinite, your bliss is infinite. The smaller you are, the more suffocated, the more confined, imprisoned, the more

miserable you feel. And the ego tends to become smaller and smaller and smaller. Ultimately it becomes so tiny, so small, so atomic, that to live in it is to live in hell – that’s what hell is all about. And heaven is to have no limits, to have no boundaries, to live unbounded.

Anand means bliss, salila means a river. Life has to have a riverlike quality, flowing and flowing, never getting stuck anywhere, never becoming stagnant– because the moment life becomes stagnant, misery arises. If life remains a flow, a constant flow, bliss surrounds it. Bliss is a byproduct of flow, and misery a by-product of becoming stagnant. People have become reservoirs of water, they are no more rivers – that is their undoing.

Your name has a message for you: remain like a river, always moving into the unknown, never looking back, never clinging to anything, enjoying the moment that you are passing through – the banks and the trees and the sun and the birds and the people – but only for the moment; not getting attached.

That is the greatest secret to learn in life – not to get attached to anything. Then one is always available to new things, to new openings; then the doors are never closed. Life can become such an incredible experience of ecstasy if one only remains in a flow.

So become a river and you will be blissful.

Prem means love, niraj means cloud – a cloud of love. Love is not anything solid. Everybody wants it to be solid, but the moment you make it solid it is no more love. Love can only exist as a mystery – vague, like a cloud. You cannot hold it in your hands, you cannot close your fist on it. The moment you do that, love is lost; and then you go on carrying something else in the name of love.

Love is as fluid, as formless, as a cloud. One moment it is one thing, another moment it is another thing. It is never the same: not even for two consecutive moments is it the same. It is a flux. And that’s the beauty of it: it is alive, hence it is a flux.

Love is without roots, as is a cloud: it floats in the sky, it has no roots anywhere. It is a miracle; it exists without any roots. And also, love means tremendous trust, so it does not plan. It moves like a cloud, wherever the winds take it; it has no programme, no expectations. Love cannot be frustrated. If it is frustrated, then something else was there hiding behind the love. Love is always surprised but never frustrated.

So learn the ways of love – and the cloud is one of the most symbolic expressions of it.

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