20

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 20

20 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, Odin means god of poetry – god of love and poetry. Good, Odin. Keep it with you.

Anand means bliss, viresha means courageous. Bliss is only for those who are courageous. It needs tremendous courage to drop misery because we have invested in misery for so long. Our ego subsists on misery, our whole life is rooted and based in misery, so to drop it means to die as you have known yourself To drop it means to destroy the identity that you have always thought you are. Hence courage is needed. It is dying to the old, only then can the new be born.

Bliss is possible; that is not a problem at all. The only problem is how to gather courage to drop misery – and that’s what I teach here. Bliss cannot be taught, but how to drop misery can be taught. And once misery is not there, bliss is.

Veet means beyond; cecilia is Latin, it means blind. Your full name will mean: going beyond blindness. To live in the mind is to be blind. To think of oneself as the body is to be blind. To live only in an extrovert way is to be blind. Turn in, and for the first time one starts feeling that one has eyes; only by seeing the within do the eyes open up.

Watch your mind, observe its ways, become detached, see that you are not it, you are the witness of it, and you attain to eyes. In the same way, slowly slowly, go on watching your body: one day it was small, the body of a child; some other day it became young, some other day it will become old. It is constantly changing, but something in you remains eternally the same: the consciousness. I am the child, the child will not be there forever; I am young, the youth will not be there forever – but that quality of I-am-ness persists. It persists even when one dies; it has no birth, no death. To know that eternal quality of one’s consciousness is to have eyes, is to become a seer.

Prem means love; edgar is Anglo-Saxon, it has four meanings. One is fortunate spear, the second is lucky spear, the third is a warrior. All these three meanings are German, and I don’t choose any of them. The fourth meaning is rich; that is non-German. I choose the fourth meaning. Your full name will mean: the richness of love.

In reality, only the lover is rich, nobody else. Only the lover can be rich, and nobody else; all other riches are substitutes for love. Because people cannot love, are afraid of love, are not courageous enough to love, are not intelligent enough to go on that adventure, they start loving stupid things somebody loves a house. somebody loves money, somebody loves power politics. These are escapes, escapes from real love; these are pseudo substitutes for love. But the mind is a coward, and it always finds something cheap, something in which there is no risk involved.

The heart has the courage to go into the unknown. The heart loves – and the more the heart loves, the more rich you become. The inner poverty simply disappears, the inner darkness is found no more. The hollowness that people feel, the emptiness that people feel, is suddenly gone; one is full, overfull, overflowing.

Love makes a man an emperor; without love, everybody is a beggar. So love more, love unconditionally, love each and all. Let love become your very life style, let love be your sannyas!

Deva means divine. Wilfred is Teutonic; it means one who is determined to attain peace, one who has resolved to attain peace, a resolution for peace. The full name will mean: a divine resolution for peace.

That’s what sannyas is all about: a resolution to change one’s life – not just to modify it, but to change it, root and all; not just to reform it, to whitewash it here and there, to renovate it, no, but to demolish it totally and to create a new life: a life of love, silence, God.

Man ordinarily lives in a madhouse, and unless one makes a total decision to come out of it, it is almost impossible to come out. The totality of resolution creates integrity, makes you one- pointed, turns your consciousness into an arrow. And that arrow is capable of coming out of the imprisonment.

Prem means love, sandra is Greek, it is part of Alexandra; the meaning is: helper of mankind. Only love can be of any help, and without love, all help becomes harmful. The world is suffering very much from so-called good people, the do-gooders. They are the most mischievous people in the world; and because they do good, nobody can prevent them. But their basic motive is egoistic. Their basic motive is to gain more and more power, to oblige people; that is the simplest way to become powerful over them. The moment you help somebody you are becoming higher, holier, saintly, generous, and all that crap! You are reducing the other to a dependent; in fact you are enjoying his humiliation.

Without love all kinds of service, help, are dangerous. Love has to be the fundamental thing; only then, whatsoever you do will be good. But always watch whether love is there or not. Good is a fragrance of love. Without love, the good is only pseudo, pretension. Humanity has suffered from pretenders for so long that it is time to get rid of all of them.

Deva means divine; adelina is Teutonic, it means serpent – divine serpent. In the East the serpent is the symbol of the energy that is unmanifest in you. It is as if a serpent that is sitting coiled up inside,

needs uncoiling. Hence kundalini is called the serpent power. It is accumulated exactly at the sex centre, hence the serpent also became a symbol of sexuality. If it goes lower, it becomes sex; if the serpent starts moving upwards, it becomes samadhi – it is the same energy.

The whole thing depends on how we use it. If it remains under the influence of gravitation and is pulled downwards, and if we don’t know how to take it upwards, then life is wasted. Life simply remains in the hands of some unconscious biological force. Then we are victims of nature; we play a role that nature gives to us and then we disappear. This has been going on and on for many lives.

But the serpent can rise upwards. And that is the miracle of meditation: it releases the serpent from the confinement of gravitation, it makes available to it a space to move upwards. And the higher it moves, the more and more peace and tranquillity and silence and bliss start happening. When it reaches to the highest peak, the seventh chakra, then one blooms, then the ultimate manifests, flowers. Call it God, nirvana, enlightenment, or whatsoever you wish, but the whole game is with the serpent energy.

To turn it upwards is not really difficult; we just have not tried, that’s all. It can move as easily upwards as it can downwards. One thing is certain about it, that it has to move. If you don’t allow it to move upwards, if you don’t create the context for it to move upwards, it will move downwards. It is movement, hence it is called the serpent.

And because it needs no legs to move, that’s also one of the reasons why it is called the serpent. The serpent can move on a wall, it can move upwards on a tree, with no legs. It is a miracle to see it moving on a tree!

Zen people say that to talk about enlightenment is like putting legs on a serpent – the talk is not needed at all. In fact if you put legs on the serpent, you will make it very very difficult to move. It does not need legs, it moves as pure energy. In the East the serpent power has been respected for centuries; in the West too the serpent has been always thought of as a symbol of wisdom.

The Old Testament says ‘Be ye as wise as the serpents.’

Anand Petros. That is the original of Peter, the Greek original, petros. Anand means bliss, petros means a rock. The rock symbolises the eternal; it symbolises the non-temporal, the unchanging, the abiding. If we watch existence deeply, it is bound to be noticed that there are two things happening everywhere: the periphery goes on continuously changing – it is a flux; but at the deepest core of it all there is a centre, the centre of the cyclone, which remains eternally the same. That is petros, and to find it is to find God. To find it is to find something eternal which can become the base of the temple of your life. Otherwise people are making their lives on sand: by the time they have made them, everything will start disappearing.

To be too concerned with the fluxlike life is a wastage. You are playing with foam. It looks beautiful, sometimes so silvery in the moonlight, but when you catch hold of it... you don’t have anything in your hands – just plain ordinary salt water. So is life on the periphery. Each periphery has a centre, but to know the centre of other peripheries, the first requirement is to know the centre of your own circumference. The body is your outer circumference; then there is the mind – a little inner; then there is the heart – a little more inner; and then there is the being – a little more inner. Then there is the non-being, the ultimate centre: petros. To find it is to find bliss, is to find benediction.

Veet means beyond; ronald is Teutonic, it means mighty power. The mind is in search of great power. If the mind is looking for more money, it is not really for more money but for more power – because money brings power. If the mind is searching to become famous, that again is a power trip. The mind suffers from a great inferiority complex, hence it wants to overcompensate. But this is understood, that in the world people hanker for money, for power, for prestige, respectability, because these searches are very gross.

When a person starts turning spiritual, the search remains almost the same; it only becomes more subtle. Again it is the same game played on another plane. Now spiritual power, psychic power – powers that are brought by telepathy, clairvoyance, the power to levitate, the power to disappear, the power to read others’ thoughts, and so on and so forth – psychic powers or ultimately spiritual powers... to be in heaven with all the joys and all the pleasures available there, to be special even in heaven. But it is the same trip. So the worldly and the other-worldly are not different, they are the same people. Maybe they are standing back to back, but nothing has changed.

My vision of sannyas is to drop this whole power trip. Seeing its futility, seeing that it is a kind of pathology, seeing that it arises out of an inferiority complex, it starts disappearing of its own accord. And then what is left? A very ordinary human being. That ordinary human being, that nobody, is a Buddha.

To be a nobody, to be as if you are not, to be as if you are of no account, to be in a state of fana – that’s the word Sufis use – alive and yet dead, to have no special claim, just to live the ordinary life, silently, consciously, moment-to-moment, you create the space in which god is possible. In that very ordinary space, god becomes possible. In that very ordinary state, extraordinary things start happening.

So, to me, to be ordinary is to be the most extraordinary phenomenon. To ask, to desire, to be extraordinary, is very ordinary, because everybody else is doing it.

That is the meaning of your name: go beyond all power and the desire for power, howsoever disguised it is, howsoever camouflaged in spiritual words, go beyond all power trips. Then suddenly, chopping wood, carrying water from the well, is more than one can ask for. Then each moment is a miracle, a surprise.

[Osho explains the name for a meditation centre.]

Satgyan means right-wisdom. One can gather wisdom from others, then it is wrong. When it wells up within your own being, then it is right. Truth borrowed becomes a lie. You cannot depend on others’ truth; only the truth that has happened to you can liberate you. Jesus says: Truth liberates. It is certainly true, but Jesus’ truth liberates only Jesus, nobody else. In fact others who think that they will be liberated by Jesus’ truth, become imprisoned in a lie.

So in the name of religion there are many prisons on the earth. And when a person becomes very tired of one prison, he changes the prison; he goes to another prison, hoping that the other will not be a prison but will be a freedom. But these hopes are always just hopes; they are never fulfilled.

Make our centre a place where information is not to be imparted, but where people are helped to go inwards. Don’t make them knowledgeable: make them wise.

Good. Keep it (a box) with you, and whenever you need me just put it on your heart. Start the centre – and many many people are going to come. You start the centre and I send the people!

< Previous | Contents | Next >