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‌CHAPTER 21

21 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love; almiro is Arabic, it means exalted. Love is the most exalted state of being. It is just next to God: one step more and God is reached. Love is the last thing; beyond that is the infinite, the eternal. Love is our boundary; if we remain on this side, we remain in the world. If we cross the boundary of love, we enter into another kind of existence, a totally different dimension. This side is ego, that side, no-ego; and love is the fence between the two. Love has to be transcended, but all transcendence is through living One cannot repress it, one cannot by-pass it; it can be surpassed only by deeply living it.

Love is the way beyond love.

Deva means divine. Maria is Hebrew, a form of Mary, but the meaning of it is tremendously significant: it means rebellion. And a man like Jesus can be born only out of rebellion. Only rebellion can give birth to Buddhahood. And rebellion is always virgin because it remains unpolluted by the past. Rebellion is always pure because it is not a reaction. Rebellion is not reacting against something; it is simply a declaration to live one’s life according to one’s own light. And that was the sin of Jesus for which he was punished. The society does not allow rebellious people to exist; the society needs slaves, obedient people, conformists.

It is very unfortunate that we have not yet been able to create a society where rebellion is respected. The day rebel lion is respected, taught, we will have a totally new humanity – a humanity which will be divine, a humanity which will be very close to god.

Anand means bliss, josep is a form of Joseph. In Hebrew joseph means: god increases, god goes on giving, god is a giver. Your full name will mean: god is the giver of bliss. All that is needed on our part is to receive it, to welcome it – but we don’t even do that; we keep our eyes closed. We are very miserly about receiving.

You have heard about the misers who are miserly in giving, but the real misers are those who are misers in taking. In fact, because you cannot take, you cannot give. The ordinary worldly miserliness arises out of the first miserliness. The moment you are ready to receive god’s gifts, you have so much you cannot contain it within yourself. It will start overflowing from you, it will start reaching people.

So open up, become more and more receptive. Become a womb and you have become a sannyasin.

Prem means love; jane is Hebrew, it means god’s gracious gift. The full name will mean: love, god’s gracious gift. Love is a happening; you cannot do it. If you do it, it will be only acting. You cannot manufacture it. If you manufacture it, as millions of people are doing, you will have only a plastic kind of love; it will not be a real flower. It will not have roots in your being. It will not give you any fragrance, any fulfilment; and when it will not give any fulfilment to you, it will not give any fulfilment to anybody else either. Hence the absurd situation: everybody is loving everybody else, and yet there is no love. The world stinks of hate; it doesn’t show any sign of love. It shows all kinds of destruction but no creative fragrance of love, and the reason is that we have been told, we have been hypnotised, that we can do love. It is not a doing: it is always a gift.

We can bow down in prayer, and love comes from the beyond. We can only be on the receiving end. It is something which has never been done and will never be done; and unless one trusts in existence, one remains without love.

Trust, surrender to existence, feel in tune with the world, and slowly slowly you will see a new quality arising in you that you had never known before: a love growing. And as love grows, fulfilment arises; as love grows, one starts feeling contented. And when the spring comes, when the time is ripe and love blooms, one has arrived home.

Prem means love, ananda means bliss. Premananda means bliss that arises out of love. In fact that is the only kind of bliss there is; all other kinds are bogus – painted smiles, pseudo faces, acting masks. The true bliss arises only out of a loving heart; and we have forgotten the ways of the heart. We are hung up in the head, and the head knows nothing of love. It knows the word ‘love’, but the word ‘love’ is not love.

And the head cannot experience love. It cannot experience anything; as far as experience is concerned the head is utterly impotent. It can talk about it, it can philosophise about it, it can speculate about it, but all remains wordy, verbal. If one looks deep down into it, there is no substance in it.

Sannyas means a shift from the head to the heart, which is om original home. Each child is born with the heart; the head is a social imposition. We drag the child from the heart towards the head, because the head pays. In the marketplace it is needed; and the more you have of it, the more success you will have. The man of the heart is going to remain a failure in the world; people will think of him as a fool. They even thought of Jesus as a fool, of Francis as a fool.

So the society starts pulling the child out of the heart towards the head. It is such a manipulation, and the child is so helpless that he cannot protect himself; he has no ways to protect himself. He is a dependent person; he cannot survive without the parents, so whatsoever they say, he has to follow. Reluctantly, in spite of himself, slowly slowly, he forgets the language of the heart and learns

the arithmetic, the calculation, the logic, of the head. And then he lives his whole life in that desert land of the head. The heart is an oasis.

Sannyas is the beginning of another childhood; it is a rebirth. It is bringing you back home. And once it starts happening it is so easy, because it is natural, spontaneous. It is intrinsic to our being to be in the heart. To be in the head is a tension, a constant anxiety, because it is against nature. It is going upstream; it is a struggle and a dissipation of energy. When you go towards the heart you start t moving with the river, you no more push the river. Then life becomes a tremendously beautiful experience, a relaxation, a let-go.

Prem means love. Maureen is Latin; it has two meanings, and both meanings are tremendously significant: one is dark, and the other is great. Love has both the qualities. It is certainly the greatest experience, incomparable, unique; and it is also a very dark experience, dark in the sense that it has depth. Light is shallow, darkness has depth. Light is public, darkness has privacy. Light is known, darkness remains not only unknown but unknowable. Light is explainable, darkness very elusive, mysterious.

Love is a great darkness, a great mystery, a great indefinable experience; something unfathomable and something utterly private, intimate; something so close to the heart that it cannot be talked about – inexplicable, indefinable.

Very few people are aware of the beauties of darkness, very few, because of an unnecessary association with darkness – the association of fear. And because of that association, darkness has become a symbol of all that is fearsome: death is dark, sin is dark, the devil is dark and hell is full of darkness. These are just projections, they have nothing to do with darkness; and these projections are made by people who have no experience of darkness. Otherwise darkness is really relaxing, very calm, it has a music of its own. It has a special touch, it is very velvety... and the infinity of it. Light is always finite, it comes and goes. Light always needs a cause for it to exist; once the cause is exhausted, light disappears. But darkness always is, uncaused; it needs no fuel.

All the religions of the world say ‘God is light’: it is just to help people not to be afraid of god. But the truth is that god is more like darkness than like light – the eternity of darkness and the unfathomable mystery of it.

Science has been able to understand what light is, but about darkness everything Still remains in the dark. Science has been able to measure light. If you collect the rays that fall on five square miles, they have a certain weight, one tenth of a kilo. Light is measured, its mystery is known, it can be used, you can put it on and off. Light has been reduced to a slave.

Darkness still remains beyond our grasp It is better not to think of god as darkness than as light.

Prem means love, hanny means grace, mercy, prayer. All the three meanings are beautiful, and all the three meanings arise out of love. The loving person cannot be anything but graceful; it is natural. The unloving person cannot be but ungraceful. The very idea of love deep down in your heart makes you luminous; a certain grace starts surrounding you – a beauty that is not of this world, a fragrance that comes from the beyond. It is something from god, and is available only to those who allow love to happen in their hearts.

The person who is loving, graceful, is bound to have compassion, mercy. And there is a great difference between sympathy and mercy. Sympathy is only in specific situations: somebody is miserable and you are sympathetic. Mercy is simply the way you live. It is not a question of specific situations – that you are compassionate to the beggar because he is hungry, and merciful to the blind because he is blind. These things are good, but mercy is something more: it is simply your very life style; whether somebody needs it or not is irrelevant. It is not a response to somebody’s need, but an overflowing of your own heart. It is not a reaction created by the outside, but a sharing of your joy – because you have so much, you would like to share it.

And the third is the ultimate expression of love: prayer. When one loves one person it feels so good, but it brings misery too. You love one against so many, hence the misery of love. If you start loving more and more people, less and less misery arises out of love; and the day your love becomes universal, it becomes prayer. Then there is no misery. then love is sheer joy. Then love is rejoicing, a celebration. And when somebody is able to celebrate love on that plane of universality, god is happy; one has entered into the garden of Eden again.

[Prem Satlok – true land of love.]

We don’t live in one world; there are as many worlds as there are minds, and each mind creates its own world. We live in the world we create. There are people who are living in hell – they may be your neighbours, they may be sitting just by your side. There are people who are living in heaven – they may again be your neighbours, or sitting by your side. The world is not something outside us: it is our inner creation.

Truth happens only whenever a heart is overflowing with love. When the heart knows nothing except love, when the heart is madly in love, in that madness the greatest of sanity becomes possible. Love opens the eyes for the truth.

Love more, love intensely, and love without asking anything in return. Let that be your meditation, and you will be surprised: as love grows, life becomes truer, authentic, sincere. And with sincerity, authenticity, truth, bliss starts showering from all directions. It rains – it rains cats and dogs! It comes like a flood. It is so much that it is uncontainable; it simply takes you off the ground. A totally different dimension of life opens up. That’s what religion is all about, and t at s what the search of sannyas is.

[A sannyasin asks about creativity. She likes writing and music. She feels inspiration but when she starts, suddenly she is empty.]

My feeling is that you have a great desire to be famous, and that creativity is only a means towards it. That is causing the trouble.

Forget about becoming famous, then there is no problem. Then when you feel like playing music, play; when you feel like writing, write. If you don’t feel like writing, don’t write – even if in the middle of the sentence the inspiration disappears. So what? Stop, then and there.

The problem arises because you would like to make it a beautiful piece to be appreciated, you would like to become a great musician or an author. Somewhere deep down there is ambition – and ambition is very very dangerous for creativity. If one can be creative without having any ambition,

then creativity flows so easily, so spontaneously. But still I am not saying that by dropping ambition you will become a great musician. I am not saying that, otherwise one can drop even ambition, hoping that by dropping ambition one will become a great musician – but that is the same thing from the back door.

Creativity somehow became entangled with fame. That’s why so very few people in the world are creative; they all want to do great things. Every painter wants to become a Picasso – and when he cannot, the inspiration disappears. Every poet would like to become a Byron or a Shelley – and when he thinks ‘These lines that I am writing are just worthless, these are not going to make me a Byron’ the inspiration disappears.

If you are not after fame, then the question does not arise. You are not writing these lines for somebody else; you are writing for the sheer joy of writing. There is no end, no goal-orientation; the writing in itself is its own end. And if you are playing on the guitar, you are playing because you are enjoying it. The moment there is no enjoyment, stop. Why go on prolonging it? What is the point? But the ambitious person cannot stop there. The ambitious person has to go on polishing, he has to go on practising; if he wants to become famous it is an arduous path.

So my feeling is that you call it the desire for creativity, but deep down search: somewhere unconscious, coiled up, is a desire to become famous, to be somebody special. Then there will be trouble. All cannot become great poets, an cannot become great musicians – and it is good that all cannot, otherwise the world would be such a mad place. It is already! If everybody is a musician, just think: everybody practising eight hours, ten hours! People will simply go mad, they will start committing suicide.

Disconnect the idea of the ego from creativity, and then there is no problem. Then whatsoever you feel... then even cleaning the floor is creative, cooking food is creative, watering the garden is creative. Then sometimes just sitting silently doing nothing is creative.

Creativity has nothing to do with anything in particular. It is a graceful state, a joyful state, and in that joyful state whatsoever you do is good. And the end is in itself; it is not a means to anything else.

Just observe it: if you can drop the ego, there is no problem. If you cannot drop the ego, then the problem will persist, then it is better that you drop your creativity, otherwise you will be in trouble, in great tension.

[An older sannyasin was worried about feeling emotional and going mad. Once she accepted it, she felt okay, but is still frightened.]

No, sometimes the unconscious throws out things. Through just going there and coming back and coming now to stay for long, the unconscious may have got stirred up, and that stirring may have brought something. But it is good that it was released. Remember, next time it happens, rather than repressing it, rather than consoling yourself, rather than rationalising, close the doors, have a good cry. Roll down on the floor, cry, cry your heart out, and within fifteen to thirty minutes you will be out of it.…

Crying will be tremendously helpful. And start working now.

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