23

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‌CHAPTER 23

23 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love; roger is Teutonic, it means spear. Love is like a spear: the moment it penetrates the heart it is the greatest agony possible, but beyond the agony is the ecstasy. Love is pain, pure pain, but out of the fire of pure pain, bliss is born. The pain is the price we pay for the bliss. Once the bliss is attained, then one knows that what one gave was nothing. But unless it is attained, it is too much to bear, it is unbearable, and many times one wants to escape.

People are very much afraid of love for the simple reason that you have to pass through pain, agony, fire. The way to heaven goes through hell, and those who avoid the pain part will never attain to the ecstatic flowering.

Anand means bliss, lorraine is a symbol of victory, the laurel. The full name will mean: bliss, the symbol of victory. One can have – as much money as possible, and it is not a symbol of victory, it may be just the opposite, that the man has wasted his whole life in collecting junk. One can even conquer the whole world, can become Alexander the Great, and yet when one dies, both the hands are empty. One cannot take this kind of victory with oneself. Only one thing can be taken beyond death, and that is blissfulness. It has nothing to do with the outer; it has something to do with your inner energy, the flowering of your inner energy.

Once it has happened, there is no death. No time is going make any difference to it, it has eternity in it. And that the only victory there is; all other victories are covers to hide our defeats and failures. And the beauty of bliss is this, that you need not depend on anybody; no outer cause is needed at all – as you are, you are enough to be blissful. It is only a question of starting to live it; it is not a question of attaining, achieving.

One cannot believe that it is only a question of living it – because one has lived in misery for so long how can one suddenly become blissful? But try and see the miracle happening. Tomorrow morning

get up blissfully, with a decision that today you are going to remain blissful, whatsoever happens you are going to remain blissful. Persist, and remind yourself again and again; old habits will be there, coming back, knocking on the doors, but go on smiling deep down within your heart, and you will be surprised: it is possible. And if it is possible one day, it is possible every day. Slowly slowly it deepens; slowly slowly it becomes such a natural phenomenon that you need not even remember; you are simply blissful.

That is what sannyas is all about: living life blissfully without any effort, without cultivating it; living bliss spontaneously, uncultivated, unpractised, effortlessly. Lao Tzu calls it wu-wei, action without action.

Miracles can be done without any doing, and this is the first miracle. If this happens, then everything else becomes possible. Then god becomes possible, then paradise becomes – possible, then nothing is impossible.

Anand Orna... will mean blissful light. Light in itself is delight. If we can be full of light within, our life becomes a tremendous, unbelievable delight. Bliss is an expression of inner light. It is light overflowing in you, reaching to others; it is a fragrance of your flower, riding on the winds. And just the opposite is the state of misery: it is a by-product of inner darkness. People are living in inner darkness, because people are living without self-knowledge.

Socrates says a life unexamined is not worth living. He is right; a life which has no awareness to examine itself, to look at itself, can’t be worth living. At the most one can drag. That’s what millions are doing and have been doing, down the ages – carrying mountains of burdens for no reason at all. One day they die because of those burdens, are crushed under those burdens, never knowing a single moment of joy. They could have lived their whole life as joy – just one thing went wrong: from the very beginning they were taught to know everything except themselves. That is where the original flaw is.

Sannyas has to be a beginning of self-knowledge. Everything else is secondary. If you don’t know anything else, it doesn’t matter much, but let a great decision be born in you that ‘I will know myself’, that ‘I will know who I am.’ In that moment of knowing, suddenly the inner being becomes enkindled, knowing becomes light, light starts overflowing. And that overflowing light is delight, is bliss.

Anand means bliss. Hywel means eminent, famous, special, extraordinary, the quality of uniqueness. Bliss makes everybody unique, misery is anonymous. Bliss makes one an individual. That’s why to be blissful is dangerous, because you become so eminent, so different from others, and people don’t like that. They don’t like anybody to have any difference to them; they become afraid, they feel offended.

How dare you? They are so miserable and so anonymous and you are becoming so extraordinary and unique? They are so dark and you are becoming so light ? They are living in hell and you are dancing in joy ? Just out of sheer cowardice, millions of people who could have been blissful have never dared to be blissful. The crowd does not like that, the crowd wants to be part of the crowd. The crowd wants you to be a sheep, not a lion – and bliss is a roar, a lion’s roar.

Gather courage to be blissful, risk everything to be blissful. Even life can be risked for bliss, because

without bliss life has no meaning. Even to live blissfully for a single moment is better than to prolong a hundred years in misery.

Prem means love, leo is Latin for lion. There are two possibilities for the human psychology: one is the psychology of the sheep. It is rooted in fear. That’s how crowds live – in a sheepish way, always searching for a tyrant, a shepherd, always in need of being dominated, always hankering to be commanded. They feel good only when there is a leader to lead them. If there is no leader, they start freaking out – freedom is unbearable. That is one kind of psychology; the majority of human beings live in that world. But if you live in fear, you don’t live at all; you go on missing the opportunity.

The other psychology is the psychology of the lion. It is rooted in love; it is individualistic, it is not collectivistic. It does not depend on somebody, it tries to live its own life. It risks going into the unknown without any map. It is not ready to remain confined to the familiar, to the comfortable, to the convenient. It is the psychology of the wanderer, the explorer, but its basic root is in love: one loves existence so much that one wants to explore it. We want to explore somebody only when we love them. You love a woman; you want to explore her body. You love a rose; you want to explore its touch. All exploration is out of love.

The lion is an explorer and the lion walks alone. He is not afraid, fear is not his way of thinking. And once one is free of fear, life has a totally different taste: it is utterly beautiful, it is immensely precious. But it depends on what kind of psychology you choose.

To be a sannyasin is to be a lion, and to be a sannyasin is to choose the psychology of love, the psychology of exploration, the psychology of the wanderer. It is accepting the challenge of the unknown. It is getting ready to risk all for that which is not known yet and for which there can be no guarantee.

Deva means divine, sagaro means the ocean – the divine ocean. We have all become identified with the waves, and because of this identification we have lost contact with the ocean. This is our misery, this is our only problem: the identity with the waves, the identity with the part. Once we become obsessed with the part too much, the whole disappears from our vision. All that is needed is a change of gestalt. All that is needed is to uncling from the part, disidentify yourself from the wave, and suddenly the ocean is heard, roaring all over. And suddenly that which had been forgotten is remembered, that which has been lost is regained. One is again whole and holy.

Never think in terms of the part; always think in terms of wholes. This whole existence is a single unity, it is one individuality. That’s exactly the meaning of the word ‘God’ – that existence is one individuality, undivided, that we are members of each other; that you are in me, that I am in you, that that is the only way to be. The mountains and the stars and the trees are in you and you are in the mountains and the stars and the trees. That is the only way to be! We participate in each other’s being, we criss-cross each other. There is no way to be separate; the very idea of separation is the root cause of our being in hell. The moment the illusion of separation disappears, one is back in paradise.

[A sannyasin, who is leaving, says: I’m always fighting, a victim of my mind. Just today I was seeing everything inside; everything is upside down.]

Everything will go, don’t be worried; it just takes time. It is so many lives of rubbish that we are carrying, it is so deep, that you go on digging, and layer upon layer comes up. Sooner or later it is finished; it is not infinite, that much is certain. And our capacity to dig is infinite – so rejoice!

[The sannyasin says he thought the number of the layers is infinite.]

No, it is not so, otherwise there would never have been a Buddha. The darkness is great, but it is nothing compared to light. This is what trust means: the misery is great, but hope is greater than the misery. Then there is no fear.

It is never unbearable. People say that pain is unbearable – it never is. You can bear it, your capacity to bear pain is infinite. And if you start witnessing it, then suddenly a distance is created. The pain is there and all nonsense is there, but you are no more affected by it, you are no more a part of it. You are just a pure witness, a watcher on the hills, and everything else is just there, dark, far away in the valley, none of your business really.

This distance is liberating; but when it comes, nobody knows It comes, that much is certain; but as to when, nothing can be said.

So one has to wait, one has to be patient and one has to go on working.…

It will be good this time if you go for a few months. It will be helpful, mm? it will do something good; and the come back.

Help my people there – they need you there!

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: Please say something to me.]

I will be with you! So whenever you need me, just close your room, close your eyes, dance for fifteen minutes. Then just sit as you are sitting in front of me, ask any question and it will be answered through your own heart. But that fifteen minutes’ mad dance is a must – it has to be before, only then will you be in tune with me.

[A sannyasin says that since arriving recently she has much pressure in the head, which has become more intense.]

Everything becomes intense here! Don’t be worried, it will be gone. It will be gone and it will be gone forever, it will never come again. So don’t try to repress it. Let it have as much intensity as possible, so it is finished once and forever. If you repress it with drugs or anything, then it remains in the system.

After Tao, remind me again. If it has not gone, then I will take it out!

[Before beginning an energy darshan, Osho says, A few things to be remembered... ]

This is a totally new phase of work, so you have to be totally available, as if you are not – only then can my energy penetrate to the very core.

And for the helpers, for the mediums who will be helping; they have to be utterly absent, merged into me – only then can their energy become part of my energy and move.

From today, slowly slowly, mediums, helpers, will be chosen. Only those will be chosen who can be with me totally, with no critical mind – not analysing what is happening, but simply going into it, whatsoever it is. Any analysis and it becomes a disturbance.

Energy can go to tremendous heights, it can simply bloom into a lotus. Within minutes it can happen, but just total availability is needed, and more so on the part of the mediums.

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