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‌CHAPTER 3

3 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means blissful; raphael is Hebrew, it means healed by god, or a divine healer, or a medicine of god. Raphael is also the name of one of the angels, one of the four angels that surround god’s throne. He represents one dimension of god’s being.

Existence is four-dimensional. Three dimensions are very visible, the fourth dimension is invisible. Modern physics calls it time, the fourth dimension, but all the ancient mythologies have something to say about it - - the fourth dimension.

Raphael represents the fourth. Gurdjieff used to call his way ‘the fourth way’ because his whole work consists of transforming time into timelessness, mind into no-mind. Time and mind are synonymous, two aspects of the same phenomenon. The East, Yoga in particular, divides human consciousness into four parts. One is waking, the second is dreaming, the third is sleeping, and the fourth is simply called the fourth – turiya. No other name is given to it, just ‘the fourth’.

Raphael represents the fourth, turiya – entering into timelessness, mindlessness, entering into no- thought. And that’s what meditation is all about.

Waking is full of thoughts – too full; one is crowded, there is no space for god to be. So is dreaming – too full of imagination, fantasy, pictures. The third, sleep, is better than both waking and dreaming, because one is not crowded; no thought exists, no dream. But then another problem arises one becomes unconscious. We know only one way of being conscious, and that is continuously remaining occupied. Our consciousness is a by-product of occupation. The moment we are not occupied we start dozing, falling into sleep. If you have nothing to do, you will suddenly start feeling sleep overtaking you.

The greatest problem that all meditators face is that when they watch the mind, and through slowly watching it thoughts start disappearing, the first thing that becomes a problem is sleep. Hence the

Zen master with his staff, moving around the meditators, watching who is dozing, hitting him hard on the head and waking him up. To move from waking consciousness into sleep is easier for the mind; it knows the way. But to move from waking consciousness, from thought to no-thought, and still not fall asleep, is a totally new phenomenon.

Sleep is far better still than waking and dreaming, because it is empty. But the emptiness is a negative state. Emptiness is not a fulfilment and cannot be. Unless this thoughtless state of sleep becomes suffused, permeated, with consciousness, unless this emptiness of thought becomes fullness of awareness, meditation has not happened.

When sleep is transformed into meditation, this is the miracle that happens: there is no content in the mind, yet the consciousness is there. There is no occupation, no object, yet one is fully alert, aware – aware, not of something, but simply aware. Or we can say aware of awareness, attentive to attentiveness, conscious of being conscious – that’s all. This is the fourth stage.

In Christian mythology, Raphael represents the fourth state. All the three meanings are beautiful: healed by god – healing is a process of becoming whole. Not to be whole is to be ill. To be part is to be sick, to be whole is to be healthy. The moment the ego disappears and one joins the whole, healing happens of its own accord. It has nothing to do with physical illness; I am talking about metaphysical sickness, the sickness of the soul – that we have become uprooted, that we are feeling undernourished, that we are shrinking, that we are feeling very alone, meaningless, that there is great anguish inside. This is the sickness unto death. That’s exactly what Soren Kierkegaard calls it: sickness unto death. But if we can relax into the whole, the healing happens.

Prem means love, and love is my whole teaching. If love is understood, then all is understood – god and all. If love is not understood, then everything is simply gibberish, with no meaning, with no significance. People can use very high-sounding words, theological jargon, and they can go on fabricating beautiful systems of thought, but they are made of dream-stuff and nothing else. Only love is substantial; all else is dream.

Love is the stuff that the existence is made of. Hence, whenever we are in love we are close to existence. A great intimacy arises, not only between two lovers; when love is there, a great intimacy arises between you and the whole existence – with stars, with trees, with birds. Suddenly there is communion. Even with mountains, rocks and oceans, you start feeling a kind of dialogue, an ‘I-thou’ relationship. Love is magical, miraculous.

Learn to be loving. And finally, learn to be love! The day your whole being has bloomed in love, that is the real day of sannyas.

This is just sowing the seeds: that day you will reap the crop.

Deva Ronit.… will mean divine singing. Singing is divine, one of the most divine activities. Only dancing is a competitor with it, it is only next to dancing. And why are singing and dancing divine activities? Because these are the activities in which you can be utterly lost. You can drown yourself in singing – so much so that the singer disappears, and only song remains, or the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. And that is the moment of metamorphosis, transfiguration. When the singer is no more there and there is only the song, when your totality has become a song or a dance, that is prayer!

What song you are singing is irrelevant; it may not be a religious song, but if you can sing it totally it is sacred. And vice versa: you may be singing a religious song, hallowed by the ages, but if you are not totally in it, it is profane. The content of the song does not matter; what matters is the quality that you bring to singing – the totality, the intensity, the fire.

Prem means love, sylvia is Latin, it means a forest-dweller or a forest maiden. It is a beautiful word. The full name will mean: love that dwells in the forest, love that dwells in nature, love that is courageous enough to be wild.

Man has become very ugly through civilisation. Civilisation has not really been a blessing; it has proved a curse. We will have to try another kind of civilisation sooner or later, and the sooner, the better – because this civilisation that we have tried up to now is doomed to fail. It has already failed; it is just taking time to collapse. It is a big edifice, so it will take time to collapse.

This civilisation has failed because it has been against nature. Man has tried to be very arrogant with nature; he has been trying to conquer nature, which is utterly ridiculous. We are part of nature! how can we conquer it? We are nature; to fight with nature is to fight with oneself. It is so foolish and so suicidal that later generations will not be able to believe how man committted such a crime.

Man has to learn again how to come closer to the trees, to the forest, to the mountains, to the oceans. We have to learn how to befriend them again – and my sannyas is an effort towards that great goal.

Man can live joyously only with nature, not against nature. The moment we are against nature, our love energy turns into hatred. If we flow with nature in total harmony, love grows, matures, becomes more integrated. And the maturing of love is the greatest gift of life. To know a mature kind of love is to know god, because it brings joy, it brings freedom, it brings blessings.

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