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‌CHAPTER 5

5 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand is Sanskrit, it means bliss or blissful. Arno is Teutonic. it means the eagle. Anand Arno will mean: the blissful eagle. It is a message.

Plotinus says: The search for god is a flight of the alone to the alone. It is a flight, and it is the greatest flight there is, because you are not simply changing one place for another, you are changing one space for another. You are not covering a physical distance, you are changing the very dimension of your existence.

To feel yourself as the body is one space. one dimension; and to start feeling as the spirit is another dimension, another space. And the gap between the two is infinite – logically it is unbridgeable. But it is good that logic is not all: there are ways to bridge it.

Sannyas is the way to bridge the unbridgeable. From matter to consciousness, from earth to heaven, from the outer to the inner, the gap is really big. And if one wants to bridge it gradually, it is impossible; one can only have a quantum leap.

That is the message, the symbolic message, in your name: become a blissful eagle so that you can go to the farthest corners of the sky.

Prem means love, simon is Hebrew and also Greek, and in both languages it means the same: gracious hearing, one who is capable of hearing the truth. This great experience of being capable of hearing the truth is possible only through love. It is only through the heart that truth is heard; it is not through the mind. The mind can hear only the words – and the words are empty; their meaning can be heard only through the heart.

The moment a word enters your ears, it is divided into two parts: its body moves into the head, its soul into the heart. The soul is its meaning, the body is just a corpse. The head goes on dissecting

corpses – analysing, philosophising, guessing; it does great work, but it deals with death and it knows only the dead.

The real spirit moves into the heart, it stirs the heart. It is not a question of analysing, dissecting, arguing; it is simply a question of gracious hearing.

That is the meaning of simon. And that is one of the greatest qualities for the seeker, because there are things of which the mind can never be convinced, but they are. They are the most important things in life: love, beauty, truth.

If you depend only on the mind, then all that is great is debarred; then only trivia is left for you. You can sink into the trivia but your life will not have grandeur, your life will not have significance, your life will continuously remain a wasteland where nothing grows – no foliage, no greenery, no flowers, no fruits, nothing that grows; everything dead, dull, boring, stale, stagnant.

To open yourself to things of which the mind cannot be convinced, is the meaning of simon. It is the very meaning of being a disciple.

Listen lovingly. Don’t decide for or against; just let it in. If it is truth, without any of your effort it brings its own evidence. Truth is self-evident, self-authenticating; it has its own authority. It is not authoritative, but it has its own authority, its own validity. It needs no other proofs.

If it is not truth and you hear silently, lovingly, you will immediately know that it is not truth. This knowing will not be a conclusion; this knowing will be immediate. And when knowing is immediate, it is liberating. It never becomes a dogma, it never becomes a belief, it never becomes Christianity, Hinduism. It simply becomes your wisdom, your intelligence.

Prem means love, elisha is Hebrew, it means god is salvation.

Salvation is not something that man can do; it can only descend as a grace, it can only come as a gift. Salvation is so vast and man is so small that it is not possible for man to manage it. The more man tries to manage it, the more entangled he becomes in new kinds of chains. in new imprisonments. He moves from one cell of the prison into another cell, that’s all.

To be really free, to be totally free, to be absolutely free, can only be a gift from god. That is the meaning of elisha: god is salvation.

Then what should we do? We cannot attain salvation on our own, but still something is expected of us. We should become receivers – not doers. but receivers. We should be on the receiving end. And that’s what love is, to be receptive. Man can be loving, and then god descends as salvation. In the womb of love, the child of ultimate freedom is conceived. Man has to become a womb, a receptacle.

All that is needed on our part is to drop all armour, to drop all defences, to open all the doors and all the windows so that the wind can come, the rain can come and the sun can come.…

Prem Mihoko... will mean: love that maintains beauty. In fact love not only maintains beauty, it creates it. Love is the alchemy that creates beauty. It is only through love that people become

elegant, graceful; it is only through love that they start having something mysterious about them – because through love, poetry is born in their hearts. Their very bodies start pulsating with a new rhythm. They are no more alone, they are no more unneeded, for the first time in their life they start feeling a significance; and the feeling of significance is the most beautifying thing.

If you are loved and you can love, that means that the existence needs you, that you are not unwanted, that without you there will be something missing in the world. You may be a small song, but still the great universe will miss that small song. You may just be a small flower that grows by the roadside, but still without you the world will be a little less.

That feeling that ‘I am an essential part of existence’ imparts beauty. Beauty is not something that can be imposed from the outside; all those efforts of beautifying are really uglifying. Real beauty arises from the innermost core and spreads outwards. It is like a lamp burning inside you, and your whole being becomes luminous. Love is the flame that can make you luminous.

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