< Previous | Contents | Next >
CHAPTER 7
7 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem means love. Asa is Hebrew; it means healed by god. God heals, all healing is through god, god is the only healer: all those meanings are involved in it.
Prem Asa will mean: the god of love heals.
Prem means love. Simone is Hebrew; it means god has heard. Prem Simone will mean: love that has been heard by god.
That’s what prayer is. When your love is heard by god, the prayer has reached to the target: the arrow of the prayer has reached to the heart of the divine.
Amelea.It means the worker: it is Latin. Deva Amelea will mean: divine work. Life is divine work.
It is not for the mundane; it is an experiment for the sacred. That’s why Jesus says ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’
The outer is only the periphery; the inner is the real work. To know oneself is the goal of life, the very purpose of us being here. Life is an opportunity for self-knowing.
Deva Champa – divine champa.Champa is one of the most beautiful flowers in India, one of the
most fragrant. The fragrance has a certain quality in it: it is non-aggressive, it is very non-violent. It comes in such a way that you only feel that it is there. It is very indirectly there, its presence is almost synonymous with absence. And that is the beauty of it: it does not declare itself, it only whispers. That’s the way of love and that’s the way of god too.
That’s the way of grace, that’s the way of silence - - you cannot hear its footsteps; suddenly it is there and suddenly it is gone. For a moment you only vaguely feel that it is there, and if you want to catch
hold of it, it disappears. If you become very aware of it, it is elusive. It is there if you are receptive: it is there if you don’t look it in the eye, if you allow it there, if you don’t disturb, if you don’t concentrate on it. Your very concentration, and it disappears. It is very shy, it is very feminine.
Hence the flower became very symbolic of worship, because it has the qualities of love. Love is shy. Even to say ‘I love you’ is so difficult. That’s why women never take the initiative in love: they wait. They can wait, because to take the initiative will be a little aggressive. It is the man who takes the initiative. His love is a little gross, more earthly, more physical. His love is not so aesthetic; it tends more towards the sensual. The feminine love tends more towards the spiritual. And the more love tends towards the spiritual, the less and less direct it is, the more and more indirect, the more like the flavour, the fragrance, of champa.
And I say that this is the way love, god, grace, and all that is beautiful, comes. One has to be very sensitive to the indirect approaches of existence. If you trust only the direct, you end up with matter. That’s why science ends up with matter: it is too direct, too male, too aggressive, too analytical. The essence of science is concentration, and the essence of religion is meditation – the difference is tremendously great. In the dictionary, both concentration and meditation mean the same, but only in dictionaries. In actual experience they are poles apart, diametrically opposite.
The concentrated mind is a tense mind, focused. The meditative mind is a non-tense mind, unfocused. The concentrated mind is a narrow mind; it goes on becoming narrower and narrower, it excludes more and more; then only can you concentrate. It includes less and less, and excludes more and more. Then only a single point is included, and all else, the whole existence, is excluded.
The meditative mind is all-inclusive. It is not narrow; it is wide, as wide as the sky. It is simply available. It is a kind of vulnerability, a receptivity, something like a feminine womb – waiting with great expectancy, but with no concentration. Then suddenly the indirect starts coming to you, the invisible starts approaching you; the subtle is heard, felt. One starts entering into the mysterious – call it god, the soul, nirvana, or whatever.
Science will never come to know the real; it will only know the factual. The factual is just like the hard shell, the outer shell, of reality. It is not the inner juice – that is available only to those who know how to be feminine. Hence sannyas makes everybody feminine.
Down the ages, those who have followed Krishna say that there is only one man, and that is the god, Krishna; everyone else is a woman. They are right, they are absolutely right, because that is the way of prayer and love – that it makes you feminine, it makes you more and more relaxed, available, in a state of let-go.
[A sannyasin had previously written to Osho about an incident on a beach when she felt like walking into the water and disappearing.]
Everything was perfectly good. Don’t think about these things, just leave them. Things will be happening: don’t think about them, don’t analyse them, don’t make questions out of them.
Just leave them as they are. Enjoy and forget them and more will be happening. Everything is going perfectly well. I am aware of it. Just let it happen, and help people.
[A sannyasin, arriving, says she doesn’t understand what sannyas means, and she came here to find out.]
This is really good, because sannyas is something that can never be known. It cannot be reduced to knowledge; it will remain something mysterious. The moment you know something it is already meaningless, because there is nothing more to explore in it. You have known it; all that can be done is that it can be thrown away. It is pointless to carry it.
Things which are really valuable–love, prayer, meditation, music, sannyas – are bound to always remain unknowable.
You will come to know many things, and still the essential core will remain unknown. But that’s the beauty of all such mysterious experiences of life, that you can never catch hold of them; they are too big for that. The depth is such that you can go on and on, but you cannot fathom them out. In fact one day the searcher and the seeker disappear into the sought. A day comes when the seeker is no more found, the person who wanted to know has evaporated. Then the mystery is total, absolute – and that’s what enlightenment, realisation, salvation, liberation, is.
It is not that you have come to know truth, but that the knower has disappeared. The knower tries this way and that, the knower tries every possible way. He is frustrated, and fails in every attempt, and finally dies out of the frustration. When the knower dies, there is a kind of knowing; but because the knower is not there, you cannot call it knowledge. There is a kind of knowing, a very mysterious light – fulfilling, tremendously fulfilling, ecstatic, blissful – but the knower is not there, so it cannot be called knowledge.
So this is good.This is the beginning of sannyas!
< Previous | Contents | Next >