9

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‌CHAPTER 9

9 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love. Christina is Greek, it is from Christ. Christ is Greek for messiah, the one who has arrived; it is exactly the equivalent of the Buddha.

We are in the journey. Life is a pilgrimage, and only very few have arrived at the goal. These few are called the messiahs, the Buddhas, the Christs. It is the ultimate state of consciousness, bliss; the ultimate state of being, beyond which there is no goal - - where one starts feeling at home, at case, where tremendous contentment is felt and all desires disappear.

Desire is disease. To desire means to be in discontent. When there is contentment there is no desire; when there is contentment there is fulfilment, one is simply joyous. That state of rejoicing is Christ; and love brings one to that goal. It is only through love that one arrives.

Start by loving more and more, for no other reason at all, just for the sheer joy of loving. And, slowly slowly, loving becomes your very flavour – not anything that you have to do, but a simple quality of your being. Even while asleep, one is loving. If nobody is there, still one is loving: one is love. Keep remembering; that it is a far-away distant star, but not impossible to achieve. It is our intrinsic potentiality to achieve it, we are meant to achieve it: it is our destiny.

Deva means divine or god. Judith is Hebrew, it means the praised one. Your full name will mean: god, the praised one. God is only when you are in the mood of praising existence. When you are in the mood of prayer, god exists; otherwise god is as non-existential as anything. God exists only in the vision of lovers.

It is futile to ask where god is, unless in your heart there is praise, gratitude, love, prayer. God is found only in the heart of one who is utterly in praise of existence because it is so incredibly beautiful,

so utterly valuable. We have not earned it, we are not worthy of it. To be is a gift. Life is a gift, love is a gift, and all that is, is a sheer gift from god. All that we can do is praise him.

That very praising is enough, because that praise becomes prayer – prayer is nothing else. Prayer is the heart in tremendous rejoicing, thankfulness, saying that existence is good.

The moment you say that existence is good, god is: in that very assertion, god is. Hence god cannot be proved by any logical, rational approach; it is proved only by the loving heart.

Deva means divine. Kai is Greek, it means rejoicing – divine rejoicing. Life is a song to be sung, a dance to be danced; and only those who can sing and dance and rejoice can know what life is.

Others only vegetate. Others live, but without any aliveness in them. They never know the ecstasy of being here, of being now; they never know exultation, they never reach to the peaks of being. It is only in utter rejoicing that one touches the optimum, the ultimate – and the moment one touches the optimum, the maximum, one has touched the divine.

People live at the minimum; their life is only so-so, lukewarm. That is not the right way to live. That is just a way of slow suicide – they only die.

Jesus says again and again to his disciples, ‘Rejoice! Rejoice! I say unto you, rejoice! I say again, rejoice!’ But it has not been heard; the disciples have not understood yet.

Christianity became very sad, serious; it lost the quality of playfulness. And the moment a religion loses the quality of playfulness it is dead, it is only a corpse. You can worship it, but it cannot deliver you, it cannot liberate you. In fact it becomes a bondage – a beautiful bondage of course, but the church becomes a prison.

If there is dancing and there is singing and there is joy and there is love, and life is respected not denied, not negated but affirmed, totally affirmed, with all that it contains – with all the pains and all the pleasures, with all the agonies and all the ecstasies – when life is praised in its totality, only then does rejoicing happen.

My sannyas is nothing but rejoicing; it is not renunciation but rejoicing.

Deva means divine. Serena is Latin for serenity, tranquillity, stillness – divine serenity. It is not something to be cultivated. It is already there; we have only to uncover it. It is already at the very core of our being. Our innermost core is made of serenity; the stuff it is made of is serenity. We have only to reach to the core. We live on the periphery, and we go on round and round, never penetrating our innermost core. Hence we remain in a turmoil. Then a very false idea arises: people start asking ’How to be serene? How to be silent? How to be still ?” Then methods are created – because whenever there is a demand, there is a supply.

When people start asking how to be serene, some cunning, clever guys are bound to supply the methods. They will say ‘Repeat this mantra and you will become serene’ or ‘Do this method and you will become serene.’ All those methods can only create a false serenity. That serenity, that false serenity, is against the turmoil of the mind; and all the methods are to repress the turmoil of the mind. It is a forced kind of serenity, imposed.

If you go on forcing the mind, the mind has to yield. If you go on sitting every day, repeating a certain stupid mantra, sooner or later you will force the mind to become quiet. But that serenity is false, because if you look a little deeper into it you will find all the turmoil moving as an undercurrent, just waiting for you to stop your stupid mantra so it can come back. The whole traffic remains; it simply goes underground, it is forced to go underground. This is not true serenity; I don’t teach it.

There is no way to become serene, because we already are. There is no need for any method; all that is needed is a jump from the periphery to the centre. Real serenity is not against the turmoil of the mind; the turmoil remains and you become serene. Real serenity is the centre of the cyclone: the cyclone goes on and on, and the very core of it all is silent, utterly silent. It is our true nature. We have only to discover it, not to invent it, not to create it.

My approach is not of creating serenity, but of discovering it – because this is my realisation, that it is already there. One just has to look withinwards, one has to turn withinwards. And when one has come to know natural, spontaneous serenity, it remains with one for twenty-four hours, without any method to support it, without any artificial prop. It is simply there like breathing, it is simply there like your heartbeat. Then it is really a liberation. Otherwise the method becomes your bondage.

You become addicted to methods. Without the method you are at a loss, you don’t know what to do now; without the method you are again in a turmoil. So you start clinging to the method. The method becomes so important – more important than serenity itself, because serenity seems to be just a by-product of the method. It is not; true serenity is not.

Remember it: you are not to cultivate it, it is already the case. Just look in as much as you can. Whenever you have time, just close your eyes and look in, and one day you will stumble upon it without any method. One always stumbles upon it. One should just go on groping in the inner darkness and one day, sooner or later, one stumbles upon it. One has found the source, the very spring of well-being. Then life has a totally different taste, a different quality – the quality of joy and the taste of grace. Then life is beautiful and each moment is a benediction.

When you are serene, the whole existence seems to be serene, because the existence only reflects you. Whatsoever you are, it reflects you. Whatsoever you are, it only goes on echoing you in a thousand and one ways.

Anand means bliss... and a rose is a rose is a rose!

Life can become a rose of bliss – it should. There is no reason why it should not. It should have the fragrance of a rose, the freshness of a rose, the beauty of a rose, the joy of a rose. It can, it has all the potential, but the potential has to be transformed into the actual. The potential can die without becoming actual. That is the risk but also the excitement of experiencing, exploring, and the adventure also.

If it were an absolute certainty, there would be no joy in it. Because one can miss, to attain it brings such ecstasy. Because one can miss, not to miss makes one feel so tremendously joyous. But there is no reason why you should miss – the whole existence supports you in reaching the goal – unless you yourself stop the growth.

People are very afraid of growing, for a certain reason, because growth brings new problems, and they have to find solutions for those new problems. If you remain ungrown-up, your problems remain old and you know the solutions. It is cheaper, safer, more secure. You have a few problems and you already know the answers. But then there is no exultation; one simply lives a routine, dull and dead life.

People are afraid of growing, because the moment you grow, growth means going beyond the known, reaching to something unknown. And with every experience of the unknown, new problems are bound to arise; and new problems will demand new solutions – and that needs intelligence. Nobody wants to labour that much to be intelligent. People live in stupidity, in mediocrity; it is less risky, and much effort is not needed. People settle very early

The average mental age of human beings on earth today is not more than twelve years. People settle too soon. One should not settle to the very last; in fact one should not ever settle – not even when one is dying should one settle.

One should be like a Socrates: even dying he is so tremendously excited. He is excited about death! His disciples cannot understand why he is so excited. They are crying, and he says: Stop crying! When I am gone you can cry; you will have all the time then. Right now don’t cry. I am entering into a totally new experience. I have never known death. Life I have known, so I don’t hanker for more life; I have known it already. I have lived long and I have lived in every possible way – good and bad, the way of the sinner and the way of the saint. I have lived all possibilities, I have exhausted all alternatives, so it is finished! Now I am excited about death, about what it is. I want to experience it, I want to go into it. Be quiet and be silent. And also meditate on my death: sooner or later you will die. Your master is dying – participate in his experience!

This is the way one should live and one should die - - but this type of intelligence cannot die, this intelligence is bound to conquer death. How can death destroy such intelligence? Impossible! Existence cannot be so unfair. Death destroys only stupid minds. Death cannot destroy intelligence – in fact it sharpens it, it enhances it, it gives it more colour, more depth, more integrity.

The really intelligent person lives his life in totality and lives his death also in totality. And through totality is transcendence.

Prem means love, june is Latin, it is from junius; it means young, youthful, fresh. Love is always young, it never becomes old. Its intrinsic quality is to be as fresh as dewdrops, as fresh as new lotus flowers.

The moment love starts becoming old, it is no more love. Love has disappeared; now you are only living in a memory, now it is nostalgia. But in fact it is no more there. If it is there, it is always young. And what do I mean by young? If love is there, you never think of the past; you never think of beautiful moments, love moments, of the past. One starts thinking of the past only when the present is pale compared to the past. When the present is no more so joyous, when the present is no more so alive, then one starts thinking of the past.

To think of the past is to become old. Only old people think of the past. Children think of the future, old people think of the past. The really young person lives in the moment, neither in the past nor in

the future; he lives in the present. And if one can live in the present, one remains young. The body will grow old, but one remains young.

To keep that quality of freshness always around oneself is to have lived rightly. People gather too much dust, too much memory, and people live either in the past or in the future. And both are non- existential: the past is no more, the future is not yet. The only reality that is, is this moment. Reality is always this-ness, such-ness. It is now, it is here.

To live in the now and the here is to know the depth of life, the height of life. It is unimaginable, it is incomprehensible. It is so mysterious that the more you know, the more mysterious it becomes. The more you know, the less you know it. And the person who lives in the present, of necessity lives in love; because life is so mysterious, how can you miss it ? How can you manage not to love it ? And vice versa: the person who loves lives in the present, because there is no other way for love to live. To love or to be in the present are the same, two sides of the same coin.

Prem Serge – in the service of loveService can be without love too. Then it is superficial, then

it is only a duty to be fulfilled; it is not a virtue. But in the past, religions have made much out of it. All over the world, the so-called saints have been teaching people to serve; they have been saying that service is the way to God. But just service with no love in it is not a way to God, and cannot ever be a way. It is just a motive for attaining some pleasures in the other life, it is nothing but greed extended to the other world. It has a profit motive, and then it is no more religious.

When you serve out of love it has beauty in it, because there is no motivation. You are not searching for any heaven as a reward; you are serving out of sheer joy. There is no other reward except itself, it is an end unto itself. Then your act is total. It is the means and it is the end too; the circle is perfect. And whenever an act is total, it frees you; it does not hang around you like a weight. You live it and then it disappears. You always remain unburdened by it; it never becomes a karma. And to make an act total means the act should arise out of your innermost core; it should not be an imposition from the outside.

That’s what I mean when I say that service should well up in your heart out of love, for no other reason. Then it is really virtue, then it is paradise itself. One can live in paradise on this very earth if one knows how to act out of love.

The whole aspect of sannyas is action out of love, because action out of love is total action and total action brings freedom.

Now try to go deep into meditation. Sannyas needs nothing, nothing external; its need is just internal, and that is that you should be deeply involved in meditation and all your energy should flow into it. It is only a matter of effort for a few days in the beginning. Once the rock is broken and the stream starts flowing, there is no difficulty. Once the stream starts flowing, then the stream itself will carry you to the ocean. Effort is needed only in the beginning. If you do it for the first four to six months with determination, without wavering and without relaxing your efforts, then meditation will happen by itself; you will not be required to do it.

Try all the meditation techniques here, and then regularly continue one of them that suits you. [The new sannyasin says: I do Vipassana.]

Vipassana is good. Concentrate on Vipassana.…

Whatever it is, see it as a witness. Don’t desire it to be there, nor desire it to go. Don’t attach your desire to it; don’t have any attachment to it at all.

You will have many such experiences that will be pleasurable, but don’t cling to them, let go of them. You have to remember that a time should come when there will be no experiences; only witnessing will be there, only the witness. There should be no object to observe, just observing, plain mirroring. Be aware of it.

In the meantime, many things will happen during meditation. There will be pleasurable experiences, like the appearance of a fragrance which will thrill you, or an explosion of colours as if a rainbow has burst forth. You will also see that flowers are blooming and that spring has arrived; you will experience many sorts of light and sound and music. Sometimes you will feel so weightless that you can fly in the air.

Such experiences will be there when Vipassana deepens. You have to just be a witness to them all, without any identification, without any attachment. Just go on witnessing. You have to remember that you are a witness, just a witness. Do not identify yourself with any of the experiences. Always know, ‘I am neither this nor that, I am just the observer before whom these experiences are taking place. I am not the observed but the observer. I am the witness.’ This remembrance should always be there.

Slowly slowly, all the experiences will disappear. And the day when only the observer is there, the experience of experiences – the ultimate experience – happens. To call it an experience is not right, because no experience is left there. But that is the experience which we seek – call it samadhi, enlightenment or whatsoever you want.

Go on observing, and be aware of the observer.

[A sannyasin is leaving for the West. Continue to meditate, Osho reminds him.]

Remember, whenever you are in meditation, you are close to me, I am close to you. So make it a point that at least once a day for one hour you will be with me. That’s what meditation is all about – twenty-three hours for yourself, one hour for me. In the end you will find that those twenty-three hours that were for yourself are all lost, and only that one hour is saved!

Help my people there!

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