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‌CHAPTER 1

1 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Bliss is not a result of prayer, it is not a reward: it is prayer itself. It is not that prayerful people become blissful; just the contrary: blissful people are prayerful. There is no question of becoming; bliss and prayer are synonymous. And once this is understood then the whole of life can be a prayer. If this is not understood then prayer remains a ritual and never becomes your whole life, and unless prayer becomes your whole life, your totality, it cannot transform you. It remains a duty, a formality, a good ritual – healthy in itself, but it takes you nowhere.

My whole teaching is that if a person remains blissful in ordinary day-to-day life, doing small things but blissfully, then prayer is spread all over his life. Then eating he is prayerfully eating because he is blissfully eating. Then walking he is prayerfully walking because he is blissfully walking. Then breathing, he is prayerfully breathing because he is blissfully breathing.

Prem means love, vinito means humbleness. Love brings humbleness. It is not cultivated, it comes on its own accord. A cultivated humbleness is nothing but the ego masquerading in a beautiful form. If one practises humbleness one misses the whole point. It is one of those few things which cannot be practised. Something else has to be done: that is, the heart has to melt into love, and then humbleness comes as a shadow of love, as a natural consequence. Then it has tremendous beauty because one is not even aware that one is humble.

The true humbleness is not self conscious, because the true humbleness means that the self is no more there to be; it is the disappearance of the ego. One cannot brag about it, one cannot even claim. It is very silent. One feels it, one knows it, but there is no way to express it; it is ineffable.

Anand means bliss, viren means courageous, courage. It is one of the most significant things to understand in life that to be miserable needs no courage, any coward can afford it. But to be blissful needs courage. That’s why there are so few blissful people in the world: they don’t fulfil the first

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requirement. It really needs tremendous courage, because the society is against blissful persons. The society is against the blissful person because the blissful person cannot be reduced to a thing, cannot be reduced to a machine. And the society is not interested in men; it is interested in machines – efficient, skilful, but machines – not men. The society is very much afraid of real men, because the real man means freedom, the real man means the capacity to say no, the capacity to revolt, the capacity to be oneself. The real man means not to be just a part of the crowd; and bliss is part of individuation. When one becomes individual, one is blissful, when one remains part of the mob psychology one remains miserable.

The masses live on the lowest rung of the ladder. It is very dark there and very dismal, but they don’t have the courage to rise higher. They are afraid of climbing the mountains, they are afraid of the risks. It is secure where they are; even if they fall, it is not dangerous, they are on plain ground. But the man who is searching for peaks of bliss – and bliss is the greatest peak, it is the Everest of life – has to be courageous. He has to be courageous to drop misery, he has to be courageous to drop all investment in misery, he has to be courageous to go into the unknown for the search of bliss. And once one has learned to take a few steps into the unknown. only the first steps are hesitant. There is a trembling. because one is moving beyond the boundaries of the known and the familiar. It is the same fear that the small child feels the first day he goes to the school, the same fear when the boy leaves home and goes to live in the hostel; that kind of thing is natural. It has to be accepted and transcended and then suddenly skies of bliss open up. There is no end. One cannot contain it, so much bliss is possible. One starts overflowing with it.

Deva means god, monika means an adviser – god is the only adviser. God is the guru in your heart. The outer guru only reflects the inner guru. I can only say things to you which your own heart wants to say to you but which you are not capable of hearing. I can translate it into your language, but whatsoever I say to you is nothing but a translation from your unconscious to the conscious.

The conscious does not know the language of the unconscious, hence a gap has happened between your being. The master fulfils that gap; he simply bridges your unconscious with your conscious.

Once it is bridged, then god is the adviser. Then all that you ever need will be communicated to you from the holiest of the holies, from the very centre of existence. Once you have learned how to be silent and to listen, you can hear the still, small voice within.

Prem means love, antonio means priceless. Love is the only thing that cannot be purchased, the only thing that is not a commodity available in the market-place, the only thing for which you can never pay enough. But it is available, and it is available just for the asking or just for the taking.

All that is really valuable is available free. It is like the air that we breathe: without air there is no life, but it is available free, although man has polluted it now and is destroying the very source of life itself every day. The same has happened on a subtle level as far as love is concerned. Man has polluted love even more than he has polluted the air. The air pollution is a very recent thing. It happened only after automobiles were invented, it happened only because of scientific developments; it is only within one hundred years that it has happened.

But priests have been polluting love for ten thousand years at least. They have destroyed the whole energy of it, they have poisoned the very source of love. It has to be reclaimed, because just as the

body cannot exist without air, the soul cannot exist without love. What air is to the body, love is to the soul: it is priceless but yet available free. Still, people are so stupid that they remain completely unaware of the great gift of god. The river goes on flowing by the side and they are thirsty.

One of the greatest Indian mystics, Kabir, has said: I laugh to no end because I see that the fish in the river is thirsty.

He is talking about man, the fish. He is talking about love, the river.

Anand means bliss, nirjana means aloneness – not loneliness mind you: aloneness. Loneliness is a negative state, empty. There is great urge for the other, you are missing the other; it is a state of misery. But aloneness is totally different. It is positive, full, too full. You are too full of yourself; there is no need of the other. You are overflowing with joy; the joy is welling up within you.

Loneliness is sad, aloneness is blissful. And unless one becomes capable of being alone, one is not mature. One remains immature, dependent, hankering for mummy or daddy or something or other – this toy, that toy, money, powerAll those things are nothing but things to stuff your inner emptiness

somehow, but that inner emptiness cannot be stuffed; it erupts again and again. It disappears only when you become alone; and the process of becoming alone is meditation.

It is the art of becoming alone, it is the art of finding one’s own inner juices. It is the very science of finding all that is needed within one’s own being; and once it is found, one is happy for no reason at all.

This does not mean that you will not relate with people; in fact only a person who is capable of being alone can relate, because he has something to share. The lonely person cannot relate, he can only exploit. The alone person is my definition of a sannyasin: he relates, he relates in many ways, in every possible way, he is not an escapist, but even in the crowd he is alone. His aloneness is such that nothing can destroy it, not even the market-place. That is the meaning of your name, and that has to become the meaning of your life too.

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