10

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‌CHAPTER 10

10 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Atmo means the self, and volker means the master – master not of the people but master of one’s self.

That is true mastery; to be master of others is really a poor substitute. People try to be masters of others because they are not masters of themselves. Once the self-mastery has happened, all desire to dominate, all desire to possess, all desire to be superior, simply disappears. That disappearance takes away the whole burden of life, as if a mountain was being carried on the head and it is no more there. One feels so light that one can almost fly.

So be a master of your own self!

[The new sannyasin explains the meaning of his son’s name: It means going straight to the light. It’s the name of one of the oldest angels, Serafin.]

But I have found a better meaning! Serafin means the burning one. Prem means love and serafin, burning one – burning love, the fire of love. Love is fire; it consumes the ego, and then only the pure self is left behind. It consumes all that is foreign and leaves only the natural, and that naturalness is what god is. To be utterly innocent and natural is to be divine. One has to go through the fire of love to be purified.

Prem means love, sarah means princess – princess of love. Love makes everybody a prince or a princess. Love bestows great riches, the inner wealth. It opens the doors of the inner kingdom of god. Everybody is meant to be a prince or a princess, and if people are not, it is their own decision. Out of their own stupid decisions they have become beggars.

Search outside and you will remain a beggar; search within and immediately you are a king, an emperor.

Michael means godlike, premanando means love and bliss. those two dualities are godlike, they make a man divine: bliss within and love flowing towards the whole existence. Bliss is the experience when you penetrate your own centre, and love is the sharing of that experience with others. Love is the shadow of bliss, a by-product of bliss. Only the blissful person can be loving; vice versa is not possible.

People try that: they think that by loving they will become blissful; they are hoping in vain. Yes, there will be great expectation, excitement, but in the end all that is left is a great frustration. Love cannot bring bliss. but bliss always. automatically, brings love. It is like I cannot invite your shadow to be a guest with me, but I can invite you, and the shadow comes of its own accord.

Bliss is the thing to be searched for; love happens of its own accord. The more you become blissful, the more you become loving. These two dualities take you beyond the human, they take you to the plane of the divine. They are godlike dualities: god is absolute bliss and absolute love.

Anand means bliss. albert means noble. Bliss always makes a person noble; it is misery that makes a person mean. Misery is a sin; all other sins are born out of misery. Bliss is virtue, the basic virtue, and all that is noble arises out of it. People try to cultivate noble dualities; they cannot be cultivated unless bliss happens. You can cultivate them but they will remain phoney, just masks. Deep down you will remain the same – the same animal instinctive, mean attitudes towards life, just white-washed.

I don’t teach the cultivation of any other virtue except bliss; and bliss cannot be cultivated. It has to be discovered, it is already there. It is not something that you have to bring into existence. You are born with it, it is inborn, it is innate; it has simply to be discovered. It has got lost in social conditionings. It is hiding behind much rubbish. One just has to search and find the diamond again, and once the diamond is there, one is noble.

The blissful person is noble simply for no other reason than that he cannot be otherwise.

Deva means divine, henk means the ruler of the home. Your full name will mean the divine ruler of the home. By the home I don’t literally mean the home. but metaphorically. Your body is your home, your inner space is your home. We can exist there as a slave or as a master. If we are asleep, we exist as a slave; if we are awake, we become the master. Hence all the religions are basically nothing but methodologies to awaken consciousness.

Our real being is fast asleep. And because the real being is fast asleep, the mind which is just a servant has become a ruler. It is very good as a servant and very bad as a ruler. Unless this sleeping consciousness awakens one remains miserable, because one starts living a life which one is not meant to. Everything is upside-down: the servant is the master and the master is asleep. The servant knows nothing and goes on pretending that it does. And the problem becomes more complicated because there is not one mind in you but many, so there is not one servant but many servants pretending to be masters, a crowd. So one becomes a victim of a crowd – each desire pulling one in its own direction and each thought trying to dominate one. There is great competition and a conflict inside.

This is the situation of the ordinary man, a very maddening state. But a miracle happens once the awareness comes back: once you wake up, immediately all the servants fall in line, they are

immediately ready to follow. Once the master arrives, there is no need for any other discipline: discipline happens of its own accord. The very presence of awareness is enough and the miracle happens.

Prabhu means god, claus means victory – god’s victory, not yours. Let god be victorious over yoU; surrender! Let this be your only prayer: Thy will be done. thy kingdom come.

Let this be your only longing that ‘I should be defeated utterly. absolutely’, that ‘I should become anonymous, that ’I should be just an emptiness to receive god, an open door; that’s all that I should be.’

Once this becomes possible one attains to things which look impossible to the mind. Yes, even the impossible becomes possible if you can efface yourself totally. If you can put yourself aside, if you can say ‘I am not’, you are! This is what prayer is all about, what meditation is all about: I am not; you are.

A great mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi, has written a poem: A lover knocks on the door of his beloved and the beloved asks ‘Who are you?’ He says ‘I am your lover – open the door!’ There is great silence and the beloved says ‘This house is too small, it cannot contain two. So first prepare, be ready, then come.’

The lover goes, prepares himself. Years pass, and when he is ready he comes back and knocks again. The same question: ‘Who are you?’ He says ‘Now only you are’, and the doors are immediately opened.

This should be your prayer, this should be your way: I am not, you are, because love’s house is too small, it cannot contain two.

Anand Verena... will mean a garden of bliss.

Man has immense potentialities. Many flowers can bloom in his being – marigolds and roses and lotuses. Man is multi-dimensional; but we live without any awareness of all these possibilities. We go on crawling in the mud without being aware at all that we have wings and we can fly to the stars. It is good to be rooted in the earth, but to forget the sky is a calamity.

Be rooted in the earth and go on reaching for the stars. In that very reaching one becomes a garden. In that very longing flowers start blooming. That very effort to reach to the stars creates the context for growth, and when the longing is pure the fragrance is immense, infinite.

[A sannyasin said that his mother died last year and it was a very intense experience for him.]

It is always an intense thing when a mother dies, because there is such a bond with the mother. It may be of love or hate, but either way it is the strongest bond there is. But don’t be obsessed with it too much, otherwise it can be destructive.

One should be able to say good-bye; because many people will leave. Your mother has left, then some others will leave, and sooner or later everybody has to leave, so we have to learn to say

good-bye. Yes, it is sad, it leaves wounds, but there is no need to take any pride in those wounds, otherwise you will never allow them to heal. They have to be allowed, helped, to heal.

So this is an opportunity to grow. When your mother dies you are really free from the past. Make it an opportunity to grow. Now there is nobody to hold you back. Feel thankful, grateful, but don’t start living in memories. Once a person starts living in memories too much he loses contact with reality, and that is dangerous.

[A sannyasin, arriving, says: Sometimes everything becomes very transparent and fear arises. It’s you who helps me to handle it. Thank you.]

It will disappear by and by; nothing to be worried about.

Whenever anything negative – fear, anger, sadness. anything negative – arises, remember only one thing: ‘I am not it’; and the second thing, that it will pass away, it is only for the moment. So don’t become overwhelmed by it too much, remain detached. See that it is there and accept that it is there. Don’t repress it, there is no need to: it goes on its own. And don’t fight with it either; just accept it. It is there, leave it, knowing perfectly well that it will go. Remain centred in the feeling that ‘I am not it’, and soon negative things will disappear; and when negative things disappear then the positive arises. The positive is not the opposite of the negative; the positive is the absence of the negative.

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