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‌CHAPTER 11

11 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Samagra means total, catherine comes from a Greek root, catheros; from the same root comes catharsis. It means the process of purification. Your full name will mean total process of purification. And this is what sannyas is all about: a process of cleansing.

The old religions used to repress. My approach is: instead of repressing, cathart, throw it out. Repressed, it enters into your unconscious being. Repressed anger will become a wound inside you, it will create poison. Thrown out of the system it leaves a beautiful clean space within. Of course there is no need to cathart it on a somebody in particular; one can simply cathart in vacuum. If you cathart your anger on somebody it creates anger in the other person; it starts a chain which is harmful to both. But yoU can close your room; alone you can go into deep anger. You can dance in anger, you can beat the pillow, you can shout, you can scream. Slowly slowly you will see that all the energy that was involved in anger is released, and it leaves behind a silence, the silence that comes after the storm. It has immense beauty and value.

Anand means bliss, pratimo means an image – an image of bliss. Man is born to become an image of bliss. Man has that innate capacity to just be a festival... from the cradle to the grave, a pure celebration. Very few people have achieved it, that is true, but everybody can achieve it. just a little understanding, a little search into one’s own misery, a little investigation into the causes of why one goes on missing – just a little effort, just a little intelligence, not much is needed – and one can change the whole gestalt. One can simply get out of all kinds of miseries into a totally different world of bliss and benediction.

And unless this is attained, one goes on feeling that ‘I am not that which I am meant to be’. One goes on suspecting that something is missing. One knows perfectly well, deep down in the heart ‘I have not fulfilled my own self’,‘I have remained a seed; the season is passing and I could have bloomed’.

My teaching consists of only one word: become more and more blissful, cheerful, festive, celebrating. Don’t miss a single opportunity to celebrate, because whatsoever we do, we become capable of doing more.

Deva means god, ina means praise – god’s praise. That is the intrinsic meaning of prayer: praising existence, feeling grateful – for life, for the beauty of nature, for the splendour of the stars, feeling grateful for all that is and praising it. It is not a question of words; it is a gut feeling.

There are people who are continuously complaining; that is their gut feeling. They are searching for excuses to complain; in every situation they will find something wrong. I know one person who has changed the famous proverb: Every dark cloud has a silver lining. He has changed it; he says: Every silver lining has a dark cloud. There are people who go on looking for the negative; and if you look you will find it.

This is the mystery of life: whatsoever you look for, you are bound to find, because life is both – thorns and roses. If you are looking for thorns you will get them. and the more you become skilful in finding them. the more you will get them. It is better to start searching for roses. The only kind of intelligence is that which searches for roses.

Then, naturally, great praise arises. The heart starts throbbing with praise, the body vibrates with prayer Words or no words, that is not the question; whether it is said or not, that is not the question, but if it is there. it is heard: it reaches to the ultimate.

Jivan means life, andrea means courage. Life needs great courage. The cowardly only exist, they don’t live, because their whole life remains fear-oriented; and the fear-oriented life is worse than death. They live in a kind of paranoia, they are afraid of everything; and not only of real things, they are afraid of unreal things too. They are afraid of hell, they are afraid of ghosts, they are afraid of god. They are afraid of a thousand and one things which they have imagined themselves, or others like them. Fear becomes so much that it becomes impossible to live.

Only the courageous can live. The first step to be learned is courage. In spite of all fears, one should start living. And why is courage needed to live? – because life is insecurity. If you become too conscious of safety, security, then you will remain confined to a very small corner, almost in a prison made by yourself. It will be safe but it will not be alive. It will be secure but it will have no adventure and no ecstasy.

Life consists in exploring, going into the unknown, reaching for the stars! Be courageous, and sacrifice everything at the feet of life; nothing is more valuable. Don’t sacrifice your life for small things – money, security, safety; nothing is valuable. One has to live one’s life as totally as possible, then only does joy arise, then only does the overflowing bliss become possible. And unless you start overflowing, you will remain poor. The moment you overflow, you are an emperor. Then life is not beggarly, then you have the kingdom of g available to you, it is yours.

So learn the first lesson and start moving bit by bit into more and more courageous and dangerous ways.

Deva means divine, lino means lost in, drowned in – drowned in the divine, drunk with the divine. And that is the only thing worth learning – how to become a divine drunkard, how to live so intensely

and so passionately that each moment is transformed into eternity. It is possible, it is not impossible. In fact it is not even difficult, because it is our intrinsic nature. The difficulty is not natural; the difficulty is created by the society, by the culture, by the conditioning. Rocks have been put around you so that your natural life energy cannot flow.

All that is needed is removing of the rocks, hence it is not difficult. Those rocks are foreign; they can be removed and thrown away. They are not part of you; it does not hurt to remove them. It hurts only if you think that those rocks are very valuable, it hurts only if you become identified with those rocks. But that’s what my work here is: to make you aware that you are not those rocks. Once this is understood, felt, the removal of the rocks is very easy.

It is just like one is ill and needs medicine to remove the illness. No medicine can give you health: the medicine only removes illness and then health wells up. Exactly like that, misery is in the rocks that have been put around you. Once those rocks are removed, blissfulness simply starts flowing. It does not come from anywhere else: it comes from your innermost core.

Anand means bliss, rupam means beauty. Bliss brings beauty, a totally different kind of beauty: not of the physical, not of the formal, but of the inner; not of the body but of that which lives in the body – the beauty of the soul. It starts affecting the body immediately, it also makes the body beautiful. It starts changing the very quality of the body: it makes the body soft, it makes the body graceful, it makes the body more and more tranquil, silent, relaxed. But those are by-products. The real thing happens inside; the circumference only radiates it.

Because of this a great misunderstanding has prevailed. Whenever the inner is beautiful the outer automatically becomes beautiful. But we cannot see the inner of the other, we can only see the outer, hence the fallacy: whenever we see a person beautiful from the outside we conclude that the person must be beautiful inside too. That is not necessarily so. When the inner is beautiful the outer reflects it, necessarily, but vice versa is not true: the outer can be beautiful and the inner may be very ugly. This creates great problems in life because we can see only the outer of the other person. We fall in love with the outer and sooner or later the inner ugliness starts surfacing.

But there is some relationship between beauty and inner bliss. It is impossible to be ugly if the inner bliss happens. The ugliest person will also start reflecting something of the inner beauty. Even the ugliest house, if the lamp is inside, the light is inside, will start radiating light outside in the darkness of the night. Bliss inside becomes luminous and the body starts diffusing it into the world.

But the beginning should be from the inner. One can paint, one can go into plastic surgery and can somehow make it look beautiful, but it is just a facade, it is pseudo it is utterly meaningless. The real beauty happens only through meditation, because bliss happens through meditation.

Anand means blissful; donna sounds beautiful so I will keep it, although it means lady! To be a woman is enough, to be a natural woman is enough. A lady is something artificial, cultured. In the past the lady has been praised very much, because in the past artificial qualities. arbitrary qualities, were thought to be very very valuable. Because of those artificial qualities the natural was repressed.

Woman has suffered more from unnatural qualities that were taught to her than from anything else. Every girl was taught to be ladylike: Don’t do it, it is not ladylike. For thousands of years women

have lived unnaturally, and because of that they missed much. They became so arbitrary, their whole life became just a long long tragedy. They were not really living, authentic persons. They were just playing a role that was taught to them, they were just acting it. Of course if you go on acting something for a long period it becomes second nature, but second nature is not nature. It keeps you away from your reality.

I respect the natural woman, the natural man. To be natural is the greatest need today, otherwise humanity is going to disappear. We have to learn how to be raw again, we have to learn how to be a little wild again. We have to learn again to love, to live, to be, as nature means us to be, not as the society demands.

Woman can never be free unless she drops artificial conditionings. It is difficult to drop them because the society respects you for those qualities. It is very ego-fulfilling, so to drop them seems to be very difficult. But I hope that my sannyasins slowly slowly will be able to drop all that is artificial and will start living as naturally as possible. And with nature joy arises. The joy of the trees and the birds and the animals becomes available to us too, and that joy is the first ray of god’s experience.

Shanta means peace, ananda means bliss. Shantananda means bliss that comes out of peace.

Mind is constantly in turmoil; thousands of thoughts, desires, dreams, constantly go on passing. The screen is never empty, something or other is continuously there. The traffic is constant; even when you are asleep the traffic continues, and the noise is deafening. Because of this noisy mind and this continuous noise, one loses the sensitivity to feel one’s being, one’s inner voice, one’s inner sound. One is cut off from oneself.

The first thing for a sannyasin to learn is how to be a little still, silent, peaceful; and the way is to watch the mind. Fight is not going to help; just watch the mind. Let the traffic pass. Just sit by the side of the road and watch the traffic, with no judgment, with no evaluation, with no choice. Just go on watching, aloof, distant. Just be a witness, and as the witnessing deepens, the traffic lessens. Then a few moments start coming when the traffic is not there; you are simply there watching and there is nothing to watch. In those moments for the first time you will know the meaning of the word ‘peace’ – not the meaning that is given in the dictionary but the existential meaning, the experiential meaning of what peace is. And from that door of peace a new phenomenon starts coming: bliss.

Once you are peaceful, bliss starts showering on you.

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