12

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 12

12 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin explains her son’s name, Jolon: valley of the dead oak trees.]

Prem means love. Love and death are very deeply related. Love is a kind of death: it is the death of the ego. Those who are not capable of dying cannot be capable of love either, because it is the same phenomenon looked at from different angles. Those who know how to love will know how to die too. Their death will be a grace, a beauty. Their death will not be an end, but a beginning, a beginning of something which we cannot visualise because it is invisible, a beginning of something which can only be experienced and cannot be described. Those who are capable of love, for them death is transformed; it becomes a door into the divine. Those who have missed love, they will miss their death too. They will not be able to willingly disappear into death, and because of their unwillingness they will go unconscious. Because of their resistance they will be dragged into death; they will not go dancing into it.

One who knows how to live, how to love and how to die, knows all that is worth knowing; everything else is of no significance. These three things: life, love and death – this is the trinity I teach.

Prem means love, ria means the origin of a river. Love is a river. Love is not really love unless it is a river. It is energy moving, dancing, flowing. Love cannot be stagnant; if it is, it dies. Its existence depends on flow, on movement. For it to be means to be flowing. Love can never be reduced to a noun, it remains a verb, but this is one of the problems with our languages: we have reduced everything to a noun, even things which cannot be reduced.

Love is loving. Love is not a noun, it is the activity of loving. It is not something complete and finished. It is something on the way, always on the way, a movement to the very far-away, distant star, a hope, a dream, but never a thing. You cannot manipulate it, you cannot transfer it, you cannot manage it, because when it is there you are drowned in its flood.

But we have done the same with everything. The word ‘faith’ is wrong because it has become a noun; faithing will be right; it will be a verb. Man has changed his experiences into nouns for a certain reason. They become definable, there is a beginning and an end, you can draw a boundary around them. Then the mind can create a concept of what it is, then the mind can label it. But once something is flowing and one never knows what is going to happen next moment, when it is changing moment to moment, when it is a flux. the mind is at a loss. It cannot be labelled, it cannot be defined, it cannot become a concept; and the mind feels very much embarrassed by anything that is so mysterious.

The mind is constantly trying to demystify everything in life, and it has succeeded in many ways. It has demystified all that is beautiful and all that is valuable, and now man is bored. It is because of the mind that the whole humanity is bored. It has demystified everything, now there is no excitement left, no ecstasy left.

My work here consists in changing nouns back into verbs: love into loving, faith into faithing. even river into rivering. And once this becomes clear, your life starts taking on a totally different colour, a different flavour. A great joy arises, because now each moment is going to be a surprise. Each moment is going to be unexpected and unpredictable, and when life is unpredictable there is ecstasy, there is thrill. Instead of boredom there is zestfulness. One is overflowing and one is constantly in contact with the existence that is.

Anand means bliss, Ingrid is a mythological name for the god of fertility, prosperity, peace. The full name will mean goddess of fertility, prosperity, peace and bliss. They all come together, they are all different facets of the same phenomenon. The creative person is fertile, the creative person is blissful. The creative person is rich and the creative person is at ease with existence.

To be creative is to be a sannyasin. I teach creativity because it is only through creativity that man comes closer to the creator, obviously; there can’t be any other way. If god is the creator, then to be creative must be the only way to be closer to him, and when one is lost in creativity, utterly lost. one is in god.

Poets are far closer than the priests, painters far closer than the theologians. A dancer, a singer, is far closer than your so-called saints, because they are unfertile. In the past religion has been very uncreative and unfertile, that’s why slowly slowly it died. Now it exists only as a corpse – venerable, respectable, but a corpse all the same. Now churches are nothing but cemeteries, and the reason is that in the past religion never tried to be creative, it never respected creativity. On the contrary it respected the person who renounced everything and became utterly inactive, passive. He started living a kind of slow death. He moved in a monastery and slowly slowly faded out.

My approach is just the opposite: create, be fertile. Life is an opportunity to be creative, and only the creative person knows what joy is. When something is created there is a great exhilaration, ecstasy. Only the creative person is rich; he may be a beggar but he is rich. And the uncreative person may be an emperor but he is poor. The creative person constantly finds himself in deep harmony with existence. In fact only because of that harmony can he create. If you are in harmony with the sunset you may be able to paint it; if you are in harmony with a rose flower you may be able to sing a song of it.

Creativity brings harmony, harmony brings more creativity, and so on and so forth. Just as there are vicious circles, there are virtuous circles too. One thing leads to another, and it goes on and on, moving towards a crescendo. At the ultimate peak is god.

Deva means divine, herman means a warrior – a divine warrior. Life is not only a struggle on the mundane plane; it is also a struggle on higher planes. In fact the higher the plane, the greater is the struggle. Life is easy if you remain on the lowest rung of the ladder because you don’t really live, you only vegetate. The higher you climb on the ladder, the more and more the gravitation of the earth pulls you downwards. The higher you move on the ladder, you have to learn how to live with pure air, more and more pure, and you have to learn how to live with the infinity of the sky.

All boundaries disappear, there seems to be no shelter. All that was familiar is no more there, one is utterly in the unknown. Where to go? – no direction, no milestones, no arrows pointing the way, all maps gone and one is in the uncharted sea and... the small boat of life. Yes, one has to be a warrior, one has to have great courage. Only then does one reach to god.

But the struggle is very sweet. When you fight for small things the struggle is mean. It demoralises you, it destroys your dignity. When the struggle is for the higher it gives you dignity, it glorifies you. One starts respecting oneself, a great reverence for oneself arises. When the struggle is for money one is bound to become mean, and when the struggle is for meditation one is bound to become very very compassionate, very large-hearted, big-hearted, open, available, sharing.

Fight for the higher and go on seeking newer and newer, higher goals to fight for. One has to reach to the ultimate, and unless the ultimate is reached, one can rest for a while, but it has to be only an overnight’s stay. Remember that in the morning one has to continue the pilgrimage.

It becomes difficult as you move higher but it also becomes more and more ecstatic. It becomes dangerous but at the same time it becomes immensely blissful too.

Anand means bliss, bob means bright – a blissful brightness. Blissfulness automatically brings a tremendous rush of intelligence. Blissfulness is luminous, it is very bright, shining. You cannot hide it, there is no way to hide it. If people don’t see it, that simply means that they are blind – not that you are capable of hiding it. If they don’t recognise Jesus it simply shows that they are blind, not that Jesus can hide himself; there is no way.

Those who had eyes immediately recognised him; the simple people – the farmers, the gardeners, the fishermen. The simple people recognised him because their eyes were not covered by knowledge – knowledge functions like a blindfold. The rabbis could not recognise him; they had to destroy him. He appeared to them as if he were a mischief-monger, dangerous. They could not see that he was a messiah; they could only see that he was a mischief, dangerous to the public morality.

Whenever there is bliss there is no way to hide it; but this is unfortunate, that even Buddhas remain unrecognised by the millions.

Jesus says again and again to his disciples If you have eyes to see, see. If you have ears to hear, hear. He is not talking about the ordinary eyes and ears; he is talking about the inner insight. At

the last moment on the cross he had to pray to god: Forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing. They are blind, they are deaf; they have not seen me, they have not heard me.

And bliss is not something that you have to get from somebody else. It is not something that you have to purchase, cultivate, earn; it is already the case. It is your innermost, innate quality. It has to be discovered, rather, rediscovered. Just a little garbage that is surrounding it has to be pushed aside, and then the diamond of your inner being is so luminous, so bright. that the mystics say even the sun is not so bright!

< Previous | Contents | Next >