16

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‌CHAPTER 16

16 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, robbie means bright, shining one. God is the shining one. He shines through everything – through the flowers and through the stars and through the eyes of people. That which shines is divine, and the person is blind who cannot see it. Not to see god is the greatest calamity that can happen to a person, and that has happened to millions of people: people have become utterly incapable of seeing god. They can see the flower but they cannot feel the fragrance; they can see matter but they cannot taste consciousness. They can see only the gross and they go on missing the subtle; the subtle is the truer reality, the gross is only the cover. The whole search is: how to uncover the hidden one; and it is not difficult, because he is not only without, he is also within.

Right now it is he who is listening to me, right now it is he who is talking through me. When I look into your eyes he is looking into his own eyes, because god is the only reality and it is a very shining reality. It is simply unbelievable how people go on missing him.

Meditation helps to open your eyes. Sannyas becomes a commitment, a decisive act, that ‘I am not going this time without knowing god’. Once this commitment is there, miracles start happening; once this decisiveness is there, direction arises out of it.

Anand means bliss. patrice means noble. It is bliss that makes a person noble. The miserable person becomes automatically mean. The more miserable a person is, the more cunning, the more deceiving he becomes. It is natural; he wants to take revenge on life. He cannot be noble, he cannot allow himself to be noble. What has life given to him? Why should he feel good with life? He can’t have compassion.

My whole effort is first to make you more and more blissful so that you can be noble. The old system of thought that prevailed all over the world was: make people noble. But then nobility is just a facade, a cultivated screen around you; deep down you remain mean.

Nobility cannot be created. It is an overflow of inner bliss, it is a sharing of bliss, that makes a person noble. And bliss has some inbuilt tendency to be shared; you cannot hold it, there is no way. Bliss expands, it starts flowing; you cannot control it. That is one of the reasons why many people have chosen not to be blissful – because it cannot be controlled, you will never be in control of it; on the contrary it will possess you. Misery is good: you can control it, you are always in power with misery. With bliss you are gone, you disappear. Bliss takes possession of you so totally that the ego cannot have any space in it.

When bliss is there, it is not something static. It is like a river, flowing: it starts moving towards the ocean. And whenever bliss arises in the heart, it starts moving towards the universe, towards the ultimate; and that’s what makes a person noble.

Prem means love, diego means may god protect you. The full name will mean may god protect your love. Because love is your very soul. If love is saved, the soul is saved; if love is lost, all is lost. The whole thing hangs on the single phenomenon of love. With love you are in paradise; without it you are in hell. Hence sannyas is nothing but initiation into love.

Love and allow yourself to be loved. Let love become your very style of life. Let love be the suprememost value. Everything can be sacrificed for it, but it cannot be sacrificed for anything. Even if life has to be sacrificed, sacrifice it, because without love, life has no meaning; but never sacrifice love. In sacrificing it for anything you are destroying your own soul.

Millions of people are there who are walking on the streets without any soul. Just like zombies they go on moving through life, dragging themselves somehow. With love arising in your heart you are no more a zombie. Love brings its own intelligence, the intelligence of the heart; love brings its own joy, its own celebration, its own religion.

So let that small word ‘love’ become your whole bible, and all else shall follow.

Deva means god, maureen has two meanings, on the surface looking very different, even diametrically opposite to each other, but deep down related, deeply related, aspects of one phenomenon. One meaning is darkness, another meaning is greatness. On the surface one cannot find any relationship between the two, but deep down there is a relationship.

Light is always limited; darkness is unlimited. Light always has a boundary to it; darkness is unbounded, infinite. Light comes and goes; darkness abides. Light is temporal; darkness is eternal. Light is caused by something: you need fuel, you need something to cause it. Darkness is uncaused, it needs no fuel. It is like god, uncaused, and it is like god. always abiding.

Light is shallow; darkness has depth. Light demystifies things. Darkness is a mystery, hence it is great; it is immensely mysterious. God is more like darkness than like light, although all the scriptures say that god is light. They are not saying so because god is light but because people are afraid of darkness. And my feeling is: the person who is afraid of darkness will remain afraid of god too.

Scriptures say that god is light just to console people. People are very afraid of depth, darkness. death – and god is all these things. God is a death. The resurrection follows, but in the beginning is

death. And god is eternal darkness; impossible to demystify it. And god has abysmal depth; once you start falling into god there never comes a moment when the fall stops; there is nothing to stop. It is abysmal, infinite, and people are afraid of it.

Scriptures are written for people who are rooted in fear. All scriptures are somehow wish-fulfillments for the ordinary mind. They don’t state the truth; they only state the lie that is comfortable, consoling, cosy.

You have a beautiful name. God is darkness and god is great in his darkness; that is the meaning.

Deva means divine, susanne means white lily – a divine white lily. The white lily symbolises two things: one, whiteness has always been, in all the cultures, in all the civilisations, the symbol of innocence, purity; and secondly, the lily is a poor flower, it grows very easily, anywhere. It is a very humble flower, hence it represents humbleness.

So the white lily represents innocence and humbleness. They are aspects of the same coin. If one is innocent, one is automatically humble, and vice versa. And if one is innocent and humble, one is open to god; then god is not far away.

Be a white lily and god will find you; you need not go in search of him. Be innocent and be humble; that’s enough. Then you need not go in any search: he comes, it is always he that comes.

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