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CHAPTER 20
20 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Anand means bliss, kerry is a name of a place. Bliss is a place within you, it is a space within you. It is not something that happens to you: it is already there. It has just to be allowed to overflow, to overwhelm you.
We have created many hindrances for it, we have blocked all its ways. The society has existed in a repressive way. Repression has been the religion up to now, and because of repression, religion has gone pathological.
Real religion can only be of expression, not of repression. All the blocks have to be removed, all the inhibitions, taboos, have to be removed. One has to become again innocent, and suddenly it is there and it starts flowing, it wells up.
It is a place within you, it does not come from the without.
Prem means love, renate means reborn. Sannyas is love reborn. It is a rebirth, the birth of the soul. The first birth is only physical, and those who are contented with it are simply befooling themselves. The first birth is significant only if the second happens. The first is only a means, the second is the end: the second birth is the birth of the real you.
Jesus says to Nicodemus: Unless you are born again you will not be able to enter into my kingdom of god.
That’s exactly the meaning of renate: unless you are born again.And the only way to be born
again, to be twice born, is through love. If you love, you are constantly renewing yourself; if you love totally, each moment you are born again. Then the whole of life becomes just a sequence of rebirths and then each moment is a surprise and each moment is a joy.
That’s how one comes to the temple of immortality. By being reborn again and again and again one comes to know the innermost core, which is beyond birth, beyond death.
Veet means going beyond, noriyuki means ritual – going beyond the ritual. Then one encounters the real. Reality is not a ritual. Ritual is man-made; it is an invention, a consolation, a poor substitute for the real. And one who wants to know the real has to drop all rituals, all formalities. One has to become natural, informal, spontaneous.
Religion is in being natural. Whenever a religion becomes a ritual it is a corpse of the religion. Whenever a religion is alive it has no rituals, it lives moment to moment; and that’s how a sannyasin has to be.
Live moment to moment, not according to any prefabricated ritual, not according to any schedule, not according to any ready-made answers but responding to the real, in the present. Out of the present one comes to realise oneself, and that realisation becomes the door of the divine.
Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, all have become rituals; that calamity befalls all great religions. When Buddha is alive religion is not a ritual; when Buddha dies people make rituals. They simply learn how to repeat, how to imitate. All significance is lost. The centre is simply forgotten, only the circumference remains. Hence one has to seek a living Buddha as a master, where religion is still breathing and pulsating – and that’s what sannyas is all about.
Deva means god, and kosuke means cultivation – cultivation of god.
Once Buddha was passing through a village; he came across an old farmer. The old man asked him ‘What do you do?’ Buddha said ‘First you answer me: What do you do?’ The man said ‘I am a cultivator.’ Buddha laughed and said ‘I am also a cultivator.’
Now it was the turn of the old man to laugh; he said ‘You are joking. You, a cultivator? What do you cultivate?’ Buddha said ‘I cultivate truth, I cultivate god, I cultivate meditation. I sow the seeds of the divine!’
So become a cultivator of god. [Shuichi means to master one thing.]
Atma Shuichi. Atma means the supreme self. Master only one thing: your own self, because that is the greatest mastery, in fact the only mastery. To master others is just an effort to cover up one’s own inner slavery. To master oneself is to enter into the kingdom of god. It is difficult, arduous, but not impossible. And because it is difficult and arduous, it is a great challenge. It is a challenge which has to be accepted and overcome.
Sannyas is a challenge to master yourself, and the way towards this mastery is by becoming more and more aware, alert, understanding.
Knowledge is power. It is power in the world of science, it is also power in the world of religion. One can master oneself only if one knows oneself. Hence ’Know thyself is the key towards self-mastery.
Deva means divine, edgar means richness – divine richness. Man is poor without god. One may have all the riches of the world but one remains poor without god. In fact the more you possess in the world, the poorer you start feeling in contrast. The outer becomes richer and richer and the inner is empty. Hence the paradox: the richest man in the world is the poorest.
Alexander the Great suffered very much in his last days because he became aware of his poverty, his utter poverty. He was just a few miles away from his capitol and wanted to reach the capitol because he had promised his mother that he would come back – that after he conquered the East he would come back. There was just one day’s journey more, but his physician said ‘It is not possible, you cannot survive twenty-four hours. And it is risky, the journey cannot be taken.’
He cried: he said ‘Then what use are all of my riches? I am ready to give anything – just save me for twenty-four hours. I promised my mother.’
But the physician said ‘What can we do? Life is disappearing. At the most you can survive two, three hours, not more than that. Even if you give your whole empire, it cannot purchase even a single moment of life.’
Just see how poor he must have felt in those moments! When he died, the last thing he said was ‘When you take my coffin, let my hands hang out of it.’ ‘Why?’ the people asked. He said ‘So that everybody can see that even Alexander the Great is going empty-handed, a poor man, a beggar.’
There is only one kind of richness, and that is when you become harmonious with the whole, when you start feeling in tune with existence. That tuning is god, that harmony is god. God is not a person, god is a principle – the principle of harmony, the principle of being in accord with nature. God cannot be worshipped, god can only be lived. If you live in harmony, you live god. All churches and all temples are false because god is not a person so there is no point in worshipping: either you live him or you don’t live him.
Live god and become rich!
Anand means bliss, gerda means garden – a bliss garden. That’s exactly the meaning of the word ‘paradise’: a walled garden of bliss. Paradise is not somewhere else, it is not geographical. It has something to do with your psychology, with your soul; it is an inner space.
People are like deserts in their inner world, nothing grows there; and unless something starts growing in your inner world, you cannot grow. So people only age, they don’t grow: they become older but they never become grown-ups. They remain deserts. dry; their life is utterly juiceless. But down the ages we have worshipped these people as saints.
My effort here is just the opposite. I would like my sannyasins to be gardens, not deserts – green with all the green of the trees and all the red of the trees and all the gold of the trees, and full of sap and juice. Then life has a different flavour, a different dance. Then it has a fragrance, and that fragrance becomes the proof that god exists.
God is not a conclusion of syllogistic thought: god is an experience of inner flowering. It is possible. and to miss it is really to miss all. The whole of life is then a sheer wastage. And it is not far away
either – very close by. Just a little effort and you can transform your desert into a garden – just a little effort; and that little effort is what I call meditation.
Call it meditation, call it prayer, call it silence, any name will do, but the essential point is: start dropping the mind with all its noisy thoughts. Become more
silent, more a no-mind, and then from a desert you are transformed into a garden.
Prem means love, makoto means truth. Truth is not available through the mind, it is not a conclusion of logic. Truth can only be reached through the heart; it is the flowering of love. Only the lovers know what is. Love is the only way of knowing the truth, hence science can never know it. Science can only know the fact but never the truth. Fact is only the circumference; truth is the centre. It is only the arrow of love that can penetrate to the very centre of it.
There are two ways of knowing. One is through logic: through logic you can know about others but never about yourself. You can know about objects but never anything about the subject; the knower remains unknown. There is the other way of knowing: the way of love. Through it you cannot know the objective world but you can know the knower. And that should be the first step of any intelligent person: to know oneself should be the base of one’s life. Everything else is secondary.
Self-knowledge is the goal. Use everything as a means towards it.
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