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CHAPTER 22
24 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Deva means god, ray means a wise protector – god, the wise protector. We are protected each and every moment of our lives. We may not be aware of it, but the protection is always there. We are not strangers to existence, we are part of it; and we are not unnecessary, not accidental, we are intrinsically necessary. Without us there will be no existence, just as without existence we will not be there; we are inter-dependent. And the whole automatically protects the part, and protects it with tremendous wisdom.
Once you become aware of it great gratitude arises. Then even while you are in suffering you know that it must be a blessing in disguise. Then even suffering is no more suffering; by the change of your attitude you have changed the very quality of the thing. The world remains the same; our attitudes change, and the change of the attitude is a change of the whole world in which you had lived before. It disappears; a new world starts appearing.
So always think in terms of being protected, loved, secure. There is no need to worry about it, there is no need to think of safety all is safe in god’s hands. And by ‘god’ I don’t mean a person but simply a principle: the principle that connects the whole, the thread that connects the whole, the thread that makes it a garland and not a heap of flowers, a thread that makes it a cosmos and not a chaos.
Bodhigyan. Bodhi means enlightenment, gyan means wisdom – wisdom that comes through enlightenment. That is the only kind of wisdom there is; all else is mere knowledge. Knowledge comes from without, wisdom comes from within. Knowledge is borrowed. wisdom is yours, authentically yours. Knowledge makes you a parrot. Wisdom gives you total freedom from all kinds of imitation. For the first time you are just your own being. and to be just your own being is the greatest achievement because it is freedom, because it gives you wings, because it makes available to you the whole sky of existence and its mysteries.
Knowledge destroys mysteries, it demystifies existence. Wisdom mystifies it, it makes it more and more mysterious. The deeper your wisdom, the more wise you are, the less you know. When one has reached to the ultimate peak of wisdom, one knows nothing or one knows only nothing. That is ultimate innocence: knowing nothing. The purity of it and the beauty of it are immeasurable.
Prem means love, johannes means god is gracious. Love, god’s grace – that will be the full meaning of your name. God and his grace come in the form of love. Love is the first ray that penetrates the heart and starts a process of transformation. It is the first experience of grace, and slowly slowly as the experience becomes more and more profound one starts feeling the invisible hands of god behind it. So the first experience is of love, the second experience is of grace, and the third experience is of god.
It is possible when love arises that you may not think of grace; then you are stuck at love. Then you are missing an opportunity. When love arises, if you think this is all, an end in itself, then you became satisfied too early. It was just a beginning, just a stirring. Much more was to come; it was just the opening of the door. One need not cling to it. One has to go deeper and deeper, and the only way to go deeper is to go beyond.
One has to be alert of something more that comes always like an aroma, a fragrance. Love is very visible like a flower; grace is more subtle, like a fragrance.
Unless you are very alert you will miss it. Millions of people in the world miss love; they can be forgiven. But there are a few who attain to love but miss grace; they cannot be forgiven.
Once you start feeling grace then love is no more a doing of your own; it is a happening. It is something that is beyond you, that overwhelms you, that is bigger than you. You start having a new context to your life, and significance arises out of it. But to stop at grace is again missing the point – although it is more difficult to stop at grace than it was to get stuck at love.
It is more difficult to stop at grace because grace is already half the journey: one starts having an inkling of the divine hand behind. But one can get stuck there too. That’s why there are religions that accept grace but deny god. They are stuck at grace and they think this is enough. Peace has descended, compassion has been found, wisdom has arisen, what more can there be? There is still more, there is always more; it is unending.
So when grace happens, start searching god must be very close by. It is so subtle that we cannot even call it a fragrance. It is so subtle that we can only call it an absence, not even a presence. It exists in a very non-existential way. It exists as the empty sky. That’s why Buddha calls it nirvana – utter cessation of all. Just a pure emptiness is left behind; nobody as an observer, nobody as an observed. That’s god!
So start by love, move to grace, and go on moving into god. Unless you disappear completely never believe in any stoppage, never believe that any stop is a destination. Unless you disappear completely the journey has to be continued. When you are gone, gone forever, then the goal is achieved. When the achiever is no more, the goal is achieved. That is the paradox.
Anand Jan-France. Anand means blissful, jan means god’s grace, france means freedom – god’s grace as blissful freedom. There is nothing more blissful than freedom. That is the deepest desire
in the human heart: to be free of it all, just to be without any limitation, just to be without any circumference, because each circumference becomes a confinement, each definition limits, and one starts feeling encaged, imprisoned. So one may not be aware, very few are aware of it, that our deepest desire is to be ultimately free.
God can come with a blissful gift of freedom, we just have to allow him. We hinder, we create all kinds of obstructions. Man is really so foolish that he is the greatest enemy of himself. He creates misery with great effort, and he goes on missing all blissful moments which were just there for the asking or just there for the taking. No effort was needed, because bliss is our nature. It needs no other condition to be fulfilled to attain it: it is already there, it is already the case.
Misery needs much effort, much planning, much thinking, but man is so stupid that he strives hard to be miserable. When he is miserable he starts thinking how to get out of it, and in the first place there is no need to get into it.
The really intelligent person is not one who knows how to get out of misery; the really intelligent person is one who knows how not to get into it. Getting out of it is more difficult, very difficult, because one thing leads to another. But not to get into it is very simple: a little alertness, a little witnessing, a little watchfulness, that’s all.
Be a little on guard and you will be surprised: ninety-nine percent of miseries simply disappear. and the one percent that will not disappear you will be able to accept because it will be part of your growth. It will be a pain that is not painful but sweet.
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