25

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‌CHAPTER 25

28 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, david means god’s, the lord’s – one who belongs to god, bliss that is god’s. There is a bliss which is not ours, which cannot be ours; we cannot claim it as a possession. It comes on its own and goes on its own; it is a visitor.

The moment we try to possess it, we destroy it. To possess it is to lose it. One has to learn the way of non possessiveness for it to remain. One has to learn to be just a passive receptivity for it, just a host, taking every care but in no way dominating it, in no way manipulating it.

It is a hard task because when bliss comes one wants to grab it. One becomes so afraid that one may lose it; it may be gone, it may not come again. One wants to reduce it to a certainty; and in that very longing we destroy it, it is lost forever. If we do it again and again it may stop happening to us, because it is a happening. it is not a doing – and doing is just contrary to happening. Doing has to cease for the happening to be.

All that is really valuable – bliss love, truth, prayer – they all come from the beyond, they belong to god. They are gifts, and we should not claim that they belong to us; on the contrary we should allow ourselves to be possessed by them. Then they become an abiding factor. Then the guest slowly slowly merges into the host and becomes one.

Prem means love, helga means holy – holy love. Love can be very earthly, love can also be very holy. Love is a ladder between this and that, between the material and the spiritual, between this world and that world. One end of the ladder is rooted in the earth; the other end reaches beyond into the sky.

But millions never become aware of the holiness of love. They know its sensuality, its sexuality, they know its physicalness, but that’s all they know. They never become aware that something

tremendously valuable is hidden behind it, that love contains prayer, that at the innermost core love contains god himself, that love is a seed. If given the right soil and the right climate and the right gardener, the seed can bring something that is not of the earth: a lotus that descends from the beyond. Something very unearthly is hidden in the earthly love.

People have been doing two things with love. There are people who think that love ends with physics, physiology, chemistry, hormones, etcetera. And there is the polar opposite of these people who think that because love is so physical one has to deny it, fight with it, condemn it as a sin, only then can one reach to god. Both are wrong, utterly wrong.

Love is a paradox. It is matter on the surface, it is soul at the centre. If you live only on the surface you will miss the soul; if you deny love totally then too you will miss the soul. This has been one of the greatest calamities: the worldly have missed and the so-called other-worldly – the pious, the religious, the monks – they have also missed, because nobody has yet been able to accept love in its totality.

I accept love in its totality – in all its sensuousness and all its spirituality; they are two aspects of the same coin. Love in a multi-dimensional way. Love the whole spectrum. Love all the possibilities, exhaust all the possibilitites of love. That’s what brings richness, that’s what brings treasures, inexhaustible treasures, immeasurable treasures.

[The new sannyasin asks: My energy is very slow. What can I do?]

Nothing to be done. Just allow it and accept it. One has to learn to love oneself as one is. The moment you start doing something with yourself you naturally divide yourself in two: your energy and you are separate. It is slow, and there is a condemnation inside; it should not be so. So you become split, and all splits are dangerous.

My first approach is to help you not to be split. So forget all about it; if it is slow, it is slow. Then god wants you to be slow. He needs a few slow people! And slow people are good people; they have their beauty and grace. All trees don’t grow in the same way: a few grow very slowly, a few grow very fast. That brings variety into existence. A few are very tall and a few are very small. Both are needed, otherwise life would be monotonous.

So the first thing: accept yourself in absolute trust and totality, as you are. In that very acceptance you will start finding surprises waiting for you; things will start changing. Acceptance triggers change, but that change is something different from the change that you can bring about. If you bring it about it will be forced, violent. If something changes out of acceptance, that means that it was needed, your body was waiting for the right moment.

So accept. If that changes your energy, good; if it does not change then it is perfectly right as it is. One has to learn to love oneself, to live with oneself. And never compare. Comparison brings great misery, and the whole world lives in hell because of comparison. Comparison is the door to hell. You are unique, you are yourself. You are the way you are, and you are meant to be the way you are.

So accept, and if something happens out of it, good; if nothing happens, then too it is good. It is always good!

Anand means bliss, svarupa means inner nature. Bliss is our inner nature. It has not to be created, it has not to be brought in; it is. It has only to be uncovered. We are it. To be miserable is really a miracle, because we are not it. It is something impossible that man makes possible.

Bliss is very simple. The trees are in bliss because they are not so clever as man to create misery, they are not so intelligent to devise ways for misery. The birds are in bliss because they are not so cunning as man. They don’t know how to become miserable, that’s why they are blissful.

Man is the only animal who has invented ways of creating misery. So all that is needed is to unlearn the ways that create misery. Once those ways are unlearned, suddenly bliss wells up. It does not come from the outside; it comes from your innermost core. And that’s what meditation is all about: unlearning the ways of misery so that hindrances, obstacles, can be removed, and the spring of bliss can start flowing again.

Anand Jantien... will mean bliss, the gift of god. God is always ready to give it; we go on rejecting. He is very persistent, he goes on knocking at our door. but we are deaf. His hand comes searching for you each moment, day in, day out, year in, year out, life in, life out; his search for you is untiring. But we go on avoiding.

Man is really a very strange animal: he searches for the negative, he is always ready to welcome misery, depression, despair, anguish, but he is never welcoming bliss. He mistrusts bliss, he doubts anything that comes from the beyond, but he is a great believer in all that is wrong. The reason is there; the reason is simple: the ego can exist only with the negative. The negative feeds the ego and the positive destroys it. If you are miserable you can be, but if you are blissful, you disappear. Bliss remains but you are no more, and that is the fear.

A sannyasin has to learn the art of disappearing, of dissolving, then the gifts start pouring in. They have always been pouring in; it is just that we were closed, we were not receptive.

Life is sheer majesty. It is such a joy to be; just to breathe is enough celebration. But we have to do one thing, one thing is absolutely required: we have to dissolve the idea of separation, that ‘I am’: ‘I am not, god is.’ Then all the gifts are yours.

Deva means divine, alessandro means a helper of mankind. The full name will mean a divine helper of mankind. But the only way to help mankind is first to know thyself. Without knowing oneself no one can be of any help to anybody else.

Many people try to help others; they simply create more misery, more mischief. They have good intentions, but good intentions are not enough. A luminous being is needed. Unless your inner light is burning bright you cannot be of help to anybody, and whatsoever you do will he harmful. You may like to give happiness to others but you will succeed only in making them more miserable. That’s what is happening all over the world: the husband wants to make his wife happy but he makes her more miserable, and vice versa; the parents want the children to be happy but simply make them miserable, and vice versa. This goes on and on, and nobody looks at a simple fact.Maybe

because it is simple nobody looks at it, maybe it is so obvious that it is taken for granted.

The simple fact is: you can light an unlit candle only if you are already lit. You can give to others only that which you have. Intentions are irrelevant; your reality is the only relevance.

Know thyself, be thyself. In knowing and being thyself you will become so full of light and bliss that it will start radiating around you; it will become infectious. Then one really becomes a great help; and mankind needs many helpers.

Prem means love, domenico means belonging to the lord. Love comes from the beyond. It is a ray of heaven penetrating the darkness of the earth. That’s why it is always a happening, not a doing. You cannot make love because it cannot be manufactured. If you try to make it, it will be false; at the most, a pretension, an acting, a deception, but it can’t be for real.

The real love only happens. Something from the beyond possesses you, overwhelms you. You are taken away by a flood, taken off your feet. Hence people are afraid of true love, because it almost looks like going mad. You cannot control it, you are afraid of it. Because the mind will not be able to discipline it, the mind wants to avoid it; the mind will not be a master in it any more.

When love comes, Love becomes the master and everything else starts serving it. Love is the lord. It belongs to the lord and when it comes it comes like a lord. The very presence of it and your body. your mind, your soul – all fall in tune, all fall in service to it.

So naturally the mind is afraid of such a great earthquake. The mind wants to remain in control, hence it creates plastic love, synthetic kinds, artificial, arbitrary. With them it is perfectly happy; with those dummies it remains the master.

Let this become a deep understanding in your heart – that we have to provoke, invoke. something from the beyond, and we have to be ready to surrender to it, because in that very surrender is victory. When you are effaced, utterly effaced, you have come home.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says he finds it really difficult to surrender in the ashram.]

It is always difficult, it is not an easy thing. If it were easy the whole world would be in paradise. People are in hell because they cannot surrender. It is difficult, it is arduous; it is one of the greatest things in life to be able to do. But if you are aware that it is difficult it is a good sign that you are trying. You are aware that it is difficult; you are not pretending, you are not deceiving yourself. If you remain alert, slowly slowly it will disappear.

The ego is like a rock, and surrendering is like water: if the water goes on falling on the rock sooner or later the rock will be gone. In the beginning is very hard, and even to conceive of the soft water being able to destroy it seems improbable; but it happens. Lao Tzu calls it the watercourse way – the power of the feminine, the power of the soft. Surrender is a feminine phenomenon, the ego is a masculine phenomenon. But the ego is like a rock: on the surface very hard, but it cannot win against the waterfall.

So go on making all efforts that you can to surrender. It is going to be hard, but one day it happens. and the day it happens is a day of great rejoicing. That is your real birth. From that moment you start living; before that you were only a living dead.

Anand means bliss, suvir means courageous, brave. Bliss needs you to be courageous, it needs guts. Any coward can be miserable. Cowardice needs no talents. Misery can be chosen very easily;

it is available everywhere. And all people are miserable, so one feels at home when one is miserable. When you become blissful you start feeling like a stranger. an outsider, and nobody likes a blissful person. People feel jealous, people feel revengeful. hence it needs great courage to decide that ‘From now on I am going to be blissful, whatsoever it costs.’

Misery is a compromise with the society. Because everybody is miserable, it is a compromise to be like everybody else so that one can remain anonymous. The blissful person becomes so extraordinary that he cannot be anonymous. Either people think that he is a tool, otherwise how can he be so blissful? – or he is mad, otherwise how can he be so blissful? – or he is a pretender... and things like that.

One has to be ready to accept all these condemnations from the society, then only can one live a blissful Life. So be courageous if you want to be blissful.…

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