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‌CHAPTER 26

29 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, larry is from laurel, a symbol of victory – bliss is the symbol of victory. Unless bliss is achieved a man has lived in vain, his life has been nothillg but a failure. He may have all the riches of the world – that will not make any difference: if his heart is not overflowing with bliss nothing is going to make any difference. Life remains a tale told by an idiot, much ado about nothing.

One has to be very alert from the very beginning; each moment has to be devoted to the search for bliss. Only when it becomes your focus of whatever you do, of whatever you think, when everything starts moving towards the one centre, one target – that life has to attain to blissfulness – then only is it attained.

It is really the intensity of the search that breaks the ice, and things start happening. It is the intensity that creates the fire. In that fire all that is not needed is burned and all that is needed blooms.

Veet means going beyond, mariette literally means bitterness. It is a form of Mary, but the literal meaning is bitterness. Your full name will mean going beyond all bitterness. There are a thousand and one things which make one bitter, and there is only one thing that makes one sweet. That one thing is love, and everything else – anger, jealousy, greed – they all make one bitter. The only hope is love. Love is the only sweetener, and with love is the beginning, the beginning of god in your life.

Be alert and drop all that is bitter. And everybody knows the taste: when one is angry one knows it is bitter; it is so self-evident. When one is jealous, one knows; when one is full of revenge, one knows. One cannot miss; one can deceive others but one cannot deceive oneself.

So make it a criterion: whatever feels bitter has to be dropped. You are not to go on giving more energy to it; you are to drop your co operation, you are to withdraw. And the energy that is saved has to be poured into Love. It is the same energy that becomes anger, greed, jealousy; it can become

love. It is the same energy that can grow thorns in your being. It can also grow flowers in your being; it all depends on you, what is going to happen. Man is free to grow in either of the directions – bitterness, sweetness.

To be sweet is to be religious, and to be sweet is to be capable of receiving god. God can only be received when the heart is full of sweetness and fragrance. And this is the alchemy from bitter to sweet: a constant awareness so that old patterns and habits don’t go on repeating on their own, a constant alertness so that slowly slowly you can change your energies towards the right direction.

Anand means bliss. hans means a gracious gift of god. Bliss cannot be created out of our efforts; efforts are totally irrelevant. In that dimension doing does not work; in that dimension doing becomes undoing. There is a world where effort works – the world of the without; and there is a world where only grace works – the world of the within.

If in the world of the without you go on sitting and just waiting for something to happen, nothing is going to happen; you will have to do it. Just the contrary is the case in the inner: if you try to do you will miss; if you can simply wait, silently wait, totally in trust, expectant but with no effort, it happens.

Religion is the world of grace, effortless happenings. You don’t need to be a doer, there you don’t need to be very active; on the contrary, your passivity. receptivity, is required.

But remember one thing, receptivity or passivity is not a negative state. It is not a kind of dullness. sleep, slumber. The passivity I am talking about is very alert, very brilliant. very intelligent, luminous, expectant. That’s how I use the word: with no expectations, but just expectant that something is going to happen, not that it should happen. There is no desire to force something to happen, there is no demand, but there is an urgent feeling that it is going to happen, that it is very close by. One is pregnant and alert, and watching, and waiting, not asleep.

Passivity can be of two kinds. It can be lethargy; then it is futile, it won’t work. If it is utterly alert, alive, then it creates the space in which gifts from god start falling, descending; and bliss is the ultimate gift.

Deva means divine, ted means blessed – blessed by the divine, blessed by god. Just to be is enough. If one knows how to be. then just to be alive is more than enough; just to breathe in and out is such a blessing if one knows. Otherwise nothing is a blessing. everything is a misery. And the way to know is to be utterly present to the present.

The mind wanders into the past, into the future. It never comes to the point where reality and we can meet, where reality and we are meeting; it never comes to that point. It is always somewhere else, either in memories or in dreams but never in that which is. And to be in that which is, is to be blessed; to live moment to moment is to live a life of tremendous significance, of immense meaning. Out of that significance the heart starts singing songs never heard before, songs unheard.

If it doesn’t happen, if that significance is not available and the mind goes on wandering into the past and into the future, into the unreal... that’s what in India we call maya: the unreal. the illusory; the past and the future. The world is not illusory, the mind is illusory. The world is very real but we are not in it. If one has not become capable of living moment to moment, then life is a sentence to be served, not a song to be sung.

To get in tune with the present is to enter into the door of the divine. Then each experience is a blessing; then one is rich. One may not have anything and one is rich; one may be a beggar but one is an emperor. Then there will be no visible sign of any success and victory but one is victorious, one has arrived. And when that feeling settles in you, that you have arrived, there is great joy, great serenity, great stillness. That’s what meditation is all about.

Prem means love, isabel comes from a Hebrew root ‘el’; el means god. Your full name will mean goddess of love.

It is only love that transforms a human being into a god or a goddess. Love is the alchemy of transforming the lower into the higher. the base metal into gold. Love is the secret key that opens the innermost treasures of our being. that makes us aware of who we are.

Ordinarily we are absolutely unaware of who we are. We have been told ‘You are a Christian, you are a Hindu; a man, a woman, this and that’, but these things have been told by others. We have collected these opinions, and out of that collection we have created a kind of identity, which is false because that is not our experience of our own being; it is borrowed. And what can others say? They don’t know themselves. These are just opinions, paper clippings that you can collect, and you can make an identity. That identity is the ego. It is false, it is put together. It is not our own inner experience, it is not our own encounter with ourselves.

It is only through love that one becomes aware of who one is. In the eyes of love one starts seeing one’s real reflection. That’s why love beautifies everybody. Love changes ordinary things into the extraordinary. Wherever love touches anything it starts breathing; and the ultimate gift of love is to make you aware of your inner godliness. The day it happens, one has fulfilled the pilgrimage of life, one has learned the lesson.

Life is a school to know who you are, and all identities that are gathered from the outside have to be dropped. Only love can give you the true taste of your being, hence love is the greatest transforming force in the world.

Miracles are possible through it. It is magic!

Satyam means truth, evan means a gift of god – truth, the gift of god. Truth is not a logical conclusion; you cannot arrive at it by thinking. Thinking can give you at the most a hypothesis, a workable hypothesis, but never truth itself. Thinking cannot take you beyond inference, and inference is not truth. Truth to be true has to be an experience. Philosophy thinks; religion experiences. Philosophy is speculative; religion is existential. Philosophy uses logic to come closer and closer to truth; religion drops all logical processes. In fact it drops all thoughts; it becomes utterly quiet and silent, and in that silence the gift arrives. In fact to say that the gift arrives is not right: the gift is already there; when we are silent we know it.

Truth is not something that is going to happen to you in the future: truth has already happened. You are a form of truth. All that is needed is a silent space in which you can feel who you are. The mind is very noisy and it does not allow you that space.

So the whole work here consists of how to help you to unburden all the garbage that the mind is carrying, how to cleanse it and how to unlearn the ways of constant inner chattering, how to stop

the inner talk. In those gaps when inner talk stops, truth simply surfaces, it wells up within you. And only that truth which wells up within you can be a liberating force.

Jesus says ‘Truth liberates’, but not the truth borrowed from others. Jesus’ truth cannot liberate you, my truth cannot liberate you; only your own truth is your liberation. Be a light unto yourself; there is no other salvation.

Satyam means truth, andrew means I rave, manly, courageous. Truth needs great courage because one has to drop so many cherished dreams. One has to drop so many things that one has always carried, thinking that they were precious. One has to drop one’s whole identity for which one has lived up to now. One has to become discontinuous from the past. That needs the greatest courage in the world. Only very few people are able to do it, that’s why only very few people are able to attain to god, to truth, to liberation; but everybody is capable of it. One just needs to gather oneself together, one just needs to be a little madly in love with truth so that one can risk.

And it is a real risk. You will be leaving the shelter of the shore; the other shore is unknown. Your boat is small and the ocean is wide and the ocean is uncharted, no maps are availableIf the

desire to know the unknown grips your heart so totally that it becomes a question of life and death, only then and only then can one go into the darkness, into the wilderness, into the unknown. But those who go, only they are the salt of the earth. The others are only cowards, clinging to the shore and the safety and the security. They cling and they go on clinging and they die; they never have any taste of life and its adventure.

Life is an adventure. Invite constant adventures, and whenever a call comes from the unknown, listen to it. Risk all and go into the unknown, because this is the only way to live at the maximum. To live dangerously is the only way to live, and at the highest peak of life one comes to have glimpses of god. People who live in a lukewarm way may believe in god but they don’t know that god exists. Their belief is just a social formality; it is just a belief and nothing else. It works as a cover-up for their ignorance but it is not transforming.

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