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‌CHAPTER 3

3 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, darshano means insight. They say that love is blind; I say that only love is not blind. The person who lives without love lives in blindness and in darkness. His ears hear not but only translate. His eyes don’t see but impose. His mind does not understand but only interprets. His whole life is phoney. It is love that gives one authenticity. and to be authentic is to be worthy of receiving truth.

Love takes away all that is pseudo in you; and the Pseudo is hindering the insight, the pseudo is blocking the way. It is because of the pseudo that we cannot hear and we cannot see and we cannot feel. Once love arises in the heart the pseudo starts disappearing, just as when you bring light in the darkness disperses.

A man who has not lived in love, through love, for love, has not seen anything.

I am giving you this name just to remind you that the real is yet to be seen. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Prem means love, hellmut means courage. Love needs only one thing, and that is courage – courage, because love means surrender, courage, because love really means dying into the other, courage, because love means dropping your own identity, your own ego, your own personality. Hence millions of people have decided not to love, but then life is misery, then life is hell. It is comfortable, convenient; hell is really very comfortable and very convenient. The latest news is that they have air-conditioned it.

If one really wants to live, one has to be ready for insecurity; and love brings the greatest insecurity in the world because love cannot promise for tomorrow. Love is of the moment, tor the moment, in the moment. Love cannot promise, because all promises are lies, and love cannot lie. Love can only

say for this moment nothing for the next; the next remains open, vulnerable, insecure. Love may be, may not be. Nobody knows, there is no guarantee, and because of that, people choose something like marriage instead of love, something secure, safe. guaranteed by the law and the government and the society and the church – something that they can depend upon. But in that very choice they have committed suicide, they will never live.

Life itself is insecure. Life knows nothing of security. Death is very secure, so those who are cowardly, they choose death instead of life, they choose the false, the plastic, instead of the real. And those who are courageous, they choose the real, they go with it, wherever it leads. They surrender to it, they are ready to go into the uncharted and the unknown and the unseen.

Prem means love, gary means a spear. Love hits the heart as if a spear has penetrated it. Love brings much pain; that is the price we pay for the rejoicing that is going to come out of the pain. The pain is sweet, the pain is a blessing. Those who are afraid of the pain that love brings remain without love and without life and without truth and without god, because in the ultimate, existential sense, love, life, truth, god – they all mean one and the same thing. Love brings agony, but agony is the way of ecstasy coming to you. So when love brings pain, accept it, welcome it; don’t reject the guest. Just hidden behind the guest the great guest is coming.

Love is only a messenger... that somewhere close by is god. But pain is natural; it has to be understood, it has to be accepted. Because naturally we are afraid of pain, naturally we avoid it. Hence many people have avoided the heart and are hung up in the head, they live in the head. The heart gives pain, true, but only because it can give pleasure – that’s why it gives pain. Pain is the way that pleasure arrives; agony, the door that ecstasy enters.

If one is aware of it, one accepts the pain as a blessing. Then suddenly the quality of the pain immediately starts changing; you are no more antagonistic to it, and because you are no more antagonistic to it, it is no more pain; it is a friend. It is a fire that is going to cleanse you. It is a transmutation, a process, in which the old will go and the new will arrive, in which the mind will disappear and the heart will function in its totality. Then life is a benediction.

Michael means one who is like god, godlike. Anando means bliss. Man becomes godlike only when he is in bliss. Bliss happens only when we start overlapping with god. When our boundaries are not separate. when that overlapping of boundaries happens with god, there is bliss. The ultimate bliss happens when our small circle has been completely absorbed by the infinite circle of god, when the drop has disappeared in the ocean, and in other words, when the ocean has disappeared in the drop. That is the moment of ultimate bliss – that’s what we have been searching for for lives and lives.

That search has brought you to me, to sannyas. It is not something new, it is not something accidental. It is a long, long journey, it is a very ancient pilgrimage. But now, at this moment, a turning point is possible, a door can open. You are very close to it; all that is needed from your side is a deep yes, a total yes, and in that very yea-saying the door will be found open.

Jesus says: Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you. I say there is no need to even knock; just say yes, amen, and you will find that the doors have always remained open; it is just that your eyes were covered with nos. Yes opens the heart, no closes it. The whole art of sannyas is the art of saying yes.

[Araguacy means a sky open to friends.] Deva means divine. A sky open to friends is a human sky. Open it to the enemies too and it becomes a divine sky. It is human to love one’s friends; it is divine to love one’s enemies too. And the moment one can love one’s enemies, only then can one really love one’s friends. If one cannot love the enemy, one is always suspicious of the friend too, because the friend can turn into the enemy any moment.

Machiavelli says: Don’t say anything to your friends that you would not like to be known by your enemies, because today’s friend can become tomorrow’s enemy.

One who cannot love the enemy cannot totally love the friend either, hence the great statement of Jesus: Love thine enemies as thyself.

Anand means bliss, ursula is the name of a constellation of stars, Ursa Major. The full name will mean a blissful constellation of stars. That’s what every being is.

Man looks so small; he is not so small. He contains universes in him. He has an inner sky as big as the outer sky, and he has inner stars, a sun and a moon, as there are in the outer world. The inner and the outer are in an absolute balance: whatsoever is out is in the inner too.

The ancient saying of the mystics is: As above. so below. And I say to you: As outer, so inner.

Let sannyas be a search for the inner sky, a search for the inner light, a search for inner infinity, endlessness, eternity. It is possible, it is within our reach; all that is needed is a one-hundred-and- eighty degree turn.

Deva means divine, ugo means intelligence. Intellect is human; intelligence is divine. Intellect is of the mind; intelligence is of the heart. Intellect can be cultivated. taught; intelligence can only be dug up from deep in your being. Nobody can make you intelligent, but everybody is born intelligent. Then many layers of conditionings... and it remains hidden. It has to be rediscovered. Intelligence is an intrinsic quality of life. It need not be learned, it is already the case; by being alive we are intelligent. But the society has done great work in keeping our intelligence hidden.

Instead of helping the intelligence to arise it has enforced intellect upon us – which looks similar but which is not the same. Intelligence is wisdom; intellect is knowledge, information. Intellect is always borrowed, never original; intelligence cannot be borrowed. it is always original. It originates from our own inner core, it wells up within our being.

All that is needed is to remove the blocks; and that’s the function of a master. I cannot give you intelligence but I can remove a few rocks in the way. Once those rocks are not there, the intelligence starts flowing. Those rocks can be removed because they have been put there from the outside.

My definition of religion is: whatsoever the society has done, religion has to undo.

[A sannyasin says that Indian people tease him about his name, deva nirodh, as it can also mean divine birth control.]

They also call it nirodh – birth control devices their call nirodh! But it is a very ancient word; it means inner discipline. Patanjali has defined Yoga as ‘chit vrutti nirodh’: the stopping of all the waves of the mind. He uses the word ‘nirodh’ for the discipline that stops all the waves of the mind.

But all the old languages have many meanings for one word. It can be used as ‘the discipline that stops the mind waves’; it can be used as ‘that which stops the birth of a child.’ So one of the most famous devices in India for birth control has the name ‘nirodh’; that must be why they laugh.

Next time they laugh, you laugh louder than them, and tell them ‘You need nirodh!’ ‘Nobody else in the world needs it so much!’ You tell them ‘You need me’; just tell them.

[A sannyasin says: Since you gave me the name Nirmohi I feel so attached to everything.] That’s good. You are becoming aware! You were not aware, that’s all.

People go on living without being aware that they are attached, that they are possessive, manipulative, dominating. Once they are made aware, then they become aware. The name is a device to make you aware. Your name means non-attachment. Now each time vou are moving into some attachment your name will remind you ‘What are you doing? You are becoming attached again.’ Just that awareness is of tremendous import. If that awareness goes on deepening in you, soon you will find that attachment becomes impossible, because attachment brings only misery and nothing else; it brings bondage and nothing else.

It is very very stupid to be attached. The intelligent person will enjoy life without any attachment. While anything is there, enjoy it. While the sun is shining, enjoy, but when the clouds have gathered then don’t start crying for the sun that is there no more. Instead of wasting your energy in crying, now enjoy the clouds. And when the clouds are gone – and they will be gone because in life nothing remains permanent – then don’t start crying for the clouds that have gone. Then whatsoever is available, dance with it, sing it!

This is the intelligent way to live life: whatsoever is, is, and whatsoever is not, is not. And don’t cry over spilled milk; that is the whole meaning of non-attachment.

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