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‌CHAPTER 4

4 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, jurgen means a farmer.

Life is an opportunity, just a seed. One can miss it, one can remain a seed; that will be the missing of the opportunity. One has to seek the right soil. One has to be a farmer; One has to learn how to grow.

All that is needed in farming is needed in inner growth too: the right soil, the right season, protection for the new sprouts, the right quantity of water and sun and air, and not too much protection; that is the most important thing, because too much protection will not be helpful, it will be harmful. If one is protected too much, one becomes spineless; one never becomes strong enough, one is never on one’s own feet.

So just as the plants need protection and yet insecurity too, safety and openness to danger, vulnerability, too, in the same way the inner growth needs both. One has to be exactly in the middle of the polar opposites. The moment you lean too much towards one extreme, growth is stifled. Growth needs the golden mean: neither too much security nor too much insecurity. One has to learn it by ones own efforts, slowly slowly; it is a delicate affair.

No farmer can teach his son farming except by taking him to the farm day in, day out, year in, year out, so that he learns the knack of it.

Thomas is the name of a disciple of Jesus. To be a disciple is one of the greatest moments in life; neither birth nor death is so important. It is the moment of disciplehood which is of supreme importance, because the real birth happens when one becomes a disciple, and the real death too. In a way one dies, in a way one is reborn. Disciplehood is a paradox, birth. death together. simultaneously; and if one allows this, god is not far away.

Narayana is a name of god. If one is a disciple, god is not far away. That is the meaning of your name: be a disciple and god is very close by, just by the comer. Be a disciple totally and you have arrived.

Prem means love, uri means light of god. Love is the light of god. God comes in no other way, in no other form. God showers as love, reaches to the deepest recesses of your being as rays of love. Once it is felt that the whole existence is full of love, god is experienced. The experience that the existence is made of the stuff called love is the experience of god. God is not a person: it is like beauty, an experience.

Love is the greatest experience possible – the highest and the deepest both. One touches the peaks of the Himalayas and one also reaches to the depths of the Pacific, and simultaneously. Love gives you that expansion. The moment you are in love you are huge, enormous. The lover starts feeling that the body cannot contain him; the body feels to be too small, a confinement. And as love grows, even the whole sky cannot contain it.

When all is felt as love one has known what god is. God is not in the temples, not in the churches, not in the synagogues; god is in the experience of love, god is the experience of love, god is love. Forget god, remember love.

Deva means divine, and the sound of eenee is beautiful, so I will keep it. The meaning doesn’t matter; what matters is the music, the melody of a word, the music of a word, the rhythm. All meaning is arbitrary. We have given a certain meaning to a certain word, hence it has that meaning. It is not anything natural; it is arbitrary, invented. But sound is natural; it is not given by us.

Mm? – these insects and their sound.If you listen and if you want to find ‘eenee’ in this sound it

will be found. Sound is a natural phenomenon.

Think more of nature and less of the arbitrary, the artificial, because the natural is the door to the divine. Language is not the door to the divine, but music. If one can start hearing the music of existence which is all over – it is just that we are deaf – then god is heard. Or these soundsand

god is trying to approach you. Bu our senses have become dull, and we have started living n the man-created world too much.

Only the man-created world has meaning. Remove men, the world will be there in its utter beauty, but there will be no meaning to it. The sun will rise and the birds will sing; the trees will grow, the roses will bloom; the spring will come. Everything will continue but with new meaning, with no purpose, with no goal – utterly beautiful but utterly nude of meaning; that’s what existence is.

To fall into this meaningless, purposeless existence is meditation; to drown oneself in this beautiful existence for no other reason, for no goal, is to become divine.

‘God’ also is a meaningless word, the most meaningless of all words, but tremendously significant: the significance consists in its meaninglessness.

Deva means divine, paul means very little, very small, just like a dew-drop. But the small only appears small. The dew-drop contains all the oceans there are, it has the secret of all the oceans

in it. It is only quantitatively small, qualitatively not. In the ordinary mathematics the part is smaller than the whole, obviously, but in the higher mathematics the part is not smaller than the whole; it is equal to the whole, because the part is the whole.

Quantitatively the dew-drop is very small; qualitatively it has the same quality as all oceans have. Man is also very small. Qualitatively it is not so, only quantitatively. Quantitatively man is divine, man is god.

Jesus refers to himself in two ways. Sometimes he says ‘son of man’ and sometimes he says ‘son of god’. It is very significant. When he says ‘son of man’ he refers to his smallness, to his being just a dew-drop; he refers to the quantitative. When he says ‘son of god’ he refers to the qualitative; he refers to his infinity, his eternity.

Know yourself as the smallest of the small, and yet remember that you are the eternal, the infinite. Remembering your smallness will help you to become egoless, and remembering your greatness will help you to come closer and closer to truth, to god, to reality.

Deva means divine. Think of yourself as divine and think of everybody else also as divine. It is not a fiction, it is the reality. Except for god, all are fictions, except for god, everything else is a dream of the mind; only god is. Hence, if we follow the mind, we are never contented, because dreams cannot nourish. They are beautiful when you are far away; when you come closer, disappointment and nothing else is in your hands.

Dreams are like rainbows in the sky: from far away so beautiful, but if you come close and you want to hold the rainbow in your hand, you will find nothing but the vapour. That happens to everybody every day: the dreams, sooner or later, are found to be nothing but vapour.

Once this is understood, that all that mind creates, desires, dreams, is a kind of mirage, then the turning point comes, the converting point comes. Then one starts thinking how to transcend the mind, how to have a state where no thought is, no dream is, no desire is? We have lived through dreams and desires and found nothing; now let us try the other way round.

That’s what meditation is: looking into reality without anything between you and reality. Just a pure look... and suddenly, all is revealed. That revelation makes you aware that everything, every particle of dust, is divine. Then to live in the same world is a totally different experience. Then you are at home, at ease; then there is no death, there cannot be any death. Then there are no limitations of time and space. Then you have simply gone beyond all limitations. You have freedom, and freedom is joy!

[The new sannyasin says she has never done groups and does not want to.]

Then something has to be experimented with. It is always good to try something new. Who knows? – something may happen out of it. Try at least two groups, and if you feel that they are not for you, you can drop out; but try! Mm?

I will give you two groups – try! The first group you try is Centering – it starts tomorrow – and the second is Intensive Enlightenment. Try two; if you feel that you would like to go deeper, enquire; I will give you a few more. They can be of immense help.

And never close your doors before you have experimented with anything – never, never. Otherwise many things remain unlived, unknown. They were available, and you would have gone through something beautiful; you would have been enriched by them. Always say yes to the new. No has to be used for the old. That which you have seen many times, say no to it. It is pointless, you have seen it; now there is no more in it. But never say no to the new. Even if the effort seems to be meaningless later on – later on it may be felt that it would have been better if you had not gone into it – then too I say, say yes to the new. Even doing something right, efficiently, if it is old, it is meaningless. Doing something which may be a mistake, erroneous, if it is new, it is worth doing, because one grows with the new. It is not a question of right and wrong; the question is between the old and the new. For me the old is sin and the new is virtue.

Deva means god, david means beloved one – god’s beloved one. Always remind yourself of that. that god loves you. You may have forgotten him, he has not forgotten you; he cannot. You may have gone far away from him but he is always close by. Any moment if you turn towards him he is available. It is like: a man can go running far and far away from the sun, -keeping his back to the sun, but any moment that he turns back. the sun is there as much as before. Those many many miles that he has been running make no sense, no difference.

God is always there; we can keep our backs to him or we can confront him. Sannyas is a confrontation with god, it is an encounter, and it needs courage to encounter god. But if you go on feeling and remembering that god loves you, that courage arises; then there is no fear. If god loves you, then there is no problem. Even if you are not worthy it doesn’t matter – god loves you, his compassion is greater than your worthlessness. Your sins cannot be greater than his compassion.

This is the attitude of the religious mind: I may have gone astray, I may have made many mistakes. but his quality is to forgive. And in his vision, my sins and my errors and my mistakes can’t be very important. He may not ever be able to see such minute details. they may not be of any relevance in his vision. Man can confront god only if this remembering slowly slowly sinks deep into the heart that ‘God loves me’.

Names like David were given in the old days as part of meditation. All over the world almost all the old names are somehow related with god, for a certain reason: those names were given to remind yoU again and again that you are David – that god loves you, that you are a beloved one. Don’t feel unworthy and don’t feel worthless. His love gives you worth, significance. splendour.

That very understanding is nourishing. It helps you to stand erect. It helps you to be strong enough to go into the unknown; it helps you to seek and search and enquire. It helps you to become a pilgrim of the ultimate.

Zahira is one of the Sufi names for god. Sufis have a hundred names for god; ninety-nine are pronounced, the hundredth is kept unpronounced. Zahira is one of those ninety-nine names; its literal meaning is the manifest one.

God has two aspects: one, the manifest – that is the universe: the sun, the moon, the stars, the people, the trees, the birds, the animals. This multi-dimensional universe, that is his manifest form, that is zahira. Hidden behind it is the unmanifest form. Those who remain with the manifest and think that this is all are the worldly people. Those who think that the manifest one is only a finger pointing to the moon and who start searching for the unmanifest one, they are the religious people.

This whole existence points towards god; eyes are just needed to see that all arrows are pointing towards god. Each experience of life goes on pushing you towards god. It is really unbelievable how people can go on missing god, because each day a thousand and one opportunities are given, and each day we go on missing. Each day he knocks on our doors and so many many times; and we don’t hear.

Think of the whole existence as fingers pointing to the unmanifest. Then the beautiful rose suddenly becomes a manifestation of god. The man you love or the woman you love suddenly becomes a manifestation of god. If we can constantly live with this awareness – that all is god – life becomes a benediction.

This will be the name for your centre: Joshua. Joshua is the original name of Jesus; in Aramaic it is Joshua. The literal meaning is Jehovah saves, Jehovah is salvation. Only god saves – not our efforts, but his grace. Our efforts do something, certainly – they make us capable to receive his grace, that’s all – but what really saves is his grace.

Our efforts do a negative part: they remove the hindrances so that his grace can reach to us, but our efforts don’t create it.

So this thing has to be constantly remembered: our efforts are needed, yet their function is only negative. They are needed, yet they are not the sole cause of the ultimate happening. They help in removing the hindrances, but the grace was always coming – it was just that the hindrances were there. Now there are no hindrances, the grace reaches you and saves you.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I feel my distrust is still stronger in my than my trust in people... a certain point comes where it is very much hurting to go into a relationship.]

Next time something much more will have to be done. Distrust is there in everybody, more or less; you may be having a little more, that’s all. But it can be dropped; in fact one cannot carry it very long. It is such an unnecessary burden, it is so destructive. It does not give you any joy, it does not give you anything at all. In fact it destroys so many beautiful things in your being: it destroys your love, it destroys your friendship; it destroys every possibility in which you can grow. So how long can you carry it and for what?

And if you really know how to distrust, then the first thing to be distrusted is distrust itself! Why do you trust your distrust? For what? What is it going to give you? It is your life: you have to be alert about what you are doing to your life. If your distrust is paying you well, continue; there is no problem in it, don’t create a problem out of it. Distrust, distrust more intensely, more totally. But if it is not giving you anything and simply destroying all that is beautiful in your life, then this is the first thing to distrust.

I think a little more learning about how much it is destroying you will help. So be a little alert. just watch what it is doing to you and to your life. And the next time you come the first thing to remind me about is your distrust, so we will start working on it. Good!

Prem means love, raj means the secret. Love is the secret, the secret of all secrets, the golden key, the master key, that opens all the locks of all the mysteries. Love, and love for no other reason but

just for the sheer joy of it. Don’t try to find out reasons to love, because then love becomes shallow. When love is for no reason at all it has tremendous depth. Love unconditionally. The moment you make a condition love becomes a bargain, mundane; without any condition, it is sacred.

Love to give, not to get. Much comes; but that is another matter. Your whole approach should be that of giving; and the more you give, the more you have to give; the more you pour yourself, the more you are overwhelmed from some unknown sources. Once that is known you have come to know the secret of love.

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