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‌CHAPTER 5

5 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, ariel means a lion of god... and each sannyasin has to become a lion. There are two many sheep in the world, and the world needs individuals. It needs really free people, because only out of freedom do flowers of love, bliss, arise.

Prem means love, janaina means god’s gift. Love is the gift of god, the greatest gift. Each child is capable of love, we are born with that inner capacity. To become a sannyasin means to become a lover – a lover of god, a lover of beauty, a lover of music.

Anand means blissful, david means a friend. Become a blissful friend to the whole of existence: to people, to animals, to birds, to trees, to all that is. In every possible way create more and more friendship and less and less enmity.

If one can become a friend to all that exists, one has attained to the greatest prayer. Then one need not go to the church or to the temple. Then wherever one is there is the temple, because friendship is the highest form of love; it is the fragrance of the flower called love. Learn the ways of being friendly.

Veet means beyond, Gudrun is the name of a mythological heroine who represents revenge. Your name will mean: go beyond revenge. There is nobody else than god. To be revengeful towards anybody is to be revengeful towards god. To think of someone as your enemy is to make god your enemy. Hence Jesus says ‘Love your enemies’, because they are not enemies. We are members of each other, we are one whole.

And remember: one who forgives is forgiven. The quality and the capacity to forgive is one of the most beautiful flowers of the human soul. Revenge is ugly. mean; it is falling to the lowest. To forgive is to rise so high. The more one becomes capable of forgiving, the more one’s heart expands, one’s

consciousness grows bigger. The day one can forgive all and everything is the day when god meets man, man meets god.

So let this quality of forgiveness become your very centre. Don’t forgive in the sense that you are obliging. Don’t forgive as a duty, because then it creates the ego, and a very subtle ego, which is dangerous. more dangerous than revenge itself. The holy ego is the worst possible ego in the world. So don’t be righteous. Take it with ease; to forgive should become natural, and then it is really a benediction.

Veet means going beyond, transcending; marco means god of war. Your name will mean going beyond all possibilities of war, going beyond the god of war. In fact the god of war is not a god but the devil.

The world has suffered too much from war; it is time we stopped. It is time we started the ways of love and friendship. It is the right time for nations to disappear and the world to become one. Then this very earth can become the lotus paradise.

Anand means bliss, georg means a farmer. Now cultivate bliss, sow seeds of bliss so that one day we can reap the crop of god. It is only by becoming more and more blissful that one comes closer to god. Bliss is both the means and the end. By becoming blissful you come closer to god; by coming closer to god you become blissful. It is the way and the goal both.

The goal is spread all over the day. Even with the first step you have entered into the goal – it is just a little bit, but you have entered all the same. Bliss is the first step and the last too.

Anand means blissful, chris means a follower of Christ. But the language that Christ spoke has been forgotten by the Christians. He was not a sad, ascetic person: he was full of zestfulness, he was very alive. In fact that was his crime: it was for his being too alive that he was crucified. He loved people, he loved eating, he loved drinking. He was not a man whom Christians would think of as a saint. He was very earthly, and yet divine. He was a meeting point of the sky and the earth. And that’s how every Christ, every Buddha is – a paradox. where the visible and the invisible meet and mingle and merge; in sense, very earthly, in another sense, not of this world at all.

But Christianity has taken only part of Christ, the other-worldly part, and has completely forgotten the this-worldly part. Hence it became a pseudo religion; it lost contact with the reality, it became an empty ritual. But it is nothing special about Christianity; this has happened with all the religions of the world. It almost always happens: when the master is gone, everything is misinterpreted. When the master is gone, the learned people come in and they start interpretations of their own.

And the problem, I can understand, is that the master is always paradoxical and the followers want to be consistent; this is the basic, fundamental problem. The master is consistently inconsistent, and the follower tries to make something logical out of him because he has to fight with the world and he has not that insight which can enjoy being paradoxical. He himself is afraid of the paradox, he is worried about contradictions, so he has to choose: he has to drop one part which contradicts the other part, to be consistent; and that’s how every religion is falsified.

I would like you to be this-worldly and that-worldly together. Be blissful; there is no need to be sad, there is no need to be serious at all. It is through playfulness that one learns how to pray. Playfulness is prayer and to be cheerful is to be holy.

Veet means going beyond, maria in Hebrew means bitterness. Going beyond all bitterness – that is the meaning of your name.

Man is born bitter but has an innate capacity to be sweet. Bitterness is like a hard shell that surrounds a seed: it is protective, it protects the inner sweetness. It is an armour, it has to be dropped one day. The day the seed drops its hard shell it starts growing into a sprout.

The same happens with human consciousness. Drop all kinds of bitternesses – anger, greed. jealousy, domination – and then suddenly there is an explosion of sweetness. That sweetness is love, that sweetness is compassion, that sweetness is prayer; and to taste it is to have tasted god himself.

It is beautiful that Maria is the name of Jesus’ mother. The sweetest man was born out of Maria; and Maria means bitterness. Let your bitterness become the mother so that sweetness can be born out of it. The bitterness can become the womb for the Christ child to be born out of.

Those who have known the truth of life, this is their fundamental understanding: that poison can be transformed into nectar, that we need not throw anything, that everything can be transformed. The lower is the way to the higher, the dark night is the womb for the morning, and the darker the night, the closer is the morning.

Nothing has to be renounced but everything has to be transformed.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says she has a burning desire to be total, and at the same time is so overwhelmed with her energy she doesn’t know what to do.]

This is the problem for everybody. This is not only your problem.

The mind allows nobody to be total; and everybody is burning for totality. It is good that you have become aware of it, because this burning, this pain, sooner or later will help you to attain to totality; there is no other I way. The whole way is full of pain. Only in the end when you have achieved totality does the whole pain disappear, and then you are thankful to the pain, because without it you would have never reached. So this is perfectly good!

Remember two things. One: the desire for totality is good, it is a blessing, because in other words that is the desire for god. The second thing to remember: meanwhile don’t stop yourself because you are not total; that is not going to help. If you stop even being partial how are you going to be total one day?

So meanwhile go on as much as possible bringing totality into your acts, into your love-making, into everything that you do. It will not be absolute; you have to accept that it will remain something short, never reaching the peak. That has to be accepted and one has to go on working on oneself. One day one reaches to the peak.

Many times the mountaineer finds himself stuck; he has to change his route, he has to change his direction. But if one goes on and on.Fifty years it took to reach Everest, and in fifty years hundreds

of mountaineers tried and failed. But finally one day, one man succeeded.

And that’s how life is: you will fail many times, and each time the failure will give you great frustration and great agony. In failure you may even start thinking ‘What is the point of it all? Why make love when it is not total?’ But that is not going to help; not making love is not going to help. Why see the sunset if the experience is not total? Why listen to music if the experience is not total? Still, knowing that it is not total and burning for totality, go on accepting whatsoever is available today; and whatsoever is possible today, go on doing. It is only by doing it that slowly slowly you will become m re and more capable. One day it is going to happen. It happens – I am a witness to it!

[A sannyasin, leaving, says she is pregnant.]

Good. Enjoy pregnancy! Be more and more meditative; it will help the child. Sit more in silence, listen to soft music. Be with the trees, in the sun, in the ocean, on the beach. Let the child experience more of nature from the very beginning. Because whatsoever you experience becomes the child’s experience. So start teaching him meditation, joy, beauty.

And for all these days that the child is within you, drop a few things completely: don’t be angry, don’t be greedy, don’t be possessive.

To be a mother is a great art!

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