9

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‌CHAPTER 9

9 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, Laila is from a symbolic Sufi story. Sufis believe that god is the beloved, that god is the woman, and that the seeker is the lover.

The story of Laila and Majnu represents the seeker and the sought. Majnu is the seeker, Laila is the beloved; Laila represents god. It is one of the most beautiful stories, but it has lost its message. People read it as an ordinary love story; it is not. It is a Sufi parable, a device for teaching.

[The new sannyasin says: I feel that I jump outside myself, I feel I live outside myself. I’d like you to help me to come back into my body.]

I think: drop it as a problem; rather, use it as a stepping stone. If you make a problem oUt of it you will be unnecessarily worried, and the worry is not going to help at all. The more you worry, the bigger is the gap between you and the body. It does not matter about what you worry. You may be worrying about how to get into the body; that worrying will keep you separate from it.

The first thing is: drop it as a problem. Start enjoying it, because it has its own beauties, it is not just without any utility. In fact there are methods in the East which are used to create the situation so that the person becomes separate from the body.

There are only two ways to reach to the ultimate truth: either you become the body – that is the way of Tantra – or you become separate from the body, utterly separate – that is the way of Yoga. The whole effort of Yoga is that you become just a witness, a transcendental witness of everything, unidentified with everything that happens to you, around you. Your body, your mind, your heart, everything is separate from you. On the Yoga path you have to continuously remember neti-neti: neither this nor that; ‘I am neither this nor that, I am just a witness.’ If the witnessing becomes absolute, the ultimate is attained. This is one of the main ways to god.

The other main way is: become more and more lost in the body, so much so that there is not even a slight difference left. You are totally one with the body, not identified, but one, not having an idea of unity, but being one, existentially one. Then too the ultimate happens. The first is the way of awareness, the second is the way of love.

So my suggestion is: don’t make it a problem. Who knows? – it may become the key for you. So just wait. Enjoy it, enjoy it more and more. It is possible that that is going to be your path. If it is going to be your path, by enjoying it, it will deepen; it will become more and more clear, crystal-clear. If it is not your path, if it doesn’t fit with you, then the more you enjoy it, the more it will disappear.

Slowly slowly you will suddenly find one day that it is not there, and you are one with the body. Not by trying to be one with the body; any effort in that direction will keep you away, effort as such will become the barrier. So forget about it. Live it. This experience has been happening to you; maybe in past lives you have been practising something of Yoga, and that still persists in the collective unconscious and still keeps affecting you and your consciousness. So if it is so, we will use it! My approach is: use everything possible as a stepping stone.

God is like a mountain and you can reach to the peak from many many sides. Each side has its own view, its own beauty, its own blessings; the other side has its own. But the point is not from where you reach to the peak; the point is that you reach the peak. So just enjoy it more and more. Drop looking at it with the idea that it is a problem and has to be solved.

In India, if a person feels ‘I am the body’ he comes to me saying that ‘This is a problem. How to drop it?’. To feel oneself as the body is the worst space one can be in because Yoga has been so dominant; it has influenced all the religions of India. It has crushed the whole tradition of Tantra, has almost effaced it. So the Indian feels very .much in trouble when he finds himself identified with the body; he wants to be disidentified.

Now in the West a new vision of being in the body. of being the body, of being more sensuous, sensitive, has taken possession of the modern mind. This is a reaction against the Christian tradition; that was the tradition of Yoga. It is a revolt. It always happens: once one tradition becomes too much then a revolt is bound to happen. So all sensitivity programmes are against the Christian attitude of thinking oneself as separate from the body, higher than the body, holier than the body. Having the feeling that ‘I possess the body and I am not it’. A great rebellion has happened, and it was bound to happen, because whenever one thing goes to the extreme, the pendulum starts moving to the other extreme.

So whenever this happens in the West – that you start feeling as if you are not in the body – this modern climate makes you feel that you are missing something; a kind of anxiety arises. But for me both are valid. If one comes to me identified with the body I say ‘Get lost completely’. The whole thing is totality: be totally it. If somebody like you comes – feeling separate – I say ‘Be totally separate and enjoy it’; and that will be decisive. Within three to six months it will settle of its own accord without any effort from your side. Either it will grow to such deep awareness that you are really separate from the bodyThat has a beauty, great coolness, great silence and utter

tranquillity. But if it is not your path, if something has gone wrong in your childhood, by enjoying it, it will be resolved; by enjoying it, it will not be a problem any more.

If you think of it as a problem you feed it; you feed it by your anxiety, anxiety becomes its food. When you enjoy it you don’t feed it, you starve it. If it is really your nature, then it will continue; if it is just accidental it will die. And when something dies of its own accord it is beautiful, because then it leaves you in the space that yoU were hankering for: suddenly you are in the body.

So just enjoy and wait. Good!

Prem means love, rick means rule – rule of love, discipline of love, power of love. Let love become the very centre of your life; be ruled by it. Let everything be coloured by it. If love can become your climate then all is possible.

Then miracles are possible, because love brings with it magic. Love is magic: it is the greatest force in existence.

Very few people are aware of it, and they go on collecting rubbish when they could have become immensely rich by just being loving, immensely blissful just by being loveful.

Love is my message and love is my method. Love is the path and love is the goal.

Anand means bliss. Lynne means an image, an idol – an image of bliss. My sannyasin has to become an image of bliss. To me, to be blissful is to be moral, because the person who is blissful cannot hurt, cannot harm; it is impossible, it is intrinsically impossible.

The blissful person naturally helps others to be blissful. His very presence starts ripples of bliss around him, because whatsoever we are, we are constantly broadcasting it by subtle waves, by vibes. The miserable person creates misery in the world, because we can give to people only that which we have. Miserable people are trying to make others happy; they cannot, and because they cannot, they become more miserable. Their intention is good hut it is impotent. How can you give to others what you don’t have yourself?

The husband who is miserable is trying to make his wife happy, and the wife is miserable and is trying to make the husband happy. Both end up in making each other a thousandfold more miserable, that’s all.

The most fundamental thing is to be blissful; that is the first principle of morality, of religiousness. If the first is there, then everything else comes of its own accord. The blissful person will be loving, will be compassionate; the blissful person will be kind, understanding, accepting. The blissful person will be non-possessive, non-dominating, non-manipulating. The blissful person will not interfere in anybody’s freedom in any way, because he knows the value of freedom. He experiences the value of freedom.

Religions have been teaching many things; I teach only one single thing: be blissful. And all the ten commandments will be fulfilled, no need to bother about them.

Anand Daena: blissful fairy. Anand means blissful. It is only a question of deciding whether to remain miserable or to become blissful. And it is not dependent on others at all. We go on finding excuses – that we are miserable because of this, because of that. There is no because; we are

miserable simply because we have decided to be miserable. We are miserable simply because from the very beginning we have been taught to be miserable. We are miserable because for centuries we have been conditioned and told again and again that the world is a suffering, that life is misery.

It has become such a deep-rooted thing that we take it for granted. The world is not a misery and life is not a suffering. It all depends on you: life can be a blessing and the world can be a benediction. It is what we make out of it, it is our own creation.

By becoming a sannyasin one starts taking responsibility on oneself, one stops finding excuses. That is very essential to understand. Never think in terms of somebody else causing you suffering, because if you think in those terms then you can never be free. What can you do? – if the whole world is causing misery you have to be miserable. It is a good excuse to remain miserable.

The moment you say ‘Nobody can cause my misery unless I choose to be miserable’ a great change starts happening, the gestalt changes. Slowly slowly you stop your investment in misery and you start pouring your energies more and more into things which make life a bliss. You become more creative, you become more sensitive, you become more loving. You simply don’t go on waiting for some miracle to happen that will make you happy; you start creating space for it, yoU start creating a context for it. Miracles don’t happen unless we create the space for them.

God happens only when you have created the context of utter blissfulness in you. In that moment of sheer joy – when yoU are shivering with joy and your whole energy is dancing at the maximum – suddenly the door opens. Existence is no more material: it is transformed into consciousness. That vision is what god is all about.

So from this very moment start taking responsibility more and more and start pouring your energies into blissful things. Whenever you catch hold of yourself red-handed, creating some misery for yourself, immediately disconnect yourself, unplug yourself from it. It takes a little time to catch oneself again and again and not to get caught, but slowly slowly the knack arrives.

Life is an art, and only one who learns the art of how to be blissful lives; others only carry their weight, they drag. From the cradle to the grave their story is sheer stupidity, it is much ado about nothing. It is empty; it contains no treasures, it culminates in no contentment.

Deva means divine, karl means man – divine man.

Jesus talks about himself in two ways; sometimes he calls himself ‘son of man’ and other times he calls himself ‘son of god.’ It has puzzled the theologians down the ages; it is so contradictory. Either you are son of man or you are son of god. How can you be both? But it is not a

contradiction, it is a simple statement about humanity: man is both. That is the dignity of man and the anguish too, because he is two. He is the meeting of the earth and the sky, he is the meeting of the material and the spiritual, he is the meeting point where one world ends and another begins.

Man is man but not only man; he is god too. And unless the god part is fulfilled, man remains half – hungry, thirsty, starved. The god part has to be fulfilled, because only then can man bloom in totality. in wholeness.

Don’t be against man and don’t be against god. Both types of people have existed on the earth. There have been people who were against man – all the so-called saints and priests. And there have been men who were against god – Charvaka, Epicurus, Karl Marx – all the materialists and atheists down the ages. But because of this division nobody has been able to give a wholly fulfilling philosophy to humanity. The saints have failed, and so have the atheists. Both were similar in a way because both had chosen half.

I accept the whole man. His humanity is beautiful; without humanity he will be just a ghost. His divinity is beautiful, because without divinity he will be just dirt. Man is divine dust.

That is the meaning of your name: divine dust, divine man. We have to live both, in deep harmony, with no conflict. That’s what my work through neo-sannyas is: creating a harmony in your being, bringing both the halves together so that you can become a perfect circle.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says: Part of me doesn’t want to participate – I keep holding back. I don’t know how to be one hundred percent.]

In fact that desire to be one hundred percent is also an unnecessary desire, and it creates conflicts. It is a new kind of perfectionism. From the back door a new ideal enters: you have to be one hundred percent. Why do you have to be one hundred percent? Why can’t you be as you are?

The beauty is that if you can accept yourself as you are, you will be one hundred percent. If you want to be one hundred percent you will never be, because the very desiring creates a conflict. You start fighting with yourself; you are immediately divided into two. One part starts resisting, one part starts pulling and manipulating: you have created a civil war. Create any ideal, any, and you will be in a kind of civil war. That’s how people go on being miserable for no reason at all. unnecessarily creating misery.

Accept! This is how you are. A part of you holds back – so what? A part of you allows – good! Accept this situation and then see what happens. If acceptance is there and you are not against the part that holds back, it will start relaxing, because what is the point of remaining tense when you are not against it? When you are no more trying to manipulate it, it is bound to relax. If you are not fighting with it, it stops fighting with you. Then one day suddenly, one is surprised that something has happened: one is one hundred percent. Those non-conflicting parts will come closer and closer of their own accord. They come only when you are relaxed; and the secret of relaxation is acceptance. People don’t accept; then they create the trouble. Now this is a new trouble that you want to create for yourself: you have to be one hundred percent.

Be whatsoever you are, and it is good. The most beautiful thing said in the bible is that god created the world in six days, then he looked at the world and said ‘Good!’ It doesn’t seem to be so good – thousands of problems are there, any stupid person can find as many flaws in existence as he wants – but god said ‘Good’. It is something tremendously beautiful: he accepted! In that acceptance is the whole secret.

Learn to accept, learn to say to yourself that as you are, you are good, perfectly good; you are happy with yourself. Yes, one part holds back, so what? – one part holds back. Maybe there is some inner mystery in it. We don’t know our own whole mystery; maybe it is just that your inner being wants to

remain a little secure. It holds back a little bit, so that if something goes wrong you can fall back. If something happens, in case it does, you will not be lost, you will have some shelter. Maybe this is just an instinctive safety measure, nothing else. Don’t create a problem out of it. It’s perfectly good and natural and human.

Don’t desire impossibles, because they bring misery and nothing else. And let me repeat again: if you accept, some day you will find you have become one hundred percent in everything that you do, but it is not going to be cultivated by you; it will come as a revelation. It is a revelation... just a gift from god for a person who is relaxed.

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