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‌CHAPTER 18

18 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, udgam means the source. We are already at the source, we are the source. We have never left it, not even for a single moment, yet we have forgotten about it. We have fallen asleep: we have not gone anywhere. God has not been lost, only forgotten; it is a kind of forgetfulness. So all that is needed is remembering, waking up, looking inside to the deepest core of your being, and you will find there the source, the divine source.

Once one is fully aware of one’s divine source, the whole of life changes because its central context changes. The moment you know that you are the truth, then everything remains the same yet nothing is the same any more. The ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary, the mundane becomes the sacred. This very world becomes a lotus paradise.

Udgito means a song. Life can be a song, but it is not necessarily so; we have to make it one. It is an opportunity. We can miss the opportunity; the majority of people go on missing it. The basic reason why they miss it is that they think they have already got it.

The moment you think that you have already got it, you don’t care about creating. If the ill person thinks he is already healthy then he will not go to the doctor, he is not going to take any treatment; that will be logical.

Man is born to be a song; but in the beginning we have only the seed for it, the potential for it. It can blossom, life can really be a celebration. It should be. There is no reason why it should not be, except that idea that we have already got it.

Birth has become synonymous with life; it is not. With death, birth ends, not life. If you don’t know life, then death looks as if it is the end of life. If you know life, then death makes no difference at all. Life is not confined between birth and death: birth and death are episodes in the long journey of life.

Life spreads backwards to the very beginning, if there has ever been a beginning, and forwards to the very end, if there is ever going to be an end.

Life is eternal, universal, but that life can be known only when we transform our being into a song. Life is touched only when you are in a dance, in a song, in a celebration.

Deva means god, upagam means to come close to – to come close to god. Ordinarily man is escaping from god, because that is the only way to remain in the ego, that is the only way to feel oneself as separate from existence. If you come close to god you start melting, you start disappearing, you start evaporating. That creates fear – so people worship god, they pray to god, but they never come close. From far away they go on praying and worshipping, but they remain cautious so as not to come close. Once they come close they will disappear.

To come close to god is almost committing suicide. And it is the real suicide – not just the bodily suicide, but total annihilation. So only the very courageous ones come close to god.

The cowards pray, worship, they go to the church, they go to the temple, they read the Bible, they read the Koran, the Gita, but they keep a distance. If Jesus is alive, they will not go close to him. When he is dead, then they will worship him. When Buddha is alive, they will create every kind of barrier between themselves and the Buddha. When Buddha is gone, then Buddha is god. Then they will make temples and statues. This is a very subtle strategy of the ego to remain in existence: worship the dead, avoid the alive.

Only the courageous ones can come close to a Buddha or a Christ or a Krishna – and that’s how one comes close to god. God becomes visible in people who have disappeared, and those people become doors. That’s the meaning of a master. The master has nothing to teach, he is not a teacher. He is a master because he is not. It is a paradox, but a master is a paradox: he is not and that’s why he is a master. He can help you to disappear; he can become a door, he can become an opening into existence. He can be a window for you, and from him you can jump into the eternal. He can be a jumping-board.

Deva means god, parinit means married to – married to god. Sannyas is a marriage: marriage to the ultimate, marriage to the absolute, marriage to the whole.

Unless the part is married to the whole, the part is bound to remain in misery, because then the part has no roots in the whole, is not nourished by the whole. And to remain separate from the whole is a constant struggle to survive. That struggle dissipates energy. But that’s how man has lived for thousands of years, struggling with the whole, fighting with the whole. The attitude has been very arrogant, but it has been dominant because it gives gratification to the ego.

Man has been fighting with nature, fighting with the universe – trying to conquer. It is ridiculous, the part trying to conquer the whole. In the very effort, man has destroyed ecology, man has destroyed spirituality. Man has destroyed all that is beautiful and now he is on the verge of destroying the whole earth and himself too. This has been the outcome of a particular philosophy of life: the philosophy of conquering.

Religion is the philosophy of surrendering, not conquering. And the beauty and the paradox is that the more you surrender, the more you conquer; the more you try to conquer, the more you are

defeated. In the very surrendering of the part to the whole, the part becomes the whole. In the very surrendering, there is a tremendous release of energy; all the energy that is involved in struggling is released. There is great relaxation, great peace, silence, serenity.

Be married to the whole, make it a love affair with existence. It is not a struggle, it is not a conflict. It is a love affair, it is a marriage.

Upageya means to be sung, to be celebrated; and that’s the very core of religion.

Religion has nothing to do with ascetism. Asceticism is born out of a masochistic mind. It is sickness, it is pathology. There is a very ugly joy in torturing oneself; it is perversion. To torture is ugly; whether you torture others or you torture yourself does not make much difference. In fact to torture oneself is more of a crime than to torture others. The others can retaliate, they can defend themselves, they can do something to protect themselves. But when you torture yourself then there is nobody to defend you, then there is nobody to fight you back. So it is more ugly. more violent.

But down the ages these masochists have been thought to be mahatmas, great saints. They needed psychological treatment, they needed electric shocks. They were utterly ill, but they were dominant. For a certain reason they became very very dominant, and the reason is that man is always impressed by something that is outlandish, which looks extraordinary. Man is always impressed by something which is not common. Hence the Kohinoor diamond: if there were millions of Kohinoors nobody would be impressed, but because there is only one, man becomes hypnotised by it.

To torture oneself is a very rare disease, because it is unnatural, against nature. Nature wants to celebrate. No tree tortures itself, no animal tortures itself, no bird tortures itself. If you remove man, then existence is constantly in a festival; it is a carnival of joy. Only man can get into such a perverted state that he can start torturing himself – fasting, beating his body, living in the cold or living in the heat. Man has done a thousand and one things, he has been very inventive. But these people were few; it is so against nature that only a few people could be so sick, so pathological. But they became Kohinoor diamonds – rare specimens. Because it was against human nature, people were tremendously impressed: they were doing something extraordinary. They have dominated religion, and because of them the earth has remained irreligious.

The real religion has to be born, has yet to be born. There have been a few people who have been religious, but religion has not yet happened.

Somebody said to George Bernard Shaw ‘What do you think about civilisation?’ He said ‘It is a good idea – somebody should try it!’

So is the case with religion: it is a tremendously beautiful idea but it has not been tried yet. Yes, there have been a Jesus and a Buddha and a Lao Tzu and a Zarathustra, but they are people who can be counted on one’s fingers.

I initiate you into the world of celebration, into the world of natural spontaneous wholeness and health. That’s the purpose of this sannyas, neo-sannyas.

Updipa means to set fire to. That’s my purpose here: to ignite a fire in you, a fire that can only be fulfilled when god is realised, to set fire to your being, to make you thirsty. It is a thirst that will only be

quenched by god and nothing else. It is a risk, but life attains to heights only when one starts taking risks. The greater the challenge, the sharper becomes the intelligence, awareness. The greater the danger of facing it, of encountering it, the greater the wisdom that arises in one’s being. And unless the danger is there, one goes on sleeping; one remains a somnambulist, a sleepwalker.

God is the ultimate danger, the greatest risk and adventure. It is not for cowards, it is not for frightened, trembling people. It is for the trembling that the churches and the temples exist. Churches and temples provide people with a pseudo god, with a synthetic, plastic god. People can afford that, because there is no risk in it. But to move into reality, to penetrate the truth of life, is playing with fire. And unless you become fiery, you will not be able to enter into the world of god, into the kingdom of god.

Sannyas is a process of creating more and more fire in you. Fire is a symbol of eternal life, and fire is a symbol of the ultimate too. It is only by going through great fire that one is purified, that one becomes pure gold.

Satyam means the truth. Truth is not a conclusion of any logical thinking. Whatsoever logic can arrive at remains only hypothetical; it is never the truth. It is almost always only an approximate truth. But truth cannot be approximate; either it is true or it is not true. There is nothing like approximate truth.

That is as ridiculous as to say that this circle is just an approximate circle. If it is approximate it is not a circle. A circle has to be perfect, only then is it a circle; otherwise it is something else. You cannot say that a man is approximately dead or approximately alive; either one is dead or one is alive. There is no possibility of a category in between these two.

So what logic calls truth is only a hypothesis. That’s why logic goes on changing; yesterday’s truth is no more today’s truth, and today’s truth will not be tomorrow’s truth. Philosophy goes on changing, science goes on changing. Truth is eternal, unchanging, unchangeable.

Then what is the process to attain to truth? It cannot be thought about. How can you think about the unknown? Whatsoever you think will be part of the known. Truth is known when all thoughts are dropped; when thinking disappears, then truth is known. So truth is not a conclusion of thought, but the experience when there exists no thought in you. When the mind is utterly empty of the thought process, truth arises in your own being; when there is space and there is no thought, truth wells up within your own being. It is a non-logical process. It is existential, not logical. Truth arrives only when you are in a state of meditation – not in any state of mind, but in a state of no-mind.

Remember that: truth has nothing to do with philosophising. One can go on philosophising for eternity and one will not arrive at any truth. Everything will remain approximate, so-so, inferential, hypothetical.

What Buddha knows was not arrived at by any logical process; he has arrived by dropping the mind in totality, in toto. Anyone who has ever known truth has known it only when the mind was put aside. Then suddenly one is herenow, and there is such great silence that one starts hearing the whispering in one’s own heart. It is a still, small voice: when the mind has ceased creating noise, it is heard.

Truth has to be discovered, not concluded, and the discovery has to be made within oneself, not without. That is the meaning of satyam.

Love is the greatest magical quality in life. If love is not there, there is no magic in life; life remains very ordinary, unlit, no light radiates from it. It remains like a piece of rock, not like a flower that radiates light and colour and fragrance. Love brings all these things into life. It brings colour; then one is no more black and white, and life becomes a rainbow. All the colours, the whole spectrum of it, becomes available. Suddenly, one is full of light, as if darkness had never existed. Darkness cannot exist with love: it exists with hate. Hate is dark, love is light.

Also, one starts exuding a fragrance. Beautiful qualities that one had never been aware of suddenly surface. One starts looking at life with poetic eyes, with the vision of a painter. One starts hearing words and sounds with the ear of a musician. All art is nothing but a by-product of the loving heart, because the loving heart becomes creative. The loving heart has to become creative. It has to pour itself into existence in as many ways as possible, through as many dimensions as possible. Once love starts flowing in your heart, you start creating an aroma of magic around yourself; a subtle elegance, a subtle grace, starts happening of its own accord.

Love is magic, love is religion. Remember that word, and not only remember it: live it. The more you live it, the richer you will become.

Vimala means utter purity: purity that is not imposed from the outside, purity that is not cultivated, purity that is not practised, purity not as a discipline but as an explosion of one’s nature, purity not as character but as consciousness.

At the innermost core of every being, there is an uncontaminated well of purity. It cannot be contaminated; by its very nature it remains virgin. Whatsoever you do remains on the circumference, it never reaches the centre. The difference between the sinner and the saint is only on the circumference; at the core, nobody is a sinner and nobody is a saint. How can you be a saint when no idea of sin exists there? Sinner and saint are two aspects of the same coin. The good and the bad, god and devil, they are aspects of the same coin; they all exist on the circumference. The circumference is the world of morality of good and bad, of constant judgement, condemnation appreciation .

As you go deeper into your being, those distinctions lose meaning, they start fading away. Slowly slowly they become more and more blurred, and a point comes when they are not found at all. That point is your inner purity. That makes you not a saint but a sage.

A sage is one who is beyond the saint and the sinner. The sage and the saint are not synonymous words. The saint is very ordinary; the sage is transcendental.

To be a sage is the goal. The goal of sannyas is not to be a saint – I don’t teach morality and I don’t teach character. I teach you how to get into the essential core of your being so that you can taste something of your virgin nature. And the very taste of it is a transformation.

[The new sannyasin asks if she can work in the ashram rather than do groups.]

I think you should do at least one or two groups more and then you can start working, mm? Groups will help you more and more to feel the energy that is available here; then it is good to enter into work. Otherwise the work remains work and does not become worship, and unless it becomes worship, it is pointless.

Prem means love, prashanto means profound, deep. Prashanto can have another meaning too: silence, peace – deep peace, deep silence. Love has both the qualities in it, the quality of depth and the quality of silence. Those are the two wings of love: peace and depth. Without love, life remains shallow and life remains noisy; a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise signifying nothing. Without love, life remains much ado about nothing.

Love brings depth. The dimension of depth is very unknown, even to lovers, because they think that love is only a relationship. It is a relationship too, but far more important is that the moment you start moving into love, you become more and more attuned to your depth. The lover or the beloved is outside, and people become focused on the outside and forget the inner dimension – but that is far more important. That is what is really happening in you, and that’s what is giving you so much joy.

The outer thing is just an excuse. To be really meditative about love means to know this inner happening. One starts finding that one is no more shallow; some depth is opening up. And the deeper you go, the more silent you are. If love does not make you deep and silent, then it is false; it must be something else, masquerading as love.

So there is a key for you: be deep in love with people, with animals, with birds, trees, rocks. Don’t miss any opportunity: if you can be in love, be in love. If there is nobody and you are sitting alone, then just be love; there is no need to find an excuse. Slowly slowly, one starts feeling that one can exude love without any object; there is no necessity for an object. Then love has freedom – and the more free it is from outer objects, the deeper it goes. Then love becomes meditation, and a far richer meditation than any other meditation.

Slowly slowly, through love you discover your own silent spaces, and ultimately you open the innermost shrine with the key of love. And that’s where god is found!

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