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CHAPTER 21
21 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
[A sannyasin with her daughter, newly returned says she had much tension in her chest since her daughter’s illness when she had much anxiety and hatred for people and institutions... ]
Every new relationship brings up many things which are repressed. To be a mother is a beginning of a totally different world. Many things that were never available to you consciously will become available to you when you become a mother. It is a new dimension: it will bring many things into focus; many things will fall out of your perspective. You will have to change a lot.
With each relationship – you make a new friend or fall in love with a new person – you are in an upheaval. And the mother-child relationship is one of the most deep-going; it stirs your very heart. It is not an easy thing to be a mother, it is one of the most difficult things in life.
So you have to be very watchful, conscious, and let arise whatsoever arises, don’t repress it. It is good that you get rid of it, and the only way to get rid of it is to be a simple witness without any judgment. Then motherhood can become a transformation.
Things will start changing here.
Prem Werner... will mean a warrior for love. It is a paradox, because love is not war, love is peace, but because we have created a world full of hatred, full of war, we have to fight for peace too, for love too.
The man-made society is a very unloving phenomenon. To be unloving is easy. You will never be in conflict with the society, you will adjust, because it is an unloving society. If you are unloving you are part of it, you are welcome. If you become loving you are a danger to the society; you start moving away from it, you lose the so-called adjustment to it. The society starts becoming suspicious of you:
either you have gone mad or you have become a poet, an artist – which is another way of saying the same thing, in better terms, that you are crazy, that you are no more a part of the calculating society, the market-place.
When for the first time Mohammed saw the light of god and heard the inner voice reciting the Koran, he rushed home – he had been meditating in a cave in the mountains. He was trembling and perspiring. The first words that he said to his wife were ‘Take care of me. Either I have become a poet or I have gone mad.’ And both are dangerous!
This society does not allow the heart to function. Only on the fringes of the society do a few poets, a few painters, a few musicians, live the life of the heart. But they too have to compromise with the society because they also have to survive; they have to go on selling their hearts.
So it is a fight; it should not be, but it is a fight. To be loving is to be in a constant war with the ugly society that we have created. But this war is divine, it is in the service of god. It does not serve any politics, it does not serve any nation, it does not serve any church. Fighting for love ii fighting for god, and because you are fighting for love, your fight cannot be a camouflage for hatred; you will love your enemies too.
That’s why Jesus goes on saying again and again to his disciples: love your enemies as thyself. He is the warrior for love. He was trying to create a new kind of human being who would live in love, hence he declared: love is god. But Christianity betrayed him. War continued – still in the name of love, but it was just a pretension. Deep down it was hatred, politics; all kinds of ugly things were hiding in it. It was not war for love.
Sannyas is the same experiment again. It may succeed, it may fail: it all depends on you, it depends on my sannyasins.
Remember it, that we have to fight for love and a loving world, that we have to create a new man, homo novus – a new humanity which will not know any barriers of caste, creed, race, nation, which will know only one earth, one humanity, one world.
Almira is an Arabic word. It is a name for god; it means the exalted one.
One has to learn respect for oneself. That is one of the most necessary things in life, but it has not been taught to us. We have been taught to respect a thousand and one things except ourselves: on the contrary, we have been conditioned to hate, to reject, to condemn ourselves. That is the root cause of so much misery in the world. Anybody who hates himself deep down cannot allow himself to be happy; it is impossible for him to give permission to himself to be blissful.
Misery fits perfectly well with our self-condemnation; misery is a by-product of self-condemnation. Unless we allow bliss to happen, it is not going to happen; there is no other way. And we can allow it only when we have tremendous respect for our own being, a great love for ourselves. But that has been condemned for centuries and centuries – it is called selfishness, and all kinds of names. But self-love is the foundation of all other love.
The person who does not love himself cannot love anybody else either, and the person who hates himself will hate god too. You are nothing but a wave in the ocean of god, and if you hate yourself, you will hate other waves too; they are just like you.
Humanity has lived under a dark cloud of self-condemnation and hatred, and everybody feels unworthy, everybody feels just like dirt. We go on pretending on the surface that it is not so, but deep down we have been told that it is so – that we are sinners, that we are sent into the world only to suffer, that we have committed millions of crimes in our past lives and this suffering is a logical consequence of it. All these theories are nothing but forcing on you this idea that you are a sinner.
Man is not suffering because Adam and Eve have committed any sin; they never committed sin in the first place. They must have been tremendously beautiful people: they rebelled. They rebelled against authority. They are the founders of humanity. In fact their statues should be everywhere, in all temples and all churches. They did not bow down to an irrelevant order, they didn’t surrender to something which was not acceptable to their intelligence.
In the East, the serpent has always been a symbol of wisdom. The parable of Adam and Eve has a totally different meaning to the Eastern mystic: the serpent represents their inner wisdom, their intelligence. Their intelligence convinced them that this disobedience was worth it. They risked much, because it was said to them ‘If you eat from the tree of knowledge, you will become mortal. If you don’t eat, you are immortals; if you eat, through that, you will become part of the world of death.’ They risked, they risked losing their immortality. They said ‘So let it be, but we cannot bow down to an unnecessary commandment, an irrelevant commandment.’
They were not sinners; they were the first revolutionaries. We are not suffering because of them: we are suffering because of the priests who condemn the rebellion as sin.
In each society the same story continues in different ways. In India we don’t have the story of Adam and Eve, but we have a far more philosophical argument for why man should be miserable. The argument is that because he has committed sin for millions of lives, he has to suffer for his sins. All these theories are just utter nonsense.
Man suffers, not because of the past: man suffers because he condemns himself. The moment you drop the condemnation, you will be surprised how much energy is released.
That is the meaning of Almira: feel yourself as exalted, feel yourself as a tremendous gift of god. Feel yourself loved, feel yourself lovable. Give all the respect that you can to yourself, and you will be surprised: when you respect your humanity you start respecting other human beings, when you respect your life you start respecting all other life. A great reverence for life arises. And when you love yourself you cannot hate anybody.
Hiroshi is a Japanese word; it means generous.
Generous, kind, loving, one who is capable of sharing. This is one of the most important things to realise, that there are things which grow if you share them: the more you share, the more you have. It is a very very different kind of logic. In the ordinary outside world, economics won’t agree with it. They will say ‘If you want to have more, save, hoard.’
In the inner world, in the inner economics of life, just the opposite is the law: if you want to have more, share, don’t save. The more you give to people, the more you will have. For example, love: if it is not shared, it dies. Not only does it die: it turns into its own opposite. When a person dies,
sooner or later the corpse will start stinking. When love dies, the corpse stinks; that’s what hatred is. When love is not allowed to flow, when it is stuck and becomes stagnant, it becomes dirty, it goes sour, it becomes bitter. It was nectar when it was flowing; it becomes poison if it is stagnant.
If you had shared it, more and more love energy would have been coming to you from the beyond – because we are connected with the beyond, but the beyond can pour energy into us only when we go on pouring it into existence. Otherwise we are so full, there is no need for the beyond to pour. Even if the beyond wants to pour, there is no space in us to receive it.
Being generous means constantly emptying oneself into the world in every possible way – in a dance, in a song, in love, in friendship – pouring one’s energies into existence in every possible way. That creates a circle of energy: you pour into the world and the beyond pours into you. It is just as the river moves from the mountains, pours itself into the ocean, clouds arise and shower on the mountains, the river is full again and goes on flowing: it is a circle. In exactly the same way life is a circle. But break the circle anywhere, and difficulties arise.
So whatsoever you have – your talents, your intelligence, your love, your friendship – share. That is the meaning of Hiroshi.
Prem means love, pragosh means declaration. Love should not be kept a secret: it should be declared from the housetops. It should be declared to the sun, to the moon, to the wind, to the rains. It should be sung and celebrated; only then does it start growing, expanding.
The more love is declared, the more you disappear, because the ego and love cannot exist together. If you don’t manifest your love, your ego goes on growing bigger and bigger. The ego is the only error there is, because it is utterly false; it does not correspond to any reality in existence, it is only a belief. If you search into it you will not find any substance in it; it is only a shadow.
Love is truth, love is light, and when you bring love in, all shadows disappear. They need not even be destroyed. They need not be renounced. One need not drop the ego: when love is there, it is not found. So these are the two possibilities: either the ego becomes your declaration, then love disappears; or love becomes your declaration, then the ego disappears.
Declare love! Each act should become a revelation of love. Each word that you utter should be full of your love. Whatsoever you do and whatsoever you are, it should go on emphasising only one thing: love and love and love. Then one day, you disappear and god appears.
Love prepares the way, it is the path. Somewhere in the middle of the path, you and god meet. It is on the path of love that you move towards god and god moves towards you.
[A sannyasin, whose twelve-month child drowned yesterday, is unable to talk about it.]
The child disappeared? Let him disappear and don’t be worried. We are all here just to disappear sooner or later. Life is very precarious, accidental: any moment anybody can go. So don’t be worried about why it happened; there is no why. All the answers that can be given to your why will be nothing but consolations to somehow rationalise a thing which is mysterious, but which by rationalising we help to console ourselves. I am not interested in consoling, because it is a dangerous game, this consolation. It keeps you hidden behind buffers.
The truth is that the child was alive and suddenly is alive no more. This should make you understand the dreamlike quality of life. Life is made of the stuff called dreams. We may be seeing a beautiful dream, but it can be broken by any small thing – just a noise and the dream disappears. It may have been a sweet dream, and one feels hurt and one wants to close one’s eyes and to continue dreaming, but now nothing can be done.
Rather than finding explanations and consolations, always look at the naked truth. It is sad, it hurts, it is painful: see it, that it is so, but don’t try to somehow whitewash it. All explanations and all philosophies are nothing but efforts to whitewash things which are not white, which are very dark and mysterious.
When such moments come they are of tremendous significance, because in those moments awakening is possible. When your child dies, it is such a shock: you can awaken in such a shock, rather than crying and wasting the opportunity. After a few days the shock will be a shock no more; time heals everything. After a few years you will forget all about it. By the end of your life it may look as if you have seen it in some movie or read about it in a novel. In time it will have faded and faded so far away that only an echo...
Catch hold of it right now.
This is the moment when it can help you to be alert, awake. Don’t miss the opportunity; all consolations are ways of missing opportunities.
Never ask why. Life is without any why and death is without any why. The why cannot be answered, need not be answered. Life is not a problem that can be solved, neither is death. Life and death are both parts of one mystery, which knows no answer. The question mark is ultimate.
So all that can be done in such situations is that one should awaken, because these shocks can become a breakthrough. Thinking stops, the shock is such that the mind goes into a blur. Nothing seems to be meaningful, all seems to be lost. One feels an utter stranger, an outsider, uprooted. These are tremendously significant moments; these are the moments when you can enter into a new dimension. And death is one of the greatest doors that opens into the divine. When somebody dies who is as close as a child is to a mother, it is almost the death of yourself, as if you have died; a part of you has died.
So just see that life is a dream, that everything will disappear sooner or later, dust unto dust. Nothing abides here. We cannot make our home here. It is a caravanserai, an overnight’s stay, and in the morning we go. But there is one thing which is constantly there and permanently there – that is your watching, your witnessing. Everything else disappears, everything else comes and goes; only witnessing remains.
So witness this whole thing. Just be a witness, don’t become identified. Don’t be a mother, otherwise you are identified. Just be a witness, a silent watcher. And that watching will help you tremendously: it is the only key which opens the door of mysteries. Not that it solves anything, but it makes you capable of living the mysterious, and of living it totally.
Would you like to start working in the ashram?
Start working – this is the right time to enter into the ashram. Good.
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