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‌CHAPTER 24

26 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, sufi has many meanings. One is wisdom, sufiya; philosophy comes from the same root. Another meaning is purity; it comes from sufa. And the third meaning is simplicity. The Sufis lived such simple lives that they used only one shirt made of wool; that was all. It might be summer, it might be winter; that was all that they had. Suf means wool.

All three meanings are interconnected: simplicity, purity, wisdom, are three facets of one phenomenon. They all happen together, they cannot be separated. Wisdom is never complex. It is so simple that only those who have the quality of a child can attain to it. The more complicated a man’s mind is, the less capable he is of becoming wise. He will be knowledgeable of course, but not wise. He may accumulate much information, he may become a great scholar, but he will not have his own insight; it will be all borrowed – and anything that is borrowed is ugly. Beauty has to be your own, only then is it alive, otherwise it is dead.

Wisdom is simple. That’s why millions of people go on missing it, because it is so simple. And man is not so simple any more; man has millions of doubts, millions of questions. Trust makes one simple 24and trust has disappeared from the world.

The little child has trust; he knows nothing of doubt. Even if he enquires about something it is never out of distrust; it is always out of wonder, his questioning arises out of wonder. When the knowledgeable person asks something it is because of his knowledge, not because of his wonder. In fact he already knows the answer; he wants to quarrel, he wants to argue. He is getting ready to fight, to have a verbal fight, to be verbally violent. Hence his question. His question is not out of wonder but out of knowledge 24and any question out of knowledge is worthless.

Wisdom is simple and wisdom is pure. It is uncontaminated, because it arises at the deepest core of your being where nothing can penetrate from outside. Anything that can come to you from outside

remains hanging around you; it remains peripheral, it cannot penetrate to the core. There is simply no way; it doesn’t happen, it is not in the nature of things. Hence at the very core of your being you remain virgin, always virgin. That virginity is eternal.

These are the three qualities of a Sufi, and if these three qualities happen, then bliss naturally arises. Bliss is a by-product of being wise 24it follows wisdom like a shadow.

Sam is beautiful. It is Hebrew; it comes from Samuel, a name of god. So this will be your new name: Swami Sam Anando. Anando means bliss. The full name will mean: bliss-god. Sam can also mean: god has heard you, the prayer has been received. That is another meaning of sam, that the prayer has not been in vain, that your arrow of prayer has reached the target. One of the greatest things in life happens when prayer is heard. When existence starts caring for you, when existence starts responding to you, when it becomes possible for you to have a dialogue with existence – that is also the meaning of sam.

We are not separate from existence; we have just forgotten the language to commune with it. We have forgotten the ways to relate with it. The way to relate to existence is love, and the language of communing with existence is silence. If one can bow down to existence in loving silence, that is true prayer. Not a word is uttered, and the prayer is heard; no demand is made, and all that you have longed for is fulfilled. And what is the longing of man or the longing of any being? At the deepest core there is only one longing, and that is for bliss: that is the only prayer.

Everybody is seeking and searching for bliss – a state of such serenity that nothing disturbs it, a state of such stillness that it is joy but without excitement. That is bliss: joy without excitement. If there is excitement, sooner or later you will become tired of it. Any kind of excitement tires – even the excitement that you love and like, even that tires. It is a kind of feverish state.

Bliss cannot be an excitement because it remains forever and forever. It is tranquillity, it is stillness, it is silence. There is not even a ripple of excitement, but that’s the joy of it: one has arrived home.

Andreas is from Greek, and means manly; and that is dangerous. That carries the old association that man is superior to woman, that there is something special in being manly. There is nothing special in being manly; to be womanly is as beautiful as to be manly. Nothing is inferior, nothing is superior. But the whole past of humanity has been male chauvinistic. Man has dominated woman, and the reason why man has dominated woman is very strange. One is surprised when one comes to know about it for the first time.

In every possible way except muscularly, man is weaker than woman. Maybe because of that inferiority complex, man started dominating woman – just to protect himself This is a certain law of nature. For example, man is the most unprotected animal in the world. You cannot fight naked- handed with a tiger. The tiger is far more powerful; he has nails and teeth, and you have nothing. Because of this, man invented weapons, swords, arrows, spears; those are substitutes for nails and teeth. Because man was more helpless he had to find ways and means to protect himself.

The same has happened with man and woman. One hundred and fifty boys are born to one hundred girls, but by and by the number becomes equal. Fifty boys die; such is their weakness. Many more boys, four times more than girls, are born dead. Girls grow faster than boys in every way: they speak

first, they walk first, they sit first. Maybe this has been the cause of man becoming very afraid of women and having to depend on only one capacity that he has more of than woman – muscular power. Because of muscular power he has been dominating women down the ages. It has been an ugly history, inhuman.

These words belong to that past, they still carry the meaning of the past. To be manly is something great; to call somebody feminine, effeminate, is to condemn him.

We have to create a new world where man and woman will not be thought of as enemies, competitors, where they will not be compared as superior or inferior but will be friends in the great enterprise of being human.

Prem means love, sagaram means ocean – ocean of love. Man has the capacity to become an ocean of love. From the surface we look as if we are just small drops, dew-drops, not more than that, but if we enter into it, the dew-drop’ contains the depths of all the oceans. The dew-drop only appears to be a dew-drop; it is not – it is infinity, it is eternity.

Meditation is the technique to dive deep into your own being, so the drop disappears and you can find the ocean within yourself.

Deva means divine, irene is Greek; it means peace – divine peace. There are two possibilities of creating peace. One is by our own effort. It will be a very tiny peace, not worth the name, because our hands are small. The peace that we create by our efforts will remain superficial, because we don’t know our own depth. It will be a kind of decoration from the outside, it will be painting the walls from outside. It will be basically a pretension, it will be pseudo, it will be a mask. It is just as people can paint their lips and powder their faces and for a moment can deceive one; but that is not real beauty. Real beauty needs no decoration; only ugliness needs decoration, only ugliness needs ornaments. Real beauty is enough unto itself; it is luminous, it overflows.

So the first kind of peace is just a manoeuvre. It is social, it has certain utilities; it makes you more loveable, respectable. It makes social life more easy, smooth; it is a kind of lubricant between you and other people. It helps you to avoid many unnecessary, embarrassing, conflicting situations. It creates a buffer around you, a shock absorber, but it has nothing to do with your real growth.

Real growth happens through a totally different kind of peace which happens from the beyond, which you don’t create, which does not come out of your effort but out of your surrender. When you surrender in utter helplessness, a miracle happens: grace descends, god possesses you. But he can possess you only when the surrender is total. If there is even a lurking desire to do something on your own, that will be enough to prevent grace from flowing into you.

If one is utterly empty... nature abhors a vacuum, god abhors a vacuum too. When you are really empty, from every nook and comer god rushes into you. And that is real peace. You become so full of it that it starts overflowing in you, and you have to share it. There is no other way but to share it. It is like a flower that releases its fragrance; it has to release it. It is like light; it has to spread, the flame cannot contain it. That is divine peace.

Human peace is only part of morality, ethics. Divine peace is a gift of god, it is religious, it is spiritual. Seek divine peace. Efface yourself totally; become just an empty vessel, a prayer, an awaiting. Then

one day, from the blue, something starts pouring into you and goes on and on pouring into you. Once it starts, it never ends.

[Bhagwan invites a sannyasin from Mozambique to start a centre. The sannyasin said he would like to but the political situation is difficult.]

Try. There is nothing to be worried about. The political situation everywhere is... Just start!

This will be the name: Asha. Asha means hope. The political situation is going to remain the same; it has always been the same. But we cannot wait for it – we have to hope, we have to hope against all hopes.

The spiritual work has to happen amidst all kinds of antagonistic situations. Otherwise Jesus would have remained silent, Socrates would never have spoken and Buddha would have moved to the farthest-away caves of the Himalayas.

Politics and religion are basically in conflict. Politics means ambition, religion means non- ambition. Politics means extroversion, religion means introversion. They are diametrically opposite dimensions.

The politician agrees with religion only when religion also becomes part of politics, when it becomes an organised church. When Jesus is gone and the pope comes in, then it’s perfectly okay. But whenever there is an awakened person, there is no possibility of any compromise. The awakened one cannot compromise, that is impossible – light cannot compromise with darkness. And darkness cannot accept light, because it is darkness’ death to accept light. So the struggle is eternal and will always remain so. In a way it is beautiful, because in that very struggle is the challenge, and through that challenge one becomes integrated.

Just think: if Jesus had not been crucified, if he had not been persecuted, tortured, if wherever he went he was simply garlanded and respected, there would have been no Christ at all. The people who persecuted him, the people who finally killed him, are the people to be thanked. They created this man, they created the crystallisation in Jesus: they made Jesus a Christ.

So never be worried about outer situations; they are always there and they will always remain the same. Go on hoping. It is beautiful to search for a ray of light when everything is dark, when everywhere is darkness. Light can be found, even in the darkest night. And the beauty and the exhilaration and the ecstasy of finding it is tremendous.

So this will be the name: Asha. It means hope.

Keep it (a box) with you, and whenever you need me just put it on your heart. And come back whenever possible!

Anand means bliss, anatto means no-self. Self is misery, no-self is bliss. To be is to be miserable; not to be is blissful. The whole process of spiritual growth is basically ego suicide. You have to go

on killing yourself, because whatsoever you think about yourself, you are not that. You are identified with some fiction, with some shadow, with some dream.

Disidentify with yourself. For a moment it will be very very frightening, scary, because you will lose all identity, you will pass through a great identity crisis. But that is the pain you have to go through to be reborn. Once one has accepted that identity crisis and does not go back and start clinging again to the false ego, then a totally new vision arises: a self which is not a self. You can call it the supreme self or you can call it no-self, but both are synonymous. At that point of experience, what you call it does not matter. If you have a positive leaning, you can call it the supreme self, the divine self. If you have a negative leaning, you can call it no-self.

Anatta is a Buddhist word. Buddha has a negative leaning: he loves to describe things through the negative, via negativa. There is a certain reason for it: he is very cautious. If you call it the supreme self, there is every danger that you may start thinking about your old self in a magnified way. That is the danger with using a positive word for it: the old self may come in from the back door. You may start thinking ‘Yes, this is the divine self.’ So Buddha cuts the very roots, he does not leave any opening for the self to come back again: he calls it no-self.

Then nothingness is left. It is very cool, that nothingness; it is tremendously beautiful, that nothingness. It is utter purity, that nothingness 24but in that nothingness all happens, god happens.

[A sannyasin says he has confusions about leaving; he feels scared to stay here.]

Mm mm. Confusion arises only if you start forcing something upon yourself. There is no need to live here. You must be trying to force yourself to live here; then confusion arises. Confusion is our own creation.

Listen to your heart: if your heart says ‘Go’ then go, and there is no confusion. When your heart says ‘Be here’ then be here, and there is no confusion. Confusion arises when you create a contradiction in yourself: you want to go and you want to be here, then you create confusion. Just listen silently, and whatsoever is the major voice in you, follow it, and you will always be on the right track. Don’t be worried about where to go and what you do. Don’t stifle your major voice; that is dangerous.

Listening to the major voice, slowly slowly, you will become so clear. Your voice will become very clear because it will be heard. It will become louder and louder, and a moment will come when you can immediately look within and a one-hundred-percent answer comes. Then there will be no confusion at all.

So if your inner voice says ‘Go’ go. To follow your inner voice is to be with me. Being here or not being here is irrelevant; to follow your inner voice is to be with me. Keep that in mind and then there will be no confusion ever. Go happily: when the voice says ‘Come back’ come back.

[A sannyasin asks about her eighteen-year-old daughter who is unhappy and expects the mother to help her. She will try to bring her here next time she comes, meanwhile she is concerned about falling into old relating patterns with her.]

Bring her. That will be very simple. It will be no problem at all.

Bring her here, and just by being here within a few weeks she will be totally different. She just has to understand, and situations are needed to make her understand.

You will not be able to help her, because this is how you have been for eighteen years; now you cannot suddenly change. And she will not listen to you. It is your creation: you must have been fulfilling her expectations. The more you fulfil, the more demand there is; and if you don’t fulfil her demands, then there is misery. The misery is just a strategy to force you to fulfil her demands, to be according to her. She knows that you cannot tolerate her misery, so now she has a perfect technique in her hand to torture you.

So now it will be difficult for you to sort things out24very difficult. But bring her here. I will give her a few groups and within six to eight weeks she will be totally different, because she will see that by creating misery for herself she is destroying herself. Even if she can force things upon you, it is too costly and unnecessary, and she is learning a strategy that will destroy her whole life. You may not be there tomorrow, but her whole life will be destroyed. What she is doing with you she will do with her husband, she will do with her children; this will be her whole life’s programme. It has to be changed: she has to be de-programmed.

Don’t do anything there. Just bring her here, and I will see. With children I have my own ways. Don’t be worried!

Finish things there, come back, and be here forever. Bring her also, so I can see her.

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