26

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 26

28 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love; sabine is a Latin word, it means an ancient Italian tribe. Your name will mean ancient love. Love is eternal, it is always. Lovers change, love continues. Love is the eternal drama of life: it takes many faces, many forms, but the essential core is the same. It is in the stars, it is in the flowers, it is in men and women, it is in animals, birds; and those who know say that it is even in a rock.

What we call gravitation is nothing but a manifestation of love. Love is the energy that pulls things together towards an unknown centre. Love is the energy that keeps the existence together. It is love that makes existence a cosmos, not a chaos.

Disappear in love. Don’t be a lover, don’t be a beloved, just be love – and that liberates. That’s my whole message of sannyas.

Prem means love, markus can mean many things. The Latin meaning is: belonging to the godman, god of war – which is ugly. I will not make it mean that. War and god don’t go together. God can only be of peace, because god is peace. War is of the devil. War is something utterly ugly; it can have no association with god. But in the ancient days we projected all our uglinesses onto god. The Jewish god declares ‘I am a jealous god.’ Now, just to think of it, god himself declaring ‘I am jealous’ is so ugly. It should be deleted from the Old Testament; it should be dropped, it no more fits. Humanity has grown up, man understands life more. Jealousy may be perfectly okay with the devil, but not with god.

So I will not make markus mean war god. There is another meaning: in Hebrew it means large hammer. That too seems to be violent. But there is a third meaning which is beautiful; it means polite. So that is the meaning I choose: love and politeness.

Love is always polite. It is a whisper, not even a dialogue. Love does not shout, it is not loud. Love is not even laughter; it is only a smile. It is like the soft fragrance of a flower: it does not attack, it is not aggressive. It permeates, it pervades, it overwhelms, but it doesn’t conquer. It knows how to surrender, and in that very surrender is its secret of victory.

So forget other meaning of markus; remember that your name means love, politeness.

Prem means love; erik is Teutonic, it means a king, and a king who is a king forever. Only love can confer upon you a kingdom which can remain forever. Otherwise even an Alexander has to lose his kingdom; it cannot be forever. That which is conquered by force can only be momentary. That which is imposed cannot be eternal, because the enemy that you have conquered has not become your friend; in fact he has become more of an enemy than before. He will wait for the time to react, to retaliate, to take revenge. It is a constant on-going struggle.

The only true kingdom comes through love. Jesus talks about it – the kingdom that is within you. In the false kingdom you conquer others; in the real kingdom you become a self-conqueror. And to be master of oneself, not to be a slave of any desire, of any thought, of any passion, any more, is the most precious thing in life, the greatest splendour that can happen to anybody. I am not saying to destroy your desires and I am not saying to destroy your passions; I am not against your body, I am not against your desires. What I am saying is: they should not be the masters. You should be the master and they should be the servants. When passions serve you, when your desires are your shadows, life is infinitely enriched.

This can happen only through love – not through conflict but through harmony. Love yourself: that is the first commandment, and then all other nine commandments follow on their own. If you love yourself you cannot do anything wrong. The very thing, the very phenomenon of loving oneself, makes one capable of loving all. And love is the only protection against evil. The devil is not afraid of your virtues: the devil is only afraid of your love.

Anand means bliss, earnest is a Teutonic word. The first meaning is serious, and that is something pathological. To be serious is to be ill, seriously ill.

Life is not for those who are serious, life is for those who are playful. Be sincere but don’t be serious. Sincerity is a totally different phenomenon. Sincerity comes out of simplicity; seriousness comes out of calculation, cunningness. Sincerity is child-like, very pure. Seriousness is something imposed, pseudo, a pretension – but if one goes on pretending, slowly slowly one starts believing in it; it becomes an auto-hypnosis. So drop the idea of seriousness that hangs around the word ‘earnest’.

The second meaning is: one who is very intent in his purpose; that too is not right. That brings the future in; that brings in desire, ambition, goal-orientation. These are the qualities which are very much appreciated by the society. But sannyas is a fight against these qualities, because these are the qualities which make this society, and this society cannot disappear from the world unless these qualities are taken away.

We have to take away the very earth from underneath the feet of the old society.

‘Purpose’ should be a dirty word; although it is not four letters, that doesn’t make much difference. Life should not be lived according to a purpose; life should be lived as a celebration, as a song, as

a dance, as a love affair. Life should not be business, it should not be mundane. And that’s what I call the religious quality – to live life for no other reason except for the sheer joy of living. It is a gift of god. Enjoy it, but don’t reduce it to a means to a certain end. That’s the meaning of purpose: always reducing things for certain ends, sacrificing everything that you have for certain future goals.

I teach you just the contrary: don’t sacrifice anything that you have. Live it, live it totally, live it intensely, live it wholly – because only by living it in totality will the next moment be born out of it.

Out of today’s life, tomorrow will come; it will have the flavour of today. If you sacrifice today, your tomorrow is going to be ugly again; and then you will have to sacrifice that too for some other tomorrow – and so on and so forth, ad nauseum.

People live only in sacrificing. They never come to a moment when they can enjoy; they never come to a moment when they can see the great gift and feel grateful to god. They are always missing something, because the goal is far away in the future. The goal is not far away in the future: each moment is its own goal. So that meaning also is not right.

But there is a beautiful meaning in this word, which is not ordinarily used; it also means the eagle. That I love... that’s beautiful!

So your name will be: a blissful eagle. The whole sky is yours – be a blissful eagle! It is better to be a bird, playful, on the wing, than to be a serious man, goal-oriented, ambitious. It is utterly beautiful to be an eagle on the wing, in the wind, in the sun, in the open sky.

The eagle represents the spirit of freedom, and that is the spirit of sannyas too. So forget all other meanings. And those other meanings are very very important; you will find them in all the dictionaries. The meaning that I am giving, you may find very rarely somewhere. But even if you don’t find it, don’t be bothered! I make it mean eagle!

[The new sannyasin asks for a name for a meditation centre, and for his dance company.]

This will be the name for the meditation centre: Manisha. Manisha means wisdom – not knowledge, but wisdom. Knowledge is easy because it is borrowed, accumulated from others. It is information; you can store it in your memory. It does not change you, you remain the same. You become more knowledgeable, but you don’t have more being. Qualitatively you remain the same; quantitatively you have more knowledge than you had before. But the real change is not quantitative; the real change has to be in your inner quality, in your very being.

That happens only through wisdom. Wisdom does not come from the outside: it has to be searched for within. At the deepest core of our being there is a spring of nectar: once you have drunk out of it you become wise. It transforms you; you are no more the same person. The old is gone, and gone forever, and something absolutely new of which you could not even have dreamt has arrived. It is discontinuous with the old.

Knowledge is of the without, wisdom is of the within. Wisdom is a welling up of your own energy. It has nothing to do with memory; it has something to do with intelligence. And remember the difference between the intellectual and the intelligent person. The intellectual is knowledgeable; he

depends on memory, he is a beautiful biocomputer. The man of intelligence does not depend on memory; he depends on his insight, his vision, his way of looking at things. His third eye is open – that is his insight. That insight is manisha.

So this will be the name for your meditation centre.

And would you like another name for your dance troupe?

So would you like a separate name for it or will the same do?

The same will be perfect, mm? – manage everything underneath it... dances, meditations, music, everything, because wisdom contains all. Let wisdom be a big tree underneath which everything is possible.

Next time, come for a longer period.

Deva means divine; simon is Hebrew, it means gracious hearing... one who is capable of hearing. That is one of the greatest talents – a very rare talent, very few people have it. It is easy to talk. it is very difficult to listen. Hence the growing science of psychoanalysis. Nobody is ready to hear; if you want somebody to hear you, you have to pay for it.

That’s what psychoanalysis is. The psychoanalyst is doing nothing, he has nothing to do, but many things happen. I am not saying that nothing happens through it; much happens through it, but the psychoanalyst does nothing. All that he does is to sit behind the couch and listen. He listens attentively, he listens sympathetically, he listens lovingly; he is open to you. He does not criticise what you are saying. You need not be on guard, you need not say a few things and not say a few other things; you are given total freedom. He is all yours, with no judgment, with no evaluation, with no condemnation, with no appreciation; he is simply there. You can rely on his not thinking good or bad of you; his listening is value-free.

That makes miracles happen – because when one can pour one’s heart totally, holding nothing back, that very pouring of the heart is a catharsis. Wounds start oozing their pus, traumas surface to the conscious. One is able to say the thousand and one things that one had always been repressing, had wanted to say but could not manage to say. And the moment you say them, you are free of them.

It is a very ugly state of affairs that we have to pay people just to listen to us. It simply shows one thing about modern humanity, that nobody is sympathetic. Not even the wife is ready to listen to the husband, not even the father is ready to listen to the child, not even the children are ready to listen to the teacher; nobody is ready to listen to anybody else. Everybody is hiding behind granite walls. If you want somebody to hear you, you have to shout. Then too, it is not certain that it will reach or that it will reach in the same way that you wanted it to; every possibility is that it will be misunderstood.

We are living in one of the strangest worlds: communication has disappeared. And when ordinary communication has disappeared, what to say about truth? What to say about a master and a disciple?

The whole art of the disciple is to listen to the master – and to listen so attentively, so totally, that there is no listener inside but just listening, a pure opening. Then truth has magic in it: if you can allow it to reach to your heart, just the hearing of it is enough to transform you.

So you have a beautiful name: divine hearing. Don’t let it remain just a name: let it become your very style of life. And if you can listen to me with totality, with no strings attached, with no conditionings, you will be surprised: you can listen to the wind passing through the pine trees too, you can listen to the birds singing in the morning, yoU can listen to the clouds thundering and you can listen to the waves of the ocean roaring. You will be surprised: truth is declared from everywhere, truth is being shouted at you from every nook and corner! From every housetop, truth is being declared. It is just that we are blind and deaf – we don’t see, we don’t hear.

[A sannyasin says: I’m worried about my health. Since I did Alchemy group, there has been very strong trembling.

Osho checks his energy.]

Nothing to be worried about. Something good is happening, something really good is happening. For the first time in your life, your energy has moved. You have been holding it back all along; you are still holding it back a little bit. You are afraid that it is something crazy. It is not: it is just a new vibe. The body wants to move into a new dimension, the body is ready to take the jump, and you are holding back. It is as if the car is ready to move but you are not releasing its brakes: the engine is throbbing and trembling. Your body needs to go into a new pattern, a new gestalt – so don’t hold it back.

Alchemy has done something really significant: it has moved your heart. But your mind is still not ready to move with your heart. The mind is always sluggard. the mind is always lousy. It always lags behind, because it has no courage; the mind is a coward. The heart knows how to risk, how to go into a new adventure, and how to move into the unknown, the uncharted. The heart is ready – your heart immediately affected [my medium] – but your head is holding the brakes.

Release those brakes: press the accelerator and release the brakes! You have really a good energy system – a Mercedes Benz!

[A sannyasin, newly returned, says that he feels unsettled from travelling to and from the West, but it’s okay.]

No, it is perfectly okay; it has to be so.

My whole effort here is to destroy all that you have been in the past, to destroy all the roots, so that the new can be born. But in between the two this situation is bound to happen. The old roots are cut and the new roots take time to grow; one feels in the middle, neither here nor there. But this is perfectly as I would like it to be.

Sooner or later, the West has to be dropped. And once you have dropped the West, then I will start helping you to drop the East too! The East is only a device to cut the roots in the West. It is just as if you have a thorn in your foot and with another thorn you pull it out and then you throw away both the thorns. The East and West both have to go.

My sannyasin has to be a universal being, a citizen of the universe. Even this earth is very small; we have to be universal. Why not possess all the stars and all the moons and all the suns? – when they are ours! Why remain poor unnecessarily? The moment somebody thinks ‘I am Western’ he is poorer, because he is denying the whole Eastern heritage. When somebody says ‘I am only Indian’ he is far poorer, because he is denying the whole heritage of humanity. When somebody says ‘I am a Christian’ or ‘I am a Hindu’ he is becoming a beggar by his own choice. Claim the whole – and not only the whole past but the whole future too. This is our world, and we are here to destroy all boundaries.

If sannyas takes possession of millions of people in the world, then many more things will start happening out of it. This is the beginning of a new world, a new concept of a man who will not be white or black, Indian or German, Chinese or American, Communist or Catholic, who will simply be a human being, utterly joyous, utterly in celebration, who will be a poet, a singer, a dancer, a musician. Yes, those things are beautiful. But he will not be a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan, because those things are ugly.

We are to destroy the whole past. It has been a horrible past, it has been a nightmare. The work is great, and I cannot even exactly tell you the whole thing that is going to happen, because if I tell the whole thing you may lose courage, you may lose hope. So I will have to give it to you only in bits and bits.

If you can just move one step, I will talk of one more step; when you are ready to take another step, I will talk of another step. But the vision is great: the vision is as inclusive as possible.

So this is something good. First become uprooted in the West, then I will make you uprooted in the East.

Anand means bliss, niraj means a cloud – a cloud of bliss. Bliss is very indefinable, like a cloud. It is a vague feeling, not a solid thought. It is more like a fragrance than a flower. You cannot catch hold of it: the moment you try to catch hold of it you will miss it. It is also like a cloud because it has no destination. It simply floats, without any purpose. It is not going anywhere, or only wherever the winds take it. So is the case with bliss: it has no direction – and the moment you start directing it, you start killing it. It can exist only in total freedom.

It is also like a cloud because it takes many forms. One moment you can see an elephant in the cloud. Another moment it is gone; there is a tiger. Another moment that too is gone. So is the case with bliss: it takes millions of forms because it is liquid. One moment it is beauty, another moment it is music, still another moment it is love, and so on and so forth.

Remember it, that bliss is a cloud, and become a blissful cloud.

< Previous | Contents | Next >