28

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‌CHAPTER 28

30 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love. Love is the only real strength; all other strengths are only pretenders. But love is a paradox too – its strength is not that of violence, that of aggression; its strength is that of receptivity, vulnerability, openness. Its strength consists in surrendering, yielding, giving way.

In the world there is a possibility of two kinds of strengths. One is masculine – the strength of a rock, the strength of a wild animal. The other strength is feminine: the strength of water, not of rock; of a flower, not of a wild animal; the strength not of the body, of musculature, but the strength of the heart.

Your name is good but the meaning has to be understood rightly. A strong woman does not mean the same as a strong man; with a man the meaning changes. The strong man means rock-like. A strong woman means fluid, liquid, flowing, waterlike; the watercourse way, the strength of tao – not fighting but yielding.

Jesus says: Blessed are those who are the last in this world, because they will be the first in my kingdom of god. He is talking about that kind of strength, the strength of a nobody.

Anand means bliss, moksha means ultimate freedom. The word ‘moksha’ is so unique in the East that it is impossible to translate it into any Western language, because the very idea of moksha has not existed in the Western consciousness. But it can be understood.

The Western religious consciousness thinks of two existences: one is hell, the other is heaven. Hell is just pure suffering and heaven is pure joy. We have these two words in the East, but we have a third word ‘moksha’ which means freedom from joy as much as from suffering – because the great Eastern insight into life is that there comes a moment when one is even tired of joy, bored with happiness. That’s a great insight.

It is simple to understand that a person is bored with suffering, that he is tired of it, that hc wants to get rid of it. But the Eastern mystics have come to see that there comes a moment when even happiness is trivial, an unnecessary burden, and one wants to get rid of that too. When you are free from both pain and pleasure, good and bad, light and darkness, life and death, when you are free from all dualities – that state, that transcendence, is moksha.

It is impossible to define it, because the moment you try to define it and you use any word, the duality comes back. If you call it light, it is not, because light is part of a duality: light-dark. If you call it love, it is not, because love is again part of a duality: love-hate. If you call it good, it is not. Even if you call it god, it is not, because god is part of a dual existence: god and devil. No word is adequate. It is a wordless non-dual experience of utter oneness with existence. It is so still, so silent, that one is not, because one can be only if there is some excitement.

The ego feeds on excitement; excitement is a must for the ego to exist. If it is not that of pleasure. the ego is ready even to live with pain, but excitement is needed. To be in a state of non-excitement is to disappear, and to disappear is to attain to the ultimate freedom. That’s what we call bliss. Bliss is not equivalent to happiness; it is just absence of all happiness, all unhappiness.

That is the goal of sannyas, and unless it is achieved something remains missing. It can be achieved. because it is something in-built in our very being; it only needs unfolding.

Anand means bliss, reiner means the pure one. Purity does not mean goodness: purity means the absence of the idea of good and bad. Purity means innocence. The sinner is not innocent, he is guilty; and the so-called saint is not innocent either, he is proud. Both have chosen: one has become the sinner, another has become the saint, but both have calculated.

The really innocent one is like a child: he knows nothing of good and nothing of bad. He lives an uncalculated life. unplanned. moment to moment. He has no character; the really pure person has no character at all. Bad people have character, good people have character, but the really innocent one has no character. He cannot afford to have character. because character means pollution, character means contamination.

Character means you have already started living according to a certain idea. You are no more innocent; your action is preplanned, rehearsed. Your action is not out of the moment, it comes from the past. It is ready-made, hence it is dull, hence it is irresponsible, hence it is unintelligent. An intelligent person need not carry ready-made answers with him. He trusts his intelligence, so when the situation arises he responds, and out of that response something happens.

That happening will surprise him as much as it will surprise others, because he had not known that it was going to be like that. Hence the innocent person lives constantly in surprise; he lives a wonder-full life. His life is full of awe. He lives in the miraculous, he moves in the mysterious.

Calculation kills all mystery, arithmetic destroys all mystery. Knowledge creates walls around you and does not allow you to see the tremendous beauty that surrounds you, the incredible moment- to-moment dance of life that goes on and on. It prevents you – it keeps you blind, it keeps you deaf. Slowly slowly, it makes you so insensitive that your life is only a name; it is no more really alive, you are already in your grave.

To live innocently is to live religiously. Jesus says: Those who are like small children, they will be able to enter into my kingdom of god.

That is the meaning of your name: blissful innocence, blissful purity.

Anand means blissful, usha means the early dawn – a blissful early dawn. The East has loved the early dawn, and the reason is that the early dawn represents something of the inner in the outer world. Just as the night ends and the horizon becomes red and the sun is just going to rise, in exactly the same way the inner awakening also happens.

If one can meditate at early dawn, the inner and the outer can synchronise. Hence the early dawn became the time for meditation. The outer can trigger a process in the inner, because the outer and the inner are not really as separate as they appear; they are joined together, they are part of one whole.

Just as the morning is tremendously beautiful, so is the inner morning – far more so, a million times more so – because when the inner night ends and the light arises in your being, for the first time you are really born. Before that, it was only a physical life. Now it takes on a new colour, a new quality, a new flavour: the flavour of eternity, the flavour of deathlessness.

Anand means blissful; bernie is Teutonic, it is an abbreviation of bernard. It means the brave one. My observation is that the greatest bravery in life is to take the risk of being blissful.

The world lives in misery because of cowardliness. People are cowards, and for cowards only misery is available.

Misery has a few things in it which are very appealing to cowards. It is secure; you can depend on it. It will not leave you easily, it will accompany you; you will never be left alone. It helps you to get others’ attention, it helps you to get others’ sympathy. It becomes an excuse for many things: if you fail, it is an excuse; if you don’t succeed, it is an excuse; if you are uncreative, it is an excuse. It is an umbrella, you can hide many things under it. And you need not be very creative; you can simply wait and it comes of its own accord. You need not be very talented, you don’t need much intelligence to be miserable. Any stupid person is capable of being miserable. But to be blissful needs intelligence.

To be blissful is an art – in fact the greatest art there is. To be blissful, one needs to be adventurous. One has to explore for it, one has to go into the unknown, one has to take the risk of moving into the uncharted, with no maps, with no guides. One has to risk one’s life, only then can one become blissful. One has to be a gambler, not just a businessman, then only can one be blissful.

Sannyas is a risk because it is moving into something unknown, insecure, unfamiliar. It is moving into a world of which you know nothing. It is diving deep within your own soul from which you have remained alienated for many many lives. One will need the courage to drop the old identity, the courage to die as the old, only then can the new be born. When the old ceases to be, the new is born. All that we know about ourselves is the old; it is our identity, our ego, our acquaintance with ourselves. The greatest risk is to go through a deep identity crisis.

That’s what sannyas is: in the beginning it creates an identity crisis. The old starts disappearing, the new is nowhere to be seen, and you are in a kind of vague, cloudy state. Great fear arises. One would like to go back and cling to the old, familiar world, but one cannot; it is impossible to go backwards. Life knows no backward movement, it always goes forwards.

Great courage will be needed, great fearlessness will be needed. That is the price we have to pay to be blissful.

Prem means love, cecilia has two meanings: it comes from Latin, it means blind. Love is blind, that’s the beauty of love. It is blind in the eyes of the intellect, because it is illogical, irrational. It has its own eyes, but the head cannot see those eyes of the heart. The head goes on condemning love as blind. But those who have tasted of love, they say that only love has eyes, because it can see where logic fails, it can move where reason stops.

Reason is heavy, earth-bound. Love is light; it has wings, it can fly to the highest skies.

But it remains incomprehensible to the intellect, hence all over the world the intellectuals have been calling love blind. But it is better to be blind in love than to be full of the eyes of logic. If there is a choice between the eyes of the head and the blindness of the heart, choose the blindness of the heart.

That is the beginning of sannyas. Sannyas is a love affair with existence.

The other meaning of cecilia is also beautiful. Cecilia was a Christian woman mystic. She was killed, murdered, but while she was being tortured she went on singing beautiful songs. They could not kill her song: they could destroy her body but not her soul. Even Jesus was not singing while he was crucified, but Cecilia was. She burst forth into many songs; to the very last breath there was song in her heart. Hence she became the patron saint of music. She must have loved god immensely, absolutely.

It is only out of tremendous love that this miracle is possible – when you are being tortured, when you are being killed, when death is becoming more and more certain every moment, and still you go on releasing fragrance and song. It is possible only out of total trust. It is the victory of life over death. It is the victory of music over murder.

Next time come for a longer period; much has to be done – mm? I have to kill you and teach you how to sing!

Prem means love, gerard is Teutonic; it means brave with the spear. That is a little dangerous, violent, and not of my liking. But with love joined to it the whole quality is transformed. Your full name will mean now: brave with the spear of love.

Love is a spear. It does not kill, it gives life; it is not destructive, it creates.

It is the very fountain of life, joy, creativity. But I am keeping the name because of the meaning it contains of being brave.

Remember: brave does not mean fearless. If somebody is fearless you cannot call him brave. You cannot call a machine brave; it is fearless. Bravery exists only in the ocean of fear, bravery is an island in the ocean of fear. Fear is there, but in spite of the fear one takes the risk; that is bravery. One trembles, one is afraid to go into the dark, and still one goes. In spite of oneself one goes; that is the meaning of being brave. It does not mean fearless. It means full of fear but still not being dominated by it.

The greatest question arises when you move into love. Then fear grips your soul, because to love means to die, to die into the other. It is death, and a far deeper death than ordinary death. In the ordinary death only the body dies: in the death of love the ego dies. To love needs great guts. It needs one to be capable of going into it in spite of all the fears that will clamour around one.

The greater the risk, the greater the possibility of growth – so nothing helps a man more in growth than love. People who are afraid of being in love remain childish, remain immature, unripe. It is only the fire of love that gives you ripeness. And love is a double-edged spear: it pierces the other but it pierces you too – and it pierces you to the very core of your being.

So let the meaning be: brave with the spear of love. Think of love, meditate on love, take steps to move into love. Slowly slowly, you will be able to explore the territory of love. And the territory of love is the territory of god; that is the whole map of god. One who knows love knows god; one who does not know love may know much about god but will never know what god is.

[A sannyasin says: Osho, since I’ve been with you I’ve seen love through two faces, and I’ve brought those faces with me. Everything that is the most wonderful and the most terrible to me is with that situation.]

The situation is simply beautiful. Just because somewhere deep down you create a problem out of it, you get into trouble unnecessarily.

Learn one simple secret: don’t choose, let things happen. And whatsoever happens is good. Yes, sometimes bad things happen too, but they are also good. Sometimes misery happens; that too is good. Good does not exclude anything, it includes all.

You are really in a good situation, but because you want to make it more clear-cut, more settled, more definite, more certain, you create trouble for yourself.

No alive situation can ever be definite. It is always vague; it is cloudy, it is ambiguous, it is always changing, it is in a flux. And man creates misery because he is afraid of being in a flux. He wants certainties, solid, hard certainties. He wants to reduce everything to a definition, to a shape, so that he can manipulate it. He does not want to be lost in a cloud. But that’s what life is, what love is, what meditation is: being capable of being lost in a cloud – shapeless, vague, with no direction, with no possibility of any prediction about what is going to happen next moment. With immense trust, one allows whatsoever happens.

You are in a beautiful triangle. And love really becomes sharp only when there is a triangle. Just two lovers is not a very deep phenomenon. When there are three lovers, then things become three- dimensional; otherwise they remain flat, two-dimensional. And you are really looking at a three-D

picture! Just go into it, and go with joy! What is there to lose? The other two partners are taking things more easily than you; they are enjoying the game far better. You also enjoy!

But we are too burdened with out of date ideas, meaningless concepts. Just put everything aside and let things happen. Whatsoever happens is good. Don’t try to manipulate the situation and there will be no problem. Be available to situations, don’t try to master them. In the very effort of mastering them you start fighting, you start resisting. And then the whole joy is lost; the mystery becomes a problem. Don’t resist, don’t fight, and every problem turns into a mystery.

That is the whole art of life: I call it the alchemy. The art of changing problems into mysteries is alchemy. But people go on doing just the reverse – they go on changing mysteries into problems, and then they suffer.

This time don’t choose. Be available to whatsoever happens, and go wherever it takes you. Just be a dry leaf in the wind, with no destination, with no direction, with no idea of where you are going. Wherever the wind is blowing, you are going; and if the wind changes its direction, obviously you change your direction with it – you don’t give even a slight fight to the wind.

Be a driftwood and see the joy of it – that is the whole secret of tao.

Prem means love, lok means the world – the world of love or the dimension of love. Life is multi- dimensional. We are not living in one world, there are many worlds together; it is a multi-verse, it is not a uni-verse. The man who lives in logic lives in a totally different universe than the man who lives in love. The poet lives in a totally different world than the mathematician, the politician lives in a totally different world than the mystic. There are many worlds available here, but the best to choose from is the world of love, because out of love all that is great arises – poetry, music, dance. And ultimately out of love, the arrival of god.

So let love become your world: choose it consciously. Drop all that goes against love, and hold close to your heart that which is for love; then slowly slowly the gestalt changes. And when you become love, you have really become a man. Only man is capable of love – and not all men, because many remain only capable, they never make it actual. Only once in a while, a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarasthustra, a Lao Tzu, become real lovers. But they know the peaks, they know the treasures of life.

Sannyas is the world of love. I initiate you into sannyas so that I can initiate you into love. Sannyas is the door; love is the temple.

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