CHAPTER 29
31 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Anand means bliss, the ultimate state of joy – ultimate in the sense that one cannot fall back, ultimate also in the sense that it has not anything in it which opposes it. It is not a composite experience. Ordinarily your happiness contains something of unhappiness in it, and your unhappiness also contains something of happiness in it; they are never pure. In ordinary life everything is adulterated, adulterated by its opposite.
Your love has some part in it which is utterly hateful. And your hate contains love; it is an ill kind of love, a sick kind of love, but it is there. In ordinary life-experiences every experience is impure. By saying ultimate joy I mean that it is just joy and nothing else; it’s pure joy.
The word ‘henk’ is beautiful. It is Teutonic; it comes from henry. It means the ruler of the home. And that is the greatest thing to achieve in life – to be a ruler of oneself.
It is easy to rule others. The most difficult thing is to rule oneself, to be a master within one’s own being – not a slave to desires, not a servant to thoughts, not being pulled, pushed, manipulated by a thousand and one things in one’s mind, but being utterly at ease, at home, a king of one’s own inner kingdom. And bliss is possible only to the person who has become a master of himself, who rules his inner nature: that is your home.
Prem means love. Luciano is Latin, it comes from lux, it means light. The full name will mean light of love. And there is no other light in life, all other lights are only substitutes. For a moment one can deceive oneself and others, but one remains in darkness. Unless love arrives, the darkness of the soul continues. The night is broken only when love has knocked on the door. Only with love knocking on the door is the dawn.
Luciano is also beautiful, because this name is given to children who are born just when the sun is rising, at day-break – the children of light, the children of the morning. It can be a beautiful metaphor
for the inner birth too. One has to be born there, one has to become a child of the inner dawn. The darkness is deep, the darkness is dense, the darkness has prevailed for long and our efforts to create light are very small, negligible. Only once in a while the desire arises to move towards light, but that desire proves only a momentary soap bubble.
It has to become a perseverance, it has to become a tremendous intensity, a longing, a thirst, as if one’s life is at risk. Unless it becomes a question of life and death, one cannot create light. Then one is doomed to live in darkness – and to live in darkness is not to live at all, it is to live in death.
Love is the first step towards light, because love is the first step beyond the ego. Love is the first step in surrendering. Darkness consists of the ego, of resistance, of non-surrendering; darkness consists of the illusion that ‘I am separate from existence.’ The moment you relax, you trust life, you are no more fighting with it, you are in a kind of let-go, darkness starts disappearing. And only in love is let-go possible, is surrender possible.
Sannyas is nothing but the subtle art of learning how to be love – not how to love but how to be love. Love, not as a relationship but as the very flavour of your being. And then life takes on a totally new quality, the quality of light.
Darkness can create only misery. Only light can create bliss. Light is god – a symbol for ultimate clarity, vision, insight.
Deva means divine. Harald is Teutonic; it means a great warrior. The full name will mean: a warrior for god, a divine warrior.
Man can either fight for himself or he can fight for god. When he fights for himself he gratifies his ego, he strengthens his ego; it is an ego-trip. And because the ego is illusory, the whole thing is nothing but a dream. To fight for oneself is to fight for something which doesn’t exist in the first place – and that’s what millions of people are doing.
To fight for god is to fight against the ego, to fight for god is to fight for the whole. The fight consists in dissolving oneself, in disappearing, in becoming a nobody, a non-entity, in dying, in crucifixion. But if one is capable of crucifying one’s own ego, then resurrection is certain, absolutely certain. One dies as a small ego but one is born as the whole, as god. Jesus dies and Christ is born. This is the real war, and those who fight other wars simply go on missing the opportunity.
So wage a war against the ego, not for the ego; wage a war not against the whole, but for the whole. Remember: we cannot succeed against the whole, we can succeed only with the whole.
Anand means bliss, geha means home – a home of bliss. Man lives without a home of bliss; he lives in a market-place. The market-place has entered into his being. His inner being is a constant traffic, crowded, and it is always rush hour – so many thoughts, so many desires, so many memories, so many expectations, hopes, programmes. Man lives in this crowded condition for his whole life, never knowing for a single moment that this whole crowd is unnecessary, that it is dissipating energy, that it is destructive, that it is a slow poisoning, that it is suicidal; that one can live in utter peace, silence, that one can have more silence in one’s being than there is on the Himalayas, that one can move into such spaces within one’s self which are eternally virgin – nobody has ever moved there, and
nobody ever can except oneself. But unfortunately we remain unaware of our own inner treasures; we live on the periphery, we never enter into our own palace.
All the teachers and all the masters of the world are agreed upon only one thing, that the kingdom of god is within you, that the home has not to be searched for somewhere outside, that it is already there. You have just to turn in, tune in; you have just to learn the art of groping into your inner being.
It is more or less a knack – not even an art but a knack. It is learned only with people who know it. It is something that has to be caught. Hence sannyas, hence being with a master: he has moved into his inner home. It is infectious. If one comes close to a person who has moved into his inner home, sooner or later his silence will start stirring something in one of which one had never dreamt before. His very vibe will provoke dreams in you, dreams of the unknown. His very impact will go like a shock from one end of your being to another; and the shock will be a great cleansing. It will purify you, it will burn all that is rubbish, but it will save all that is precious.
Deva means divine, marianne has many meanings. The first – it is a derivation from Hebrew – means grace, prayer, mercy, and also, very strangely, rebellion. That word ‘rebellion’ with prayer is very significant, because to me the really religious person is always rebellious. Prayer can never be a conformism; and if it is, then it is not prayer, then it is a social formality. True prayer is always a rebellion; it is a revolution, because it transforms one’s being and it transforms one’s world too. It looks strange that the same word should mean prayer, grace, mercy and rebellion, but to me it is not strange.
Secondly, it is also possibly of Latin origin. Then it means god’s gift. Life is a gift, a precious gift. We cannot pay for it, there is no way to pay; we are eternally in debt. We can only bow down in gratefulness. We have not earned it; it has been given to us because god is bountiful, because he is overflowing, because he cannot help but give. That meaning is also beautiful.
And the third meaning is Egyptian. In Egypt, Men-Amen was the name of a goddess. From the same root comes the Christian word ‘amen’ which ends every prayer, and from the same root comes the Mohammedan word ‘amin’ which also ends every prayer. Amen or amin both mean ‘I say yes to you, Lord. My yes is total, my trust is total. In my yes there is no shadow of no; it is utterly innocent. There is no mixture of any kind of doubt, conscious or unconscious, in it.’
Amen, amin, they all mean ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ And that is the whole prayer. What else can we say to god except yes? And the moment one can say yes to god totally, life starts growing wings.
All these meanings are beautiful. Meditate over all these meanings, because each name can become a metaphor. It can give you great insight into life. Think of prayer, think of mercy, think of grace, think of yea-saying, trust, surrender, think of rebellion, and you will be able to contemplate on the whole spectrum of religion; all the seven colours of religion are there.
Anand means bliss, nirmohi means unattached.
The moment we become attached to anything, misery arises. Attachment is against life, hence it creates misery. Attachment means that we will hinder any possibility of change. Life is change, constant change, and the moment we start hindering change we start pushing the river. Then we
are becoming enemies of life – and the natural outcome is misery; we are automatically punished. To remain unattached is the secret of remaining blissful forever and forever.
Enjoy, live, love. But when things change, let them change; when things move, don’t stop their movement. Always remain with the changing flux of existence, never be against it, and then nobody can create misery for you. Then whatsoever is, brings bliss, because you never expect it to be otherwise. Whatsoever is, is welcome. Whatsoever is gone you say good-bye to; you feel thankful that it has been there, and you feel thankful that now it is no more there, so space is created for something new to happen. Then life remains an adventure, unhindered, unattached. It remains the flow of a river. And then the ocean is not far away – it comes closer and closer every moment.
The whole secret of sannyas is to live life in toto, in totality, but without any attachment. It is a difficult phenomenon. There are people who can live life but they cannot remain unattached. Then there are people who can remain unattached but they cannot live life. These are simple things. That’s why in the past there were worldly and other-worldly people. The worldly lives life and becomes attached and suffers. The monk escapes from life; afraid of becoming attached, he stops living life. He remains unattached but there is nothing to remain attached to, there is no life.
My sannyasin has to create a new phenomenon in the world.
He will be in the market-place and yet not of it. He will live everything from the ordinary to the extraordinary with joy, with celebration, with gusto, yet he will remain unattached. When it goes he will not cling to it, he will let it go. He will be able to welcome and he will be able, in the same way, to say good-bye. That is the highest pinnacle that is possible to human consciousness. Only such a person is liberated.
Anand means bliss. Lionel is Latin; it means a young lion.
Bliss is only for those who are ready to break away from the crowd-mind, from the mind of the sheep, only for those who are ready to become lions. The lion has a totally different psychology. He does not believe in the crowd, he does not follow trodden paths. He is adventurous: rebellion is his very spirit. He is not a follower, his search is for the original face.
It is said that when Buddha attained his first glimpse of enlightenment, he roared like a lion. The metaphor is significant. In that very roar, that lion’s roar, his whole past, the sheep-like past, was dissolved. He was no more part of his society, no more part of a country, no more part of any kind of crowd – religious, political, ideological. For the first time he was alone. That aloneness is the spirit of the lion.
And the second thing to be remembered: the lion is always young. An ‘old lion’ is a contradiction in terms. The body may be old but the spirit of a lion always remains young, youthful; he never loses that freshness.
That’s why in India we have not painted Buddha, Krishna or Mahavira as old – no, never. There is not a single painting, not a single statue exists, depicting them as old. You can go to thousands of temples in India and you will always find them young. Not that they never became old – they became old, they died too, but we have not taken any notice of it. We have not taken any note of their body;
our whole concern has been their spirit. They were as fresh as dew-drops, as fresh as the petals of a rose in the early morning sun, like new leaves coming out of a tree. They were always of that freshness, that youth, and they never became entangled in their own past.
No man who is alert ever becomes entangled in the past. He dies to the past every moment and keeps his youth flowing, his freshness alive. He is never burdened; he has no past. He lives in the present, the present is his only time.
So you have a beautiful name: a blissful young lion!
Prem means love. Pierre comes from Greek; it means a rock. The temple of love can only be raised on a rock, it cannot be raised on the sands – and our mind consists only of sand. Nothing of the eternal can ever happen in the mind, because it is all shifting sand; not even for two consecutive moments is it the same.
The heart consists of a rock, because the heart consists of eternity. Only the heart can become the foundation of something timeless. The mind is full of doubts; doubts are destructive. The heart is full of trust; and trust is the rock, so anything that is rooted in the heart remains. Love has to remain rooted in the heart. But we have completely forgotten where the heart is, whether it is or not; we live hung up in the head.
Let your sannyas become the search for the heart, the lost heart. The lost heart is the lost paradise, and the heart regained is paradise regained. It is not far away either, it is closer than you can imagine. Just a little effort in the right direction, a little digging inside your own being, and the rock is found. On that rock you can make a temple of eternity. And only when the temple of love is ready, can god be invited in.
[A sannyasin who is leaving asks: Tell me something about gratefulness... because sometimes I feel grateful for everything but sometimes I feel so empty, it’s like a desert.]
Accept that too. Don’t try to change it, just accept it. Whatsoever god gives be grateful for.
Sometimes he gives deserts because they are needed. Sometimes emptinesses happen; and they are tremendously significant, so don’t try to change them. That is ungratefulness. That means that you are trying to improve upon something which has been given. Real gratefulness means that whatsoever happens is good. Even emptiness is fullness then.
Just allow whatsoever happens and accept lovingly. And when a desert state is accepted lovingly it starts changing into a garden; it becomes the garden of Eden. That is the miracle of gratitude: whatsoever it touches, it transforms into gold.
Don’t try to do anything, just relax into it. What can you do? If he wants a desert, then welcome it and go into it.
Down the ages, Christian mystics have been going to the desert for a certain reason – for this kind of desert. They take the hint and they go to the desert so that they can live the inner and the outer, in both ways, in a desert. Sometimes such flowers have bloomed in a desert that you could never imagine that in a wasteland where nothing grows, such beautiful souls could have bloomed.
But I am not saying to go to some desert. The inner is enough, there is no need to search for the outer. If the outer is needed, god will give it to you. Just wait and trust!