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CHAPTER 3
3 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem means love, garima means glory, splendour, grandeur. Love is the only glorious phenomenon on the earth. It is only through love that we become aware of god. Those who miss love are bound to miss god, because there is no other way to become aware of the presence of the divine except through love.
When you look through love, existence starts taking on a new colour, a new shape, a new meaning. It is through the eyes of love that the transformation happens. It is not a question of logical proof; god cannot be proved and cannot be disproved either. It is a question of a loving heart. If your heart is full of love and flowing, you will start feeling the presence. Love gives you the necessary receptivity, the necessary sensitivity; it opens you up, makes you available, allows god to happen to you. Hence the glory of love, the supreme glory of love.
Love is a natural phenomenon, but somehow we go on repressing it. On the contrary, we cultivate logic: we cultivate the head, not the heart. Our whole civilisation is head-oriented; it has been so down the ages. And now we have come to a critical point where a decision has to be made. If man remains still head-oriented, then except for suicide there is no other possibility, there is no hope. The head has come to its very end; it cannot take man beyond. It is finished, it has come to a cul-de-sac.
The only hope for man is to start looking into the ways of the heart. A great change, a shift, from intellect to intuition, from logic to love, is needed. To be initiated into sannyas means to be initiated out of the world of logic into the world of love.
Deva means divine, suniti means virtue – divine virtue. The divine virtue is not something against sin: it is a transcendence of all duality. The ordinary duality between sin and virtue is also included in that transcendence.
Ordinary virtue is against sin, morality is against immorality, the saint is against the sinner. And because you are against something, you cannot be whole. The sinner is not outside the saint; it is part of his own being. Being against it he will repress it in the unconscious and he will be afraid to enter into his own being because he is going to meet the sinner there. That’s why the so-called religious or moral man becomes split: he is one thing on the surface and just the opposite in his depth. He lives a double life; he is not one person but two. Hence the so-called religious man is bound to be a hypocrite, it cannot be avoided.
A totally different vision is needed to avoid hypocrisy. That’s why I call it divine virtue, not human virtue. Divine virtue is nothing but being totally aware. Then you are neither moral nor immoral; you are a pure consciousness, a witness of all, good and bad, and detached from both, far away from both, unidentified with either.
In that consciousness a great transformation happens. Then it is not that you have to do good, but whatsoever you do is good. Then virtue is not something imposed upon you but is a natural flow. It is as natural as the fragrance of a flower. The flower has not to do anything to release it; it is spontaneous.
So I teach only one thing: awareness, consciousness, witnessing; they are different names for the same key. I don’t teach conscience. Conscience is the old way, the way of the hypocrite.
So remember this, that only one thing is really virtuous, and that is becoming as aware as you can manage. Put your total energy into awareness. Then it goes on growing. It is a never-ending process, it is an eternal pilgrimage. Let sannyas be the first step towards it.
Just raise your hands and close your eyes. Feel like a tree; forget the human body, just become a tree. It is raining, it is windy, and the tree is delighted and dancing in the rain and in the wind. Just let the tree sway and dance. Allow it, co-operate with it.
Prem means love, and Kaaba is the name of the sacred place of the Mohammedans. Kaaba is their holiest of the holy. Kaaba simply means a temple, a love temple. And there is no other temple; all other temples are false, pseudo, substitutes. One who lives in love lives in the temple. He need not go anywhere – to any temple, to any mosque, to any church, because those are all man-made things. Love is god-made.
There is a very beautiful story of a Sufi mystic, Mansoor. His master was worried about Mansoor, because whenever he was in ecstasy he would start shouting ‘Ana’l Haq’ – I am god. In a Mohammedan country it is dangerous to say ‘I am god.’ The master was worried. He was a famous mystic himself – Junaid was his name. He told Mansoor ‘This won’t do. You will create trouble for yourself, for me and for other disciples too. Keep it secret. There is no need to shout it.’ Each time Mansoor would promise but again, whenever he would be in that state, he would forget all promises.
Finally he said ‘I can promise, but when I move into that space, I am no more, so I cannot fulfil these promises. How can you expect me to fulfil promises when I am no more there? It is god himself who shouts through me! What can I do?’
Rumours were reaching the king, and people were getting angry, so the master said ‘Do one thing: go on a pilgrimage to Kaaba.’ In those days it would have taken at least one year, two years, for
him to go on foot, and for at least those two years trouble would be avoided. ‘Then we will see’ the master thought.
Mansoor said ‘Perfectly good. If you say to, I will go to Kaaba. Right now I will proceed.’ Junaid was very happy; he blessed him, but what Mansoor did was this: he went around the master seven times and said ‘The pilgrimage is complete; vou are my Kaaba, because you are my love! You are my temple. It is in you that I have found god, so where else can I go?’
This is a tremendously beautiful story: wherever love is there is Kaaba; whenever love happens Kaaba happens.
Remember, love is the only temple of god. And the temple of love does not belong to any sect, to any religion. Love is simply love; it is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian. And it is only through love that one is bridged with the ultimate. Love teaches you how to be intimate, and it is through becoming intimate that one day you come to the ultimate. Intimacy is the way to ultimacy.
Deva means divine, gitam means a song – a divine song. Religion need not be serious, should not be serious. Seriousness is pathology, it is ill. Religion has to be a play, a non-serious phenomenon; only then can one dive deep. Seriousness keeps you on the surface. Seriousness is never deep, it cannot be; it is shallow. It is only in playfulness that one relaxes and goes deep; relaxation is the door to depth. When you are serious, you are so tense that it is impossible to relax.
A serious saint is a contradiction in terms. If he is serious he is not a saint; if he is a saint he can’t be serious. But that’s how saints have been thought of up to now: they cannot laugh, they cannot be playful, they are not healthy and holy; they cannot sing. But real saints have always been a song in the world. They have been a dance, they have brought more festivity into existence, they have made the whole of their lives a festival. And that’s my whole effort here: to create sannyasins who are songs, dances, celebrations.
Unless you can be playful with life you will not know what god is. So drop all kinds of seriousness; on no level should seriousness be allowed to settle in you. Remain like a small child, playful, and then god is not far away. He is very close by, in the flower, in the tree, in the river. All that is needed is the wondering, innocent, playful eyes of a child; not the seriousness of the scholar and the so-called saint, but the playfulness of a lover.
And that is the meaning of your name: become a song. In becoming a song you have become a prayer, and you will be heard. Only songs reach to god.
Deva means divine, dip means lamp, light – divine lamp. It is there in you, as it is in everybody else, but we never look into our own being. We are keeping our own light at the back, hence we live in darkness. It is our own choice; the darkness is not natural. We are living in our own shadow; the lamp is behind us and we never turn back. Slowly slowly we become so accustomed to looking outwards that it becomes a fixation, it becomes a kind of paralysis; we cannot turn in. It is as if for years one has not used one’s neck to turn and look back, and now one’s neck has become fixed; it is exactly like that.
Becoming a sannyasin means that you are making yourself available to changing this pattern. Sannyas is a gesture that ‘I am ready to do something to change my old gestalt’, that ’I will not
resist the change’, that ‘I will not fight the change’, that ‘I am willing, even if it is painful’ – because if your neck has become stiff then it will take a little time and it will be painful too. But it is tremendously paying.
Once you can look at what you are in your innermost core, you will be surprised that you were born a king and you were living like a beggar, that you had all the treasures of the world within you and yet you were begging, that you had all the bliss that you could ever contain and there was no need to desire anything more. Nothing more can be desired, nothing more is possible: all that is possible has already happened at the deepest core of your being. But we live on the periphery, unaware of the centre.
The name will remind you again and again that the light is within. Look in, turn in, tune in. [The new sannyasin says: Give me the key!]
It is getting ready to be given to you. You just have to get ready to receive it. It is going to happen!
All that you need is the art of praying; and it will not be difficult for you to learn, it will be very easy, very natural.
Prayer does not mean any formality, ritual. It simply means a pouring of the heart. It can be crying, it can be laughing, it can be silent, or it can be a spontaneous dialogue, a heart-to-heart talk with existence. But it has to be informal; that is the first, basic requirement. That is where millions of people are missing: they pray, but their prayer is a formality, it is not spontaneous. It is a ritual that has been taught to them – the Christian prayer, the Hindu prayer, the Mohammedan prayer. They have been taught it, they perform it well, they repeat it word by word, but it is meaningless.
The meaning can come only through an informal communion, so if you are feeling to say something to god, you can say it, but the words have to be yours, not the words of Jesus. When Jesus used those words they were spontaneous. He was not repeating Moses, he was simply pouring out his heart. When he calls god he does not call him father, he calls him abba; that is tremendously beautiful. Father is formal; abba is informal. By translating abba as father, the Bible has missed the whole beauty of it; it has misinterpreted the word. It is a totally different thing when you say dad and when you say father. Father is institutional, it is not really a relationship. When you say dad it is totally different: it is a relationship.
Don’t repeat Jesus’ words. Say something of your own, whatsoever it is. There is no need to repeat it again and again either, because then again it becomes formal. You may be repeating your own past, again you have missed the point. Prayer has to be spontaneous every day. And don’t fix a time – in the morning or in the evening or in the night. Don’t fix a time at all, because when you fix a time your mind tends to be mechanical. Let it happen when it happens.
Sometimes in the night, in the middle of the night, sleep is not coming and suddenly you feel prayerful. Then cry and weep and have a little dialogue with existence. Or sometimes seeing the sun rise, tears start coming, or you feel like dancing; or looking at a rose, you want to have a talk with the rose – that’s what I call prayer. Prayer is a poetic relationship with existence. It has nothing to do with your so-called religion.
That will be possible. I can see it: the seed is there. Just a little work and you will start growing in prayer.
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