9

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‌CHAPTER 9

9 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Udgeya means that which has to be celebrated, that which has to be sung.

Life is a celebration, and unless one understands it as celebration one goes on missing god. To connect with the divine, the only bridge is celebration. It is only in the moments when you are utterly drunk with joy that you are close to god. In those festive moments when life is not a burden somehow to be carried but a song to be sung, in those moments when you are on holiday, with no worry of the world, with no mind, when you are utterly in the moment, in tune, you start breathing god in and out.

That is really the meaning of holiday: when the day is holy, when it is a moment of festivity. Then suddenly a new vision opens up. Life is not seen as wholly material; it becomes luminous with the divine. Trees are alive and so are rocks; then everything is transparent and of tremendous splendour.

Religion went wrong in the past because it became more and more of a renunciation rather than a rejoicing. Jesus says again and again to his disciples: Rejoice, rejoice! I say again, rejoice! And Christianity has gone to just the opposite: it is not rejoicing. If you look at the Christian saints they are very sad. Laughter has become a sin to them. Sadness seems to be religious; joy seems to be profane, laughter seems to be shallow.

Laughter is never shallow. In fact it is only in laughter that you become a unity; that your body, your mind, your soul, become one. It is only in laughter that suddenly one transcends the mind. Laughter is the deepest prayer there is.

But it happened not only to Christianity; it happened to all the religions. It seems that man is pathological, so even the messages of rejoicing are immediately translated, corrupted, distorted, into messages of renunciation.

Being a sannyasin means that you will take life more as fun than as work, that you will think of life more as joy than as duty.

Unmesh means the act of opening one’s eyes. We have eyes but we have not opened them yet. I don’t mean the physical eyes, I mean the metaphysical insight. Just as we can look outwards, we can look inwards. Each sense has its interior part; everything that has a without has a within. If we can look out, we can look in; if we can move out, we can move in.

But in the contemporary mind the interiority of man is denied. Man lives as if there is only one possibility: the without. That is living on the periphery, it is living a non-essential life. Nothing is wrong in it, but in itself it is very partial and very shallow, meaningless. Unless you have an interior core to each of your acts you will not find meaning in life.

Meaning arises within you; it is not somewhere outside where one can catch hold of it. And when there is meaning inside, everything outside becomes meaningful; everything outside reflects your meaning. But before life can become meaningful you have to know your inner meaning.

Meditation is a way of opening your eyes inwards. Whenever you can find time, sit with closed eyes and try to look in. In the beginning you will encounter only darkness and nothing else; don’t be worried about it. Even if you can see darkness inside, that is far better than seeing light outside. At least it is something inner, something deeper, closer to home.

In the beginning it will be darkness. It is just as when you come in from outside. It is a hot sunny day, and when you enter your house all looks dark. Just rest a little bit and your eyes will become attuned to the light that is inside the house.

For many many lives we have lived outside so we have forgotten how to see the inner; our eyes have become focused on the objective. It takes a little time for them to relax, for them to change the gestalt. But within just three to nine months if one can sit silently for a few hours every day, one day it happens. That day you are really born.

This is the beginning of a process, but not the end. Sannyas is only a gesture from your side that you are available to go inwards, that you are ready to learn the art, that you are ready to take the risk. It is going into the unknown, so it is risky, but ultimately tremendously paying.

(to someone taking sannyas) Just raise your hands, close your eyes, and feel as if you are standing underneath an energy waterfall. Great energy is showering on you: absorb it. And if your body starts trembling, shaking, swaying, go with it. Be in a state of uncontrol; don’t hold yourself.

Bhavito means one who is overwhelmed, one who is overflowing. People who live in the head are never overwhelmed by anything; for them life is very flat, prosaic. But those who have not yet killed their heart can live a totally different kind of life – of overwhelming feelings, of poetry.

And remember, prose and poetry both consist of the same words, just the arrangement differs. One can arrange one’s life as a head; it is the same life, the same ingredients. One can arrange the same energy as a heart. To live in the head is to live without living at all; it is just dragging oneself somehow. One is logical, one is mathematical, one is calculative, but out of all these activities joy

does not arise. Joy needs a totally different orientation – not of thought but of feeling; and the world of feeling is diametrically opposite to the world of thought.

We have been brought up in such a way that the heart has almost been destroyed. It has to be revived again, because in its revival is your resurrection: you will come out of the grave.

The whole effort here is to help you to come down from the head to the heart. And remember, I am not against the head. If you are capable of living at the shrine of the heart you can use the head, but you will remain the master of it. If the heart is missing then the head becomes the master and you become the slave. The head is perfectly good as a slave but it is tremendously, terribly, harmful as the master, because the head is only a machine, a bio-computer. Use it but don’t be used by it.

That is the meaning of your name, Bhavito: getting deeper and deeper into feelings. Become overwhelmed by feelings, overflowing with love. Then god needs no other proof: god simply is. When the heart is functioning at the maximum, god is. When the heart is aflame with joy and love, god is.

This is possible for you, and easily possible. Your heart is there, undamaged. You have bypassed it, you have not allowed it to function, but it is there intact; it is becoming more and more difficult to find people whose hearts are undistorted.

The work is going to be easy, not hard. The journey will be very very playful; it will not be arduous. Prem means love, and christa or christ symbolises the ultimate state of consciousness.

Christ is not the name of any particular person. Jesus is only one of the Christs. Buddha is a Christ, Moses is a Christ, Krishna is a Christ. You will be surprised to know that the word ‘christ’ comes from the same root as Krishna. It comes from Sanskrit, not from Hebrew or Aramaic.

Christ means one who is awakened; it is equivalent to Buddha. It means one who has disappeared as an individual and has become a medium for the universal. That is the meaning of messiah.

So Prem Christa will mean love, the ultimate state of consciousness. And that was the contribution of Jesus Christ to human consciousness. Moses brought law, Jesus brought love. Love is the highest culmination of law. Law is rudimentary, primitive. Moses was working with a very primary class. There was no other way; that’s how the pioneer has to work. He had to give laws and commandments to his disciples. Once the laws were fulfilled, once the discipline that the law can create was created, then there was a possibility of a quantum leap.

Man can be freed from law, and only one law will be enough: love. Jesus says: God is love. Now, twenty centuries after Jesus, again a momentous change has to happen. Jesus says: God is love; I say: Love is god. Now even god can be dropped; love is enough unto itself.

And the ultimate consciousness is nothing but pure love. Passion is transformed into compassion, lust is transformed into love, the mud disappears into the lotus. And that is the greatest miracle: seeing mud become a lotus, seeing sex becoming samadhi, seeing lust becoming love, seeing oneself disappearing as a material body and becoming the body of light.

That is the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection: if you die as you are, you will be born as you really are. On one hand is the crucifixion of the ego, on the other hand you are born for the first time as egoless consciousness.

Deva means divine, udbuddha means awakening – a divine awakening.

Man is born asleep, man lives asleep, and ninety-nine point nine per cent of people die asleep. They never become aware of what is, they never become aware of who they are. This life that is lived in sleep is hell. They stumble everywhere, they fall everywhere, they move like blind people; it is bound to be so.

Only with awakening does life start settling on a new plane. Only with awakening do you have the taste of bliss and the taste of freedom for the first time; and that is the purpose of life: to know bliss, to be bliss. But many fail. They are not even aware that they are not aware; the sleep is so deep. Hence, the only thing that can be of help is making great effort to be alert. The effort is great, it is arduous, because one tends to fall asleep again. To be asleep seems to be comfortable because we have become habituated to it.

George Gurdjieff used to give a simple experiment to all new disciples. He would give his pocket- watch to them and would tell them ‘Look at the second hand and remain alert. See how long you can remain alert, for how many seconds. You have to be attentive that you are looking at the second hand moving. And any time that you forget, you have to tell me.’

It is a really surprising experiment. If you do it you will be surprised: for not more than five to seven seconds can you remember that you are looking at the clock, at the second hand moving. After five, seven seconds, you fall asleep; you start thinking of other things, dreaming of other things. You are gone. Then suddenly you become aware but the hand has moved twenty seconds, thirty seconds, or maybe one minute.

Our awareness is so thin, but it is there, even though it is thin. The seed is there, and if the seed is there then there is no worry. Even to be aware for one second is indicative that we can be aware for two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, one minute, two minutes. Slowly slowly, we can bring the quality of awareness to our lives twenty-four hours a day.

Krishna has said that the real meditator remains awake even in his sleep. And the ordinary man is asleep even when he is thought to be awake. This is the revolution! Yes, it happens: one can be alert even while asleep. The body goes to sleep but a small light of awareness goes on burning somewhere deep inside. When that awareness happens, dreams disappear. When that awareness happens, thoughts disappear in the day and dreams disappear in the night. And when you are without thoughts and without dreams you know for the first time what silence is and how tremendously blissful it is, what a benediction it is. Even to taste that silence for one moment is to have known something eternal, something deathless.

So your sannyas has to become a great effort to become aware. Walking on the road become aware that you are walking. Walk slowly with great awareness; don’t forget that you are walking. Listening, don’t forget that you are listening; talking, don’t forget that you are talking. Even when moving your hands, be aware deep down inside that the hand is being moved. And you will be surprised: slowly

slowly it happens for a few moments, then it happens for a few seconds, then for hours and then for days.

And once a person can remain alert even once for twenty-four hours, he becomes a Buddha. Then there is no going back, then all darkness has disappeared. Then the interior of your being is full of light; then you are that light – not that you are an observer of the light, you are the light itself. That is why it is called enlightenment: one becomes light, pure light.

All the ancient scriptures say: In the beginning god created light. The Koran says: God said let there be light and there was light. It is significant. It is the experience of all those who have become awakened that again only light remains. So whatsoever remains in the end must be the beginning. the beginning is the end, the alpha is the omega, the source is the goal. Then the circle is complete; and when the circle is complete you have arrived home.

Anand means bliss, sargam means music. Bliss is music: it is falling into harmony. Ordinarily man remains in fragments, divided, split. One part is going to the north, another part is going to the south; one part wants to do something and another part is simply against it. There is great disunity, and because of that disunity, because of the discord, the music is not possible.

To become one, is to be full of music. That’s what Zen people call the sound of one hand clapping. Even if two hands are there then the sound will not be music, it will be noise. But when there is only one then something unheard is heard. That unheard music is always there, but because of the conflict and the chaos and the crowd and the many minds inside you, you cannot hear it. It is a still small voice; it is lost in the turmoil.

People think they have one mind; they have many. In the ordinary unconscious state man is polypsychic, he has many minds: he is a crowd really. You are not one person. Hence we go on missing the eternal harmony of existence. It is there in the stars, it is there in the rivers, it is there in the mountains. It is in us too, the same harmony, because we are part of this whole.

One has to create a unity in oneself; one has to become individual. Exactly, literally, the word ‘individual’ means indivisible. When one becomes indivisible there is music and there is bliss. Bliss and music are two aspects of the same energy. Become blissful and you will feel more and more music in your life. Become more and more musical and you will feel more and more bliss in your life.

Down the ages, in all the mystery schools of the world, music has been used as one of the greatest helps for meditation, for this purpose only – because the outer music can trigger the inner music, it can create a synchronicity. Listening to the outer music, something can be stirred inside. That always happens when you are listening to music, great music: something inside you starts falling into one unity, a silence is created. For a few moments the crowd of so many quarrelling minds disappears, the market-place in you disappears, suddenly there is silence.

Music is great only if it creates inner silence; that is the criterion of great music. The modern music – jazz and pop music – is not music at all. It does not create silence in you; on the contrary, it reflects only your noise outside. It is not helpful in meditation. But people like it because it fits with their noise: they are noisy and the modern music is more noisy; it drowns their noise. But it is not great music, it is not really music at all.

[Osho tells us about the experiments that have been conducted with plants and music. When modern music is played near plants they tend to shy away; when classical music is playing they grow twice as big as they would have!]

The modern music. simply reflects the inner chaos and the ancient music reflects the silence of the sages. It can be used as an outer device to provoke the inner harmony in you.

Listen to classical music, listen to ancient Eastern music, and it will be of tremendous help to you.

Anand means bliss, vijen means victory, victorious. The only victory worthwhile is to attain to bliss; all else is just a sheer wastage of time and life. The only victory is to be victorious over oneself.

That’s where politics and religion are diametrically opposite dimensions. Politics is an effort to be victorious over others; religion is an effort to be victorious over oneself. The people who try to be victorious over others are the people who are suffering from an inferiority complex, who are not masters of themselves; hence they want to dominate others as a substitute.

The person who is a master of himself will not like to dominate anybody at all, in fact he cannot. Even if the opportunity is given, it is impossible for him to dominate the other. To dominate the other you have to be suffering from an inferiority complex. And the person who is a master of himself neither suffers from inferiority complex nor from superiority complex. He simply does not suffer from any complex, he is free from all complexes. That is the meaning of inner victory: to be free from all complexes. And to be free from all complexes is to be in paradise.

That is the meaning of your name. Let it become a reality too!

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