Chapter #6 The Sun Behind The Sun Behind The Sun #6

Prem means love, and anjana literally means 'eye ointment' -- love, the eye ointment: because love gives you new vision. It cleanses your eyes of the old, makes available to you the present and the future. It transforms your eyesight. In fact, it gives you eyes, otherwise one is blind. So anjana means an ointment that can restore the sight of a blind man. And everybody is blind, everybody is deaf and everybody is dead.

This life is not much of a life; unless you awake, you live in vain. Unless life becomes a conscious phenomenon one is just a driftwood, a victim of winds, and one goes on living accidentally. When consciousness enters your life, you don't live accidentally. For the first time there is meaning, significance, a kind of continuity, a kind of thread running through and through. Otherwise one is just like a dictionary: you cannot read a dictionary because there is no running thread. All kinds of words are there but words don't have meaning in themselves; they have meaning only in context. A word is meaningful only in a sentence, the sentence is meaningful only in a paragraph, the paragraph is meaningful only in the book. Greater and greater meaning becomes possible as your context becomes greater.

One who lives in the context of god has the greatest meaning possible, because that is the greatest context. God means one who comprehends everything, encompasses everything -- the ultimate meaning. And unless you start seeing that ultimate meaning in everything, you don't have eyes. When you can see a rock and you can still see god in it, then you have eyes. If you can only see the rock, that is not much of an eyesight; even a blind man can see that. When you see a tree and you see not only the tree but god in the form of the tree... And not as a belief, not that you believe that the tree is god, but it is an actual experience, you really see it that way... then you have eyes and then life is a great joy.

To attain to that eye, love is the process. Only love gives eyes; intellect only pretends. It goes on supplying false eyes but they are all false; you can only believe in them but you cannot see through them. Rather than helping you to see, they hinder.

The more a person becomes intellectual, the less his life has vision, the less creative he becomes. He accumulates information and that information goes on collecting and becomes a barrier. It doesn't allow you to see life as it is. He has so many interpretations, so he cannot see a fact in its nudity. To see a fact as it is, is real eyesight.

Only love knows how to see things without interpretations. Love never interprets; it never imposes anything. It is pure receptivity. It is looking at life through the heart, not through the head.
So you have to remember these two things: love and a new vision, new eyes.

Prem means love, ananta means infinite -- infinite love. And remember, that which is finite is not love. Love by its very nature is infinite; it knows no boundaries. Hate knows boundaries. Hate is always addressed; you have to hate somebody. You cannot just hate but you can just love. There is no need to love somebody; love can be unaddressed. Love can become your very state, it need not be a relationship. That is the meaning of love's infinity: that it can be a state of being, you can be simply loving.

Love can become your nature. Hate can never become your nature. It remains foreign, it remains separate. You can go on clinging to it but you are never it. Hate has boundaries, definitions; love has no boundaries and no definitions. Love is like health. Diseases have definitions; you can define what cancer is and what tuberculosis is, but you cannot define what health is. Diseases are many and health is only one, but those many are definable and the one is indefinable. Hatreds are many but love is one.

Love is your inner health. Just as the body feels a well-being, when your inner being feels a well-being there is love. Love has nothing to do with the other. It is something that happens in you, that arises in you and overflows you. Remember it. That remembering will help you infinitely. And when you are sitting silently after meditation or in the morning, evening, night, when you are feeling cool and collected, just remember, just contemplate on love's infinity, overflowing, for nobody in particular. And one day you will start feeling it. The day one starts feeling love as a state is a great day, the day of celebration! One has started becoming religious.

One does not become religious by becoming a Christian or a Hindu; one becomes religious by becoming religious.

[deva arun -- divine source of light.]

Start contemplating on light. Whenever you have time and a few moments, just sit silently and start feeling a source of light in the belly, behind the navel... a red and bright sun, just as it is early in the morning when the sun is rising. And when you can visualise the sun behind the navel, feel the rays are reaching to every part of the body -- to the feet, to the head, to the hands -- feel full of light.

That will destroy many problems, that will destroy many of your anxieties. Light is going to be your mantra. Whenever you see light anywhere, be very respectful; light is your element. In the early morning see the sun rising and bow down. In the night, the stars -- bow down. Sometimes just light a small candle and bow down. Start getting in tune with all phenomena of light. Befriend light and light will befriend you. And soon, within three, four weeks, you will start feeling a great joy in light.

Deva means divine, anu means food -- food for the divine, food for god. We have to be absorbed by god, eaten by god. We have to become an offering. Only when we are digested back into god, will our misery stop.

Separate from him, we are bound to remain in misery. We have to become part again, and to become part means to be ready to be eaten up.

One has to surrender totally. One has to almost commit suicide as an individual, as an ego, as a self, so that one disappears and only god remains. We have to disappear as the wave, then we will be as the ocean. And the whole problem is that we cling to be the wave, we want to retain ourselves, we persist, we insist. We don't want to Lose our being.

Jesus is right when he says, 'Those who lose themselves will gain. And those who preserve themselves will be lost.' It takes guts to dissolve oneself, hence only a very few courageous people become religious. All the others who gather in the churches and mosques and temples are just cowards, not religious people at all. A religious person is one who is ready to sacrifice himself; but that sacrifice brings great blessing. It is not really death; it is resurrection.