Chapter #4 Eighty Four Thousand Poems #4

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed on to the computer. It is for reference purposes only.]

Man has to be a lamp unto himself.
Drop the whole idea
That you can get guidance from scriptures
That knowledge is possible by borrowing.
That is one of the greatest hindrances
In the spiritual search.
Nothing is needed from the outside
God has provided you with everything
That you will need on the journey.
The light is there
And only your own inner light can help you
To distinguish the right
From the wrong
Can help you not to go astray
Can help you to always be moving towards god.
Those who depend on others
Are simply wasting their opportunity.

My effort here is not to guide you
Not to give you directions
Not to give you certain character styles
Structures, patterns
But only to help you to be yourself.
I am not here to distract you from your being.
That is what is being done all over the world
By all the so-called organised religions.

The past of humanity has been very uncreative
For the simple reason that religions
Were teaching renunciation, not creativity.
Religions were teaching that the world
Is illusory. If the world is illusory
What is the point of creating anything?
The religions were teaching people
To become drop-outs
They were teaching people to become escapists.
And their impact has been great
They have poisoned the whole humanity.
Otherwise every child is born
With a tremendous capacity to be creative.
But we destroy him, we cripple him
We paralyse him.

My approach is just the opposite.
I would like you to be more and more creative
Because only by being creative
Can you participate with god.
Whenever you are creative
You are part of god, the creator.
There is no other way to participate with him.

So what you create is immaterial,
That is up to you, but create something.
Anyone creative -- a potter -- is far closer to god.
Than a professor, than a priest.
A shoemaker is far closer to god
Than a politician, than a prime minister
Or a president.
If god is a creator, then of course
All his blessings are for those who are creators.
Every sannyasin who belongs to me
Has to prove his mettle by creating something,
Whatsoever it is.
Find out what you would love to create.
There is no need to become world-famous
There is no need to become a Nobel laureate
There is no need that everybody should know
And appreciate your creativity;
That is not the point.
If you are enjoying it
If you are delighted in doing it that's enough.
That means god is happy with you.
If you are delighted that means god is delighted.
It is his delight that reaches to you.

Prayer
Has been very much misunderstood down the ages
So much so that it has taken on
A totally wrong meaning.
Now prayer means saying something to god.
Even a man like Martin buber thinks
Prayer as a dialogue with god.
What to say about ordinary people?
Martin Buber is a rare, intelligent human being
One of the greatest philosophers of this age.
But even he goes on carrying the same old
Rotten meaning of having a dialogue with god --
As if something has to be said to god.
There is nothing to say.
Prayer is not saying something to god
It is listening to god.
When you are all ears, just ears --
Open, available, ready to listen
Ready to be guided, surrendered, in a let-go --
That is prayer.
If this meaning is understood
Then prayer and meditation
Are no more different at all, then they are
Two different names for the same phenomenon.
Both mean silence.
Both mean a receptivity, an availability to god.

What can you say?
And whatsoever you do say will be stupid.
All prayers are stupid!
Man is stupid, so whatsoever he can bring forth
From his mind is going to be stupid.
It will be part of his ignorance
Of his unawareness, of his unconsciousness.
It will be nothing but his desires, demands
Complaints.

One has to be silent
Before existence.
That is prayer. Sitting silently by a river
Or sitting silently by a rosebush
Or sitting silently under the moon
Or sitting silently with a friend holding hands
That is prayer... because god is everywhere.
Wherever you are silent you are in prayer.

Basically prayer is gratitude -- gratitude
For all that god has done for you already.
It is gratefulness, it is a deep feeling
Of thankfulness. Reduced to the minimum
It is a non-verbal thank-you.
You need not say it, you have only to feel it.
The prayerful person is constantly feeling
That everything is a gift of god.
Life is a gift, love is a gift
Consciousness is a gift.
You are here
And becoming a sannyasin is gift!

When each moment of your life becomes permeated
By an unspoken thank you, that is prayer.
Then it goes on resounding in you;
Even while you are asleep it goes on and on
Deep inside you like an undercurrent.
You are not saying it
It is not addressed to anybody in particular
Because god has no address
At least no postal address!
It is unaddressed, unspoken , but it is there
Throbbing in every beat of your heart.
That is prayer.
Feel it, be it, and you will come to know
The greatest experience of your life
The greatest ecstasy.

By worship I don't mean any ritual.
Ritual is not worship.
Love is worship and love is never a ritual.
Rituals are repetitive, formal.
Love is informal, non-repetitive, spontaneous.

Be in love with existence -- that is worship.
And love in as many ways as possible
Don't hold back.
That's my whole teaching.
Jump into life totally, wholly.
When you are wholly in life, totally in life
You become religious, you become holy.
That is the only way to be holy.

Your so-called saints are not holy
They are simply dead.

Dance is the most symbolic act.
Nothing represents god better than dance.
God is a dancer.
And why do I say
That nothing represents him better?
Because dance is the only activity known to us
In which the actor and the action are one.
If you paint
The painter becomes different from the painting.
If you sculpt
You become separate from your creation.
Dance is the only activity
Which is inseparable from the dancer;
You cannot take the dance away from the dancer.
Existence is the dance of god;
They are together.
Hence he has to be found in this dance:
The wind passing through the pine trees
The sound of running water
The song of the birds in the morning
The freedom of the clouds
The beauty of the flowers.
God has to be found now and here
In this very dance.
This whole existence is his temple.
There is no need to make any churches
Any temples, any mosques. The are all false
And they go on distracting people
from the true religion.

True religion
Is a devotion towards life and existence.
Remember it: in every leaf of grass is god.
It is his gesture.
In thousand of moods and in thousands of gestures
He is dancing all over.
He is dancing within you and without you.
Hence I teach my sannyasins to dance
And to dance with such abundance
That you are lost in it.
That will give you the first taste
Of what it is to have a meeting with god
To have a date with god.

My sannyas is not to be serious
It is not to be sad.
My sannyas has to be a song, a celebration
A rejoicing in life.
I don't teach renunciation because to me
God is life, and if you cannot find him in life
You will not find him anywhere else.
God is not to be found in the monasteries
Or in Himalayan caves;
He is to be found in life
In all kinds of situations
Which one has to encounter in life.
God has to be found in all
The bitter experiences and the sweet experiences
That life makes available to you;
In the days, in the nights
In the summers, in the winters
In the thorns, in the flowers.
God has to be found here in the thick of life.

A sannyasin is one who goes
With a singing heart into the darkest night.
And if you can go with a singing heart
In the darkest night
Even the darkness becomes luminous.

Light is pure energy
Life has nothing but light in it.
The whole existence consists of light.
Matter is an illusion
It only appears because we cannot see clearly
Because we cannot penetrate deeply --
That's why it appears, otherwise it disappears.
There is only light, an immense ocean of light
And we are waves in that immense ocean.
To know it is not only to be transformed
To know it is to be reborn.
The old dies totally
And something absolutely new arrives
Which is not connected with the other at all --
It is disconnected, discontinuous.
It is the death of the old
And the resurrection of the new.

And once you feel yourself as just light
You will start feeling others also as pure light.
Then life is a dance of light, an eternal dance.
And to know this is to know what delight is.
Delight is the experience
That life is made of the stuff called light.
Then there is only celebration.
When there is no darkness
There is no death, no hell, no misery.
There is eternal celebration, halleluja!
We have been here forever
And we are going to be here forever.

Every person is born with a divine voice
Although we never hear it.
It is a still small voice.
It is the voice of god.
But our heads are so full of other voices --
Voice of America...
And there are a thousand and one voices.
We can't hear the still small voice.
And in our heads all the stations are on
Simultaneously;
It is so noisy inside that even if god shouts
You won't hear.
And he never shouts, he whispers.

Love always whispers
Because to shout is a little violent.
Love knows to wait, hence god waits.
Love knows to hope, hence god hopes.
If not today, then tomorrow...
Some dau you are going to hear.

Sannyas is nothing but an effort
To make your noisy mind a little quieter
So that you can hear your own voice.
Once you have heard it your life is transfomed.
Then you don't need any Bible, any Gita, any Koran.
You have your own Bible, your own Gita
Your own Koran.
There is no need to depend on others.
There is no need to depend on borrowed knowledge.
So become more and more silent;
Less and less noisy so that you can hear
The whisper of god within you.

That's the beginning of a new life
Of a life that is eternal.

It is tenderness that makes you vulnerable
That makes you open, that makes you sensitive
To the mysterious that surrounds us.
People who are not tender
Who are hard like rock, go on missing life.
Life passes by: it cannot penetrate them
They are impenetrable.

One should be like a rose flower, very tender:
The one comes to know
The mysterious and the miraculous.
Life is full of surprises
But only for those who have a tender heart.

But we all have been brought up in such a way
That we become hard, because we have been told
That life is a struggle, it is a conflict
It is a constant struggle for survival
So one has to be hard.
If you are not hard you will not be able to compete.
And that is true: You will not be able to compete
But competition leads nowhere.
It is a sheer wastage.
One should live a non-competitive life
Then only does one know what god is.

Jesus says:
Those who are the last in this world
Will be the first in my kingdom of god.
Now he is teaching non-competitiveness:
Those who are the last in this world
Will be the first in my kingdom of god.
But remember
Don't be the last in order to be the first
Otherwise you miss the whole point.
Enjoy being the last.
And to be the first in the kingdom of god
Is a consequence, it is not a goal.

Life is such a joy for those who are tender
Soft, loving, compassionate, sensitive.
That life itself is proof
In thousands of ways it proves that god is.
But to the hard, to the rocklike person,
There is no proof for god.
God cannot be proved for him
Because he has no sensitivity to feel.
He has lost all feeling
He lives only in the thinking.
He has lost his heart, he is just a head.
And the head is just rubbish!
Be a heart.
Even if you have to lose the head lose the head --
It is worth it.
It is beautiful to be headless
But it is ugly to be heartless.

My sannyasins have to be heartful and headless.
That is the very definition of my sannyas.

There is a peace
That is not imposed form the outside.
One can pretend to be peaceful --
That is hypocrisy, that is ugly.
Real peace arises from within, it arises
Out of understanding, awareness, meditation.
It is not something imposed
It is not like a mask that you wear.
It radiates from the very centre of your being.
One cannot cultivate it.
A cultivated peace is false, is not even skin-deep.
Scratch a little and immediately the ugly
The animal-like, the angry person is there.
All peace is gone.

But a really peaceful person is peaceful all over
From the circumference to the centre.
You can go digging
You will find more and more peace.
The more you dig into him
The more you will find fresh layers of peace.
When you reach the very centre of his being
You will find ultimate peace.
That is another name for god.

Bliss is possible
Only to those few people who are courages;
In cannot happen to the cowards.
Courage is the price we have to pay for it.
A coward is bound to remain in misery
Because a coward cannot drop his clinging
To old patterns; it feels safer to be
With the old, known, familiar.
Even though they are creating misery
It feels more safe, comfortable, cosy
Than moving into the unknown
Into the unpredictable.
Hence cowards go on crawling within their limits
Within their small holes.

Bliss is possible
Only when you go beyond your known limits.
When you go beyond the boundaries
When you start adventuring into the unknown.
That needs tremendous courage
Hence I say courage
Is the most fundamental religious quality.

Jesus is courageous, that is the meaning
Of carrying his cross on his own shoulders.
That means one is ready to die any moment
For one's convictions, for one's commitments
For one's promises.
One is even ready to sacrifice one's life
Joyously, with no complaint, with no grudge.
Just the other day in Rome, the pope
Enacted the carrying of the cross to the hill.
It is a drama.
Thousands of pilgrims were following him
With torches and flags and crosses of their own.
And he carried a beautifully carved cross
On his shoulders.
And it was thought that something
Tremendously beautiful was happening.
It is simply ugly.
It is befooling yourself and others.
Carrying one's own cross is not a drama
It is a risk.
You cannot enact it, you have to live it.
And the drama was not even completed --
At least they should have crucified him!
What is the point
Of carrying the cross to the hill and coming back
All happy that it was a good picnic!

Bliss is not a human achievement,
It is a gift from god.
It comes from the beyond.
We cannot manufacture it
It is beyond our capacities to create it.
But we can be available to it
We can be ready for it
We can be a host for it.

Amd that's what meditation is all about:
Being a host for god
Waiting with great longing but with no anxiety
With great expectancy but no expectation.
The difference is subtle but of tremendous import.
If one can wait in hope, in trust
And one can surrender and say yes to god
One day it happens.
It happens suddenly, it never happens gradually.
It is not that it comes slowly slowly, in parts.
It suddenly explodes.
It suddenly takes possession of you
From all directions
You are engulfed, encompassed by it
The experience of bliss
Is an encompassing experience.
One is drowned in it!
The ego disappears totally
And when you come back you are no more the same,
The old person is nowhere to be found
Not even a trace is found.
In fact it never existed in the first place.
It was just a dream... and you are awakened.

Hence, never make bliss a goal.
People start making bliss a goal.
That is the first step in missing it.
You are moving in a wrong direction.
Bliss is not a goal; nobody has ever achieved it.
It has come to many, but it has always come:
It comes of its own accord.
That does not mean that we have nothing to do --
We do have something to do.
We have to prepare the ground, we have to be
Utterly empty so that it can penetrate us.
We have to open all the doors and all the windows
We have to drop all fear of the unknown
Of the mysterious, of the miraculous.
And we have to be ready to be surprised.
That means we have to drop all knowledge
And we have to start functioning from a state
Of not-knowing.
We have to be innocent.
In a single word 'innocence'
Is the essence of religion.
And then it comes, surely it comes
Absolutely it comes, inevitably it comes
And possesses you so totally
That it does not leave
A single nook or corner within you
Where misery or darkness can hide.