Dissolving Fingers Pointing To The Moon #7
Questions in this Discourse
THE WHOLE SPRING BURSTS FORTH WITHIN YOU
Your path is to efface yourself totally, to annihilate yourself totally, to become more and more a nobody, a nonentity.
Sannyas is fulfilled only when you are a nothingness, because in that nothingness all becomes possible. In that nothingness the whole descends in you. Only nothingness can manage to have the whole inside it, only nothingness is enough to contain the whole. That's the meaning of surrender: being nobody.
It is hard in the beginning because we have lived according to the dictates of the ego for so long that it has become absolutely mechanical; we go on living robot-like to its dictates. Only in the beginning it is hard. Once you start getting out of the ego a little, once a few glimpses start happening to you then there is no problem; then you know the beauty and the benediction of being nobody. With just a little taste things become very simple and easy, then life becomes very smooth. Then to become ordinary is so blissful. Then not to be becomes such a rejoicing, and it brings so many flowers. The whole spring bursts forth within you.
But we have to create that space. It is difficult in the beginning but not impossible. And the function of the master is to help you when it is difficult and hard-going. Once it becomes smooth then there is no problem, no help is needed.
-- (to Surrenda) What is the meaning of your name?
-- For me, it's surrender.
-- Surrender? (a pause) Mm mm! Is it Dutch?
-- No. A little girl told me her name -- it was Surrenda. It was the most beautiful name I ever heard, so I gave it to myself.
-- Mm mm. That's good. So let it be Surrenda, Ma Surrenda. It does not mean surrender, but let it mean surrender! (laughter)
You must have heard wrongly. Surendra is the right word. Surendra means the goddess of goddesses. But there is no need to be worried about it. All meanings are arbitrary, so I accept your meaning. Let it be surrender.
And surrender is certainly beautiful. There is nothing more beautiful than surrender, because it is only in surrender that you will know who you are. Otherwise people go on believing in their egos. Surrender means surrendering the ego, the false self, the pseudo self. And when the pseudo is surrendered the real surfaces, then the real is discovered. To discover the real, the surrender is the essential process, the surrender of all that is false. And the ego is the most false thing in existence.
It is the most illusory thing. It exists only in our heads and nowhere else. It is not even a shadow, because a shadow needs some substance, a shadow has to be a shadow of something. The ego is not even a shadow. It is just a false idea propounded by the society. But one can believe in it. And if you believe in it, it becomes a reality -- for you, at least. You can destroy your whole life serving something which does not exist at all. And one comes to know it only when death knocks on the door. But then it is too late.
Sannyas means knowing the truth before death knocks on your door so that something can be done, so that you can be prepared, you can be ready for the eternal journey.
Sannyas means going beyond all fight. It is relaxation. It is a state of rest and peace. It cannot be achieved through fight, it can be achieved only by renouncing fight. It is a let-go.
There are two kinds of fighters in the world: a few fight with others, a few fight with themselves. Those who fight with others are thought to be warriors, the soldiers, the great generals. And those who fight with themselves are thought to be saints, mahatmas, ascetics.
I am creating a new kind of religious quality here, that of non-fighting. There is no need to push the river, relax with the whole, let it possess you. The moment you drop your ego all fight disappears. Fight only feeds the ego. It never leads you anywhere, it simply goes on puffing up your ego. There are worldly egos and there are other-worldly egos, but they are all egos.
My sannyasin has to be utterly egoless. Only then will he be able to feel the tremendous harmony of existence. One certainly becomes victorious, not through fight but surrender.
Meditate over this paradox because this paradox contains the most secret key.
Life can be either a rotten, stinking phenomenon or it can be an explosion of great fragrance. It is the same energy. What we do with our energy all depends on us. If we allow our energy to remain confined in the mind, moving in a vicious circle, going around in circles, then sooner or later we start feeling rotten, bored, meaningless. All poetry disappears, all beauty disappears, all joy disappears. One simply starts wondering why life exists at all, what the purpose of it all is. There is no answer, and the question becomes heavier every day. It becomes like a rock on your chest.
It is killing millions of people. Of course they go on living somehow, dragging, waiting for death to deliver them from life, hoping that death will come and they will finally be delivered. This is not because of life, it is because of us.
We could have lived in a totally different way, we could have changed the whole gestalt. We could have lived without the mind, we could have lived through meditation, through no-mind. And then great fragrance, great meaning, great joy happens on its own accord, because when you are a no-mind you are in deep harmony with existence. The conflict disappears. When you are a no-mind you are no more, hence there is nobody to fight. A deep let-go comes naturally -- and in that let-go is the meeting. Call it the meeting of man and god or part and whole, but the dewdrop disappears in the dewdrop. Then life is vast, has tremendous significance. Then life is a constant joy, a continuum of celebration.
And that's my message: each sannyasin has to become a celebration, a fragrance, a song, a beauty, a grace, a blessing to himself and also a blessing to the whole existence.
One has to go beyond all countries and lands and races and churches and religions. We have to lose all our boundaries, only then can we know the unbounded. People are Christians and Hindus and Jews and Mohammedans and Indians and Germans and British. These people cannot know god, they are too attached to small boundaries. A sannyasin declares that 'I belong to no boundaries,' that 'I belong to the unbounded,' that 'The whole earth is mine, and not only this earth but all the earths that exist elsewhere too,' that 'This whole universe is mine,' that 'I am universal,' that 'I am not ready to be confined in any prison, howsoever beautiful it is, howsoever easy and comfortable it is. I am going to be in the infinite whatsoever the cost.'
One has to leave all small territories, small identities. One should not be British and should not be French and should not be Indian. To be a man is enough.
In fact when you move a little higher even that idea drops. One is neither man nor woman, one is simply consciousness. And that is the ultimate goal. When all identities have disappeared, when you don't have any boundaries, then you are free, liberated, then you are as vast as the universe itself. And only in that vastness is contentment, because in that vastness is freedom. Otherwise we are imprisoned. We have made so many prisons, that we are feeling suffocated. But still we go on clinging to the walls which are creating the suffocation because we have been told that those are not walls, we have been told they are very precious; one should be proud of being British or Japanese or Chinese, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. One should be proud!
We have been told to be proud of prisons. That nonsense has to be dropped -- and not slowly. See the point and drop it. Let the seeing itself be the dropping. That's what I call sannyas. It is a sudden understanding. A sudden seeing which immediately becomes your life.
(to Sittich) You have a very beautiful name and yet a very dangerous one too. So I have to add something to it. This will be your name: Sw Veet Sittich. Veet means going beyond; Sittich means a parrot. I am not against parrots (laughter) ... parrots are beautiful people, but people should not be parrots! Because if people are parrots they become scholars, they become pundits, they become priests.
Parrots are perfectly good. They are neither scholars nor priests, nor pundits, they are simply people and good people. And they don't believe what they repeat.
The danger with man is that if he repeats something constantly he starts believing in it, he becomes auto-hypnotized by it. No parrot ever believes what he repeats. He knows it is a repetition, he knows it is just to satisfy the foolish owner. So he goes on doing all kinds of things, whatsoever is expected. He is simply obliging.
A parrot is neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan, but if you teach him Christianity he will repeat Christianity, if you teach him Hindu mantras he will repeat Hindu mantras. He is not serious about it. But man becomes very serious. If you go on repeating Christian formulas you will become a Christian. You will forget that the only way to be a Christian is to be a Christ, there is no other way. The only way to be a Buddhist is to be a Buddha, there is no other way. You cannot imitate, you cannot go on repeating, parrotlike. You can't just be a mechanical reproduction, you have to experience on your own.
So love parrots but don't be a parrot. Go beyond parrotlike tendencies. They are very deeply rooted in humanity. The whole humanity functions in a parrotlike way; we all function as conditioned beings. Somebody is conditioned as a Communist and somebody is conditioned as a Catholic. One person is conditioned by the Vatican, another is conditioned by the Kremlin -- but it is the same, it makes no difference.
A sannyasin has to become unconditioned and has to remain unconditioned. I don't want to re-condition you. My whole effort here is to simply uncondition you and then leave it to you. Then you can live out of that unconditioned state of your consciousness and your life will be a benediction.
My function here is to help you unlearn, simply unlearn, to negate all that has been forced upon you whatsoever it is -- Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Communist, whatsoever it is -- to unburden you. And then I don't want to teach you anything, I want you to live in that state of unconditioned consciousness. To function out of that state is such an ecstatic experience, so beautiful, so tremendously beautiful and so divine, one cannot imagine it. To know, one has to experience it.
There are many gods -- Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. There are as many gods as there are religions, sects and subjects, and there are three thousand ideologies about god in the world, so there are three thousand concepts about god. All are false, because god is so vast that you cannot reduce him to an ideology. God is so infinite that you cannot make an image of him. God is so mysterious that no word, no concept, no theory, is adequate enough to explain it.
Everything that man has done to explain god has been destructive. Rather than making the world more religious, it has made the world less religious, because all those ideas are so inadequate that they can only satisfy fools.
If you have a little intelligence then no religion can satisfy you -- just a little intelligence, not much! Then no religion can satisfy you. All religions have flaws, and such stupidities have been perpetuated.
For example, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ... now that is a very essential thing. If you are to be a Christian you have to believe in it. If you don't believe in it you are not a true Christian. So there is only one way: if you want to be a true Christian you have to say goodbye to all intelligence! You have to be simply stupid, only then can you be a good Christian. And the same is true about all religions -- such foolish ideas. But that is bound to happen.
The real mystics have remained utterly silent about god. Buddha, whenever he was asked, smiled but never answered. He would not say yes, he would not say no, he would simply smile. it would be a very knowing smile, a very inviting smile, very seductive -- but he would smile. He would ask you to be with him, to sit in silence with him, to share in his meditations, and maybe some day you would find the answer. But he had not given the answer himself. To me he seems to be one of the most honest persons who has ever walked on the earth, because nothing can be said about god, only silence... because the true god is known only in silence.
So drop all ideas of god and become more and more silent, and one day it is bound to happen: when the silence is total he comes so silently, so invisibly, that you are in for a great surprise. You don't hear his footsteps. One moment he was not there, the next moment he is there and you are overflowing with him. And you are no more the same person, and neither is the world the same.
The god of meditation is the only true god. All other gods are inventions -- inventions of crafty priests, inventions of greedy minds, inventions out of fear. The only true god, which is not an invention, is experienced through meditation, because meditation requires you first to drop all thoughts; thoughts about god are also included in it.
When all thoughts and all desires have been dropped, then whatsoever you have come to know is not part of your mind because we have put the mind aside from the very beginning. Now there is nobody to create anything. Now you will know that which is. Otherwise the mind always goes on projecting.
Meditation means functioning from a state of no-mind. And sannyas is the journey from mind to no-mind.
God is not for the cowards, although cowardly people tend to be religious because they are so afraid; they think that god is a good shelter, a good investment. But god is not a shelter and not an investment either. God is risk, god is danger, god is adventure. Hence the real god is not to be found in the churches and the temples and the mosques. You can find the real god only when you drop all that is familiar and known, all that gives you the feeling of security and safety, and you go into the uncharted sea.
The very going is a transformation. The very going means trust. Leaving all securities, all safeties, is real sannyas. To live in insecurity is to really live -- others only die.
Sannyas means courage more than anything else, because it is a declaration of your individuality, a declaration of freedom, a declaration that you will not be any more part of the mob madness, the mob psychology. It is a declaration that you are becoming universal; you will not belong to any country, to any church, to any race, to any religion. You will be religious but you will not be Mohammedan, Hindu or Christian. You will love Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed because you will be religious, but you will not belong to any dogma or creed and you will not belong to any state, any nation, because all these boundaries are false, all these divisions are ugly. The earth is one, and sannyas is a declaration of the oneness of humanity.
It certainly needs courage. It also needs courage because it is getting rid of tradition, of the past, of history. It is trying to live in the present according to your own light, not being dominated by the dead, not being dominated by history. To be free of history is such a tremendous joy. But it is a risk also, because then you are left alone, then you don't have any guidelines, any maps to follow. But that's the beauty of it too: when you don't have any guidelines your own consciousness rises to take the challenge. When you don't have the map you start exploring on your own. Then life becomes an adventure.
And religiousness is the greatest adventure, the adventure for god.
Only the courageous ones can be initiated into the inner journey, because it is moving from the known into the unknown. Only the courageous ones have been called. Yes, sometimes a few cowards also come with the courageous ones (laughter) ... but they escape. They can't stay here -- it is dangerous.
So remember it: don't escape! (laughter) But I trust Germans, so I hope you will fulfill your name.
The only way to live life truly is to live dangerously, because only in danger all that is rubbish drops and all that is intrinsic and essential grows, because danger becomes a challenge. And it is only in great, challenging situations that your potential becomes actual. If there is no challenge your potential remains asleep.
We are providing every kind of challenge here. The fortunate ones are those who don't miss those challenges; the unfortunate ones are those who go on missing them. So accept all the challenges. Even if you are trembling within, in spite of all the trembling, accept the challenge. And the challenge will give you a new kind of being. It will give you a spine of steel, it will make you a man of steel.
And every sannyasin has to be a man of steel. I don't mean that every sannyasin has to be Joseph Stalin! -- Stalin means man of steel.
Adventurousness is one of the most essential qualities for those who want to live life in its totality. And to live one's life in totality is to be religious, to live it whole is to be holy.
Life is a great adventure, but people are so afraid that they cling to the familiar, to the known, to the well-defined, to the logical. They never go beyond the boundary of the mind. If you live in the mind you are living in a grave. If you go beyond the mind you are really born, you have come out of the grave.
One can live each moment with such intensity, with such adventure, that each moment becomes a great gift of god because it brings so much joy, so much ecstasy. But one has to be ready to go on dropping the past. One should not allow the past to be accumulated. That becomes a prison wall around you.
Each moment die to the past and remain fresh, and your life will be a great adventure. And it is only for the adventurous people to know what truth is. The non-adventurous live in comfortable lies.
Unless you are a rebel you will not attain to fragrance. It is only through rebelling against all the rotten traditions that one becomes fragrant. Tradition stinks, and if you remain part of it you continually stink.
The past is dead, it is a corpse, and to live clinging to the past is disgusting. But that's what millions of people are doing. We have to get rid of the past. You are, only when you are free of the past; for the first time you are, for the first time you are an authentic individual. And that authenticity brings fragrance. Your heart opens up into a beautiful flower, you become a lotus.
Knowledge that is borrowed from others is untrue, knowledge that is gathered from scriptures is untrue. It may have come from a very original source, from a Jesus, from a A Lao Tzu, from a Zarathustra -- it does not matter, because truth is untransferable. There is no way to express it. So whatsoever information you gather from scriptures, and from others is all rubbish. One has to unlearn it. Slowly slowly one has to unburden oneself.
When your being is totally unburdened, when your slate is completely clean, when there is no writing on you, then suddenly an invisible writing starts appearing. Your own being becomes your scripture. Then for the first time you come across the Bible, the book of the books, then for the first time you read the Vedas, never before that. This can happen only through meditation; not by studies, not by logical, intellectual understanding, but by becoming more and more thoughtless, alert, silent. You can only be on the receiving end inside.
But if you are full of knowledge it is difficult: your knowledge will hinder it. It won't allow it to happen. Your mind will go on continuously fabricating, manufacturing. The mind has to cease, completely cease for the truth to be. One has to become again ignorant, innocent, childlike. Then something immensely beautiful starts growing in you. Call it wisdom, call it true knowledge, call it realization or whatsoever you will, but remember one thing: true knowledge has to happen within you; it is always yours, it is never borrowed, it cannot be learned from others.
You have to dig deep within yourself -- it is already there.
Life is something tremendously beautiful but we are unaware of it, we are blind to it. It is glory, but we are not sensitive enough to feel it.
Life is perfect but our sensitivity is almost nil; hence the whole problem is how to create more sensitivity, how to become more alive, how to be more open, vulnerable, so that wee can feel the life that surrounds us. The moment we are in step with life, life is god, and there is no other god.
And life knows no death, no birth. It is eternal, and we are part of that eternity. But we have gathered much rust around our mirrorlike being so that it reflects nothing. Our mind is like a layer of dust on our consciousness; hence nothing is reflected and we cannot see that which is. We only see the dust; we only see our thoughts, our desires, our memories, our dreams -- and they are not the reality. Unless all this dust is cleaned away we will not be able to reflect that which is.
The whole process of sannyas is that of cleansing, that of dropping all rust, all dust. As one becomes more and more silent, peaceful, alert, sensitive, life becomes more glorious, more beautiful, more blissful. It is a great gift. But we are wasting time and opportunity, we are not approaching that which has been given to us. We don't deserve it.
The heart is always pure; there is no way to make it impure.
And the head is always impure; there is no way to make it pure.
And these are the alternative ways to live: one either can live in the head or one can live in the heart. If you live in the head you may be successful in life, you may become very rich, powerful socially, politically, you may become very respectable, world-famous. But deep down you will be all tears and nothing else because you will see the futility of all that you have attained; you have wasted such a precious life for rubbish. Death takes everything away.
This is the criterion: anything that can be taken away by death is not worth bothering about much. Anything that cannot be taken away by death -- that is something to create, to discover. One can sacrifice everything for it, it is worth sacrificing for.
The heart cannot give you any outward success but it can give you a deep inner peace, a great joy, a blissfulness, a blessedness, a benediction, and it can slowly slowly lead you towards the other shore, towards god.
When you are absolutely pure the ego disappears. You are, and yet you are not. In one sense you are not, not as you have always been; in another sense you are and for the first time you are. But you are no more an ego, confined in the body-mind complex.
You are infinite.
You are as vast as god.
You are one with god. Only the door of the heart can become the door of god's temple.
Move from the head to the heart.
It is only in the experience of blissfulness that one feels one is no longer human, one is divine. The moment your heart is dancing with bliss you are like god.
In misery you are far away from god. Nothing keeps people from god as much as misery does, because misery closes you, misery makes you more and more self-centered, self-conscious. And to be self-conscious is not to be conscious, those two things are totally different. When one is conscious there is no self; when one is self-conscious there is no consciousness. When one is self-centered one cannot look towards the vast existence that surrounds one. One lives an encapsulated life, without windows and without doors; one is hiding in a black hole. How can one connect, commune with god?
It is only when you are singing and dancing, when there is laughter and joy and celebration, that from your black hole you come out under the sky full of stars. Only in moments of bliss you do forget that you are. And those are the most important moments, when you forget that you are, because when you are not, god is.
We have to create a space within ourselves, a pure space which contains nothing. We are too full of rubbish. All this rubbish has to be removed, thrown out. We have to empty ourselves totally. Once you are utterly empty you are in for a great surprise. The moment the emptiness is perfect, the gestalt changes; it is no more emptiness. You are full of something which you had never known, never tasted, before. You are full of god.
So on the one hand you become empty of your mind, your ego, memories thoughts, desires, and on the other hand you become full of god. And to be full of god is to be full of bliss, to be full of god is to be full of life. To be full of god is to be full of eternity.
That's the ultimate goal that everybody is seeking, knowingly or unknowingly. Sannyas is a conscious effort to reach the target. It is within your reach -- just a little effort is needed.
All that is great is always a gift of god. It is never our achievement, in fact it happens only when we are utterly absent. Love happens when you are absent, truth happens when you are absent, bliss happens when you are absent. When you are too full of yourself nothing happens. Then gifts go on coming but you are not ready to receive them. The ego is very non-receptive. We can receive god's gifts only when we are utterly empty; the emptier you are the better.
The whole process of sannyas is nothing but emptying you of yourself. Then gifts go on coming. So much happens, and without any effort, that it seems unbelievable, incredible. One becomes aware for the first time how generous existence is. God is not miserly. He gives, and he gives so much. He is willing to give everything, but we are not ready to receive. We don't have any space to receive his gifts.
So start emptying yourself and you will be moving on the right way.
There is a flowering inside. Roses bloom inside, and roses which are imperishable, roses which are not gross, which are made of grace. Gravitation has no effect on them. They come from the beyond, they descend on you, they shower on you. But one has to be receptive; one has to become an absolute nonentity, a nobody, a nothingness. Only in that nothingness do those roses bloom. One becomes a garden, one becomes a paradise. The word 'paradise' means a walled garden.
It is within our capacity. If we miss it then we are responsible, nobody else. Missing it simply means that we kept ourselves engaged in futile things, we wasted our energies in trivia.
A sannyasin has to be very discriminating, very alert, so that no energy is wasted. And you will be surprised: almost ninety per cent of our energy is a sheer wastage; if you watch your life you will be able to see that there is much which is non-essential, which can be dropped. You go on doing it out of habit; otherwise there is no reason for it.
The essential is very small. And when you do only the essential and the non-essential is dropped you accumulate great energy, you become a reservoir of energy. Out of that energy roses bloom.
So two things have to be remembered: one has to become a nobody, utterly empty of the ego, and then one has to accumulate one's energy so that one's emptiness becomes a lake of energy. Then the impossible becomes possible. Then all beauty is yours, and all grace and all truth and all freedom.
Consecrated to god is exactly the definition of sannyas. One starts living not for the ego but for the whole, one starts living as a vehicle of god, one becomes just like a hollow bamboo so that god can transform one into a flute. One empties oneself of oneself.
That's all that needs to be done: one has to empty oneself of oneself. And when one is empty something mysterious starts happening, unexplainable. Something from the beyond starts descending in you, some unknown force starts singing through you, dancing through you.
That unknown force is god. God is not a person; it is only a name for all that is mysterious, for all that is beyond comprehension, for all that intellect is incapable of understanding. And to be consecrated to the miraculous, to the mysterious, is the only way to live a beautiful, graceful life. Otherwise people are only dragging themselves. Their life is not a dance, it cannot be.
Unless god dances in you there is no possibility of any dance. Unless god rejoices in you there is no possibility of rejoicing.
Remove yourself so that you don't come in between you and god. Put the ego, the very idea of I, aside and be utterly empty, receptive. And the moment your emptiness is total, the whole starts showering millions of joys, millions of flowers upon you. The splendor is infinite.
On our path nothing else is to be done, only one thing -- that we should be nothings, nobodies, nonentities.
There are two things a sannyasin has to go beyond; one is name, the other is fame. They are two sides of the same coin; the name of the coin is the ego. It hankers for name and fame. And the more you feed it, the more hungry it is. Its thirst is unquenchable. It is like throwing butter on the fire to put it out: your butter is not going to put the fire out, it will help it; it will become fuel for it, food for it.
But millions of people live for name and fame. And hiding behind these two is the ego which goes on asking for more and more.
A sannyasin has to drop both. He has to drop the coin itself so both sides of it are dropped. A sannyasin has to live anonymously. He is nobody, he is just a pure nothingness. And in that nothingness miracles happen; even the impossible becomes possible. In that nothingness you become the space which is needed for god to descend in you.
The moment you have achieved this inner nothingness you are ready to be the host to the ultimate guest.
Paula has two meanings; one comes from Latin, the other comes from the Greek. The Latin meaning is 'small', and the Greek meaning is 'rest'. Both are beautiful.
One has to be so small that slowly slowly one disappears, one is no more, one becomes a pure nothingness, a nobody. Sannyas is fulfilled when the ego disappears. The ego is always trying to be big. It is always going on trips, its whole effort is to be big somehow. If it cannot be big, at least it can pretend to be big, at least it can appear to be big.
It is like a balloon which wants to go on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and there is nothing in it, just hot air. A small pinprick is enough to finish it: all its greatness disappears in a single moment. A single moment of understanding is enough to kill the whole ego. All its games and trips disappear like dreams, as if they have never been there; they don't leave any trace behind.
And the other meaning, rest, is also tremendously significant. Whenever the ego dies, there is rest. In nothingness rest grows. Rest means to be at ease with oneself and to be at ease with the universe. Rest means to be in a state of total relaxation, with no tension, no strain, no anxiety, no anguish.
Your name defines the whole of sannyas. Begin by becoming smaller and smaller and smaller so that one day nothing is left, only nothing is left. Then the second thing starts growing of its own accord: a great harmony is felt. Suddenly you are in tune with the whole. That is rest. All restlessness disappears with the ego, it dies with the ego -- it is a by-product of the ego.
Bliss is beauty; misery is ugliness. It not only cripples your body, it cripples your very soul. It paralyzes, it poisons, it is very destructive. But people cling to misery because it gives one thing which bliss can never give. That thing is the ego.
Ego thrives on misery. Misery is food for the ego, nourishment. In bliss ego dies, disappears, melts, is no more found. And to be without ego is beauty. To have no ego, just to be a nobody is the ultimate beauty. Think of it, contemplate on it -- just to be a nobody. And as the ego goes all the fuss that it creates disappears, and all that was unnecessary but which appeared very necessary because of the ego is no more needed. Life becomes the essential, not the accidental; life becomes intrinsic; it consists of only that which is absolutely necessary.
That's what I call sannyas. It is not renunciation of the world, it is renunciation of misery. It is rejoicing. It means becoming more and more blissful, more and more dance-full, more and more song-full. Sannyas means making your life a celebration. For that, space is needed.
If you want to dance you will have to remove the furniture. And our beings are so full of furniture, rotten furniture of no use at all, bur we just go on keeping it in case we need it sometimes. It leaves no space to dance. In fact it leaves no space for us to enter; our inner being becomes so full of rubbish that we have to live outside. We become so full of ego that we can't enter in. We are even debarred from our own being. Sannyas means seeing clearly that this is being stupid.
In my vision the problem is not of making sinners saints, the problem is of making stupid people a little more intelligent. So it is not a question of sinners versus saints, it is a question of stupidity versus intelligence. That's a great change that I want to bring into the world of religion.
Be more intelligent and look into things and whatsoever seems to be creating misery, drop it -- and don't drop it slowly. The moment you see that it is creating misery, in a single blow cut it off. Even if it hurts -- it may hurt -- so what? It hurts because it has been there for so long. It has become a part of you and now you are cutting it off: it hurts. It is like taking pus out of a wound, it hurts. But that's the only way for the wound to heal: the pus has to be taken out. The ego is the pus and the ego has made us wounds. Rather than being blissful beings, rather than being flowers, it has reduced us to wounds, to crippled, ill people, pathological people.
Drop the ego and drop the miseries on which it lives -- it is a parasite. And start moving more and more into bliss. In the beginning you will feel it is a little difficult. It is just as when one starts dancing; in the beginning it is a little awkward. One needs to learn the art, and then grace comes. Then you can dance as if you don't have any body.
And in fact you don't have any body, any mind. You are neither the body nor the mind but a pure consciousness. That is experienced only when you become a dance, a celebration.
Beauty is of the outer and grace is of the inner; hence the grace is the real beauty. What we call beauty is superficial. And unless a man is full of grace his beauty is only skin-deep, or maybe not even that. Scratch him a little and his ugliness comes out. He is just painted on the outside, but inside he is boiling with all kinds of scorpions and snakes and monkeys and dogs and cats. Inside he is still in the jungle. There is no peace, no silence, no joy, no grace.
Grace means to feel in harmony with existence, to be in tune with existence. When you feel the tuning ego disappears. Ego is ugly. When there is no ego and you are one with the whole there is grace, and so much that it starts overflowing you.
If there is inner grace, even an ugly body looks beautiful. And if there is no grace inside, even a beautiful body does not look beautiful.
Grace is of the spirit, and only that which is of the spirit is abiding. Only that which is of the spirit is real treasure. It cannot be taken away, it cannot be destroyed. Fire cannot burn it; even death cannot destroy it.
A sannyasin has to be full of grace. I am not against physical beauty; it is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It is beautiful to have a beautiful form but it is nothing compared to the inner beauty, to having a beautiful being. And one can have both, there is no conflict. In fact it is easier to have both together than to have one. Whenever the inner happens, the outer follows, but not vice versa: the outer may be there, the inner is not necessarily going to follow. The inner has to be created through great effort, through meditation, through awareness, through love.
Jesus says: Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of god. That's what is meant by innocence. Unlearn the ways of the world, unlearn cleverness, cunningness, diplomacy, politics. Unlearn so that you can be clean, empty, silent, again, so that you can function from a state of not-knowing. That is the greatest thing in life: to function from a state of not-knowing. Then one is living moment to moment; one is not living through the past, through memories, through knowledge. One is encountering reality like a mirror -- reflecting it and acting out of that reflection.
That is the way of sannyas. It means responsibility, not in the moralistic sense but in the sense that one becomes more and more responsive. One does not react, one responds.
Reaction is via the past, through the memory. The mind is there and you are never functioning directly, you are always using mind as a mediator. When the mind is put aside and you function directly, immediately, and there is no mediator, that is response. And to be responsible is to be religious. But only an innocent person can be responsible, only children can be responsible.
Beware of accumulating knowledge. And whenever you see that something has become accumulated, immediately drop it. It is poison -- don't carry it. Keep yourself clean and empty. Keep yourself ignorant and function out of that ignorance. And you will be surprised, because "Blessed are the ignorant for theirs is the kingdom of god."
Wisdom to me is equivalent to innocence. Not equivalent to knowledge. Wisdom is anti-knowledge; knowledge is anti-innocence. The knowledgeable person becomes less and less innocent. His ego becomes more puffed up. He starts thinking that 'I know' -- and that is the subtlest ego. The innocent person knows that he knows not. And that is the beginning of wisdom: you again become a child.
Drop knowledge, and wisdom is yours. But that price has to be paid; one can't have both. It is better to be a fool and wise than to be very clever and knowledgeable.
Saint Francis used to call himself the fool of god. He is right. By 'fool' he means wise, unknowledgeable.
Sannyas begins in unlearning and ends in total nothingness. When you know nothing you are nothing. When you know nothing the ego evaporates. When you know nothing then the whole existence is full of wonder and awe. The experience of wonder and awe is the fundamental religious experience. That is truly the encounter with god.
To love needs great strength, not only physical but spiritual too. Weaklings cannot love. They can lust but they cannot love. Love means sacrifice and the first requirement of love is the dropping of the ego. And that is the most difficult thing in life: to become a nobody, to be just a nothingness.
Unless one is ready to be a nobody, a nothingness, love cannot grow. Love needs space, and if ego is filling you, if you are too full of yourself, there is no space for love to grow. We have to uproot the ego totally; hence strength is needed.
But once you put all your energies in a concentrated way it becomes possible. It is within our capacity to grow beyond lust into love.
Lust is something biological; love is spiritual. Lust means using the other as a means; love means that the other has to be respected as an end unto himself, herself. Lust exploits; love gives and gives unconditionally, it gives without any idea of return. But the beauty and the miracle is that the more you give, the more you get. The more you give without any motivation, the more you become full of love.
Suddenly one becomes aware of an inexhaustible source within oneself. You can go on sharing, you can give your love to the whole universe, still you will not be empty. Just be empty of the ego and you will never be empty of love. You can go on giving as much as you want, you can go on overflowing. That's why Jesus says god is love. He makes god and love synonymous. It is true: if you have known love you have known god. If you have not known love then all that you think about god is just nonsense, it has no meaning, no significance. You are simply using words with no content in them.
But if you love, then for the first time 'god' becomes a meaningful word of tremendous import, pregnant with the ultimate significance of life.
It is love that makes one noble -- not birth, but love. Nobody is born noble -- the whole idea of aristocracy is sheer nonsense -- but one can become noble. One has to be very alert, sensitive, creative, only then can one be noble.
It is easy to paint a picture, to create a painting, it is easy to sculpt a statue. The hardest thing to create is your own self, your own being. Even to sculpt out of granite is not that difficult. The greatest problem arises when you start cutting chunks of your being which had been there for many many lives. You have believed in them as if they are part of you; they have almost become your second nature.
One's real being is lost in many unreal things; for example, the ego is one of the greatest problems. It is unreal, but it is covering our reality. It has to be dropped -- and it is the hardest task, very painful, because we have always thought 'This is what I am'. It feels like death.
We are identified with the ego, and with the ego there are many things: anger and hatred and jealousy and possessiveness and greed -- the whole train. The ego functions like an engine and there are many many compartments following it. Once the ego dies the whole train stops.
The ego is the energy of all that is nonsense in us, of all that is stupid in us, of all that stinks in us. And all this has to be cut out.
It is not like dropping your clothes, it is like peeling your skin, it is painful. Hence very few people grow, because very few people are ready to go through pain. But pain is the only way to be born. One has to accept the challenge. It is through the fire that the gold becomes pure and it is through pain that one becomes integrated.
And only when all that is wrong in us has been dropped is nobility born. One really becomes a noble soul. Then one is an aristocrat -- not by birth but through love.
Man can enter into the infinite only if he has courage. Nothing else is more important. No virtue is greater than the virtue of being courageous. If one is not courageous one may be very virtuous, very religious, one may perform all the rituals but one will remain unbridged with god, because all that one will be doing is out of fear. It will not be an exploration, an enquiry into the unknown, it will simply be an effort to make one's life safe and secure. It will be out of cowardliness -- and god is not for cowards. Although religion and the so-called religious people are rooted in fear -- hence they are called god-fearing people -- that is not the true definition of a religions man.
A truly religious man is not god-fearing but god-loving -- and fear and love are poles apart. When there is fear love is impossible. If you love somebody how can you be afraid? Fear exists only when love is absent. Love dispels all fear.
Hence I say that courage is the greatest virtue because it makes you capable of loving the unknown, it helps you to go into the enquiry of the uncharted, without any maps. That very gesture on your part creates integrity. It is a great challenge to accept. To accept it means to be reborn. It is a death, a death of the old pattern, the old person, and the birth of a new way of life.
That's what sannyas is all about: it is rooted in courage. And I teach love for god, love for truth, not fear of god. That is an ugly thing.
Love is the only home. Without love a man is homeless. Without love a man is simply driftwood, with no direction, with no sense of meaning in life, with no shelter anywhere. Without love a man remains accidental. He has no intrinsic value. That's why millions of people continuously feel life is utterly empty. Not that life is empty, life is overflowing with joy, but we are not bridged with life. Our hearts are not dancing in tune with existence.
To dance in tune with existence is what I call love. If you are in tune with one person, that is love in a very small way. If you are in tune with many people, that is a little bigger; it becomes friendship. If you are in love with the whole existence, that becomes immensely vast; it is prayer. But the basic note is the same: to be in tune with the other.
And remember, the goal is to be in tune with the whole. So be so much in tune that you disappear; only the harmony remains, only the symphony remains. That symphony is ecstasy. Not ecstasy in the Greek sense...
(turning to his right) What do you mean by 'ecstasy', Mukta? I have heard they say 'bus stop'...?
-- I don't know (she replies in laughter)... I've forgotten!
-- Somebody has informed me that in Greece a bus stop is called 'ecstasis'. (laughter) And in a sense it is a bus stop (more laughter) ... because the is nowhere to go. It is the terminus, the last bus stop!
(to Ulrich) This is your new name: Swami Kavyo. Kavyo means poetry. I hope you are not Italian?
-- No.
-- That's very good... because I have heard that in Italian 'kavyo' means guinea pig. (much laughter) Is it true, Lalita? (the translator sitting in the front row.)
-- Yes!
-- That's good. So there is no problem about it. Life should be looked at not as prose but as poetry. That's the religious approach, the approach of the mystic. He looks, not with questions in his eyes, he looks with wonder, he looks with awe. He does not think about existence, he feels it. He opens his heart, rather than using his head he throws the doors and windows of his heart open, he allows the sun and the wind and the rain to come in. That's what I mean by poetry.
The mystic is a poet in the ultimate sense. He may not write poetry, that is irrelevant, but he lives in poetry, he is poetry. Where else can you find more poetry than in a Jesus or a Buddha or a A Lao Tzu. Although none of them has written poetry, they lived poetry.
My sannyasins have to become living poetry. Forget all about your head. Become headless and heart-full. There are no problems in life; all problems are fabrications of the mind. Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
Live it, enjoy it, sing with it, dance with it, sway with it! Don't try to be philosophical, be poetic, and all joy will be yours. And you will be able to attain the ultimate treasure, the kingdom of god. It is available only to the poets.
Meditation is the greatest courage in life because it is going into your aloneness, where nobody can accompany you, where you have to go alone. Not only can nobody accompany you there, even your body will not be there, even your mind will not be there. Your whole identity, your ego, will be absent. All these things will have to be left behind, only then can you go in.
Going in is going through a great identity crisis. That's why very few people try it. It is going through a death. But those who are courageous enough to go through that death fearlessly, joyously, are reborn, are resurrected. They attain to a totally new kind of life. They go beyond time, they become part of eternity. They are no more small, tiny, encaged, imprisoned. They are vast, as vast as god. And only by being vast do you know what god is.
When you can feel stars moving within you, then only do you know your reality. And it is tremendously beautiful. It is so perfect that nobody can imagine anything more perfect than this. No improvement is possible. Then one rejoices, one celebrates. Then life is a sheer dance, a sharing of joy. But first one has to have the courage to die in meditation and be born through meditation.
Meditation is the mother of all intelligence. It is out of meditation that brightness happens. One becomes sharp like a sword. One becomes penetrating like an arrow. One becomes transparent, because meditation means the death of the mind.
Mind is a kind of fog, and when the fog disappears your inner shining, your inner light, your inner moon, shines in its total beauty and brightness.
God is light. The experience of god is the experience of an inner explosion of light; all darkness simply disappears. The mystics down the ages have been saying about it that it is as if suddenly thousands of suns have arisen in the inner world. The light is so much, so dazzling, that it is almost unbearable in the beginning. Slowly slowly one gets accustomed to it. And as you get accustomed to it, you are not more; only the light remains. When the darkness has gone you are also gone. You are part of darkness; the ego is nothing but condensed darkness.
To experience god is to experience at the same time the death of the ego. It is a death and a resurrection: the death of darkness and the birth of light.
God is unbounded, infinite, vast. God is oceanic and we are like dewdrops. We have to learn the art of disappearing into the ocean. It needs guts, because to disappear into the ocean means to die as a dewdrop. Because unless one dies as a dewdrop one cannot be born as the ocean. When the seed dies as a seed a great tree is born. The seed disappears; only through its disappearance does the tree appear.
The ego has to die, only then are you reborn. Sannyas has to be both a death and a birth, dying to the past so that you can live in the present.
Sannyas is the beginning of a new day. It is a new birth. It is becoming discontinuous with your past.
Renounce the past as if it had never existed. Start from abc, fresh. Let it be a sunrise. Only then will you be able to grow. If you carry the whole burden of the past it is crippling, it is paralyzing, it is poisonous.
Jesus says, "Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of god."
There is a physical birth -- everyone has passed through it -- but it only gives you the body-mind complex. It only gives you an opportunity to be born spiritually. Unless the second birth happens one has not really lived. One was only an opportunity, just a seed, but the seed never became a sprout, never became a great tree. No spring happened for the seed, no flowering, no fragrance.
Sannyas is the process of rebirth. My whole effort here is not to give you a formal kind of religion, not to give you a church -- a dogma to cling to, but to give you a new being, a new humanity, a new consciousness.
One has to pass through two things. The first is a death, the death of the old, the death of the past, the death of the way you have lived up to now. And the second is a rebirth. Start afresh, as if you were born today. It is not only a metaphor, it is so: you are born today. Let this sink deep into your heart so that you can become discontinuous with the past. Then the night is over and the sun has risen on the horizon.
Sannyas is fulfilled only when you are a nothingness, because in that nothingness all becomes possible. In that nothingness the whole descends in you. Only nothingness can manage to have the whole inside it, only nothingness is enough to contain the whole. That's the meaning of surrender: being nobody.
It is hard in the beginning because we have lived according to the dictates of the ego for so long that it has become absolutely mechanical; we go on living robot-like to its dictates. Only in the beginning it is hard. Once you start getting out of the ego a little, once a few glimpses start happening to you then there is no problem; then you know the beauty and the benediction of being nobody. With just a little taste things become very simple and easy, then life becomes very smooth. Then to become ordinary is so blissful. Then not to be becomes such a rejoicing, and it brings so many flowers. The whole spring bursts forth within you.
But we have to create that space. It is difficult in the beginning but not impossible. And the function of the master is to help you when it is difficult and hard-going. Once it becomes smooth then there is no problem, no help is needed.
SANNYAS MEANS KNOWING THE TRUTH BEFORE DEATH KNOCKS AT YOUR DOOR
-- (to Surrenda) What is the meaning of your name?
-- For me, it's surrender.
-- Surrender? (a pause) Mm mm! Is it Dutch?
-- No. A little girl told me her name -- it was Surrenda. It was the most beautiful name I ever heard, so I gave it to myself.
-- Mm mm. That's good. So let it be Surrenda, Ma Surrenda. It does not mean surrender, but let it mean surrender! (laughter)
You must have heard wrongly. Surendra is the right word. Surendra means the goddess of goddesses. But there is no need to be worried about it. All meanings are arbitrary, so I accept your meaning. Let it be surrender.
And surrender is certainly beautiful. There is nothing more beautiful than surrender, because it is only in surrender that you will know who you are. Otherwise people go on believing in their egos. Surrender means surrendering the ego, the false self, the pseudo self. And when the pseudo is surrendered the real surfaces, then the real is discovered. To discover the real, the surrender is the essential process, the surrender of all that is false. And the ego is the most false thing in existence.
It is the most illusory thing. It exists only in our heads and nowhere else. It is not even a shadow, because a shadow needs some substance, a shadow has to be a shadow of something. The ego is not even a shadow. It is just a false idea propounded by the society. But one can believe in it. And if you believe in it, it becomes a reality -- for you, at least. You can destroy your whole life serving something which does not exist at all. And one comes to know it only when death knocks on the door. But then it is too late.
Sannyas means knowing the truth before death knocks on your door so that something can be done, so that you can be prepared, you can be ready for the eternal journey.
THE MOMENT EGO IS DROPPED ALL FIGHT DISAPPEARS
Sannyas means going beyond all fight. It is relaxation. It is a state of rest and peace. It cannot be achieved through fight, it can be achieved only by renouncing fight. It is a let-go.
There are two kinds of fighters in the world: a few fight with others, a few fight with themselves. Those who fight with others are thought to be warriors, the soldiers, the great generals. And those who fight with themselves are thought to be saints, mahatmas, ascetics.
I am creating a new kind of religious quality here, that of non-fighting. There is no need to push the river, relax with the whole, let it possess you. The moment you drop your ego all fight disappears. Fight only feeds the ego. It never leads you anywhere, it simply goes on puffing up your ego. There are worldly egos and there are other-worldly egos, but they are all egos.
My sannyasin has to be utterly egoless. Only then will he be able to feel the tremendous harmony of existence. One certainly becomes victorious, not through fight but surrender.
Meditate over this paradox because this paradox contains the most secret key.
EACH SANNYASIN HAS TO BECOME A BLESSING TO HIMSELF AND A BLESSING TO THE WHOLE EXISTENCE
Life can be either a rotten, stinking phenomenon or it can be an explosion of great fragrance. It is the same energy. What we do with our energy all depends on us. If we allow our energy to remain confined in the mind, moving in a vicious circle, going around in circles, then sooner or later we start feeling rotten, bored, meaningless. All poetry disappears, all beauty disappears, all joy disappears. One simply starts wondering why life exists at all, what the purpose of it all is. There is no answer, and the question becomes heavier every day. It becomes like a rock on your chest.
It is killing millions of people. Of course they go on living somehow, dragging, waiting for death to deliver them from life, hoping that death will come and they will finally be delivered. This is not because of life, it is because of us.
We could have lived in a totally different way, we could have changed the whole gestalt. We could have lived without the mind, we could have lived through meditation, through no-mind. And then great fragrance, great meaning, great joy happens on its own accord, because when you are a no-mind you are in deep harmony with existence. The conflict disappears. When you are a no-mind you are no more, hence there is nobody to fight. A deep let-go comes naturally -- and in that let-go is the meeting. Call it the meeting of man and god or part and whole, but the dewdrop disappears in the dewdrop. Then life is vast, has tremendous significance. Then life is a constant joy, a continuum of celebration.
And that's my message: each sannyasin has to become a celebration, a fragrance, a song, a beauty, a grace, a blessing to himself and also a blessing to the whole existence.
SEE THE POINT AND DROP IT!
One has to go beyond all countries and lands and races and churches and religions. We have to lose all our boundaries, only then can we know the unbounded. People are Christians and Hindus and Jews and Mohammedans and Indians and Germans and British. These people cannot know god, they are too attached to small boundaries. A sannyasin declares that 'I belong to no boundaries,' that 'I belong to the unbounded,' that 'The whole earth is mine, and not only this earth but all the earths that exist elsewhere too,' that 'This whole universe is mine,' that 'I am universal,' that 'I am not ready to be confined in any prison, howsoever beautiful it is, howsoever easy and comfortable it is. I am going to be in the infinite whatsoever the cost.'
One has to leave all small territories, small identities. One should not be British and should not be French and should not be Indian. To be a man is enough.
In fact when you move a little higher even that idea drops. One is neither man nor woman, one is simply consciousness. And that is the ultimate goal. When all identities have disappeared, when you don't have any boundaries, then you are free, liberated, then you are as vast as the universe itself. And only in that vastness is contentment, because in that vastness is freedom. Otherwise we are imprisoned. We have made so many prisons, that we are feeling suffocated. But still we go on clinging to the walls which are creating the suffocation because we have been told that those are not walls, we have been told they are very precious; one should be proud of being British or Japanese or Chinese, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. One should be proud!
We have been told to be proud of prisons. That nonsense has to be dropped -- and not slowly. See the point and drop it. Let the seeing itself be the dropping. That's what I call sannyas. It is a sudden understanding. A sudden seeing which immediately becomes your life.
GO BEYOND PARROTLIKE TENDENCIES
(to Sittich) You have a very beautiful name and yet a very dangerous one too. So I have to add something to it. This will be your name: Sw Veet Sittich. Veet means going beyond; Sittich means a parrot. I am not against parrots (laughter) ... parrots are beautiful people, but people should not be parrots! Because if people are parrots they become scholars, they become pundits, they become priests.
Parrots are perfectly good. They are neither scholars nor priests, nor pundits, they are simply people and good people. And they don't believe what they repeat.
The danger with man is that if he repeats something constantly he starts believing in it, he becomes auto-hypnotized by it. No parrot ever believes what he repeats. He knows it is a repetition, he knows it is just to satisfy the foolish owner. So he goes on doing all kinds of things, whatsoever is expected. He is simply obliging.
A parrot is neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan, but if you teach him Christianity he will repeat Christianity, if you teach him Hindu mantras he will repeat Hindu mantras. He is not serious about it. But man becomes very serious. If you go on repeating Christian formulas you will become a Christian. You will forget that the only way to be a Christian is to be a Christ, there is no other way. The only way to be a Buddhist is to be a Buddha, there is no other way. You cannot imitate, you cannot go on repeating, parrotlike. You can't just be a mechanical reproduction, you have to experience on your own.
So love parrots but don't be a parrot. Go beyond parrotlike tendencies. They are very deeply rooted in humanity. The whole humanity functions in a parrotlike way; we all function as conditioned beings. Somebody is conditioned as a Communist and somebody is conditioned as a Catholic. One person is conditioned by the Vatican, another is conditioned by the Kremlin -- but it is the same, it makes no difference.
A sannyasin has to become unconditioned and has to remain unconditioned. I don't want to re-condition you. My whole effort here is to simply uncondition you and then leave it to you. Then you can live out of that unconditioned state of your consciousness and your life will be a benediction.
My function here is to help you unlearn, simply unlearn, to negate all that has been forced upon you whatsoever it is -- Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Communist, whatsoever it is -- to unburden you. And then I don't want to teach you anything, I want you to live in that state of unconditioned consciousness. To function out of that state is such an ecstatic experience, so beautiful, so tremendously beautiful and so divine, one cannot imagine it. To know, one has to experience it.
GOD IS SO VAST HE CANNOT BE REDUCED INTO AN IDEOLOGY
There are many gods -- Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. There are as many gods as there are religions, sects and subjects, and there are three thousand ideologies about god in the world, so there are three thousand concepts about god. All are false, because god is so vast that you cannot reduce him to an ideology. God is so infinite that you cannot make an image of him. God is so mysterious that no word, no concept, no theory, is adequate enough to explain it.
Everything that man has done to explain god has been destructive. Rather than making the world more religious, it has made the world less religious, because all those ideas are so inadequate that they can only satisfy fools.
If you have a little intelligence then no religion can satisfy you -- just a little intelligence, not much! Then no religion can satisfy you. All religions have flaws, and such stupidities have been perpetuated.
For example, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ... now that is a very essential thing. If you are to be a Christian you have to believe in it. If you don't believe in it you are not a true Christian. So there is only one way: if you want to be a true Christian you have to say goodbye to all intelligence! You have to be simply stupid, only then can you be a good Christian. And the same is true about all religions -- such foolish ideas. But that is bound to happen.
The real mystics have remained utterly silent about god. Buddha, whenever he was asked, smiled but never answered. He would not say yes, he would not say no, he would simply smile. it would be a very knowing smile, a very inviting smile, very seductive -- but he would smile. He would ask you to be with him, to sit in silence with him, to share in his meditations, and maybe some day you would find the answer. But he had not given the answer himself. To me he seems to be one of the most honest persons who has ever walked on the earth, because nothing can be said about god, only silence... because the true god is known only in silence.
So drop all ideas of god and become more and more silent, and one day it is bound to happen: when the silence is total he comes so silently, so invisibly, that you are in for a great surprise. You don't hear his footsteps. One moment he was not there, the next moment he is there and you are overflowing with him. And you are no more the same person, and neither is the world the same.
FROM MIND TO NO-MIND
The god of meditation is the only true god. All other gods are inventions -- inventions of crafty priests, inventions of greedy minds, inventions out of fear. The only true god, which is not an invention, is experienced through meditation, because meditation requires you first to drop all thoughts; thoughts about god are also included in it.
When all thoughts and all desires have been dropped, then whatsoever you have come to know is not part of your mind because we have put the mind aside from the very beginning. Now there is nobody to create anything. Now you will know that which is. Otherwise the mind always goes on projecting.
Meditation means functioning from a state of no-mind. And sannyas is the journey from mind to no-mind.
THE VERY GOING IS A TRANSFORMATION
God is not for the cowards, although cowardly people tend to be religious because they are so afraid; they think that god is a good shelter, a good investment. But god is not a shelter and not an investment either. God is risk, god is danger, god is adventure. Hence the real god is not to be found in the churches and the temples and the mosques. You can find the real god only when you drop all that is familiar and known, all that gives you the feeling of security and safety, and you go into the uncharted sea.
The very going is a transformation. The very going means trust. Leaving all securities, all safeties, is real sannyas. To live in insecurity is to really live -- others only die.
RELIGIOUSNESS IS THE GREATEST ADVENTURE
Sannyas means courage more than anything else, because it is a declaration of your individuality, a declaration of freedom, a declaration that you will not be any more part of the mob madness, the mob psychology. It is a declaration that you are becoming universal; you will not belong to any country, to any church, to any race, to any religion. You will be religious but you will not be Mohammedan, Hindu or Christian. You will love Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed because you will be religious, but you will not belong to any dogma or creed and you will not belong to any state, any nation, because all these boundaries are false, all these divisions are ugly. The earth is one, and sannyas is a declaration of the oneness of humanity.
It certainly needs courage. It also needs courage because it is getting rid of tradition, of the past, of history. It is trying to live in the present according to your own light, not being dominated by the dead, not being dominated by history. To be free of history is such a tremendous joy. But it is a risk also, because then you are left alone, then you don't have any guidelines, any maps to follow. But that's the beauty of it too: when you don't have any guidelines your own consciousness rises to take the challenge. When you don't have the map you start exploring on your own. Then life becomes an adventure.
And religiousness is the greatest adventure, the adventure for god.
ONLY IN DANGER ALL THE RUBBISH DROPS
Only the courageous ones can be initiated into the inner journey, because it is moving from the known into the unknown. Only the courageous ones have been called. Yes, sometimes a few cowards also come with the courageous ones (laughter) ... but they escape. They can't stay here -- it is dangerous.
So remember it: don't escape! (laughter) But I trust Germans, so I hope you will fulfill your name.
The only way to live life truly is to live dangerously, because only in danger all that is rubbish drops and all that is intrinsic and essential grows, because danger becomes a challenge. And it is only in great, challenging situations that your potential becomes actual. If there is no challenge your potential remains asleep.
We are providing every kind of challenge here. The fortunate ones are those who don't miss those challenges; the unfortunate ones are those who go on missing them. So accept all the challenges. Even if you are trembling within, in spite of all the trembling, accept the challenge. And the challenge will give you a new kind of being. It will give you a spine of steel, it will make you a man of steel.
And every sannyasin has to be a man of steel. I don't mean that every sannyasin has to be Joseph Stalin! -- Stalin means man of steel.
EACH MOMENT DIE TO THE PAST
Adventurousness is one of the most essential qualities for those who want to live life in its totality. And to live one's life in totality is to be religious, to live it whole is to be holy.
Life is a great adventure, but people are so afraid that they cling to the familiar, to the known, to the well-defined, to the logical. They never go beyond the boundary of the mind. If you live in the mind you are living in a grave. If you go beyond the mind you are really born, you have come out of the grave.
One can live each moment with such intensity, with such adventure, that each moment becomes a great gift of god because it brings so much joy, so much ecstasy. But one has to be ready to go on dropping the past. One should not allow the past to be accumulated. That becomes a prison wall around you.
Each moment die to the past and remain fresh, and your life will be a great adventure. And it is only for the adventurous people to know what truth is. The non-adventurous live in comfortable lies.
Unless you are a rebel you will not attain to fragrance. It is only through rebelling against all the rotten traditions that one becomes fragrant. Tradition stinks, and if you remain part of it you continually stink.
The past is dead, it is a corpse, and to live clinging to the past is disgusting. But that's what millions of people are doing. We have to get rid of the past. You are, only when you are free of the past; for the first time you are, for the first time you are an authentic individual. And that authenticity brings fragrance. Your heart opens up into a beautiful flower, you become a lotus.
THE MIND HAS TO CEASE FOR THE TRUTH TO BE
Knowledge that is borrowed from others is untrue, knowledge that is gathered from scriptures is untrue. It may have come from a very original source, from a Jesus, from a A Lao Tzu, from a Zarathustra -- it does not matter, because truth is untransferable. There is no way to express it. So whatsoever information you gather from scriptures, and from others is all rubbish. One has to unlearn it. Slowly slowly one has to unburden oneself.
When your being is totally unburdened, when your slate is completely clean, when there is no writing on you, then suddenly an invisible writing starts appearing. Your own being becomes your scripture. Then for the first time you come across the Bible, the book of the books, then for the first time you read the Vedas, never before that. This can happen only through meditation; not by studies, not by logical, intellectual understanding, but by becoming more and more thoughtless, alert, silent. You can only be on the receiving end inside.
But if you are full of knowledge it is difficult: your knowledge will hinder it. It won't allow it to happen. Your mind will go on continuously fabricating, manufacturing. The mind has to cease, completely cease for the truth to be. One has to become again ignorant, innocent, childlike. Then something immensely beautiful starts growing in you. Call it wisdom, call it true knowledge, call it realization or whatsoever you will, but remember one thing: true knowledge has to happen within you; it is always yours, it is never borrowed, it cannot be learned from others.
You have to dig deep within yourself -- it is already there.
THE MOMENT WE ARE IN STEP WITH LIFE, LIFE IS GOD
Life is something tremendously beautiful but we are unaware of it, we are blind to it. It is glory, but we are not sensitive enough to feel it.
Life is perfect but our sensitivity is almost nil; hence the whole problem is how to create more sensitivity, how to become more alive, how to be more open, vulnerable, so that wee can feel the life that surrounds us. The moment we are in step with life, life is god, and there is no other god.
And life knows no death, no birth. It is eternal, and we are part of that eternity. But we have gathered much rust around our mirrorlike being so that it reflects nothing. Our mind is like a layer of dust on our consciousness; hence nothing is reflected and we cannot see that which is. We only see the dust; we only see our thoughts, our desires, our memories, our dreams -- and they are not the reality. Unless all this dust is cleaned away we will not be able to reflect that which is.
The whole process of sannyas is that of cleansing, that of dropping all rust, all dust. As one becomes more and more silent, peaceful, alert, sensitive, life becomes more glorious, more beautiful, more blissful. It is a great gift. But we are wasting time and opportunity, we are not approaching that which has been given to us. We don't deserve it.
THE HEART LEADS YOU SLOWLY SLOWLY TOWARDS THE OTHER SHORE
The heart is always pure; there is no way to make it impure.
And the head is always impure; there is no way to make it pure.
And these are the alternative ways to live: one either can live in the head or one can live in the heart. If you live in the head you may be successful in life, you may become very rich, powerful socially, politically, you may become very respectable, world-famous. But deep down you will be all tears and nothing else because you will see the futility of all that you have attained; you have wasted such a precious life for rubbish. Death takes everything away.
This is the criterion: anything that can be taken away by death is not worth bothering about much. Anything that cannot be taken away by death -- that is something to create, to discover. One can sacrifice everything for it, it is worth sacrificing for.
The heart cannot give you any outward success but it can give you a deep inner peace, a great joy, a blissfulness, a blessedness, a benediction, and it can slowly slowly lead you towards the other shore, towards god.
When you are absolutely pure the ego disappears. You are, and yet you are not. In one sense you are not, not as you have always been; in another sense you are and for the first time you are. But you are no more an ego, confined in the body-mind complex.
You are infinite.
You are as vast as god.
You are one with god. Only the door of the heart can become the door of god's temple.
Move from the head to the heart.
WHEN YOU ARE NOT GOD IS
It is only in the experience of blissfulness that one feels one is no longer human, one is divine. The moment your heart is dancing with bliss you are like god.
In misery you are far away from god. Nothing keeps people from god as much as misery does, because misery closes you, misery makes you more and more self-centered, self-conscious. And to be self-conscious is not to be conscious, those two things are totally different. When one is conscious there is no self; when one is self-conscious there is no consciousness. When one is self-centered one cannot look towards the vast existence that surrounds one. One lives an encapsulated life, without windows and without doors; one is hiding in a black hole. How can one connect, commune with god?
It is only when you are singing and dancing, when there is laughter and joy and celebration, that from your black hole you come out under the sky full of stars. Only in moments of bliss you do forget that you are. And those are the most important moments, when you forget that you are, because when you are not, god is.
A CONSCIOUS EFFORT TO REACH THE TARGET
We have to create a space within ourselves, a pure space which contains nothing. We are too full of rubbish. All this rubbish has to be removed, thrown out. We have to empty ourselves totally. Once you are utterly empty you are in for a great surprise. The moment the emptiness is perfect, the gestalt changes; it is no more emptiness. You are full of something which you had never known, never tasted, before. You are full of god.
So on the one hand you become empty of your mind, your ego, memories thoughts, desires, and on the other hand you become full of god. And to be full of god is to be full of bliss, to be full of god is to be full of life. To be full of god is to be full of eternity.
That's the ultimate goal that everybody is seeking, knowingly or unknowingly. Sannyas is a conscious effort to reach the target. It is within your reach -- just a little effort is needed.
WE CAN RECEIVE GOD'S GIFT ONLY WHEN UTTERLY EMPTY
All that is great is always a gift of god. It is never our achievement, in fact it happens only when we are utterly absent. Love happens when you are absent, truth happens when you are absent, bliss happens when you are absent. When you are too full of yourself nothing happens. Then gifts go on coming but you are not ready to receive them. The ego is very non-receptive. We can receive god's gifts only when we are utterly empty; the emptier you are the better.
The whole process of sannyas is nothing but emptying you of yourself. Then gifts go on coming. So much happens, and without any effort, that it seems unbelievable, incredible. One becomes aware for the first time how generous existence is. God is not miserly. He gives, and he gives so much. He is willing to give everything, but we are not ready to receive. We don't have any space to receive his gifts.
So start emptying yourself and you will be moving on the right way.
CONSECRATED TO THE MIRACULOUS
There is a flowering inside. Roses bloom inside, and roses which are imperishable, roses which are not gross, which are made of grace. Gravitation has no effect on them. They come from the beyond, they descend on you, they shower on you. But one has to be receptive; one has to become an absolute nonentity, a nobody, a nothingness. Only in that nothingness do those roses bloom. One becomes a garden, one becomes a paradise. The word 'paradise' means a walled garden.
It is within our capacity. If we miss it then we are responsible, nobody else. Missing it simply means that we kept ourselves engaged in futile things, we wasted our energies in trivia.
A sannyasin has to be very discriminating, very alert, so that no energy is wasted. And you will be surprised: almost ninety per cent of our energy is a sheer wastage; if you watch your life you will be able to see that there is much which is non-essential, which can be dropped. You go on doing it out of habit; otherwise there is no reason for it.
The essential is very small. And when you do only the essential and the non-essential is dropped you accumulate great energy, you become a reservoir of energy. Out of that energy roses bloom.
So two things have to be remembered: one has to become a nobody, utterly empty of the ego, and then one has to accumulate one's energy so that one's emptiness becomes a lake of energy. Then the impossible becomes possible. Then all beauty is yours, and all grace and all truth and all freedom.
Consecrated to god is exactly the definition of sannyas. One starts living not for the ego but for the whole, one starts living as a vehicle of god, one becomes just like a hollow bamboo so that god can transform one into a flute. One empties oneself of oneself.
That's all that needs to be done: one has to empty oneself of oneself. And when one is empty something mysterious starts happening, unexplainable. Something from the beyond starts descending in you, some unknown force starts singing through you, dancing through you.
That unknown force is god. God is not a person; it is only a name for all that is mysterious, for all that is beyond comprehension, for all that intellect is incapable of understanding. And to be consecrated to the miraculous, to the mysterious, is the only way to live a beautiful, graceful life. Otherwise people are only dragging themselves. Their life is not a dance, it cannot be.
Unless god dances in you there is no possibility of any dance. Unless god rejoices in you there is no possibility of rejoicing.
Remove yourself so that you don't come in between you and god. Put the ego, the very idea of I, aside and be utterly empty, receptive. And the moment your emptiness is total, the whole starts showering millions of joys, millions of flowers upon you. The splendor is infinite.
On our path nothing else is to be done, only one thing -- that we should be nothings, nobodies, nonentities.
THE SANNYASIN HAS TO DROP THE COIN ITSELF SO THAT BOTH SIDES ARE DROPPED
There are two things a sannyasin has to go beyond; one is name, the other is fame. They are two sides of the same coin; the name of the coin is the ego. It hankers for name and fame. And the more you feed it, the more hungry it is. Its thirst is unquenchable. It is like throwing butter on the fire to put it out: your butter is not going to put the fire out, it will help it; it will become fuel for it, food for it.
But millions of people live for name and fame. And hiding behind these two is the ego which goes on asking for more and more.
A sannyasin has to drop both. He has to drop the coin itself so both sides of it are dropped. A sannyasin has to live anonymously. He is nobody, he is just a pure nothingness. And in that nothingness miracles happen; even the impossible becomes possible. In that nothingness you become the space which is needed for god to descend in you.
The moment you have achieved this inner nothingness you are ready to be the host to the ultimate guest.
SANNYAS IS FULFILLED WHEN EGO DISAPPEARS
Paula has two meanings; one comes from Latin, the other comes from the Greek. The Latin meaning is 'small', and the Greek meaning is 'rest'. Both are beautiful.
One has to be so small that slowly slowly one disappears, one is no more, one becomes a pure nothingness, a nobody. Sannyas is fulfilled when the ego disappears. The ego is always trying to be big. It is always going on trips, its whole effort is to be big somehow. If it cannot be big, at least it can pretend to be big, at least it can appear to be big.
It is like a balloon which wants to go on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and there is nothing in it, just hot air. A small pinprick is enough to finish it: all its greatness disappears in a single moment. A single moment of understanding is enough to kill the whole ego. All its games and trips disappear like dreams, as if they have never been there; they don't leave any trace behind.
And the other meaning, rest, is also tremendously significant. Whenever the ego dies, there is rest. In nothingness rest grows. Rest means to be at ease with oneself and to be at ease with the universe. Rest means to be in a state of total relaxation, with no tension, no strain, no anxiety, no anguish.
Your name defines the whole of sannyas. Begin by becoming smaller and smaller and smaller so that one day nothing is left, only nothing is left. Then the second thing starts growing of its own accord: a great harmony is felt. Suddenly you are in tune with the whole. That is rest. All restlessness disappears with the ego, it dies with the ego -- it is a by-product of the ego.
DROP THE EGO AND ITS MISERIES - IT IS A PARASITE
Bliss is beauty; misery is ugliness. It not only cripples your body, it cripples your very soul. It paralyzes, it poisons, it is very destructive. But people cling to misery because it gives one thing which bliss can never give. That thing is the ego.
Ego thrives on misery. Misery is food for the ego, nourishment. In bliss ego dies, disappears, melts, is no more found. And to be without ego is beauty. To have no ego, just to be a nobody is the ultimate beauty. Think of it, contemplate on it -- just to be a nobody. And as the ego goes all the fuss that it creates disappears, and all that was unnecessary but which appeared very necessary because of the ego is no more needed. Life becomes the essential, not the accidental; life becomes intrinsic; it consists of only that which is absolutely necessary.
That's what I call sannyas. It is not renunciation of the world, it is renunciation of misery. It is rejoicing. It means becoming more and more blissful, more and more dance-full, more and more song-full. Sannyas means making your life a celebration. For that, space is needed.
If you want to dance you will have to remove the furniture. And our beings are so full of furniture, rotten furniture of no use at all, bur we just go on keeping it in case we need it sometimes. It leaves no space to dance. In fact it leaves no space for us to enter; our inner being becomes so full of rubbish that we have to live outside. We become so full of ego that we can't enter in. We are even debarred from our own being. Sannyas means seeing clearly that this is being stupid.
In my vision the problem is not of making sinners saints, the problem is of making stupid people a little more intelligent. So it is not a question of sinners versus saints, it is a question of stupidity versus intelligence. That's a great change that I want to bring into the world of religion.
Be more intelligent and look into things and whatsoever seems to be creating misery, drop it -- and don't drop it slowly. The moment you see that it is creating misery, in a single blow cut it off. Even if it hurts -- it may hurt -- so what? It hurts because it has been there for so long. It has become a part of you and now you are cutting it off: it hurts. It is like taking pus out of a wound, it hurts. But that's the only way for the wound to heal: the pus has to be taken out. The ego is the pus and the ego has made us wounds. Rather than being blissful beings, rather than being flowers, it has reduced us to wounds, to crippled, ill people, pathological people.
Drop the ego and drop the miseries on which it lives -- it is a parasite. And start moving more and more into bliss. In the beginning you will feel it is a little difficult. It is just as when one starts dancing; in the beginning it is a little awkward. One needs to learn the art, and then grace comes. Then you can dance as if you don't have any body.
And in fact you don't have any body, any mind. You are neither the body nor the mind but a pure consciousness. That is experienced only when you become a dance, a celebration.
ONLY THAT WHICH IS OF THE SPIRIT IS ABIDING
Beauty is of the outer and grace is of the inner; hence the grace is the real beauty. What we call beauty is superficial. And unless a man is full of grace his beauty is only skin-deep, or maybe not even that. Scratch him a little and his ugliness comes out. He is just painted on the outside, but inside he is boiling with all kinds of scorpions and snakes and monkeys and dogs and cats. Inside he is still in the jungle. There is no peace, no silence, no joy, no grace.
Grace means to feel in harmony with existence, to be in tune with existence. When you feel the tuning ego disappears. Ego is ugly. When there is no ego and you are one with the whole there is grace, and so much that it starts overflowing you.
If there is inner grace, even an ugly body looks beautiful. And if there is no grace inside, even a beautiful body does not look beautiful.
Grace is of the spirit, and only that which is of the spirit is abiding. Only that which is of the spirit is real treasure. It cannot be taken away, it cannot be destroyed. Fire cannot burn it; even death cannot destroy it.
A sannyasin has to be full of grace. I am not against physical beauty; it is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It is beautiful to have a beautiful form but it is nothing compared to the inner beauty, to having a beautiful being. And one can have both, there is no conflict. In fact it is easier to have both together than to have one. Whenever the inner happens, the outer follows, but not vice versa: the outer may be there, the inner is not necessarily going to follow. The inner has to be created through great effort, through meditation, through awareness, through love.
BLESSED ARE THE IGNORANT
Jesus says: Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of god. That's what is meant by innocence. Unlearn the ways of the world, unlearn cleverness, cunningness, diplomacy, politics. Unlearn so that you can be clean, empty, silent, again, so that you can function from a state of not-knowing. That is the greatest thing in life: to function from a state of not-knowing. Then one is living moment to moment; one is not living through the past, through memories, through knowledge. One is encountering reality like a mirror -- reflecting it and acting out of that reflection.
That is the way of sannyas. It means responsibility, not in the moralistic sense but in the sense that one becomes more and more responsive. One does not react, one responds.
Reaction is via the past, through the memory. The mind is there and you are never functioning directly, you are always using mind as a mediator. When the mind is put aside and you function directly, immediately, and there is no mediator, that is response. And to be responsible is to be religious. But only an innocent person can be responsible, only children can be responsible.
Beware of accumulating knowledge. And whenever you see that something has become accumulated, immediately drop it. It is poison -- don't carry it. Keep yourself clean and empty. Keep yourself ignorant and function out of that ignorance. And you will be surprised, because "Blessed are the ignorant for theirs is the kingdom of god."
THE EXPERIENCE OF WONDER AND AWE
Wisdom to me is equivalent to innocence. Not equivalent to knowledge. Wisdom is anti-knowledge; knowledge is anti-innocence. The knowledgeable person becomes less and less innocent. His ego becomes more puffed up. He starts thinking that 'I know' -- and that is the subtlest ego. The innocent person knows that he knows not. And that is the beginning of wisdom: you again become a child.
Drop knowledge, and wisdom is yours. But that price has to be paid; one can't have both. It is better to be a fool and wise than to be very clever and knowledgeable.
Saint Francis used to call himself the fool of god. He is right. By 'fool' he means wise, unknowledgeable.
Sannyas begins in unlearning and ends in total nothingness. When you know nothing you are nothing. When you know nothing the ego evaporates. When you know nothing then the whole existence is full of wonder and awe. The experience of wonder and awe is the fundamental religious experience. That is truly the encounter with god.
TO GROW BEYOND LUST INTO LOVE
To love needs great strength, not only physical but spiritual too. Weaklings cannot love. They can lust but they cannot love. Love means sacrifice and the first requirement of love is the dropping of the ego. And that is the most difficult thing in life: to become a nobody, to be just a nothingness.
Unless one is ready to be a nobody, a nothingness, love cannot grow. Love needs space, and if ego is filling you, if you are too full of yourself, there is no space for love to grow. We have to uproot the ego totally; hence strength is needed.
But once you put all your energies in a concentrated way it becomes possible. It is within our capacity to grow beyond lust into love.
Lust is something biological; love is spiritual. Lust means using the other as a means; love means that the other has to be respected as an end unto himself, herself. Lust exploits; love gives and gives unconditionally, it gives without any idea of return. But the beauty and the miracle is that the more you give, the more you get. The more you give without any motivation, the more you become full of love.
Suddenly one becomes aware of an inexhaustible source within oneself. You can go on sharing, you can give your love to the whole universe, still you will not be empty. Just be empty of the ego and you will never be empty of love. You can go on giving as much as you want, you can go on overflowing. That's why Jesus says god is love. He makes god and love synonymous. It is true: if you have known love you have known god. If you have not known love then all that you think about god is just nonsense, it has no meaning, no significance. You are simply using words with no content in them.
But if you love, then for the first time 'god' becomes a meaningful word of tremendous import, pregnant with the ultimate significance of life.
THROUGH FIRE THE GOLD BECOMES PURE
It is love that makes one noble -- not birth, but love. Nobody is born noble -- the whole idea of aristocracy is sheer nonsense -- but one can become noble. One has to be very alert, sensitive, creative, only then can one be noble.
It is easy to paint a picture, to create a painting, it is easy to sculpt a statue. The hardest thing to create is your own self, your own being. Even to sculpt out of granite is not that difficult. The greatest problem arises when you start cutting chunks of your being which had been there for many many lives. You have believed in them as if they are part of you; they have almost become your second nature.
One's real being is lost in many unreal things; for example, the ego is one of the greatest problems. It is unreal, but it is covering our reality. It has to be dropped -- and it is the hardest task, very painful, because we have always thought 'This is what I am'. It feels like death.
We are identified with the ego, and with the ego there are many things: anger and hatred and jealousy and possessiveness and greed -- the whole train. The ego functions like an engine and there are many many compartments following it. Once the ego dies the whole train stops.
The ego is the energy of all that is nonsense in us, of all that is stupid in us, of all that stinks in us. And all this has to be cut out.
It is not like dropping your clothes, it is like peeling your skin, it is painful. Hence very few people grow, because very few people are ready to go through pain. But pain is the only way to be born. One has to accept the challenge. It is through the fire that the gold becomes pure and it is through pain that one becomes integrated.
And only when all that is wrong in us has been dropped is nobility born. One really becomes a noble soul. Then one is an aristocrat -- not by birth but through love.
NO VIRTUE IS GREATER THAN THE VIRTUE OF BEING COURAGEOUS
Man can enter into the infinite only if he has courage. Nothing else is more important. No virtue is greater than the virtue of being courageous. If one is not courageous one may be very virtuous, very religious, one may perform all the rituals but one will remain unbridged with god, because all that one will be doing is out of fear. It will not be an exploration, an enquiry into the unknown, it will simply be an effort to make one's life safe and secure. It will be out of cowardliness -- and god is not for cowards. Although religion and the so-called religious people are rooted in fear -- hence they are called god-fearing people -- that is not the true definition of a religions man.
A truly religious man is not god-fearing but god-loving -- and fear and love are poles apart. When there is fear love is impossible. If you love somebody how can you be afraid? Fear exists only when love is absent. Love dispels all fear.
Hence I say that courage is the greatest virtue because it makes you capable of loving the unknown, it helps you to go into the enquiry of the uncharted, without any maps. That very gesture on your part creates integrity. It is a great challenge to accept. To accept it means to be reborn. It is a death, a death of the old pattern, the old person, and the birth of a new way of life.
That's what sannyas is all about: it is rooted in courage. And I teach love for god, love for truth, not fear of god. That is an ugly thing.
ECSTASY -- THE LAST BUS STOP
Love is the only home. Without love a man is homeless. Without love a man is simply driftwood, with no direction, with no sense of meaning in life, with no shelter anywhere. Without love a man remains accidental. He has no intrinsic value. That's why millions of people continuously feel life is utterly empty. Not that life is empty, life is overflowing with joy, but we are not bridged with life. Our hearts are not dancing in tune with existence.
To dance in tune with existence is what I call love. If you are in tune with one person, that is love in a very small way. If you are in tune with many people, that is a little bigger; it becomes friendship. If you are in love with the whole existence, that becomes immensely vast; it is prayer. But the basic note is the same: to be in tune with the other.
And remember, the goal is to be in tune with the whole. So be so much in tune that you disappear; only the harmony remains, only the symphony remains. That symphony is ecstasy. Not ecstasy in the Greek sense...
(turning to his right) What do you mean by 'ecstasy', Mukta? I have heard they say 'bus stop'...?
-- I don't know (she replies in laughter)... I've forgotten!
-- Somebody has informed me that in Greece a bus stop is called 'ecstasis'. (laughter) And in a sense it is a bus stop (more laughter) ... because the is nowhere to go. It is the terminus, the last bus stop!
LIFE IS A MYSTERY TO BE LIVED, NOT A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED
(to Ulrich) This is your new name: Swami Kavyo. Kavyo means poetry. I hope you are not Italian?
-- No.
-- That's very good... because I have heard that in Italian 'kavyo' means guinea pig. (much laughter) Is it true, Lalita? (the translator sitting in the front row.)
-- Yes!
-- That's good. So there is no problem about it. Life should be looked at not as prose but as poetry. That's the religious approach, the approach of the mystic. He looks, not with questions in his eyes, he looks with wonder, he looks with awe. He does not think about existence, he feels it. He opens his heart, rather than using his head he throws the doors and windows of his heart open, he allows the sun and the wind and the rain to come in. That's what I mean by poetry.
The mystic is a poet in the ultimate sense. He may not write poetry, that is irrelevant, but he lives in poetry, he is poetry. Where else can you find more poetry than in a Jesus or a Buddha or a A Lao Tzu. Although none of them has written poetry, they lived poetry.
My sannyasins have to become living poetry. Forget all about your head. Become headless and heart-full. There are no problems in life; all problems are fabrications of the mind. Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
Live it, enjoy it, sing with it, dance with it, sway with it! Don't try to be philosophical, be poetic, and all joy will be yours. And you will be able to attain the ultimate treasure, the kingdom of god. It is available only to the poets.
MEDITATION IS THE MOTHER OF ALL INTELLIGENCE
Meditation is the greatest courage in life because it is going into your aloneness, where nobody can accompany you, where you have to go alone. Not only can nobody accompany you there, even your body will not be there, even your mind will not be there. Your whole identity, your ego, will be absent. All these things will have to be left behind, only then can you go in.
Going in is going through a great identity crisis. That's why very few people try it. It is going through a death. But those who are courageous enough to go through that death fearlessly, joyously, are reborn, are resurrected. They attain to a totally new kind of life. They go beyond time, they become part of eternity. They are no more small, tiny, encaged, imprisoned. They are vast, as vast as god. And only by being vast do you know what god is.
When you can feel stars moving within you, then only do you know your reality. And it is tremendously beautiful. It is so perfect that nobody can imagine anything more perfect than this. No improvement is possible. Then one rejoices, one celebrates. Then life is a sheer dance, a sharing of joy. But first one has to have the courage to die in meditation and be born through meditation.
Meditation is the mother of all intelligence. It is out of meditation that brightness happens. One becomes sharp like a sword. One becomes penetrating like an arrow. One becomes transparent, because meditation means the death of the mind.
Mind is a kind of fog, and when the fog disappears your inner shining, your inner light, your inner moon, shines in its total beauty and brightness.
THE DEATH OF DARKNESS AND THE BIRTH OF LIGHT
God is light. The experience of god is the experience of an inner explosion of light; all darkness simply disappears. The mystics down the ages have been saying about it that it is as if suddenly thousands of suns have arisen in the inner world. The light is so much, so dazzling, that it is almost unbearable in the beginning. Slowly slowly one gets accustomed to it. And as you get accustomed to it, you are not more; only the light remains. When the darkness has gone you are also gone. You are part of darkness; the ego is nothing but condensed darkness.
To experience god is to experience at the same time the death of the ego. It is a death and a resurrection: the death of darkness and the birth of light.
ONLY THROUGH THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SEED DOES THE TREE APPEAR
God is unbounded, infinite, vast. God is oceanic and we are like dewdrops. We have to learn the art of disappearing into the ocean. It needs guts, because to disappear into the ocean means to die as a dewdrop. Because unless one dies as a dewdrop one cannot be born as the ocean. When the seed dies as a seed a great tree is born. The seed disappears; only through its disappearance does the tree appear.
The ego has to die, only then are you reborn. Sannyas has to be both a death and a birth, dying to the past so that you can live in the present.
THE BEGINNING OF A NEW DAY
Sannyas is the beginning of a new day. It is a new birth. It is becoming discontinuous with your past.
Renounce the past as if it had never existed. Start from abc, fresh. Let it be a sunrise. Only then will you be able to grow. If you carry the whole burden of the past it is crippling, it is paralyzing, it is poisonous.
THE NIGHT IS OVER AND THE SUN HAS RISEN ON THE HORIZON
Jesus says, "Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of god."
There is a physical birth -- everyone has passed through it -- but it only gives you the body-mind complex. It only gives you an opportunity to be born spiritually. Unless the second birth happens one has not really lived. One was only an opportunity, just a seed, but the seed never became a sprout, never became a great tree. No spring happened for the seed, no flowering, no fragrance.
Sannyas is the process of rebirth. My whole effort here is not to give you a formal kind of religion, not to give you a church -- a dogma to cling to, but to give you a new being, a new humanity, a new consciousness.
One has to pass through two things. The first is a death, the death of the old, the death of the past, the death of the way you have lived up to now. And the second is a rebirth. Start afresh, as if you were born today. It is not only a metaphor, it is so: you are born today. Let this sink deep into your heart so that you can become discontinuous with the past. Then the night is over and the sun has risen on the horizon.
Osho's Commentary