[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]
[Last night Osho talked about prayer as being a wordless gratitude. Tonight he explained how this was misunderstood and formalised prayers used instead.]
Whenever somebody talked about his prayerfulness he had to use words. When he tried to explain his interior feeling of what prayer was he had to use words like gratitude, thankfulness, surrender, submissiveness, let-go -- and the people who heard these words were bound to misunderstand them. They started manufacturing prayers. Beautiful poetry happened through it but it was not prayer.
Prayer is nothing but silence, pure silence. You are not saying anything to anybody; the other is absolutely absent. There is no content in your consciousness, not even a small ripple in the lake of consciousness; all is still and silent. Nothing is said; but the heart, the beat of the heart, the flow of the blood, the very grace that surrounds that silence and a tremendous feeling to bow down to the whole existence for all that it has done for us, is prayer.
Hence I don't teach prayer here. I only teach silence, because prayer is a necessary outcome of silence. It is a flowering of silence. You work to create silence and when your work is complete prayer arrives.
It is just like spring comes and the trees are full of flowers. Create silence and you have created the spring; now the flowers are not far away, they are bound to come. It is part of the ultimate law -- Ais dhammo sanantano -- these are Buddha's words. This is the law, the ultimate law, that you create silence and you will be blessed by prayer.
[Prayer can only be known in silence -- the same goes for truth, Osho went on to say.]
Man cannot think anything about god and whatsoever one thinks about god is bound to be wrong. Thinking as such is irrelevant. God cannot be reduced to an object of thought because god is not a thing, god is not an object. And god is not anything known or knowable; hence it is beyond the comprehension of the mind. To know it you have to go beyond mind. to what Dionysius calls "agnosia"; you have to come to a state of not-knowing. That's what I call silence. When there are no thoughts moving in your head there is silence.
Thoughts are like ripples, waves. They keep your mind continuously wavering. And when the mind is wavering it cannot reflect the moon. It is like a lake full of waves the moon is there but the lake is incapable of reflecting it. Once the wave is completely silent, as if it has become a mirror, the moon is reflected in all its glory. In fact the moon reflected in the lake is far more beautiful than the real moon because the lake adds something to it, beauty, to its splendour.
And the same is true about truth. When you are absolutely silent and the truth is reflected in you it gains something. Truth becomes richer when it is reflected in the consciousness of a Bud & a. When Jesus looks at truth, truth has far more splendour. It is not only that Jesus is liberated by truth; truth is also liberated by Jesus. It is not only that Buddhas are grateful to truth; truth is also grateful to Buddhas.
In the East it is a wellknown fact that whenever a single person becomes enlightened the whole universe celebrates the occasion. It has to be so, the universe should celebrate it because with a single man becoming enlightened the whole universe takes a quantum leap towards the unknown.
Each Buddha has been making the diamond of truth more and more beautiful. But the whole art is being in silence, in total silence. So that is going to be your work on yourself: sitting silently, doing nothing, not even meditating. Sitting silently doing nothing spring comes and the grass grows by itself.
Enlightenment comes just like grass growing -- by itself! No effort from your side is needed. All that is needed is a complete withdrawal of all efforts, as if you are not -- that's what is meant by silence.
Sannyas is a suicide, effacing yourself completely, totally, categorically, not leaving even a small trace behind. The moment you are completely gone truth arrives, and arrives with such splendour and beauty, with such bliss and benediction, with such ecstasy, that it is impossible to imagine it.
Then he talked of pleasure and of bliss, of how the former is what people know through relationships with others, while bliss needs the climate of aloneness.
People are acquainted only with pleasure. Pleasure happens in relationship. The other is needed, the other is an absolute necessity, without the other pleasure cannot happen. Hence there is a dependence in pleasure, and because of dependence there is conflict. Nobody likes to depend on anybody. Freedom is our deepest desire, nothing is deeper than that, but for each pleasure we have to lose some freedom.
That's why couples are continuously fighting, arguing, nagging, are continuously at each other's necks, for such stupid and trivial things that if you ask them, 'Why are you fighting?' even they feel embarrassed about telling you the cause of the fight. The cause may not be anything at all; in fact the cause is just an excuse. All lovers fight for the simple reason that everybody resists the loss of freedom. But pleasure depends on the other. The other can withhold it, so you have to depend on him.
Bliss happens in solitude, it is not a question of relationship at all. It happens when you are absolutely alone, rejoicing in your aloneness. And that's the whole art of sannyas: how to rejoice in your aloneness.
It is the greatest art and the subtlest art. Nobody is born with the art. It has to be evolved, learned. It is a knack. If you don't know how to be alone you will only feel loneliness, and loneliness is not aloneness. Loneliness means you are missing the other. So people move like a pendulum between loneliness and dependence and the dependence with the other. So when they are with the other they hate, and when they are not with the other they long for the other. They are in a constant tension, a strain.
It is a wellknown fact that you cannot live with your lover and you cannot live without him or without her -- both bring their own kind of difficulties. But this happens only because we don't know how to be alone.
The man who knows how to be alone can be together with someone without being dependent. His love also takes on a new quality. It is no more dependence, it is independence. In fact it enhances his freedom. His freedom enhances his love and his love in its turn enhances his freedom.
This is my whole effort here, to help my people to learn the art of being alone so that they can enjoy themselves and they can also enjoy the world that has been given to them. I am not against the world, I am not against relationship, I am all for it, but before you can enjoy the beauty of the other, the beauty of existence, first you have to become rooted in your own being. Bliss arises out of that rootedness, that centering, that grounding.
[To Marianne, a goldsmith from Holland, Osho spoke on sannyas as being a chance to actualise the seeds of potential within us. Then to another sannyasin he spoke on the difference between adopting the belief that love is god, and through experimenting, knowing love to be god.]
I am not a theologian and I don't require of my sannyasins that they believe in anything. God, heaven, hell -- there is no need to believe in anything. Just experiment with love; and I am saying experiment, I am against belief because belief means repression, a repression of a doubt. But the repressed doubt will come up again and again. In fact you cannot repress a doubt forever; you will be sitting on a volcano. It is better to be finished with it and the only way to finish it is to experiment. Experiment with love in as many ways as possible.
Just today I was reading about an old man, ninety-five years old. He was asked what was the secret of his long life and his health. He said "I feel a little embarrassed to say the truth. The truth is that I have been getting life from the trees. I huge them and suddenly subtle flows of energies start entering my body. They have kept me alive and full of juice. And my own observation is that he is right. He may not be able to prove it scientifically but sooner or later It will be proved scientifically too: if you love a tree, the tree responds, if you love a rock even the rock responds.
Experiment with love in as many ways as possible and you will become richer every day. You will find new sources and new ways to love, new objects to love. And then ultimately a moment comes when one simply sits with no object of love, simply loving -- not loving to somebody, just loving, just full of love, overflowing with love. And that is the state of enlightenment. One is fulfilled, utterly contented, one has arrived.
The feeling, the constant feeling that something is missing is, for the first time, no more there.
And that is the greatest day in one's life, when you can feel nothing is missing, nothing at all. You search and you cannot find anything missing, all is fulfilled. That man has lived life truly. Others are simply wasting it, wasting a golden opportunity.
My sannyasins are not to waste this opportunity. It has to be used to the full. We have to squeeze the juice of each and every moment to the fullest.
[Earlier in the month he spoke of god as being tao, dhamma, a law, not a person. That's how he began his talk to the next sannyasin. Then he went on to explain:]
God is not to be worshipped but to be understood -- and that is the whole difference between the eastern and the western approach. Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism -- they have all taught the worship of god. It is as stupid as worshipping the law of gravitation or worshipping the theory of relativity.
The East has risen very high from the anthropocentric standpoints. In the West god remains the father, the great father, or if you are not very religious, then the big brother! But it is a childish attitude, very childish. Even Jesus used to call god "abba". Abba cannot even be translated as father, it can be translated only as "dad" or "daddy". (laughter)
I don't think that he was not aware of it but that was the language that could have been understood by the people he was living with.
Buddha never used the word "god" in his whole life. Whenever he entered a town his disciples would go around the town declaring "Please don't ask any question about god because all that is nonsense. Ask questions which are really significant, significant your life."
But Buddha talked about dhamma, the law. His greatest book is called DHAMMAPADA -- Steps into the Ultimate Law.
Once you think of god as a law your whole perspective changes. Then it is not a question of worshipping or praying or kneeling down, then it is a question of understanding. And understanding comes through meditation -- not through prayer, not through worship, not through religious rituals.
And if you understand the law, naturally you follow it, because if you follow it you are healthy, if you go against it you become unhealthy. There is nobody to punish you or reward you -- it is only a law. If you go against the law of gravitation then you will have a few fractures. Not that the law of gravitation comes and hits you, saying that "You are not a right worshipper and you don't come to the church and I will break a few of your bones..." (laughter) Nobody comes, there is no need for anybody to come, there is nobody to come, but you certainly have real fractures.
Once you know how to move according to the law of gravitation you don't have fractures. You are rewarded or punished through your own understanding or through your own foolishness. This has to be your basic starting point in sannyas. Then religion becomes very scientific, then it is not something airy-fairy, it is very solid, substantial.
I would like science and religion to come to a deep understanding of each other. And this is the only way it can happen.
[Then he called forward Luca, a student from Italy. Prefixing his original name with Prem, Osho explained that now his name meant "love is the light." And it is eternal so there is no question of any gas shortage, he joked.]
Love is your connection with the infinite sources of life. The moment you love you disappear as an individual unit, you become part of the oceanic existence. And then infinite powers are yours. Love opens the door of the divine.
And Luca also has another meaning. Begin with the first, light, and end with the last. The other meaning is the enlightened one.
If you can fill your life with the light of love then enlightenment happens. Enlightenment is nothing except a life of absolute love, unconditional love. undemanding love. unmotivated love.
[Osho added 'deva' to Terry's name and then explained how certain English words came from the same root as deva.]
The English word "divine" comes from the same root as deva; they both come from the Sanskrit root "div". The English word "day" also comes from the same root.
"Div" means light, "deva" means full of light -- and that is the meaning of divine too. In fact the English word for Satan, "devil", is a very strange word because that too comes from the same root -- it means divine. But in a way it is right because first he was a god and then he revolted, so he is a fallen god. Terry means soft, tender, open, loving.
Man can live in two ways. He can live a life which is enclosed from all sides, encapsulated. There are reasons why millions of people choose this kind of life -- it is safe, secure, cosy, but they are missing something far more valuable because they will miss adventure and they will miss the exploration of the truth and they will miss god and they will miss love, they will miss light. In fact they will miss all and what they will get is just a comfortable death. Their life is the life of a grave. Of course in a grave there is no danger, you cannot die again. In a grave no disease can happen -- even in Poona. (laughter) If you are in a grave no hepatitis, no amoebas, nothing! It is the safest place, but even though it is safe you have lost life.
Friedrich Nietzsche used to keep a sentence written in gold on his table. It consisted of only two words: Live dangerously. Somebody asked him "Why do you keep it there?" He said "Because the mind always wants to slip into comfort, into the familiar, even though the familiar may be miserable. The mind always likes that which it knows we11, with which it is acquainted. It may not be a joy but still, you are on familiar ground. And bliss happens only when you move into the unfamiliar, when you go into the uncharted sea.
God is possible only when one learns to live the second kind of life, the open life. The first is encapsulated. That is the choice of millions. That's why they are just walking graves -- alive only in the minimal sense of being alive, in fact vegetating. They don't have souls.
Gurdjieff used to say that very few people have souls, and he was right because a soul needs a certain opportunity to grow, it needs challenges, it needs a kind of vulnerability, all the windows and doors open to the wind, to the sun, to the rain and to all unknown forces.
When one starts living dangerously one lives for the first time. And to live dangerously is to live a divine life.
Jesus lived dangerously, Buddha lived dangerously, Socrates lived dangerously, Al Hillal Mansoor lived dangerously. But these were the people who reached to the highest peak of being individuals. They came to know the Everest of consciousness.
So be open, available, fearlessly open. There is nothing to love and everything to gain. Karl Marx ends his Communist Manifesto with the words; Proletariats of the world unite, because you have nothing to lose but your chains and the whole world to gain.
I don't agree with his Communist Manifesto, I disagree on every point, but with the last statement I agree. But to me the word "proletariat" has a totally different meaning and my meaning is far closer to truth than Karl Marx's meaning. A proletariat means one who has lost everything, who has nothing, who possesses nothing.
According to Marx the proletariat is the labourer, the peasant, the poor person. According to me everybody is a proletariat except for a few people, a few Buddhas. Because what have you got? -- no bliss, no dance, no song, no celebration, no life, no experience of god. What have you got? You possess nothing. Unless you possess the kingdom of god you possess nothing. This is my meaning of the word "proletariat"; everybody is a proletariat, even the richest, even Alexander the Great is a proletariat. They are utterly empty, they are beggars.
But one can be very rich, immensely rich. And the only way to be rich is to become available to god's existence, to all his colours, to all his rainbows, to all the songs, to all the trees and the flowers, because god is not to be found in churches -- churches are manufactured by man. God is to be found in nature.
You can find him in the stars, you can find him in the earth. When it rains for the first time and the beautiful fragrance arises out of the earth you can find god there. You can find god in the eyes of a cow or in the giggling of a child. You can find god everywhere except the place, that priests have invented. Churches, temples, mosques -- these are empty, as empty as people are.
Your name exactly defines my approach towards life: be vulnerable, be soft and open, don't create a hard shell around yourself as a protection. Remain unprotected, insecure -- and then the kingdom of god is yours.
The moment one is ready to accept life as it comes with no conditions, suddenly god rushes towards one from every nook and corner. To be full of god is the only possibility of having any meaning, any significance, in life. And the person who has known god has known immortality. Then only the body will die; the essential core of his being is going to remain forever and forever.
[His sannyasins are losing their heads, he told his newest initiate. He had given her the name Gyandevi -- goddess of wisdom.]
Knowledge is very ordinary, anybody can accumulate it. Just a little bit of intelligence is needed and a little bit of memory. But wisdom is tremendously vast. The mind is very small, it cannot contain wisdom. Knowledge is of the mind, wisdom is of the heart.
My sannyasins have to move from the head to the heart, so much so that in a metaphorical sense the head disappears completely. You will see many of my sannyasins here, running here and there and doing things without heads! If you look deeply you will not find any heads; their whole energy has moved to the heart. And the day it moves to the heart a totally new life begins; it is a rebirth. It can happen right this moment because nobody is preventing it. It is your energy; you can move it from the head to the heart.
It is a gamble but to be a sannyasin means to be a gambler. It means all kinds of bad things: a gambler, a drunkard, a rebel, a madman, and you can find many more things. But a sannyasin, when he is a gambler, raises gambling to an art and when he is a drunkard he makes sane people jealous of him. And when he is mad ... then people who are not mad will feel they have missed all.
But the whole transformation happens through the movement of the energy from the head to the heart. And all the meditations here are subtle processes of shifting the energy.
Osho's Commentary
[Last night Osho talked about prayer as being a wordless gratitude. Tonight he explained how this was misunderstood and formalised prayers used instead.]
Whenever somebody talked about his prayerfulness he had to use words. When he tried to explain his interior feeling of what prayer was he had to use words like gratitude, thankfulness, surrender, submissiveness, let-go -- and the people who heard these words were bound to misunderstand them. They started manufacturing prayers. Beautiful poetry happened through it but it was not prayer.
Prayer is nothing but silence, pure silence. You are not saying anything to anybody; the other is absolutely absent. There is no content in your consciousness, not even a small ripple in the lake of consciousness; all is still and silent. Nothing is said; but the heart, the beat of the heart, the flow of the blood, the very grace that surrounds that silence and a tremendous feeling to bow down to the whole existence for all that it has done for us, is prayer.
Hence I don't teach prayer here. I only teach silence, because prayer is a necessary outcome of silence. It is a flowering of silence. You work to create silence and when your work is complete prayer arrives.
It is just like spring comes and the trees are full of flowers. Create silence and you have created the spring; now the flowers are not far away, they are bound to come. It is part of the ultimate law -- Ais dhammo sanantano -- these are Buddha's words. This is the law, the ultimate law, that you create silence and you will be blessed by prayer.
[Prayer can only be known in silence -- the same goes for truth, Osho went on to say.]
Man cannot think anything about god and whatsoever one thinks about god is bound to be wrong. Thinking as such is irrelevant. God cannot be reduced to an object of thought because god is not a thing, god is not an object. And god is not anything known or knowable; hence it is beyond the comprehension of the mind. To know it you have to go beyond mind. to what Dionysius calls "agnosia"; you have to come to a state of not-knowing. That's what I call silence. When there are no thoughts moving in your head there is silence.
Thoughts are like ripples, waves. They keep your mind continuously wavering. And when the mind is wavering it cannot reflect the moon. It is like a lake full of waves the moon is there but the lake is incapable of reflecting it. Once the wave is completely silent, as if it has become a mirror, the moon is reflected in all its glory. In fact the moon reflected in the lake is far more beautiful than the real moon because the lake adds something to it, beauty, to its splendour.
And the same is true about truth. When you are absolutely silent and the truth is reflected in you it gains something. Truth becomes richer when it is reflected in the consciousness of a Bud & a. When Jesus looks at truth, truth has far more splendour. It is not only that Jesus is liberated by truth; truth is also liberated by Jesus. It is not only that Buddhas are grateful to truth; truth is also grateful to Buddhas.
In the East it is a wellknown fact that whenever a single person becomes enlightened the whole universe celebrates the occasion. It has to be so, the universe should celebrate it because with a single man becoming enlightened the whole universe takes a quantum leap towards the unknown.
Each Buddha has been making the diamond of truth more and more beautiful. But the whole art is being in silence, in total silence. So that is going to be your work on yourself: sitting silently, doing nothing, not even meditating. Sitting silently doing nothing spring comes and the grass grows by itself.
Enlightenment comes just like grass growing -- by itself! No effort from your side is needed. All that is needed is a complete withdrawal of all efforts, as if you are not -- that's what is meant by silence.
Sannyas is a suicide, effacing yourself completely, totally, categorically, not leaving even a small trace behind. The moment you are completely gone truth arrives, and arrives with such splendour and beauty, with such bliss and benediction, with such ecstasy, that it is impossible to imagine it.
Then he talked of pleasure and of bliss, of how the former is what people know through relationships with others, while bliss needs the climate of aloneness.
People are acquainted only with pleasure. Pleasure happens in relationship. The other is needed, the other is an absolute necessity, without the other pleasure cannot happen. Hence there is a dependence in pleasure, and because of dependence there is conflict. Nobody likes to depend on anybody. Freedom is our deepest desire, nothing is deeper than that, but for each pleasure we have to lose some freedom.
That's why couples are continuously fighting, arguing, nagging, are continuously at each other's necks, for such stupid and trivial things that if you ask them, 'Why are you fighting?' even they feel embarrassed about telling you the cause of the fight. The cause may not be anything at all; in fact the cause is just an excuse. All lovers fight for the simple reason that everybody resists the loss of freedom. But pleasure depends on the other. The other can withhold it, so you have to depend on him.
Bliss happens in solitude, it is not a question of relationship at all. It happens when you are absolutely alone, rejoicing in your aloneness. And that's the whole art of sannyas: how to rejoice in your aloneness.
It is the greatest art and the subtlest art. Nobody is born with the art. It has to be evolved, learned. It is a knack. If you don't know how to be alone you will only feel loneliness, and loneliness is not aloneness. Loneliness means you are missing the other. So people move like a pendulum between loneliness and dependence and the dependence with the other. So when they are with the other they hate, and when they are not with the other they long for the other. They are in a constant tension, a strain.
It is a wellknown fact that you cannot live with your lover and you cannot live without him or without her -- both bring their own kind of difficulties. But this happens only because we don't know how to be alone.
The man who knows how to be alone can be together with someone without being dependent. His love also takes on a new quality. It is no more dependence, it is independence. In fact it enhances his freedom. His freedom enhances his love and his love in its turn enhances his freedom.
This is my whole effort here, to help my people to learn the art of being alone so that they can enjoy themselves and they can also enjoy the world that has been given to them. I am not against the world, I am not against relationship, I am all for it, but before you can enjoy the beauty of the other, the beauty of existence, first you have to become rooted in your own being.
Bliss arises out of that rootedness, that centering, that grounding.
[To Marianne, a goldsmith from Holland, Osho spoke on sannyas as being a chance to actualise the seeds of potential within us. Then to another sannyasin he spoke on the difference between adopting the belief that love is god, and through experimenting, knowing love to be god.]
I am not a theologian and I don't require of my sannyasins that they believe in anything. God, heaven, hell -- there is no need to believe in anything. Just experiment with love; and I am saying experiment, I am against belief because belief means repression, a repression of a doubt. But the repressed doubt will come up again and again. In fact you cannot repress a doubt forever; you will be sitting on a volcano. It is better to be finished with it and the only way to finish it is to experiment. Experiment with love in as many ways as possible.
Just today I was reading about an old man, ninety-five years old. He was asked what was the secret of his long life and his health. He said "I feel a little embarrassed to say the truth. The truth is that I have been getting life from the trees. I huge them and suddenly subtle flows of energies start entering my body. They have kept me alive and full of juice. And my own observation is that he is right. He may not be able to prove it scientifically but sooner or later It will be proved scientifically too: if you love a tree, the tree responds, if you love a rock even the rock responds.
Experiment with love in as many ways as possible and you will become richer every day. You will find new sources and new ways to love, new objects to love. And then ultimately a moment comes when one simply sits with no object of love, simply loving -- not loving to somebody, just loving, just full of love, overflowing with love. And that is the state of enlightenment. One is fulfilled, utterly contented, one has arrived.
The feeling, the constant feeling that something is missing is, for the first time, no more there.
And that is the greatest day in one's life, when you can feel nothing is missing, nothing at all. You search and you cannot find anything missing, all is fulfilled. That man has lived life truly. Others are simply wasting it, wasting a golden opportunity.
My sannyasins are not to waste this opportunity. It has to be used to the full. We have to squeeze the juice of each and every moment to the fullest.
[Earlier in the month he spoke of god as being tao, dhamma, a law, not a person. That's how he began his talk to the next sannyasin. Then he went on to explain:]
God is not to be worshipped but to be understood -- and that is the whole difference between the eastern and the western approach. Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism -- they have all taught the worship of god. It is as stupid as worshipping the law of gravitation or worshipping the theory of relativity.
The East has risen very high from the anthropocentric standpoints. In the West god remains the father, the great father, or if you are not very religious, then the big brother! But it is a childish attitude, very childish. Even Jesus used to call god "abba". Abba cannot even be translated as father, it can be translated only as "dad" or "daddy". (laughter)
I don't think that he was not aware of it but that was the language that could have been understood by the people he was living with.
Buddha never used the word "god" in his whole life. Whenever he entered a town his disciples would go around the town declaring "Please don't ask any question about god because all that is nonsense. Ask questions which are really significant, significant your life."
But Buddha talked about dhamma, the law. His greatest book is called DHAMMAPADA -- Steps into the Ultimate Law.
Once you think of god as a law your whole perspective changes. Then it is not a question of worshipping or praying or kneeling down, then it is a question of understanding. And understanding comes through meditation -- not through prayer, not through worship, not through religious rituals.
And if you understand the law, naturally you follow it, because if you follow it you are healthy, if you go against it you become unhealthy. There is nobody to punish you or reward you -- it is only a law. If you go against the law of gravitation then you will have a few fractures. Not that the law of gravitation comes and hits you, saying that "You are not a right worshipper and you don't come to the church and I will break a few of your bones..." (laughter) Nobody comes, there is no need for anybody to come, there is nobody to come, but you certainly have real fractures.
Once you know how to move according to the law of gravitation you don't have fractures. You are rewarded or punished through your own understanding or through your own foolishness. This has to be your basic starting point in sannyas. Then religion becomes very scientific, then it is not something airy-fairy, it is very solid, substantial.
I would like science and religion to come to a deep understanding of each other. And this is the only way it can happen.
[Then he called forward Luca, a student from Italy. Prefixing his original name with Prem, Osho explained that now his name meant "love is the light." And it is eternal so there is no question of any gas shortage, he joked.]
Love is your connection with the infinite sources of life. The moment you love you disappear as an individual unit, you become part of the oceanic existence. And then infinite powers are yours. Love opens the door of the divine.
And Luca also has another meaning. Begin with the first, light, and end with the last. The other meaning is the enlightened one.
If you can fill your life with the light of love then enlightenment happens. Enlightenment is nothing except a life of absolute love, unconditional love. undemanding love. unmotivated love.
[Osho added 'deva' to Terry's name and then explained how certain English words came from the same root as deva.]
The English word "divine" comes from the same root as deva; they both come from the Sanskrit root "div". The English word "day" also comes from the same root.
"Div" means light, "deva" means full of light -- and that is the meaning of divine too. In fact the English word for Satan, "devil", is a very strange word because that too comes from the same root -- it means divine. But in a way it is right because first he was a god and then he revolted, so he is a fallen god.
Terry means soft, tender, open, loving.
Man can live in two ways. He can live a life which is enclosed from all sides, encapsulated. There are reasons why millions of people choose this kind of life -- it is safe, secure, cosy, but they are missing something far more valuable because they will miss adventure and they will miss the exploration of the truth and they will miss god and they will miss love, they will miss light. In fact they will miss all and what they will get is just a comfortable death. Their life is the life of a grave. Of course in a grave there is no danger, you cannot die again. In a grave no disease can happen -- even in Poona. (laughter) If you are in a grave no hepatitis, no amoebas, nothing! It is the safest place, but even though it is safe you have lost life.
Friedrich Nietzsche used to keep a sentence written in gold on his table. It consisted of only two words: Live dangerously. Somebody asked him "Why do you keep it there?" He said "Because the mind always wants to slip into comfort, into the familiar, even though the familiar may be miserable. The mind always likes that which it knows we11, with which it is acquainted. It may not be a joy but still, you are on familiar ground. And bliss happens only when you move into the unfamiliar, when you go into the uncharted sea.
God is possible only when one learns to live the second kind of life, the open life. The first is encapsulated. That is the choice of millions. That's why they are just walking graves -- alive only in the minimal sense of being alive, in fact vegetating. They don't have souls.
Gurdjieff used to say that very few people have souls, and he was right because a soul needs a certain opportunity to grow, it needs challenges, it needs a kind of vulnerability, all the windows and doors open to the wind, to the sun, to the rain and to all unknown forces.
When one starts living dangerously one lives for the first time. And to live dangerously is to live a divine life.
Jesus lived dangerously, Buddha lived dangerously, Socrates lived dangerously, Al Hillal Mansoor lived dangerously. But these were the people who reached to the highest peak of being individuals. They came to know the Everest of consciousness.
So be open, available, fearlessly open. There is nothing to love and everything to gain. Karl Marx ends his Communist Manifesto with the words; Proletariats of the world unite, because you have nothing to lose but your chains and the whole world to gain.
I don't agree with his Communist Manifesto, I disagree on every point, but with the last statement I agree. But to me the word "proletariat" has a totally different meaning and my meaning is far closer to truth than Karl Marx's meaning. A proletariat means one who has lost everything, who has nothing, who possesses nothing.
According to Marx the proletariat is the labourer, the peasant, the poor person. According to me everybody is a proletariat except for a few people, a few Buddhas. Because what have you got? -- no bliss, no dance, no song, no celebration, no life, no experience of god. What have you got? You possess nothing. Unless you possess the kingdom of god you possess nothing. This is my meaning of the word "proletariat"; everybody is a proletariat, even the richest, even Alexander the Great is a proletariat. They are utterly empty, they are beggars.
But one can be very rich, immensely rich. And the only way to be rich is to become available to god's existence, to all his colours, to all his rainbows, to all the songs, to all the trees and the flowers, because god is not to be found in churches -- churches are manufactured by man. God is to be found in nature.
You can find him in the stars, you can find him in the earth. When it rains for the first time and the beautiful fragrance arises out of the earth you can find god there. You can find god in the eyes of a cow or in the giggling of a child. You can find god everywhere except the place, that priests have invented. Churches, temples, mosques -- these are empty, as empty as people are.
Your name exactly defines my approach towards life: be vulnerable, be soft and open, don't create a hard shell around yourself as a protection. Remain unprotected, insecure -- and then the kingdom of god is yours.
The moment one is ready to accept life as it comes with no conditions, suddenly god rushes towards one from every nook and corner. To be full of god is the only possibility of having any meaning, any significance, in life. And the person who has known god has known immortality. Then only the body will die; the essential core of his being is going to remain forever and forever.
[His sannyasins are losing their heads, he told his newest initiate. He had given her the name Gyandevi -- goddess of wisdom.]
Knowledge is very ordinary, anybody can accumulate it. Just a little bit of intelligence is needed and a little bit of memory. But wisdom is tremendously vast. The mind is very small, it cannot contain wisdom. Knowledge is of the mind, wisdom is of the heart.
My sannyasins have to move from the head to the heart, so much so that in a metaphorical sense the head disappears completely. You will see many of my sannyasins here, running here and there and doing things without heads! If you look deeply you will not find any heads; their whole energy has moved to the heart. And the day it moves to the heart a totally new life begins; it is a rebirth. It can happen right this moment because nobody is preventing it. It is your energy; you can move it from the head to the heart.
It is a gamble but to be a sannyasin means to be a gambler. It means all kinds of bad things: a gambler, a drunkard, a rebel, a madman, and you can find many more things. But a sannyasin, when he is a gambler, raises gambling to an art and when he is a drunkard he makes sane people jealous of him. And when he is mad ... then people who are not mad will feel they have missed all.
But the whole transformation happens through the movement of the energy from the head to the heart. And all the meditations here are subtle processes of shifting the energy.