Darshan 1 August 1979
Prem Birgitta. Prem means love; birgitta means strength, power, energy.
Love makes you strong, makes you powerful, because love transforms your possibilities into actualities. It transforms the seed into a sprout, it transforms the potential into the real. Without love one is empty, with love one is overflowing. Without love one is a beggar, with love one is an emperor.
Love more and more, and love without any expectations. With expectations love cannot soar high.
Love without conditions. With conditions love is poisoned. Love for the sheer joy of loving, then love becomes the bridge between you and God.
And birgitta has another meaning also - that is bridge. When love energy is overflowing, you are bridged to God. There is no other way to be bridged.
Anand Alwin. Anand means bliss; alwin means a friend.
Bliss is the friend. It is only through bliss that one arrives home. It is by being blissful that we start feeling the presence of God in existence.
Ordinarily people think they will be blissful when they have found God... that is not true, because unless you are blissful you cannot find God. Certainly you will be immensely blissful when you have found God, but that is the end of the story; and first we have to think of the beginning, not of the end.
One has to learn to be blissful for God to arrive. It is only through the blissful state of consciousness that God can penetrate us.
Misery is your enemy; bliss is your friend - and remember it... don't become too associated with misery. Don't befriend misery, disconnect yourself with misery. Never get identified with anything that brings misery, and drown yourself each moment more and more in bliss. Be drunk with bliss, be a drunkard, and in bliss you will find the greatest friend.
Anand Phillip. Anand means bliss. Bliss is a state of joy, pure joy which makes no shadow. Ordinary joy is always followed by misery... it creates a shadow. Ordinary happiness brings unhappiness in its wake. It's bound to happen; they are two sides of the same coin.
Anand is a special kind of joy which makes no shadow, which has no opposite to it. It is beyond opposites; hence we cannot call it happiness and we cannot call it unhappiness. It is beyond duality, it is transcendental. It is a silent joy, a peaceful joy, it is ecstasy without excitement - and that is the goal.
Phillip, literally, does not mean much. It means a lover of horses: phil, hippos. But in another way it has some significance. Phillip was one of the disciples of Jesus, one of the twelve disciples. That way it is significant, it has some association with Jesus, and to be associated with Jesus in any way is beautiful.
So your full name will mean a blissful disciple, a disciple who has attained the state of bliss. And to be a disciple is a great experience. That's what sannyas is all about: entering into disciplehood, entering into the world of learning - not of knowledge but of learning. Knowledge is accumulative; learning is not accumulative. Through knowledge, one becomes knowledgeable; one has more and more knowledge in the head. Through learning, one's being is transformed; not that one knows more, but one is more.
It is not a question of quantity, it is a question of quality: one is more, one has more authenticity, rootedness, groundedness, one is more centered.
Become a blissful disciple. Enjoy learning the new, the unknown... And the moment you have learned it, forget all about it; don't carry its weight, so you remain available to learn more. Go on dying to knowledge: whatsoever becomes knowledge has to be dropped; the moment you have known it, it is finished. Throw it away, be empty again, so you are again available to know more.
Each moment one has to die to knowledge; that is the way of the disciple: he remains open-ended, he remains available, he is ready to go with the truth, he has no prejudices, no preconceived ideas, he carries no past. He lives in the moment and the moment is all. And to live in the moment is the only way to learn about God. One cannot learn about God through the Bible or the Koran or the Vedas, one learns about God by being in the present moment, by being open empty, by functioning from a state of no-knowledge and by being blissful. A blissful openness... that is the meaning of your name. Let it become your very way of life.
Anand Chandro. Anand means bliss; chandro means moon - the moon of bliss.
Bliss is more like the moon than like the sun it is not hot, it is cool. It is not fire, it is light. It has an intensity of its own, but there is no feverishness, no passionate excitement. It is a state of no-passion, no desire.
Buddha became enlightened on the full-moon night. The story is that he was born on a full-moon night, he became enlightened on the same night - the full-moon night - the same month, he died the same month, on the same full-moon night. It may not have happened historically - it may have happened because that coincidence is possible - but though it may not have happened historically, its significance is great.
It has nothing to say about Gautam the Buddha, the man. It says something about the state of Buddhahood: the state of Buddhahood, that state of awakening, is born as a full moon, matures as a full moon, and one day it disappears into the totality as a full moon. That full moon is a symbol, a metaphor: a metaphor for silence, peace, calm, quiet, equilibrium; a metaphor for a poetic existence, for music, for love a metaphor for the mysterious, the miraculous.
Sannyas is the beginning of the search for the miraculous, for the poetic in existence, for the mysterious in ordinary life. It is full of mystery, it is just that we are not aware Nothing is ordinary, nothing can be ordinary because everything is full of God - how can it be ordinary. Everything is extraordinary... but we are blind.
Sannyas is initiation into a new perceptiveness, into a new way of seeing into things, events, life, existence .
So let these be the guiding lines for you: coolness, calmness, tranquility, equilibrium, poetry, music, beauty, love... And the whole of religion is exhausted in these metaphors. In these few words is contained all that is of worth.
Anand Rupam. Anand means bliss; rupam means beauty.
Bliss is beauty. It is only the blissful heart which becomes beautiful. The flowers of beauty grow only in the soil of bliss. All that is beautiful in life is somehow rooted in the state of bliss. People try to seek beauty directly - they are bound to miss. Then their idea of beauty is very superficial, not even skin-deep. It has no depth, it is shallow, and it remains confined to the body. Nothing is wrong in it, but to finish at it is foolish. To think of it as if it is the end is stupid. It is not even the beginning.
The real beauty arises only when one has found bliss. A Buddha, a Jesus - these people are really beautiful. Thousands of people fall in love with these people... And sometimes it happens, they may not have physical beauty at all. It was so with Jesus. He was not physically beautiful - his face was very prominently ugly, but still, those who came in contact with him fell in love! One of the most beautiful women of those days, Mary Magdalene, fell in love with him, because something was coming from the deepest core of his being and it was so much that you could not even see his body and his body's ugliness. His body simply became like transparent glass - you could see the light within. And when you are seeing the light, you forget the transparent glass completely. It has been found again and again that whenever a person becomes blissful, he becomes tremendously beautiful... and a beauty that is not of this world at all, a beauty that belongs to the beyond and a beauty that cannot be destroyed by anything, not even by death.
Anand Nityo. Anand means bliss; nityo means eternal.
Happiness is momentary, so is unhappiness; they come and go, and because they come and go, they don't have much meaning. Even if you are happy, you know it is bound to go, so how can you really be happy when you know that it is going to go, when you know that it is only a passing breeze, that the guest will stay overnight and in the morning will be gone? It is impossible to be happy if happiness is only a momentary phenomenon. It only deepens your sadness. It simply makes you aware of the futility of life, as if life is made of the stuff called dream.
If this were all then life would be absolutely meaningless. But fortunately it is not so: there is a kind of happiness which is eternal. The momentary happiness comes from outside, it is a visitor, a guest.
And the eternal happiness is the host, it is your very interiority; it does not come and go, it is your very nature.
To know it is the purpose of sannyas. And it can be known because it is just there waiting inside for you to turn back. Just a turning in, a tuning in, and one forgets the world, one forgets the body, and one forgets the mind, and one is simply drowned in eternal bliss. Then slowly slowly one can come out of it and yet it remains; one can start doing the ordinary things of routine life and yet it remains there. Only in the beginning one has to make an effort to enter into it. Once the knack has been learned, one need not make any effort to go into it, one is always there; then one can go on doing ten thousand things and it is not disturbed. That is the greatest treasure life can give to you, the greatest gift God would like to give to you. But you have to be receptive and you have to learn to see with closed eyes, you have to learn to see within.
So think of Zazen, Vipassana; those two meditations will be of immense value to you. Sitting or lying down, just look in. Even if in the beginning you don't see anything, don't be worried. Even if only thoughts continue, let them, ignore them, remain indifferent, unconcerned.
Between three to nine months... one day it happens: all thoughts disappear. One is, but without any thought. That is the moment one has fallen into one's own center. That is the first satori. It transforms one's whole life. It is possible... and I am here to help you: just don't hinder....
Just watch. You are not the body, you are the watcher. Simply watch and everything will settle. Mm?
Good!