Darshan 2 August 1979

Deva Giacinta. Deva means divine; giacinta means beautiful - divine beauty. All beauty is divine; God expresses himself as the beautiful. It may be the beauty of a poet, the beauty of music, the beauty of a painting, the beauty of a flower or the clouds. Wherever beauty is, God is; beauty is his main expression.

So those who are sensitive to beauty are religious people - they may believe in God or not, that is irrelevant. If they are aware of the beautiful surrounding them, if they are aware of the beautiful within and without, they are on the path unknowingly; they are coming closer to the temple, unconsciously.

The poet is an unconscious mystic, so is the painter, so is the musician.

The difference between a poet and a mystic is only of awareness: poet plus awareness is equal to the mystic. Hence without being poetic, aesthetic, nobody can understand life and nobody can know what God is.

So wherever you see beauty, bow down. Feel tremendously grateful that we are part of such a profound existence, that we are part of such a miraculous, mysterious world.

Anand Norbert. Anand means bliss, blissful; norbert means divine brightness - blissful divine brightness. That's our intrinsic nature, that's what we are made of. But we never look in and hence we remain surrounded in darkness.

To be an extrovert is to be in darkness; to know the light one has to turn in. Introversion is the way.

Once you have known the light within, then coming out of it, even outside, you will find it. Once the within is known, all distinction between within and without disappears. Then there is no darkness at all; existence is pure light, it is all divine brightness. Then God starts radiating from each stone, each flower, each person.

Veet Karl. Veet means surpassing, transcending; karl means man. The greatest paradox of human life is that a man becomes truly man when he surpasses humanity. A Jesus is a true man because he is no longer within the boundaries of humanity. A Buddha is a true man, the authentic man, and the reason why he is authentic is that he has gone beyond.

Man is the only animal who can surpass himself. A dog remains a dog his whole life. A tiger remains a tiger, a rose remains a rose, a lotus remains a lotus. Nobody except man has this tremendous power, potential, to surpass himself; hence surpassing oneself is the most distinctive characteristic of human beings.

Then the paradox can be understood: why you become real man when you surpass humanity...

because then you have used the greatest gift that God has given you, then you have used the space, the opportunity, the context, of life. You have used your life as a ladder and gone beyond. By surpassing one becomes oneself.

And that's what sannyas is all about: the method, the secret, the key, to surpass oneself.

Anand Pritama. Anand means bliss; pritama means beloved. Bliss is the goal of all life; we are seeking and searching nothing else but bliss. Bliss is the beloved.

God is another name for the same thing, God is making bliss personified, giving bliss a personality...

because it is very difficult to love something which has no form. How to worship something which has no form? How to seek and search for something which has no form?

Hence man has given so many forms to bliss. Hindus give one form, Christians another, Jews still another, but deep down behind each God, if you analyze the search, you will find that everybody is seeking bliss.

And now the time has come for us to be clear about it; these metaphors have created much trouble in the past. People have been fighting just because of different metaphors - killing each other. In the name of religion more people have been killed than in the name of anything else. More people have been tortured in the name of religion even than in the name of politics, because metaphors were taken too seriously. A metaphor is beautiful if you understand that it is a metaphor, but the moment you become serious about it, the moment it becomes the truth and the only truth, then you are turning into a fanatic, then you are a dangerous person, you are mad.

And that's how religious people are and have been: very fanatical. Their religion is the true religion and their God is the true God, and all other gods are false and all other religions are false. And naturally, when they are false they have to be destroyed; in the service of truth all that is false has to be burned down.

Now the time has come for man to become a little more mature - these are childish attitudes! A fanatic is a juvenile: he never grows up, he remains at the mental age of eleven or twelve. But these fanatics can have tremendous power over foolish people, because they speak with such certainty, with such absoluteness. Their very confidence in their belief becomes contagious.

Hinduism is a poetic way of saying something about that which cannot be said, so is Christianity, so is Islam - different poetic ways, different methods to make available something which is intrinsically unavailable... gestures, fingers pointing to the moon. But the fingers are not the moon!

My effort here is to destroy all these metaphors so that we can see the real search face to face.

The real search is bliss - what name you give it does not matter. And it is not only man who is in search of bliss: the trees, the rivers, the planets, the animals, the birds, everyone in his own way is searching for bliss.

Once this is understood, once we have become alert that our search is for bliss, things become easier. Then we don't go on groping in the dark, then we have a sense of direction, then we know the purpose of life; we can put our energies totally, intensively, into gaining it, into achieving it.

So your name has to become your very reality - bliss is the beloved, beloved of all. And when you fall in love with somebody, you are really falling in love with the bliss that arises out of that person or arises out of the communion with that person. If you have fallen in love with a rose flower that simply means that in the company of the rose you feel blissful. The rose is only a door to bliss, so is the person you have fallen in love with.

The Master is the ultimate door one falls in love with, but you fall in love with the Master only because he represents bliss more clearly, more profoundly, more intensely, more passionately, more warmly, than anybody else.

[The new sannyasin asks: Will I be a good sannyasin?]

You are, there is no question of "will"!

Anand Dhammo. Anand means bliss; Dhammo means religion. Bliss is the religion; everything else is non-essential, everything else is ritual. And if one enjoys ritual it is perfectly good to enjoy it, but ritual is not the real thing. The real thing is to create a space within you which can be filled from the beyond by bliss.

All that is needed on the part of the seeker is to create a space in himself. We are so full of our own ego that we don't allow the beyond to penetrate us. We have to empty the cup completely, and then instantly something starts raining, something very tangible. You can almost hear it, you can almost see it filling you; you can taste it, you can smell it.

And once your inner cup is full of the beyond, life has become significant. Before that it is insignificant. Before that it is empty although it looks so full - of rubbish, of all kinds of furniture: thoughts and memories and imagination and projections and conceptions, philosophies, ideologies... One seems to be so full up. One is almost a junkyard, centuries have become accumulated inside. All this has to be emptied.

And this is the miracle: the moment you are utterly empty of all this rubbish, you become full! In that emptiness God descends.

Dhammo is Buddha's word for religion; he used the word "dhammo" for religion. It is something more than the English word "religion": the English word does not have that beauty, that depth, significance The English word "religion" represents Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism - systems of belief.

Dhammo fundamentally means your innermost nature. Just as it is the nature of water to flow downwards - that is water's dhammo; just as it is fire's nature to burn - that is fire's dhammo; just as it is the lotus' nature to be beautiful - it is its dhammo.

Bliss is man's dhammo, his nature. It is not a system of belief; it is not a question of believing in something, but rather of discovering something inside you which is already there, which is already the case. True religion is not a belief but a discovery; it is an experience. So what we really have to do is uncover. Much garbage has gathered that has to be thrown out.

And the moment you have discovered your innermost emptiness, immediately - not even a split second is lost - you are in contact with the beyond. That beyond is known as God, but to call it "the beyond" is far more beautiful because somehow God has become associated with wrong meanings.

Priests and churches have exploited the word so much that it has become ugly, distorted. Many people are simply put off, the moment you use the word "god" they are put off. And one cannot blame them. It is better to use the word "beyond", that opens the whole sky of the unknown, of the uncharted.

And the moment you are empty, the impossible becomes possible. And the greatest thing in life is to taste the beyond because then you have tasted something deathless, something timeless, something eternal.