Darshan 3 August 1979

Prem Bernardina. Prem means love. Bernardina literally means a bear's heart, but metaphorically it means the sacred heart... because in ancient Teutonic mythology the bear was thought to be a sacred animal, just as in India they think the cow is a sacred animal. Your full name will mean love, the sacred heart.

Without love a man is almost dead. He has a physical heart, and the heart beats, and he breathes, and he lives - but he lives in a mundane way. His life is only on the circumference. He never comes to know the center of his own being, he never comes to know himself. And not to know oneself is the greatest misery in the world, because then whatsoever we do is going to be a mess. Not knowing yourself you create only confusion and chaos in your life and other people's lives.

It is only with a knowing self, with the light of wisdom burning within you, that your action has clarity, has compassion, that your action has totality, that it brings blessings to the world and to you.

Otherwise your action is not really action, it is mechanical reaction.

And the real heart only opens not by breathing, but by loving. The heart has two aspects, as everything else has two aspects: the physical and the non-physical. The physical heart is studied by medical science, by the physiologists, the materialists, those who think that man is nothing but a body. And the non-physical part is the world of the mystic. The non-physical heart lives on love, just as the physical lives on oxygen; for the non-physical, love is oxygen.

And with the functioning of the non-physical heart your body becomes a temple, because God has arrived. You start living a fulfilled life. Each moment is of such profound depth, of such great music, of such intense poetry, that one cannot imagine... one cannot dream about it. To know it one has to know it; only the taste of it will tell you what it is all about. It can't be described, it can't be explained,

it can't be defined, but the path can be indicated. And sannyas is the path to open the non-physical heart.

Anand Silvia. Anand means bliss; silvia means goddess of the woods. Metaphorically it means goddess of solitude, the solitude that prevails in the deep woods. That silence, that stillness, has to be a part of your inner life too. Then bliss arises.

Bliss is found in solitude, but not an extrovert solitude. You can go to the mountains - the beauty of the mountains will enchant you, the silence of the mountains will enthrill you - but within a few days you will be bored because your mind will go on, round and round in circles, in the old circles. The old gibberish will continue; in fact it will be more than ever before because there is nothing else to do.

The mind becomes too occupied with imagination, hallucination, dreaming, and the silence outside becomes a contrast. And the mind becomes afraid of the silence outside also, so it starts working too much just to keep itself occupied. Hence mountains can't help, woods can't help.

Down through the ages many people have gone to the woods, to the desert, to the mountains, to find solitude, but it has never been found there; they have only become dull and dead. And one can mistake dullness for silence. They have not gone beyond the mind; they have in fact fallen below it.

They have become more like animals than like gods. Yes, there is a certain beauty, an innocence in being an animal, but it is below humanity. It has something of the child but it has no maturity in it; it is more ignorance than innocence.

And a man who has lived long in the mountains becomes more and more ignorant of the world, becomes more and more a part of the physical environment, but does not gain maturity, richness, does not become more conscious; in fact he becomes more lazy, lousy, relapses into a kind of sleepy existence. He becomes a sleepwalker, because the challenges are missing which keep oneself alert and awake.

So I am not in favor of people going to the mountains in search of solitude. The solitude has to be found inwardly. It is not an extrovert journey, it is introversion; it has to be found in your very subjectivity. It is not an object, something outside, it is your very being. The deeper you go into yourself, the deeper you are going into the real woods, into the real deserts, into the real mountains. And if you have found solitude within yourself then it makes no difference: you can be in the marketplace and you will be silent, and you can be in the mountains and you will be silent. Then the outer makes no difference at all, the outer becomes irrelevant.

And to make the outer irrelevant is the basic approach of my sannyas. Hence one has not to escape from it, it has to be made irrelevant. One has to live in it and yet be not part of it. And the moment you know the beauty of your aloneness, the beauty that exists when you are utterly oblivious of the whole world, when there is no interference, no distraction, when you are simply resting in yourself - that's what meditation is, resting in yourself; that is the best definition of meditation possible, resting, relaxing into one's own being - then bliss arises naturally, as a byproduct. Bliss can never be the goal; it is a byproduct of solitude.

Satyam Peter. Satyam means the truth and peter means the rock. Truth is the rock on which one can make the temple of one's life, the only rock which can support a life of eternity. But people live in lies, pretensions, deceptions, masks. They not only deceive others, they deceive themselves too.

People live in illusions, dreams, not in reality, not in truth.

Hence life remains a constant frustration, because no dream can ever be fulfilled: every dream is bound to fail, is doomed to fail. And when a dream shatters it shatters you - and each dream is bound to shatter sooner or later. You can postpone it at the most, you can go on pushing it towards tomorrow, but it is bound to happen, it is inevitable. No dream can remain a truth forever. You can go on avoiding seeing the untruth in it, but for how long? One day it is bound to impinge upon you, and then the whole time that you have been working on it is wasted; that whole life has gone down the drain.

But man is so allured by illusions that one illusion dropped, he immediately creates another. In fact even before the first has dropped he has already projected another; in case the first drops, he has an alternative. So we go on changing from one dream to another, from one prison to another; we go on changing from one lie to another. The Christian becomes a Hindu, the Hindu becomes a Mohammedan, the Mohammedan becomes a communist, the communist becomes a fascist, and it goes on...

One has to learn one of the most fundamental facts: that truth is already available, you need not create it. It has not to be invented, it has to be discovered. And it is discovered when you are utterly silent; it is discovered within yourself. You find the rock within yourself: the rock of eternity, the rock which knows no death, the rock which has no beginning and no end. Once you have found that very ground of your being you can build a real temple of life, which will be of fulfillment, contentment, joy, celebration.

Deva Cheryl. Deva means divine; cheryl means love. Love is divine whenever it is love, but it is very rare that love is love.

Many things pretend to be love, many things bear the mask of love: jealousy, possessiveness, domination, ego trips, power politics. There are a thousand and one things which can pretend to be love, which have the sugar coating of love. It tastes sweet in the beginning, but soon the bitterness appears. It looks like nectar, but with experience it proves to be poison. But then it is too late and you are entrapped. It is easy to get into something, it is very difficult to get out, because your life becomes invested, entangled, intertwined.

And those things which pretend to be love have a few benefits too, a few advantages. They give safety, security, comfort, and they promise you all kinds of things in the future. Those promises are never fulfilled, those goods are never delivered, but for the moment those promises are enough to keep you hanging on. Those promises go on like carrots hanging in front of you, and you go on moving, hoping for the best, but it never happens.

Whenever love is love it is divine, and whenever love is not love it is very evil; it is just the opposite, it is very devilish. And out of a hundred, ninety-nine point nine percent it is not love. Hence the world is in such misery, in such hell.

To know love, to know true love, is to know God; that's why I say love is divine. It is enough to know love, then God will be known automatically; there is no need to search and seek God. And one cannot search and seek God because one knows not where he is, what he is. His address is not available, or there are so many addresses that you may get confused. You will never be able to decide which address is the right one: the Hindu, the Christian, the Mohammedan, the Buddhist...

There are three hundred religions on the earth and at least three thousand sects. If you listen to all of them you will simply go crazy. It will take thousands of lives to listen to all of them and all the nonsense they have been pouring into humanity's mind. And it will not bring any clarity; if you had any in the beginning, that too will be lost.

But love can be understood because it is something natural. It is not invented by the priests; it is not fabricated, manufactured, by the theologian; it is not something that philosophers have inferred. It is something natural in you, it is part of your energy. It can be discovered without any help from the outside.

One just has to remember a few things: beware of jealousy, beware of possessiveness, beware of domination. If you can beware of these three enemies, sooner or later you will find the real love...

because real love knows nothing of these three, and if these three exist the real remains hidden.

And once you have tasted the real then there is no problem; you will never be deceived by the unreal.

To know the real as real is enough: the unreal is finished with, finished forever. It can pretend only in the absence of the real.

Prem Satyamo. Prem means love; satyamo means truth. Love is the most fundamental truth.

Except for love, everything else is philosophy - God, heaven, hell, reincarnation. Except for love, everything else has to be believed in - and to believe in something is to begin on a wrong track. To believe means to believe in a lie, because it is not your truth, you have not known it, you have not experienced it.

Love is something that can be experienced immediately. You need not believe in it, you need not follow any religion for it. One can even be an atheist and yet can love. And to love is to become a theist, because it is impossible to love and not to become aware of God; that has never happened.

If love is there, God comes just hidden behind it, and comes so silently that you don't hear even his footsteps. You become aware only when he has already possessed you.

So to me love is the highest religion; there is nothing higher than love. And because love need not be believed - it can be experienced, it is something existential - one need not be false from the very beginning. And if you are false, from the very beginning... That's what believing means: you don't know God and you believe. But how can you believe something you don't know? Doubt is bound to remain there somewhere, hidden in you somewhere in the unconscious, waiting for its opportunity to explode. And when it explodes, it explodes with vengeance!

So every believer is a doubter - believer in the conscious, doubter in the unconscious, and the unconscious is deeper than the conscious. So no believer has ever attained to God, no believer can ever attain to God. That is impossible because at his deepest core he is an unbeliever; belief is only a cover-up.

So I don't teach any belief. I teach you experience. I want you to become existential, not philosophical. And the only way to be existential is love. Move into love, go deeper into it. Let it be your involvement and commitment in life. Don't just remain a spectator. Be merged, be drowned, be drunk with it, and you will come out of it with something absolutely unexpected. You will go into love and you will come out with God.

What appears to be love in the beginning turns ultimately to be the very existence of God. Hence Jesus says: God is love. I go a step further: I say love is God.

Anand Svabhavo. Anand means bliss; svabhavo means self-nature. Bliss is self-nature: it is not something that happens to you from the outside, it is something that grows in you. It is like a tree:

the seed is already there, the soil too - just that you have to become a gardener. And that's what sannyas is all about: becoming a gardener of one's own inner being. Everything is available: the seed, the sun, the rain, the soil. And it is always spring there; in the interiority of your being there is only one season and that is spring. But we never go there. The seed remains a seed, the soil remains with all the potential for blooming into a thousand and one flowers, but remains empty, remains a desert. The sun rises and sets but nothing ever seems to happen there. The spring remains unfulfilled because the gardener is missing, because your consciousness is not there.

Your consciousness is wandering all over the world. Your consciousness goes everywhere except to your innermost core - and that's where one should go first, that should be the first exploration.

But we are ready to go to the moon, to Mars, sooner or later we will be going to the stars... Nobody seems to be interested in going in - and there is the real moon and the real stars, because there is the source of our life, of our energy, of our being, of our consciousness, of our love, of all that we are.

And when one comes to know that center of one's being one has come to know the very center of existence itself... because only on the periphery we are different; at the center we all meet, and we are all one.

Those who know the center say there is only one reality; those who know the periphery say "I am separate from you, you are separate from me. Everything is different: the trees are separate, the animals are separate..." They remain involved in the multiplicity of things, they don't really know the universe. Literally one word "universe" means one - universe. They remain involved with the multiverse; their world is a multiverse, it is not a universe. Only a mystic knows the universe, because he knows the one, because he knows the unity of all things. And that knowing happens in one's own being, it is our self-nature.

The moment you are there, all is bliss. Misery has never penetrated, cannot penetrate. Misery can exist only on the circumference and bliss only at the center. When you start living at the center, as the center, then you can come to the periphery also, and misery will not be found there either because now you are so full of the center and the fragrance of it, so full of the light, so full of consciousness that the center has imparted to you, that even the circumference is no more circumference. You remain rooted in the center wherever you are. Then you are the center of the cyclone, then even in the cyclone you are not distracted, not disturbed; you remain at ease, at home.

And that's the way one should be, that's the way of a sannyasin: remaining always at rest, at peace, at home.