Darshan 5 August 1979

Anand Gitta. Anand means bliss; gitta comes from a root which means bridge.

Bliss is the bridge. Nobody ever has entered into God without being blissful. The doors are closed for miserable people. Those who cling to misery will remain without God, because misery disconnects you from existence, it isolates you. Misery makes you an ego. The moment you are blissful the ego starts melting. When you are really blissful there is no ego to be found at all, and that's how one becomes reconnected, bridged.

The ego is the barrier; bliss is the bridge. And they never exist together, they cannot: either you are blissful or you are an egoist. The egoist is bound to be miserable; misery follows the ego as a shadow. And the blissful person is followed by God.

One of the great Indian mystics, Kabir, has said: "There were days when I was searching and exploring and enquiring, and I was almost mad in my search and I was calling 'God, God, where are you?' And I was constantly crying and weeping, day in, day out, and there was no response - the skies remained silent. Then one day it happened: I was not crying, I was blissful, as blissful as a bird on the wing, as blissful as an opening lotus in the lake, as blissful as the rising sun, and suddenly God started calling me: 'Kabir, Kabir, where are you?"'

And Kabir says, "Since I know the secret I don't bother at all about God; I remain blissful and he goes on following me, calling 'Kabir, Kabir, where are you going? What are you doing?"'

Anand Alfred. Anand means bliss; alfred means wise.

It is bliss that makes one wise - not knowledge, not information, but a dancing heart... not a memory crammed with information, but a heart that knows how to be cheerful, how to be singing. When your

heart becomes a singing bird, then wisdom arrives. Wisdom arrives only when you are innocent, and bliss creates the space for innocence to happen. They go together, bliss and innocence; hence children look so blissful: they are so innocent. Knowledge has not yet corrupted them; they are not yet poisoned by the society.

The work of a Master consists in undoing what society has done to you. He has to make a clean sheet out of you again, he has to give you a new birth, a new childhood. That's what sannyas is all about: initiation into a second childhood. And remember these two things, which are not really two but two aspects of one phenomenon: be blissful and you will be wise. Whatsoever is done out of bliss is always wise; whatsoever is done out of misery, anger, sadness, jealousy, hatred, is bound to be wrong.

In my vision, bliss is virtue. To be blissful is to be a saint, and to be miserable is to be a sinner.

[The new sannyasin asked about a noise in his ears which is especially loud when there is silence.

The noise changes.]

It changes... Do one thing: start listening to it very attentively. When it happens, don't be worried about it. Rather, focus on it: let it be the object of meditation. Listen to it minutely, in detail, so nothing is missed, as if it is tremendously important and not a single note should be missed. Be very meditative about it, and you will be surprised: the noise will lose all its disturbance; it will become a melody, it will be come very musical. And it is something beautiful, nothing to be worried about. It has not to be stopped, it has to be transformed. This is the way to transform it.

And I have given you one group, Vipassana, first to tenth September - that will help you to concentrate on it. In those ten days the thing will happen. So after that you remind me again.

But nothing to be worried about; it is not a disease... and it can be a blessing. Just wait!

But you start. Whenever you feel it, whenever you find silence around you and it is there, sit silently, close your eyes and focus on it - as if the whole world had disappeared and only that noise is your world, as if that noise is the voice of God - and you will be able to transform it!

Anand Gerrit. Anand means bliss; gerrit means brave, courageous.

The coward is bound to live in misery because the coward cannot go beyond his past; he clings to the past because the past feels familiar, safer, secure. But to live in the past is not to live at all, to live in the past is a kind of death. And out of that slow death arises misery. One's whole life starts stinking of death. Life is always in the present, but for that one needs great courage: courage to detach oneself from the past, courage not to look back, courage to leave the familiar, courage to live in insecurity. In fact that is the definition of sannyas: the courage to live in insecurity, to live moment to moment, not knowing what is going to happen next... without any clinging to the past and without any projections for the future. When one lives in the present, life has a thrill, it becomes an adventure. Then it has ecstasy, and that ecstasy is anand, that ecstasy is bliss.

Courage brings bliss. And because millions of people are cowards, the world remains in misery. It is very rarely that a courageous person steps out of the crowd, finds his own way, lives his own life, risks everything, becomes an individual, rebels against the crowd-mind, the mob-mind, and declares his independence. In that freedom is bliss, and in that freedom is God. That freedom is bliss, that freedom is God.

Anand Annelise. Anand means bliss; Anne means prayer; lise means God - a blissful prayer for God. That has to become your very existence: a blissful prayer to God.

Prayer is blissful when it is an expression of gratitude, with no demands, with no complaints.

Whenever one starts asking for something in prayer, it is no longer blissful; it is praying out of misery, out of demand, out of need. It loses its grandeur, its grace. It is nothing but desire disguised as prayer. And that's what goes on in the churches, temples, mosques, in the name of prayer: people are not praying, people are asking, demanding, people are trying to exploit even God for their own purposes. They pray only when they are in need, they remember God when they are in misery.

They completely forget God when they are happy. And the real prayer arises out of happiness, not Out of misery, so it is very rarely that real prayer happens in the world, because people pray when they are in pain and they forget completely when they are in pleasure. When everything is going well who bothers about God and who bothers about prayer? When something is not going right, you start remembering God.

It happened in the life of one of the very rare men of this century, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist. He was also a revolutionary, and he was condemned to death with eleven of his other comrades. All twelve were to be shot early in the morning at exactly six o'clock. They were made to stand in a line and they started looking at the church tower, at the clock, and minute by minute life was disappearing. And Dostoevsky says in his memoirs that in those four, five moments, he remembered his whole past.

It happens: when death approaches and you become aware that death is coming - when it takes you unawares - then it doesn't happen; but when you know that at exactly six o'clock you will be shot dead and only five minutes are left, one starts having a review. The whole film of the past starts moving. And in those five minutes he remembered that he has not lived his life attentively. He had wasted his life, he had lived as a robot, as a machine, unconsciously, almost asleep. He could not remember a single moment of attentiveness, of awareness. He decided, "If another life is given to me, I will devote my whole life to awareness." And by chance it happened that he was forgiven; exactly one minute before, the order from the Czar came that all those twelve had to be forgiven.

Then somebody asked him after a few years: "What happened to your decision?" He said, "I tried, but it didn't work out; I could not live attentively. I still try but... for a moment it is there and then it is gone."

People are living almost in a kind of sleep. But when pain comes, misery comes, they are disturbed in their sleep and they start praying, and they take great decisions that "Now, from now onwards, I will be good, I will be this, I will be that." But that is not true prayer. If it comes out of pain, once the pain is gone the prayer will be gone. The true prayer has to arise out of bliss, it has to arise out of your gratitude to God, it has to arise out of a tremendous sense that you are part of this great, profound mystery, that such an infinitely beautiful universe has been given to you for no reason at all; you have not earned it. It is a sheer gift from God. Then there is prayer.

And if prayer is there, God is there. Wherever prayer is, God is. People ask, "Where is God?" - their question is meaningless. They should ask, "What is prayer?" - because wherever prayer is, God is.

Prayer is the way to see God. Prayer gives you the eyes, the perspective to see God. So Anand Annelise will mean: a blissful prayer to God. Let that become your existence too.

Prem means love; janine means gift of God. Love can only be a gift from God. Man can create only commodities. Commodities have no values, they have prices but no values, and values have no price. Values are beyond price. And love is the greatest of all the values, the suprememost value; everything else can be sacrificed for it, but it cannot be sacrificed for anything else.

Just to become aware that it comes from the beyond - that it descends and we just have to be empty to receive it, a womb that we have to be pregnant with it - that awareness and a door that has remained closed up to now starts opening. You become capable of seeing things which you had never suspected before. And then it pours, it simply pours. So much comes that you cannot contain it, you have to share it with others.

And my sannyasin has to become a vehicle for love, a passage, just a pure passage with no hindrance... not standing in between. Just an emptiness, utterly empty, so that if God wants to flow through you, he can flow without any resistance from your side. To be in that non-resistant state is to be in meditation, and to allow God and his love to flow through you is to be a saint.

A saint is one who has disappeared, who has become absent, whose presence is no more there, in whose presence God has become present himself, he has annihilated himself totally. That is the ultimate goal for a sannyasin. It can be achieved, it has to be achieved, because without it life remains unfulfilled, life remains nightmarish. With it, life becomes paradise.

Anand Yusuf. Anand means blissful; I don't know myself the meaning of yusuf, but that doesn't matter. Whatsoever it means, be blissful! But suf means pure. From suf comes sufi... the purest of the heart. Yusuf may have something to do with it. And there is a tomb in Kashmir which is believed to be the tomb of Jesus, but the stone on it says "the tomb of Isa Yusuf". It seems yusuf is a form of Jesus, the Arabic form of Jesus - the possibility is there, it is only a possibility.

Then it becomes very significant. The word "jesus" means one who is beloved of God. And Jesus is one of the greatest Sufis of the world. The word "suf" also means clean, absolutely clean, with no dirt, a mirror without any dirt, so that it can reflect God. But I am not certain whether these meanings are really applicable to yusuf or not, hence I say: be blissful! My message is bliss, and bliss brings cleanliness, bliss brings clarity, bliss brings the kind of heart that becomes beloved of God. It creates Jesus in you.

But the whole alchemy depends on the process of being blissful, then all else follows. People have a very deep misunderstanding of bliss; they think it is a goal. It is not a goal, it is a discipline. If you think of bliss as a goal, then how can you be blissful right now? First you have to prepare yourself, you have to go through many austerities, fasts, prayers, rituals, then one day maybe sometime in the future - maybe in this life or in other lives - you will be capable of being blissful. To think of bliss as a goal helps you to postpone it. That's not my idea of bliss. Bliss is not a goal but a discipline in itself. You can be blissful this very moment, it is only a decision on your part.

It is our choice to be miserable or to be blissful. If we choose to be blissful no power can make us miserable, and I say it through my own experience, and through the experience of thousands of my sannyasins that it is only a question of decisiveness. If you decide to be blissful nobody can make you miserable. Even if you are thrown into hell you will remain blissful. You will enjoy hell too; it will be really a fantastic trip and you will meet beautiful people there!

Hell and heaven are not something outside you; they exist in your eyes. The man who knows how to be miserable will be miserable even if he is with God; he will find ways and means of being miserable. Even in paradise he will count the thorns on the rosebushes, and the man who knows how to be blissful, even in hell, will count the roses.

So let it become a fundamental rule of your life, that at each moment you have to decide. The alternatives are always open, both alternatives, we are always on the crossroads. You can move in the direction of misery, you can move in the direction of bliss; always choose the direction of bliss.

Slowly slowly, it becomes natural to you, then there is no need to choose it deliberately; you simply choose it. And to be blissful is to be ready for God. God is the goal, not bliss; bliss is the discipline to attain God.

Anand Nirmohi. Anand means bliss, blissfulness; nirmohi means non-attached.

Blissfulness is possible only if one remains non-attached to everything that happens, remains unclinging to everything that happens, does not become identified with anything. The mind immediately starts clinging, and particularly when something beautiful is happening, the mind naturally tends to cling more. But to cling is to miss it, to cling is to destroy it. If you love and your love becomes possessive, you have killed it. Now you can go on carrying a dead bird - you can put it in a beautiful golden cage - but it cannot sing any more and it cannot fly in the sky and it Cannot soar high in the winds, it cannot whisper with the clouds. All life is gone.

Nirmohi means not to be attached to anything, not to be possessive, not to be clinging... moving through life utterly detached. It does not mean indifference, it does not mean renunciation. Live in life, but don't gather the dust of experience around yourself. Each moment die to the past so that you are again new, so that each moment you are born again, fresh, again with the wonder of life, again with the surprise of a child, again full of joy, intrigued with everything that is happening.

That's the true way to be a sannyasin: being blissful and yet unattached. In the East we have a metaphor for it. We say that a sannyasin should be like a lotus leaf in the pond: the lotus leaf remains in the water, but it is so silky that the water cannot touch it. It remains in the water but utterly untouched by the water. So even when dewdrops collect on the lotus leaf... In the morning you can see them, separate. They are resting on the lotus leaf, but utterly separate like pearls; a wind will come and they will slip back into the lake and they will not leave a trace behind.

That is the way of a sannyasin: to live like a lotus leaf in the pond. Live in the world but remain absolutely unattached, non-possessive, non-clinging. Live as freedom, then God is yours, then truth is yours, then you are yours!

Anand Sanatano. Anand means bliss; sanatano means eternal.

Happiness is momentary, hence happiness is bound to be followed by unhappiness. They are like day and night: one is followed by the other inevitably. Hence even when you are happy, you cannot be really happy, because deep down you know unhappiness is on the way. Bliss means something which is timeless, a happiness which is not followed by unhappiness. It comes and remains forever.

It only happens once, then it is forever, that's why it is called eternal: it has a beginning but no end.

And that is the goal of life; sannyas is only a methodology to attain it.

When one is finished with happiness, unhappiness, and the duality of it, when one has had enough of it, then the journey for bliss starts, then one starts seeking and searching for something eternal, something deathless. That's what has created sannyas in the East. The East is far more ancient than the West. The West is still young, hence still interested in the happiness-unhappiness game.

The East is too ancient for that, it has known all those games and the futility of it. Sannyas is the greatest contribution of eastern consciousness to humanity. But it has died in its old form. I am trying to revive it. Of course, it will have a new form now - a new body and a new spirit.

The old sannyas was more of renunciation. My new sannyas is more of rejoicing. Rejoice in life, rejoice in ordinary things, rejoice in everything possible, rejoice even when moments are almost too difficult to rejoice in... when sadness seems to be natural, when depression seems to be just the right thing, when defeat and defeatism surround you, when you are a failure, frustrated... But remember always that when the night is very dark, the dawn is very close by.

So learn to rejoice even in the darkness of the night, because it proclaims the dawn.

[A sannyasin asks: How can I have more trust?]

That is really a difficult problem... Trust is not a commodity; you cannot have more or less. It is not a quantity. Either you have it or you don't have it. More or less is not the question at all, it is utterly irrelevant. You cannot have less, you cannot have more. If you have it, you have it, don't be worried.

If you don't have it, don't be worried... What is there to be worried about?

This is trust! If you have it, good; if you don't have it, good.

Help my people there! And you have it! - don't be worried. I certify that you have it!