Darshan 6 August 1979
Chit Karin. Chit means consciousness; karin means clean.
Mind is like a mirror. Meditation is nothing but a cleansing of consciousness. It gathers dust: the dust of experience, the dust of thoughts, the dust of memories, the dust of desires; layers upon layers of dust. And it is natural: each mirror gathers dust, and mind is a mirror. If the dust becomes too thick, then you become blind, then you can't see - and that's the state millions of people exist in.
The mirror is there but covered with such dense dust that it reflects no more.
Meditation is a process of cleansing, of making the mirror spotlessly pure - not even a particle of dust on it. Then you start reflecting the tremendous beauty of existence, the incredible joy of existence. The very poetry of being is reflected in you, resounds in you. And that's what God is all about: the experience of inexpressible beauty, the experience of such joy that one cannot even imagine it, the experience of ecstasy so deep, so profound, that one is utterly lost in it. That's what God is all about. In a single word "god", all these things are implied: joy, bliss, beauty, benediction.
But one has to cleanse the mind. It is very dirty. And I mean literally dirty; not that it is evil, not that it is bad. It is simply covered with dust!
It is natural for it to be covered with dust. Just as you take a bath every day and you change your clothes, exactly the same is needed for the inner: a bath every day, a changing of clothes, dropping the old, dying to the past, and living in the present.
If one can live in the present without thinking of the past and the future, mind remains pure, and that purity is the door to the divine.
Prem Lydia. Prem means love; lydia means bliss.
The word "lydia" comes from a small country in Asia, an ancient country, no more in existence. The people of that country were so happy, so blissful, that the name of their country became symbolic for bliss. They were exquisite players of flutes. They expressed their joys through singing, playing on musical instruments, dancing, so that slowly slowly the word "lydia" lost all connection with that country. It has simply become symbolic of being utterly happy.
Your name will mean love that brings bliss. Love can bring great misery too, bliss is not a necessity.
Love can bring great pain. Love is also like a flute: you have to know how to play on it, otherwise you will create only noise. Unless you know how to play, you will be creating only disturbance for yourself and for others. Love needs to be very alert, aware, artful. Buddha has said love needs the greatest skill in the world. And he is right, because it is the most delicate phenomenon; one has to be very alert, otherwise one is bound to go wrong.
Many people love, but rarely do they attain to bliss through it; more often, love becomes a hell. Very rarely does it become heaven. It can become heaven too; it all depends on you. It has the potential to take you to the highest peak of joy, but then your love has to become more of a meditation than only lust, more an awareness than only an instinctive desire. Transform your instinctive love into a conscious love. Be a witness to your love energy; if love becomes associated with watchfulness then bliss is bound to happen. And there is no other way to bliss; the only way is love. Either one succeeds or one fails, there is no alternative possible; hence one has to be very careful, each step has to be taken with tremendous care. Then love will have the greatest poetry, the greatest joy, the greatest ecstasy in it. It can reveal to you all the mysteries of life, but one has to learn how to love.
We are born capable, but that capacity is only raw; it has to be refined, it has to be polished. Love is like a seed in us and it has to become a tree, a flower, a perfume.
Veet Markus. Veet means going beyond, surpassing, transcending; markus means god of war.
Your full name will mean: now the time has come to transcend the idea of war. The time has come to transcend all gods of war. The world is tired, it is utterly tired of wars. The whole of history hitherto has been violent, insane. No more of it! We have to turn a new leaf, we have to start humanity as if from ABC.
The past has been ugly, sickening, nauseating. It has been very very inhuman, and the whole sickening phenomenon existed because of the idea of violence, war. Up to now we have not lived in peace, in love, we have not made the earth a home yet. We are still divided into countries, into races, into colors, into ideologies, into churches; all these divisions have to go. That's what I mean by transcending war and the gods of war: all these divisions have to be dropped. We have to declare that the earth is one... not only the earth, but the whole universe is one. It is a brotherhood. And not only are human beings brothers, animals and birds and trees and rocks... this whole existence is a brotherhood.
Once this idea starts sinking deep into our hearts we can create a totally new kind of world. We can create paradise herenow. We need not wait for paradise after death. If life is not paradise, how can death lead you to it? If even life is a wastage, death is bound to be a wastage, because death is nothing but a culmination of your life. Life has to be lived in such joy, in such beauty, in such grace, that even death becomes a phenomenon worth seeing, a phenomenon worth worshipping.
We have to transform life into love and also death into love, then only are we religious - not by being Christians or Hindus or Mohammedans, but by being lovers of existence.
Transcend the idea of conflict and enter into a totally different idea of love. We need not fight. Life need not be a fight. It has to be a dance, it has to be playfulness, it has to be love and laughter.
Deva Linda. Deva means divine. Each and everything is divine, because only God exists. Nothing else exists besides God; hence, even if there is a devil, he is divine. That's exactly the meaning of the word "devil"; it comes from the same root "deva", divine. It is beautiful that the devil is called devil. It means that the devil too is divine.
Nothing else is possible. That has to become your first understanding about sannyas - that the whole of existence be looked at in a totally new way, with a new perspective: it is not ordinary, it is extraordinary. Nothing is mundane, everything is sacred. Wherever we are, we are in God; walking, sitting, sleeping - everything is happening in God. We breathe him, he beats in our hearts, he pulsates in our blood. He is speaking in you, he is listening in you. This has to be the most fundamental understanding of a sannyasin, because with it, everything else starts changing.
Linda has two meanings. One is Latin; in Latin it means beautiful. The other is Teutonic; in Teutonic, Linda means a serpent, which is a symbol of wisdom. Jesus says: Be ye wise as serpents. In all ancient cultures, the serpent has been the symbol of wisdom - in India, particularly so. The whole of spiritual energy has been called serpent energy, and in India the symbol has existed at least for ten thousand years. Your energy is like a coiled serpent inside, lying fast asleep near the sex center.
It has to be awakened. Once the serpent starts rising and moving upwards, the higher it goes, the higher goes your wisdom and your understanding. When the serpent reaches to the last center of your being, sahasrar - the first is the sex and the seventh is the sahasrar - when the serpent has reached to the seventh center, that means it has become fully awakened. That is the moment of enlightenment.
Both meanings are beautiful. So your deva linda will mean divine beauty and divine wisdom. And both happen together: when one becomes wise, one becomes beautiful, and if one is truly beautiful, one is bound to be wise, because beauty has nothing to do with the body; it has something to do with your interior consciousness. Wisdom is the beauty of the soul, and beauty is the radiation of that wisdom. It starts filtering out of you, as if a light is burning inside and it starts reaching outside, its rays start penetrating your dense body and start reaching others. You become luminous.
But this miracle of being beautiful and wise happens only if one starts living, not with the ordinary idea of a materialistic world, but with the poetic vision of a spiritual existence. Then trees are spiritual beings and you can have communion with them, and stars are spiritual beings and you can have dialogues with them, then even when you touch a rock you are touching God. It makes you soft, it makes you sensitive, it makes you immensely alert, because you are constantly encountering God, he is constantly watching you, he is constantly your companion; like a shadow he follows you.
To be aware of it is to be transformed, totally transformed.
Anand Ken... will mean: bliss is health.
Health is not only a physical phenomenon, that is only one of its dimensions, and one of the most superficial dimensions, because basically the body is going to die - healthy or unhealthy, it is momentary. Real health has to happen somewhere inside you, in your subjectivity, in your consciousness, because consciousness knows no birth, no death. It is eternal.
And to be healthy in consciousness means: first, to be awake; second, to be harmonious; third, to be ecstatic; and fourth, to be compassionate. If these four things are fulfilled, one is inwardly healthy. And sannyas can fulfill all these four things. It can make you more aware, because all the meditation techniques are methods to make you more aware, devices to pull you out of your metaphysical sleep. And dancing, singing, rejoicing, can make you more harmonious.
There is a moment when the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. In that rare space one feels harmony. When the singer is completely forgotten and only the song remains, when there is no center functioning and only the song remains, when there is no center functioning as I - the I is absolutely absent - and you are in a flow, that flowing consciousness is harmonious.
And to be awake and harmonious creates the possibility for ecstasy to happen. Ecstasy means the ultimate joy, inexpressible; no words are adequate to say anything about it. And when one has attained to ecstasy, when one has known the ultimate peak of joy, compassion comes as a consequence. When you have that joy, you like to share it; you cannot avoid sharing, sharing is inevitable. It is a logical consequence of having. It starts overflowing; you need not do anything. It starts happening of its own accord.
These four are the four pillars of inner health. Attain to it. It is our birthright; we just have to claim it.