Veet Charlie. Veet means going beyond; charlie means man. Man is the only being in existence who can go beyond himself. This is man's distinctive character. It defines him.
Aristotle says that man is a rational animal He thought that reason separates man from other animals he was wrong. Animals also have reason; the difference is only of quantity. Men may have more, they may have less, but any quantitative difference cannot become the definition. Only one thing is special about man - that is his capacity to surpass himself My definition of man is: one who can surpass himself. It is a paradox: man becomes man only when he surpasses himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche has said that the day man stops thinking beyond himself will be the gloomiest day in the history of man. Man exists in the very endeavor to grope for the beyond, the very adventure to pass all the boundaries. That is the very spirit of man. It makes him noble, it makes him divine; it makes him something which is extraordinary.
Sannyas is only a method to transcend yourself. Sannyas means the very essence of religion.
Without religion man would be an ordinary animal: more rational, more efficient - but still, an animal is an animal. It is religion that brings something so totally new into the human existence that it is inconceivable to the mind. And to comprehend the incomprehensible is the way of a sannyasin: an effort to know the unknown and the unknowable.
It looks absurd logically, but logic is not all. And we are fortunate that logic is not all. Life is far more than logic can contain. It overflows all logical definitions. It knows no boundaries, no limitations; hence it is inexpressible in words. But the inexpressible is the very heart of man, the very poetry of his existence, the music of his being.
I will need you here! Think of this place as your home.... Do a few groups. And become part of the family right now. You can go back once, finish things, come back.
Anand Anamo. Anand means bliss, anamo means nameless. Bliss is so vast that no word is adequate enough to express it. It is so infinite that we cannot say what it is, we cannot define it. It is like a taste on your tongue: you know it, but you cannot say it.
One feels almost dumb when one enters into the world of bliss. One starts feeling that only silence can express it. All words seem so futile, so superficial, so meaningless, because words have been invented for day-to-day use and bliss is not something that is ordinary, that is routine. It is something extraordinary. A ray of light in the dark night of the soul, the meeting with the mysterious, with the miraculous, the meeting of the dewdrop with the ocean - that's what bliss is. On one hand, the dewdrop disappears in that meeting and on the other hand it becomes the ocean. But now how to say it? Now who is there to say it? The separation is no more there between the knower and the known; hence the inexpressibility of bliss.
Bliss is the poetic name for God. The word "god" has become a little dirty in the hands of the priests, in the hands of the scholars; it has become associated with the wrong kind of people. It has lost its beauty, it has lost its grandeur, it has become almost mundane. The moment you say "god" nothing sacred stirs in your heart. "God" reminds you of the church and the dead priest and the superficial rituals. The word "god" reminds you of Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism and all their stupid quarrels, conflicts, bloody wars.
The word "god" does not remind you of bliss which really is its essential meaning. It does not remind you of singing, dancing, which is its real meaning. It does not remind you of celebration, joy, which is its real meaning.
Sannyas is not a ritual. You are not becoming part of a church; on the contrary, you are dropping all memberships of all the churches and of all the nations, and of all that makes you limited, confined.
You are attaining freedom through it. Initiation into sannyas means initiation into total freedom.
Sannyas means assertion of your being as yourself. And only an individual can meet God. A crowd has never seen God, only individuals: a Moses, a Jesus, a Mohammed, a Krishna, a Buddha - only individuals, not crowds. Moses was moving with a great crowd. He was moving from Egypt towards Israel with the whole crowd of Jews, but he had to move to the mountains into absolute aloneness and solitude, to encounter God. He had to leave the crowd behind. Buddha had to leave his kingdom behind to go into the mountains.
Sannyas is really leaving the crowd behind and moving inwards, because the real mountains are there, the virgin peaks of those mountains are there, not trodden by anybody, because only you can go there; nobody else can go there.
Sannyas means an inward journey of absolute freedom, in freedom, and for freedom.
Prem Nadam. Prem means love; nadam means music. Love is the music of the heart. The heart is a harp, you can play upon it. To know how to play upon the heart is the whole art of love. The mind creates only noise. It knows nothing of music; it is incapable of creating music. The mind belongs to the marketplace; it is the marketplace. It has all the noise of the traffic and the people bargaining and shops and shopkeepers and the customers.
But the heart is utterly silent. It knows nothing of the marketplace; it knows only solitude. It knows silence, and silence is music. In fact when you enjoy and music you enjoy it because it creates silence in you. The greater the music, the greater its capacity to create silence in you. If it only creates noise in you, excitement, feverishness, it is not true music; it is part of that maddening marketplace again. True music makes you aware of such tremendous silence in yourself that you have not known before.
Meditation is the art to know one's silence, one's music. Meditation means dropping from the head and entering into the heart. And heart is the center where love arises, music arises, poetry arises.
The heart is the center of celebration, of rejoicing in life. When your heart is full of love and music it starts overflowing, it starts reaching other people. The sharing is inevitable; once you have it, you have to share it. You cannot contain it, it is so much. If you try to contain it, it hurts.
It is like when the child is nine months old in the womb. The child has to come out; the mother cannot contain it any more. The child is grown up, needs the womb no more. The child has to enter the world, the child has to leave the mother.
When your love is ripe, when your music is full, it goes on flowing towards people, towards nature, towards mountains, rivers and stars, and the sharing of it brings you more joy than the joy itself.
Anand Nijen. Anand means bliss; nijen means one who is his own self. Bliss happens only to those who insist on remaining their own selves. The society is very much against such people. The society wants sheep, not human beings; the society wants slaves, not rebels. The society is interested in what you can do, not in what you are. The society has no interest in your self, in your soul. Its whole interest is in your efficiency; it wants to reduce you to a machine. And that's what has been done down the ages: people have been reduced to machines.
One has to be very aware not to be exploited, because the machinery of exploitation is really very complicated and very great; to escape from it is no ordinary thing. That's why it rarely happens that a Buddha, a Jesus, a Socrates, a Heraclitus, find guts and courage enough to escape from this whole trap; the trap is really big. And they start poisoning you the moment you are born, or even before it, because now they say that even the child in the mother's womb is affected by what is happening around him.
So the moment you are conceived the society starts impinging upon you, and the moment you are born, immediately you are baptized as a Christian or as a Hindu. The priest enters and the priest follows you from birth to death, from the beginning to the end. He takes care that you don't escape.
You are conditioned not to escape; you are conditioned to believe stupid things. You are conditioned to become a believer, not an enquirer. Your reasoning is destroyed, your logic is paralyzed.
All that they can do to destroy you is being done; and the irony is that it is done for your sake - they are helping you. They are killing you! Hitherto the society has been very murderous, but because it has been so for so long we don't take any note of the murderous structure that surrounds us.
Sannyas means that you are becoming aware of the prison, that you are becoming aware that a few people have escaped from the prison, that you are becoming aware that there is a possibility for you too to escape, that you are becoming aware that there are methods and devices through which you can get out of the prison, that there are keys which can unlock the doors, and ladders which can be used to climb the walls, and there are means which can be used to bribe the guards. That's what sannyas means: one is becoming aware of all these possibilities and one starts enquiring what is beyond the walls. The true life is beyond the walls. God is available only to those who are free, not to those who are slaves.
That is the meaning of your name: bliss that comes to one who remains himself, who does not compromise, who does not sell his being for any comforts, security, safety. Bliss comes as a gift to those who are rebellious; bliss is for the rebellious souls. I teach rebellion!
[The new sannyasin says he doesn't know where he belongs.... he has been doing nothing for the last six months.]
You are getting ready to be here. If you do nothing for six months, then this is the place! Where else can you go? "Nothing' is dangerous. You can come here and be here, part of the family.
[A sannyasin asks: Could show to me the bridge between the divine kingdom, the mystical kingdom, and the mystical marketplace.]
The bridge is always within you. You are the bridge, and you can bridge anything: Buddha and Jesus, the marketplace and the mystical kingdom, relationship and solitude, matter and God. You can bridge anything. You are the bridge; there is no other bridge. Whenever you are in a state of witnessing you can bridge anything. That is the secret. Don't judge, don't evaluate. Just watch - a pure seeing, whatsoever is - and you will be surprised that in seeing without any judgment, bridging happens.
Those who can remain a silent witness to all that goes on around have bridged the marketplace and the mystical kingdom. They may be in the marketplace but they are in the mystical kingdom through their witnessing; they are in the world and not part of it, because that witnessing energy is always a transcendental force. It cannot be reduced to anything objective.
It is very elusive: if you want to catch hold of it, you will never be able to. If you don't try to catch hold of it, it is in your hands, it is all yours. If you run after it, you will not find it; if you stand still, it is there.
So learn to witness more and more: outer things, people, nature. Witness - don't forget that you are just a witness, a watcher. Then inner things - thoughts, desires, memories - watch and remember that you are a witness.
This is what George Gurdjieff used to call self-remembering. Continuously remember that you are a witness; never for a moment let this remembrance lapse. Many times you will forget and you will become identified. The moment you remember that you have forgotten, don't repent. Don't waste time in repentance, because that is getting identified with a new idea, the idea of repentance.
Don't feel guilty, otherwise again you are identified. Just take note that you had forgotten, that's all:
remember again. No need to repent, no need to feel guilty. Again start watching, and slowly slowly, the knack...
It is a knack, it is not even an art, because art can be taught but the knack cannot be taught - that is the difference. It is a knack. Doing it one learns only by forgetting many times, going astray, coming back again; one learns only by trial and error. Nobody can teach it to you, but you can still learn it.
And that is the bridge. Then it is not a question of what you want to bridge: the whole existence is bridged.
Suddenly all that was falling apart, was contradictory, inconsistent, opposed to other things, is no more opposed, is no more contradictory. On the contrary, all the contradictories become supplementaries and all the opposites become polarities of one energy. And out of that witnessing arises a great harmony. The whole existence is felt in deep harmony. That harmony is God, that harmony is truth; that harmony is nirvana, enlightenment.
So it is not a question of bridging this and that. If one has to bridge each time, then one will have to create millions of bridges and still there will be left many things left unbridged. I give you the simple secret through which everything becomes bridged, the master key: witnessing is the master key.
You need not carry many keys for each different lock; only one key opens all the locks.