Darshan 21 August 1979
Deva Ethel. Deva means divine; ethel means noble.
Man remains an animal unless something of the divine penetrates him. Man is just an animal without God. But the uniqueness of man consists in his being able to become available to God; no other animal can become available. All other animals remain closed; they live a closed life, absolutely preconditioned, destined. There is no freedom, no choice.
Man can choose either to be with God or to be against God. If one chooses to be with God one be comes noble. If one chooses to be against God one falls even below the animals; one becomes ignoble.
Anand Rosebud. Anand means bliss; rosebud means rose.
Bliss is a rose of consciousness. It is a flowering of your inner being. It is the release of your fragrance. Everybody carries it within himself, unaware, oblivious of it, uncaring about it, inattentive; hence the bush never grows, rosebuds never appear on it. The roses remain only in dreams. And man dreams of roses. Man would like to become a flower, man would like to become a bird on the wing, man would like to touch the stars - but all these things remain just dreams. They can all become realities: man can be a rose, man can be a bird on the wing, man can not only touch the stars, man can become a star himself.
All that potential remains potential; we never actualize it. Our whole life remains concerned with small, mundane things. I am not against the mundane world, but to remain confined to the mundane is to remain stuck, stagnant, and that stagnancy creates misery. Joy is in the flow. If one goes on flowing and growing, joy continuously follows one like a shadow.
Man's life is not that of matter; it is pure energy, the purest form of energy, and energy needs movement, energy needs growth. Keep it confined to a certain state and it feels suffocated. That's how millions of people go on feeling: suffocated. Something is missing; they know that something is missing, but they are afraid to deeply research into what it is. They want to avoid it. They keep themselves engaged somewhere else, so that they don't become concerned too much about the missing thing. That which is missing is simply the flow, the growth, the opening, of the rose.
Sannyas is nothing but an effort to transform your potential into an actuality, to bring your seeds to roses. Then bliss is yours, then benediction is yours, then ecstasy is yours; and life is meant to be a benediction, a blessing, an ecstasy.
Anand Enrica. Anand means bliss; bliss is a state beyond all duality. It is neither pleasure nor pain: it is a state of utter peace. Even pleasure is a disturbance. Pain, everybody knows, is a disturbance, but those who have known bliss know that pleasure is also a disturbance; that not only is death a disturbance, but life too... but only for those who have known bliss. Then sadness and joy, unhappiness and happiness, darkness and night, day - they all disappear. One is left in absolute bliss, and that is the moment when one becomes the master of oneself. That is the meaning of enrica: a home-ruler.
The body is the home, the mind also; beyond the body and the mind there is a witnessing consciousness. Unless one knows it one remains a slave, either of the mind or of the body, or of both.
Sannyas is initiation into that witnessing. Sannyas is not something on the outside; the outer is only symbolic. It is something inner. It is shifting yourself from mind to consciousness. It is moving from thoughts to the witness of thoughts, and immediately one becomes a Master.
That mastery has to be achieved. It is difficult, arduous, but immense is the benefit. Even the effort to achieve it is immensely beneficial; even the effort brings a grace to you. Just the idea of reaching it and you are a totally different person, because a new ray of light has already entered you. You can never be the same again.
Anand Sundram. Anand means bliss; sundram means beauty - beauty that comes through bliss.
There is a beauty of the body and there is a beauty of the soul. The beauty of the body is ordinary, momentary: today it is there, tomorrow it may not be there. And the beauty of the body is more in the eyes of the looker than in the object of beauty itself, because the same person may be thought beautiful by one, may be thought ugly by another. But the beauty of the soul is something inner. It is not in the eyes of the onlooker, because it cannot be seen; it is not a question of seeing. It can only be felt. It is not a beauty that can be destroyed by anything. Not even death can touch it, fire cannot burn it; it is eternal.
In the East mystics have talked about God in two ways. Those who were more intellectually oriented have talked about God as satchidananda. Sat means truth, chid means consciousness, ananda means bliss. Those who were not so intellectually oriented, who were more emotional, devotional, more poetic, more of the heart - they have talked about God as satyam, shivam, sunderam: truth, goodness and beauty. These are the two trinities talked about in the East.
Truth is the same in both; it has to be so because God is: that isness is his truth. But then the differences come. The intellectually oriented think of God as consciousness, and then as bliss, because consciousness is continuously seeking for bliss. It is a search for bliss, so the ultimate goal becomes bliss. But the poetic approach is different. The ultimate goal is always beauty; bliss is a byproduct. When you have experienced the ultimate beauty of existence you feel bliss, but that is a byproduct, a consequence; it is not the goal. To the poet it is not relevant even to talk about it. It comes on its own, just as when listening to beautiful music you feel surrounded by a bliss, but your concern is the music, the beauty of it.
Watching a beautiful sunset, a bliss descends, but that is a consequence; it is not the goal. Your concern is the sunset. You are so absorbed in the sunset that bliss has to happen. In such utter silence, in such utter absorption with something beautiful, bliss is bound to happen. One need not think about it.
Hence in the poet's description of God, satyam - truth - is there; then the change starts, then the paths divert. The second is not consciousness but goodness, virtue, grace, purity, innocence - those are all the meanings of shivam. And when one is graceful, virtuous, pure, innocent, beauty arrives. That beauty is spiritual beauty. You cannot find it in the outer world; you have to go in to the innermost... in the innermost shrine of your being it lives.
But both descriptions are right. They are simply symptomatic of two different minds. Humanity can be divided into two different minds: the intellect-oriented person and the emotion-oriented person.
For you the second orientation will be helpful, hence I am reminding you - and your name will constantly remind you - be a poet. Your approach towards life has to be that of a poet, of a dancer, of a singer, of a musician. Let God come to you as beauty. Seek and search for beauty, and wherever you find beauty, bow down. By the side of a rosebush, at the time of sunset, seeing a white cloud floating in the sky, surrender! That will be your prayer. That is going to be your path.
Anand means bliss; satyam means truth.
Life can be lived as truth, or as untruth. Ordinarily people live life as untruth. They think it is very clever, intelligent. It is not; it is sheer stupidity. They think they are deceiving others; in fact they are deceived themselves. And when they die their hands will be empty, because you cannot take an untrue life with you beyond death.
To be a sannyasin means a decision to live life as truth, as authenticity. Be yourself, whatsoever the cost. Even if one has to pay with one's life, it is worth paying, because truth is the highest value; everything can be sacrificed to truth. Don't be pseudo, don't wear masks. Don't pretend; just be simple, true, and express yourself as you are. In the beginning it is difficult and hard because the whole world lives in the pseudo way, but slowly slowly, it is tremendously paying, because untruth can never make you happy; it brings more and more misery, more and more complexity. Assert one lie and then you will have to assert one thousand and one lies to defend it. And this is how people become confused, insane, a chaos.
Say the truth and you need not defend it; you need not even remember it. Be the truth and your life will remain very simple, uncomplicated. To live a simple life does not mean to live the life of a poor man. To live a simple life means to live the life of truth. Then there is no inner complication: one is whatsoever one is. Slowly slowly, people also start accepting one's truth, accepting the way one is.
And whether they accept or not is not the point.
Even if one has to suffer for being true, it is good. That suffering is a cleansing; that suffering will bring maturity, integrity, growth.
Deva Pritamo. Deva means God; pritamo means beloved. Let God be the beloved.
Seek and search for God in everything that you are doing, and you will find him everywhere. Eating food, eat him; drinking water, drink him. Then the taste of the food is his taste, and the coolness of water is his coolness. Breathe him in and out. Let him surround you in every possible way. When you see the stars think of him. When you watch people know that these are all his forms.
In the beginning you will have to remember it, but soon it becomes natural. Then one need not remember; it simply remains there. It becomes an undercurrent in your consciousness.
This is the method Sufis call zikr: remembering God continuously, in each act, in everything that you come across. And you can be certain that one day God is going to knock at your door. If your love is enough, if your love is total, God is going to happen. It has always been so, it will always be so: it is the eternal law.
Prem Dwaro. Prem means love; dwaro means the door.
Love is the door, the door to all that is valuable, the door to all that is significant, the door to all that is worth achieving. Anything that can be achieved without love is bound to be worthless. Love is the criterion, so judge everything by love.
Money can be achieved without love, in fact it can be achieved only without love. Political power can be achieved only without love; in fact only in a really loveless manner can one have political power, otherwise not. That means that these things are not worth trying.
But music cannot be achieved without love, and poetry will not be possible without love, and dance will not be born. That means that these things are worth going into. And what starts as music ends as meditation. What starts as poetry one day is found to have led you into some unknown territories, some uncharted seas; and those uncharted, unknown, unmapped territories are what God is all about.
What starts as dance sooner or later takes you into such ecstasies where ego disappears, where even the dancer is not found anymore; only the dance remains. And when only the dance remains, you have arrived; the door has opened.
Love is the door to God and to all that helps to reach God.
[A sannyasin says: Often I feel rejection, especially from girls I'm attracted to. I feel very stuck and all my energy is in the head and I feel like a fool.]
Just wait - you have come to the right place! Here, no man is afraid of being rejected but every woman is afraid! Men are proving such cowards here that they try to escape from girls.
This is a different world: the girls are chasing the boys! You will not be saved - you wait!
You have come to the right place, Gokul. This problem will disappear; after three months you will bring just the opposite problem!
Have you booked for a few groups?... Do these two and then I will give you a few more, mm? And don't be afraid: just being here for a few days and the problem will disappear.