Darshan 27 August 1979

Prem Els. Prem means love. Els comes from the Hebrew root "el"; it means divine, godly.

Love is the most divine phenomenon in existence. It is the highest peak. Nothing is higher than love. It opens the doors to all the mysteries of existence, it is the master key. One who knows love is bound to know God sooner or later. It is impossible to avoid God if you know love, and vice versa:

it is impossible to know God if you don't know what love is. So in fact, God is not as important as love, because God can never be known without love.

Love can be known without God; love has to be known first without God. Only slowly slowly, as love becomes integrated, as it becomes mature, as it starts blossoming, as the spring comes, does one become aware of God. It is the eye of love that makes you capable of seeing God. Certainly the eye is more important than the light, because without the eye the light cannot be seen, and without love God cannot be seen.

So if one can only remember love, that's enough. More than that of religion is sickening; more than that is arbitrary, unnecessary garbage. And sometimes it happens, the "more" is so much that it crushes and kills love, it becomes tOo much of a burden. Avoid theology if you want to know God, avoid religion if you want tO know God, but know the poetry of love the music of love.

Prem Alex. Prem means love; alex comes from alexander. Avoid being an Alexander! Everybody deep down wants to be an Alexander. The ambitious mind - and all minds are ambitious - is bound to be in some way or other trying to become Alexander, the great conqueror: famous, powerful, dominating.

But the literal meaning of Alex is very beautiful. Alexander was just the opposite of his name: Alex means a helper of mankind - and he was the enemy. It also means that which dispels evil, and he was evil incarnate.

So remember, your name will mean love, the helper of mankind. Love dispels evil as light dispels darkness, and just by being loving one helps tremendously. One need not do anything in particular for humanity, but if one is full of love, then whatsoever one does is a help; one cannot do otherwise.

Each breath is full of prayer, full of compassion, and each act comes out of that compassion and prayer and love. It can't be destructive; it can only be creative.

Even if a loving man sits silently, doing nothing, he helps tremendously. He raises the level of consciousness of the whole of humanity just by sitting in his room. He may not go out of the room even, may not do anything in particular, may not open schools and hospitals, may not serve the poor and the ill, may not do anything at all, may be a non-doer. He may be a man like me who never goes out of his room - but his non-doing creates a pulsation, a vibration; he raises the level of consciousness of the whole of humanity. That has always been the way of the Buddhas: wu-wei, action through inaction - that is their whole secret.

I am not saying that if you feel like doing something, don't do it. If you feel like doing something, do it. If your love expresses itself through action, good. If it simply expresses itself in non-action, that too is good, but one thing has to be there: a loving heart, a heart overflowing with love.

Anand Isa. Anand means bliss. Isa comes from the Hebrew root "el"; it means god, godly, divine.

Your name will mean godly bliss, divine bliss. All bliss is divine. Happiness is human, misery is human. But bliss is divine, because bliss is a transcendence of both happiness and unhappiness; it is a state of tremendous peace.

Happiness, unhappiness, both create a kind of excitement. For those who are really very sensitive even happiness is a disturbance because it creates ripples in their being. For the insensitive happiness seems to be the goal, but for the really sensitive and alert, happiness has never been the goal, but bliss. That is far away from happiness, as far away as it is from unhappiness. In fact the distance between bliss and happiness and bliss and unhappiness is equal.

It is like a triangle. Bliss is far away from the base; the base angles are at an equidistance, so it is neither happiness nor unhappiness. It is something totally different, so totally different that it is inexpressible in any language.

"Bliss" is only an approximate word. It does not really express it; nothing can express it; it can only be experienced.

And the moment you are in a state of bliss, you are in a state of godliness. You are no more a part of the gross material world; you are no more identified with the body or the mind. You are a pure transcendence, a watcher on the hills. And the valleys, the dark valleys, are left far behind. They have become dreams. They have become as irrelevant as if they had never existed.

Deva Raje. Deva means divine; ra1e means queen.

Each person is a divine king or a divine queen. Nobody is born as a beggar. If we become beggars, that is because of our upbringing. It is because we are conditioned to be beggars. We are brought up in such a way that we become ambitious, full of desires, full of possessiveness, jealousies, and that is the way of being a beggar.

To be without ambition, without desire, without possessiveness, without jealousy, is the way of the king, the way of the queen - the royal way!

Our so-called kings and queens are also beggars because they live in the same ambitious way - in fact, more so. So sometimes it happens that a beggar is less of a beggar than the so-called king.

There is a Sufi story.

A great Sufi mystic, Farid, was very much respected by the emperor, Akbar. Akbar used to come to pay his respects to Farid, to his small village, just near Delhi. The villagers once told Farid, "If you say to Akbar - just a hint from your side is enough - that we need a school, our children can get easily educated. If you can just give a hint it will be done immediately. There is no question about it."

Farid said, "Then I will have to go to the court, because when he comes here it is not right to ask anything. If I have to ask something I have to go to his palace myself." So he went.

He arrived early in the morning. The king was in his prayer, but Farid was not prevented; everybody knew that the king respects him like a Master. So Farid went in, he stood behind the king. Akbar was praying with raised hands towards the sky. He was just finishing his prayer, and he said to God...

not knowing that Farid is present, not knowing that anybody is hearing, he said to God, "Give me more money, give me more power."

Farid turned away.

Akbar finished his prayer. He stood up and saw Farid going out of the room. He rushed, fell to his feet and asked, "This is the first time you have come - why are you going back without saying a single word?"

Farid said, "I was wrong. I used to think that you are a king - you are not. I am far better a king than you are. You are still asking, still demanding. What kind of prayer is this? It is begging, pure begging. I had come to ask for some favor, but now I cannot ask it of you; you are so poor that to ask for a school for the village will be too much for you. No, I am not going to ask. And moreover, if I have to ask, why should I not ask God himself? Rather than using you as a mediator - you ask God and I ask you - if I have to ask, I will ask God himself.

"But remember that one of my great illusions has disappeared. It has been good that I came: I have seen the beggar in you."

Akbar has written in his memoirs that, "I also became aware that although I am a great king," - he dominated the whole of India, in his time the Mogul empire was the greatest empire in the whole of the world - "I understood. Farid is right: I am a beggar and Farid is the true king."

Be a queen: be non-ambitious, desireless. That's what sannyas is all about: the art of being a king or a queen.

Anand Narayano. Anand means bliss; narayano means god. Bliss is God. Nobody is searching for God, everybody is searching for bliss; and it is natural, nothing is wrong in it.

How one can seek and search for God? - one knows nothing of God. There is no natural instinct for God. The intrinsic desire is to attain a state of peace, silence, joy. But the people who have attained to that state of peace, silence and joy, suddenly they become aware that existence is not what they used to think it is. It is full of divine presence. Matter disappears; instead of matter, the whole thing becomes a play of consciousness.

That consciousness, that pervading consciousness, that oceanic consciousness, is what has been named God. Nobody has been seeking and searching for it, but those who have found bliss have found it, certainly, absolutely, unexceptionally, because the moment you are utterly quiet, still, peaceful, joyous, you are a totally different person. You are whole, you are wholesome, you are healthy, you are sane. In that sanity your vision changes. Before that you were insane, and, of course, an insane man has an insane vision of the world.

The insane vision is the materialist vision; the sane vision is the religious vision. Religion is nothing but the experience of total sanity, of absolute health.