Darshan 28 August 1979

Anand Terry. Anand means bliss, terry means wealth and peace. Bliss is both. It is wealth, the real wealth, wealth that cannot be stolen; not even death can take it away. And it is peace, it is ultimate peace, indestructible. There is no way to disturb it. Disturbances can be created but they will remain just the cyclone - and bliss remains the center of the cyclone, absolutely undisturbed. Noise may be there, but deep at the very core of your being, silence prevails.

Attain to bliss and you attain to the kingdom of God, you attain to treasures which are inexhaustible, and you attain to a peace which is not of this world. What we call peace in this world is nothing but the gap between two disturbances, the gap between two wars. It is really cold war, it is not peace; it is preparation for war.

The real peace is not something like an interval between two disturbances, two wars; it is a transcendence of all conflict, of all duality.

And that is the true function of meditation: to create a space in you where you can be rich, infinitely rich, utterly peaceful, absolutely ecstatic.

Devanando means divine bliss. Bliss is always something that comes from the beyond; it is always a gift, never an achievement. You cannot be ambitious for it; you can only pray. You cannot desire it; you can only wait. If your waiting is total and your patience is infinite it comes in its own time. And when it comes of its own accord it transforms your whole being. When somehow you manage to bring it, it never comes in the first place, and what comes in its place is something false, manufactured by the mind. Apparently it is bliss, but only apparently: deep inside the torment continues, the nightmare continues. You remain sitting on the volcano; it can empty any moment.

But when real peace, real bliss, real silence, descends from the beyond - not that you bring it, but when it comes, showers on you, slowly slowly penetrates and permeates your whole being - you

are transformed, you are no more the same person. The old is gone and gone forever. The new has come, and the new knows no death, the new is eternal.

Prem Samadhi. Prem means love; samadhi means ecstasy.

The true way to ecstasy is love; all other ways are false. Love is the only bridge between man and God. Except love nothing else is needed, but to create love one has to die: one has to die as an ego, one has to disappear as a separate entity. One has to merge and melt with existence. Just as a river disappears in the ocean, in the same way one has to learn how not to be.

That's the whole art of love: how not to be. But the paradox is that if you know how not to be, you immediately know that this is real being. This is what real being is, not the ego that we used to think we are. And when the real being is there, there is ecstasy, grace, beatitude, benediction.

Anand Ira. Anand means bliss; ira means a messenger of peace. Bliss is the messenger of peace.

The moment you become blissful, your whole life becomes a message. Not that you try, not that you have to do something deliberately; it happens of its own accord. Your very blissfulness starts creating vibes of peace all around. Whoever comes in contact with you is immediately touched by something invisible.

If the person is open, if the person is not insane, if the person is not insensitive, if the person is not utterly closed, windowless, the message immediately goes like an arrow into his heart. To be blissful is to be in the service of God. To be blissful is to be a blessing to the world. There is no other way to help people to attain to God than to be blissful: your bliss becomes a proof that God is.

No argument can convince anyone about God's existence, for or against - no argument is conclusive. Only bliss suddenly makes people aware that life as we know it is not the end; that there is something more to it, something hidden, something that has to be discovered yet; that it is a pilgrimage and there are mysteries and mysteries.

God means the ultimate mystery. And the only message that has to be given to the world is that you are living amidst the ultimate mystery and yet absolutely oblivious of it. The blissful person hits people's heart deeply; that's why sometimes they cannot forgive the blissful person, because the blissful person creates a disturbance in their settled lives. The blissful person becomes a challenge, the blissful person becomes a call for an adventure, the adventure into the unknown.

That's why they crucified Jesus: they could not tolerate his bliss, they could not tolerate his love; it was too much. The man had to be destroyed, removed. His presence was becoming such a call that there was only one alternative left: either destroy Jesus or destroy your old pattern of life and go with him. There was no other alternative.

When you are with a Buddha or a Jesus or a Socrates, only one alternative is there: either drown yourself in the Buddha, in the Christ, or destroy him, so that the door closes and you can be at ease with your established pattern, life, securities, safety.

Prem Manfred. Prem means love; manfred means a man of peace. Only a man full of love can be a man of peace. Without love you cannot have peace; the heart full of hate cannot be peaceful. It is impossible for the heart full of anger to know anything of peace. Only in the heart overflowing with love glow the flowers of peace.

Be loving, be love, and you will know what peace is. And it is a must to know peace. Without knowing it, if one dies, one has lived in vain. One lived not at all, one simply dragged oneself, because without knowing peace one cannot know God. Peace is the door. It is peace that will make your eyes clear to see God, but before peace can happen you have to prepare your heart for love.

Love brings peace; peace opens the door of the temple of God.

Prem Diana. Prem means love; diana means bright as day. Love is the beginning of a bright day, love is the dawn. Without love a man is nothing but a dark night, a dark night without stars, without the moon, a dark night without even a candle.

A man without love lives in hell. It is love that helps you to come out of the darkness. It is love that brings poetry to your being. It wakes you up into awareness. It is the beginning of the day. The day represents awareness, consciousness; the night represents unconsciousness. And without love there is no possibility of the dawn. Once you have known love, even the night is as bright as the day.

Then it is full of stars and moon, then it has its own luminousness.

Diana has another meaning also: it is the name of the goddess of the moon. Again, it is rooted in the idea of light. If the moon is there, if the full moon is there, even the night is no longer night. If you are awake, alert, conscious, then even in hell you will create your own heaven.

Once a man asked Buddha, "Can a good man fall into hell?"

Buddha said, "That is impossible. He may fall into hell, but wherever he is he will be in heaven, because a really good man carries his heaven around himself. You can throw him into hell but he will create a small, beautiful heaven there. And the bad man carries a hell around himself. He can manage to bribe the gatekeepers of heaven and enter, but he will create a hell there."

It is not really that heaven and hell exist outside; we go on creating them around ourselves. Just like the spider creates its web out of itself, we create our heaven, our hell; we create our night, our day.

Prem Anito. Prem means love; anito means beyond morality. Love knows no morality, because morality is needed only by those who don't know love. Morality is a social substitute for the missing love. We have to tell people to do this, not to do that, we have to give them commandments, because they don't have love in their heart. If love is there then no commandments are needed, then love is enough unto itself then it will show you the way, then it will always give you an inner direction.

An inner voice will remain available to you, an inner guide will always be there. In every situation, infallibly, you will receive a direct message from God; only love is needed in the heart.

To be loving means to be in contact with God.

Love needs no morality; it is only the unloving person who needs morality. Because the society is very unloving, we need so much morality, law, codes, ethics, this and that, and still man goes on doing all kinds of crimes, goes on doing all kinds of sins. All the morality and all the preaching seems to have no real impact. In fact it is not the real medicine, it is not the real cure.

The real cure is love, not morality. The real cure is love, not character. Love creates its own fluid character. It creates its own insight, its own morality. But love's morality is very spontaneous, it is not ready-made. You act moment to moment out of your love, and whatsoever is done out of love is good; whatsoever is done without love is bad - that's my definition of good and bad.

Anand Kamala. Anand means bliss; kamala means lotus - a lotus of bliss.

In the East the lotus represents the ultimate unfoldment of consciousness. It is the biggest flower and the most beautiful and it has a few qualities of a sannyasin.

The first: it grows out of dirty mud. The most beautiful flower, growing out of dirty mud, is very significant. It shows you the way of transformation: how the lower can be transformed into the higher, how the mundane can become sacred, how even the earthly can be used to create a paradise. The earth has not to be renounced, the mud has not to be destroyed, but used, alchemically used, so that the base metal can be changed into gold.

Secondly: it grows in water, floats on water, and that's how a sannyasin should be: living in the world, floating in the world, in, yet above - in the lake but above the lake.

And thirdly: it has such smoothness, it is so velvety, that the water cannot touch it. It remains in the water and yet untouched by the water. That is the third quality of a sannyasin: remaining in the world nd yet remaining absolutely untouched by it.

Real sannyas is not renunciation, it is rejoicing In the world. It is an art of living in the world in such a way that you are in the world but the world is not in you, that you are of the world, but not of the world... The art of being in the world, yet remaining beyond it.

Satyam Anando. Satyam means truth; anando means bliss.

Being truthful, absolutely truthful, within and without, creates the right space for bliss to descend.

Being untruthful, being unauthentic, being false, pretentious, living in lies, fills you with so much garbage, with such dirt, that bliss cannot enter you. Bliss needs a certain purity, a certain cleanliness, a certain emptiness. And the untruthful mind is never empty. If you say one lie, you will have to say a hundred lies to save the first lie, to protect it. And then it is an unending process.

A man who lives through lies has to be continuously on guard, tense; he has to be very cunning so that he is not caught. You can fool a few people for the time being, but you cannot fool all the people, all the time, so you are afraid of being caught sooner or later. The untruthful man cannot live the life of freedom. He lives in fear, he lives in guilt; he lives continuously afraid of being persecuted, afraid of being found, of being caught. And the more he is afraid of being caught, the more lies he goes on spinning and weaving around himself. That is how a man becomes more and more burdened by his own falsities.

To be a sannyasin means getting out of it, jumping out of it, and starting calling a spade a spade That's what sannyas is all about: being utterly truthful... not to hurt anybody, but just to be simple, straightforward. Not cultivating truth as a virtue to attain something in the afterlife, no, but simply being truthful because being truthful is being joyous, being truthful is being unafraid, being truthful keeps one clean. And in that cleanliness, bliss comes one day. When you are really ready and your heart has become a lotus of purity, bliss comes dancing, just like a ray of light from the beyond. And once you are touched by the beyond you are really born for the first time.

That is the birth Jesus speaks of again and again: Unless you are born again, you shall not enter into my kingdom of God.

Jesus also says: Truth liberates. And he is absolutely right. It is the lying mind that is our bondage.

The moment you become true to yourself and to the world, the moment you drop all your masks, liberation is immediate, liberation is instantaneous; not even a moment is lost. You are immediately a different being: you are a Buddha, you are a Christ, you are a Krishna. And to be reborn through truth is to know all the joys of life, all the mysteries of life, all the gifts and glories of life... And they are infinite.