Darshan 9 September 1979
Prem Alice. Prem means love; alice means truthful one, noble one, cheerful one. They are all the three great qualities - truth, nobility and cheerfulness - but they all come through love!
Bliss is the ultimate goal of life, and the people who become blissful, naturally become messengers of God; not that they have to do something - their very blissfulness becomes a message to the world, their very cheerfulness is heard far and wide. Even if they are silent, their bliss speaks, and bliss is very eloquent. It may not use language, but in a subtle way, through the vibration, through the pulsation of the person's presence it reaches many many people.
God does not have a message which can be contained in words. All words falsify truth, and all gospels become anti-God finally, because the moment you enclose truth in words it dies. It is like a bird on the wing. When the bird is on the wing it has a beauty a joy, a cheerfulness, an aliveness, a freedom. Catch hold of the bird, trap it, put it into a beautiful cage made of gold, studded with diamonds, and you have destroyed the beauty of the bird. The freedom, the joy all are gone. Now the bird cannot sing. You have murdered something immensely valuable.
That's what happens when truth is made into a doctrine. The real messenger of God is one who pulsates joy, who transforms very situation into an opportunity for joy for dancing, for singing.
The ego is the hindrance; love cannot flow, the ego becomes the barrier. When there is no ego, love flows silently. That silence has a music of its own.
It can happen between two persons, it can happen between a person and a tree, it can happen between a person and a rock. It is simply a flow of energy. It has nothing to do particularly with man and woman; that is only one of the expressions of the energy. But we have become too obsessed with it, and the obsession is created by our so-called saints. Because they condemned it as a sin,
they made it too important, they have made it too attractive. Condemn anything as a sin and it becomes a magnetic force. Our beings start seeking and searching for it. If it is called a sin, and if saints are against it, and even God is against it, there must be something in it: there must be a treasure hidden behind it.
If God is so against it that you will be thrown into hell for eternity, then it can't be just an ordinary thing. So much punishment for it becomes an allurement. That's why love has become confined to one manifestation, man-woman; otherwise, love has nothing to do with man and woman as such.
Sex, reproduction, may have something to do with man and woman, but love has nothing to do with them. It can happen between man and woman; it can happen between man and man, woman and woman; it can happen between a man and a dog, man and a tree. And ultimately it need not have the other at all. The other is only on the way; it is a preparation for the ultimate love to happen. The ultimate love is not a relationship, it is simply your very nature. One is simply loving, one is in a state of love. And the day this promise is fulfilled, one has arrived home.
Sannyas is a promise - a promise that you will fulfill love, that you will become love. And if one becomes love, God is not far away, because love is another name of God, and a far better name than God itself, because the word "god" has become so polluted so contaminated. The priests have used it for so many centuries, for such wrong motives, that the very word has become a curse. It does not help your heart to dance; it has become like a burden, it has become heavy.
Nothing is wrong with the word itself, but the long, long association with the established religion and all the nonsense that the established religion has been doing, and all the bloody wars, crusades and murders... People have been burned alive in the name of God, people have been raped, children have been killed, massacred. The whole history is full of blood in the name of God; hence the word itself has become heavy.
Love is far more pure - it still has the freshness of the mountain air. Fulfill love and all is fulfilled.
[Deva Willy - divine resolution]
Sannyas is a divine resolution; it is not that you are taking it, it is the call of God that you have heard deep down in your heart. It is not a conclusion of your mind but a resolution of the heart, and there is a great difference between a conclusion and a resolution.
A conclusion is human - it may be right, it may be wrong, because to err is human - but a resolution is always divine. It arises out of the heart. It is intuitive, not intellectual. It comes out of your feeling, out of your love, and it is never wrong. It cannot be wrong; it is infallible, it is always right.
The mind is always in a split - to be or not to be. Whatsoever you do the other alternative is always there torturing you: maybe that was right. Whatsoever you do with the mind, you will repent, but when you do something out of the heart no repentance is possible because there is no alternative.
The heart knows only one, that's why the heart is always unwavering.
And I can see that this sannyas is out of your heart. It is going to transform your whole life. The few days that are left, the last phase of your life, may become the most precious part of your life. It is going to become, because if we can die meditatively, lovingly, prayerfully, then we don't die at all; then we enter into eternity. And that is the aim of sannyas: to help you rise above time and to enter the eternal. How long will you be here?
[Deva Thane. Thane has three meanings... ]
One is attendant. From this moment become attendant to God, become surrendered to God, just a servant, a slave. And if the ego is not there then slavery is not a slavery, it is freedom, and to be a servant is not to be a servant but to be the master.
It is by being attendant to God, serving Him, that one comes closer and closer to Him. God is not a person somewhere high above, in heaven; God is manifest in millions of forms around you.
Serve them all! Let service be the motive: wherever you find an opportunity to serve, don't miss it, because it is prayer. But don't serve in order to get something. The moment any condition, expectation, desire, enters into it, it loses its sacredness, it becomes mundane. Serve without purpose, because that is the only true service.
The second meaning is a follower. A true follower is really a slave: a "slave" in inverted commas, not with the meaning that is given in the books. It has nothing to do with the so-called slavery, it is a totally different experience.
If the slavery is forced on you it is ugly and political; it is inhuman. One should rebel against all kinds of slaveries, that kind of slavery. But there is a totally different dimension: you can surrender on your own, not that it is enforced on you, but out of your love and trust you surrender. Then surrender is beautiful.
Only a surrendered person is a follower. A follower is not one who believes in a certain dogma, doctrine, church - no. A follower is one who has fallen in love with God, not in love with certain theory, but with the truth of God - not the theology; the theology is manmade - the truth of existence.
One has not to believe in a book. The only book worth believing is the book of the universe. It is not written with ink on paper; it is spread all over space - in stars, in the sum, in the moon, in trees, in people, in animals. This is the script of God, this is his alphabet. One has to learn this language.
One has to decode trees and rocks and stars, and then God is found everywhere.
And the third meaning is a warrior. First become a slave - by becoming a slave you become a follower, and by becoming a follower you become a warrior because you have to fight for God.
The world is really against God: the churches are against God, the priests are against God, the politicians are against God. Although they use the name of God and pretend to be representatives of God, they are not; they are the killers of God. The have destroyed the very possibility of God's experience on the earth. They have deprived millions of people of reaching towards God. They have deprived them in such a subtle way that very rarely does one become aware. They have filled your minds with beliefs, and because of those beliefs, you never enquire. They have made such a pseudo religion that one remains satisfied with the pseudo and never searches for the real.
A man of God is of necessity a warrior. He has to fight against all convention, all conformities, all traditions, all scriptures, all churches, all dogmas - and he has to fight it all alone. But it is a joy to fight for God, it is joy to be killed in the name of God. There can be no better death, and there can be no better life. To live for God and to die for God - that is in essence what sannyas is all about: to live for God and to die for God.