Darshan 19 September 1979
Anand Gerard. Anand means bliss; gerard mean brave, courageous, and it also means a loyal heart - a blissful, courageous, loyal heart. And these are the basic qualities of a religious consciousness.
Religion has nothing to do with seriousness; seriousness is pathology. Religion is playful, sportlike, it is fun. Prayer is playing with God, and it is possible only if one remembers that one has to continuously choose to be cheerful. Mind tends to be serious and sad. Mind exists and lives in misery; misery is food for it. The moment you are blissful, mind disappears - hence the beauty of laughter. Laughter has something intrinsically spiritual in it: when you really laugh, mind disappears, and time also disappears. In total laughter you are herenow. There is no ego, nobody is laughing in you - it is pure laughter.
The actor disappears, the doer disappears, only the happening remains. That is the beauty of blissfulness, and its benediction. It is possible only for a courageous person because it needs guts to lose the mind. It needs guts to get out of the calculative mechanism of the mind, and unless you get out of the mind you can't enter into the heart.
Mind is doubt; the heart is trust, and trust is the door to the divine.
Hate is part of our unconsciousness: the more unconscious we are, the more hateful. The moment one starts waking up, becomes more alert, more aware, more conscious, one starts changing from darkness to light. That is real transformation - not the change in your character but the change in your very consciousness. And the moment you are full of light, your life is full of love. That love is real character - not the so-called cultivated virtue.
This inner light is possible only through being more alert. That's what meditation is all about: the art of alertness. Ordinarily we live like robots: mechanically, repetitively. We have to de-automatize
ourselves, we have to make each act conscious. Small, ordinary acts, walking, sitting, standing, they all have to be changed into awareness.
Walk, but remain a witness to it. Eat, and remain a witness to it. Think, and remain a witness to it. Slowly slowly you start accumulating great reservoirs of awareness in you. At a certain point awareness changes into light. Just as at one hundred degrees' heat water evaporates, when your being is full of light your actions are full of love. Then love is spontaneous. You are not even thinking of it, you are not doing it: it is happening. You become just a medium to God.
God is love.
[Satyam Gunnar: truth is the greatest battle]
It is the greatest battle because it needs tremendous consciousness to win over the mind. The mind has lived long, very long; millions of years it has existed. It has a long tradition, a great past; it is very deep-rooted. It is not easy to win over it. It will try to destroy all your methods, it will resist all your efforts.
To attain to truth simply means getting beyond the mind. The mind is the barrier; it has to be removed. You cannot see truth through the mind. It is impossible, because the mind distorts everything, contorts everything, interprets everything, colors everything. The moment it reaches you it is no more the same, it is something totally different. The mind has to be completely still, only then can truth reach to you and you can be available to truth.
You have a beautiful name, but now you will need to attain to its meaning too. Sannyas is going to be a battle, the greatest battle, because it is an effort to achieve the ultimate, the highest peak of consciousness. It is the effort to attain Everest, the virgin snows of Everest. It is a long, arduous climb, full of hazards, dangers, but full of joy too, full of thrill too... a tremendous adventure. It has nothing to do with traditional religion.
Traditional religion is for cowards: real religion is for brave people. Be a warrior, and don't let the mind dominate you any more.
[The difference between rebellion and revolution]
Revolution is political; rebellion is spiritual. Revolution is of the crowd; rebellion is individual. All revolutions have failed. Whenever rebellion has been tried it has never failed, but very few people have tried it: a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarathustra... very few people. But whenever it has been tried it has succeeded, it has never failed.
Revolution is based in hatred; rebellion is based in love. You rebel out of love. Revolution is destructive, bound to be so, because out of hate nothing else can happen. Rebellion is creative, because love is the most creative energy. When you rebel out of love your rebellion has a grace to it, a beauty, a truth, which is not of the earth, which comes from the beyond.
Sannyas is a rebellion. My whole teaching is of love and rebellion. If we can create enough people, rebellious but based and rooted in love, man can be saved yet! It is late, very late, but there is still a possibility of saving man. Revolutions cannot save; we need more Buddhas, more Christs, more Krishnas. We don't need Christians, Buddhists, Hindus - we need lovers, mad lovers of life, because unless you love life madly, you never come across God.
[Veetgyan: beyond knowledge]
Truth is beyond knowledge; love is beyond knowledge; bliss is beyond knowledge; God beyond knowledge. All that is really valuable is beyond knowledge. Knowledge only consists of rubbish. It only consists of information, it only consists of things, objects. In that sense science is knowledge; the word "science" exactly means knowledge. But religion is not knowledge, religion is experience.
Science is experiment; religion is experience. You can experiment with objects but you can only experience your subjectivity. You can know objects but you cannot know the knower; you can only feel it. And the knower is the real thing, the center of all.
Meditation takes you to the knower. It takes you withinwards, it takes you to yourself: it is self- encounter. But when you really reach the center of your being there is no division between the knower and the known. The knower is the known, the observer is the observed, the seer is the seen. The lover and the beloved are no more separate; they are one, one organic unity. That is the meaning of your name, Veetgyan, and that is the target, the commitment. It has to be fulfilled.
Don't postpone it for tomorrow, for another life. The mind always tries to postpone things: it says "We will do it tomorrow," and anything can be done only now and here. So live in the moment, and try to transcend the mind, because the mind is knowledge. Get more and more rooted in the witness who can observe even the mind, who can see the mind and its movements. Remember that you are the witness and not the witnessed; that you are consciousness and not the content of consciousness.
Sooner or later this remembrance deepens and then you are on the right track. Then any day the door opens. It is unpredictable when it will open, but any moment it can open. Once you are on the right track God is not far away; God is just around the comer.