Darshan 20 September 1979
[Prem Paula]
The moment you say God, it creates an idea of a person, which is dangerous because there is no person, there is no God as a person. When you say love it does not give you any idea of a person; it simply gives you a vision, a vision of loving energy - a presence, not a person.
When you say God the distance between you and the word is millions of light years, it is very far away. It does not sound a bell in your heart. The priests have succeeded in creating a distance, an unbridgeable distance between you and God, because that is the only way for them to exploit you.
If God is far far away, then they can become the mediators, the agents, representatives of God. If God is very close by then the priest is not needed at all.
But when you assert the word "love" there is no distance; it is human. It is very close to the heart, it is the vibe of the heart. You start hearing the fluttering of the bird in your heart, as if it is ready to fly.
The word "god" is very prosaic; the word "love" is very poetic. The word "god" requires you to believe, and all beliefs are false. The doubt persists as an undercurrent to every belief.
Love needs no belief. Love is your experience. It is so human that everybody has known something of it; it is not absolutely unknown. Maybe only a fragment has been known, only a dewdrop and it is an ocean, but still we have tasted of it in some way or other.
If you have loved your friends, if you have loved music, if you have loved poetry, painting, if you have loved trees, birds, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars - if you have loved anything at all, you have tasted something of it; it is within your reach. It does not require you to become a theist, a believer.
Love is available to all: to theists, to atheists, to agnostics, to religious people, to irreligious people.
Love is available to all, hence my word for God is "love".
And "love" is not only my word for God, it is my word for the path too: it is both the end and the means. It is through love that you will attain to God. It is through love that you will become more and more loving. One day you will have disappeared and only love energy will be left behind, a dance of loving energy.
And Paula is a beautiful name. It has two roots. One is Latin; from the Latin root it means small, little. That's beautiful. Love needs you to be egoless, to be very small, so small that you disappear, that you become anonymous, that you are no more. Only in an egoless consciousness can love grow. The more egoistic you are, the less is the possibility of love.
So be small, so small that you disappear; go on disappearing. As you disappear, love will appear; the more you disappear, the more love will appear. One day, suddenly, you are gone and love has arrived! "Paula" can also be derived from Greek. Then too it has a beautiful meaning, then it means rest.And love is rest. All else is restlessness; all else is turmoil, tension, conflict, struggle, war. Only love is peace, relaxation, rest, because love is our natural, intrinsic being. Once you have found love there is nothing else to be found, nothing else to be desired. One has arrived home. One can rest, one can relax.
[Satyam Priti] It is very rare to find true love. People love and they think that it is true, but they are deceiving themselves: it is something else which is pretending to be love. It may be an ego trip. It may be just an effort to dominate the other. It may be just a biological urge. It may be nothing but hidden sexuality. It may be just your animal, your lust. All these things can pretend to be love; hence jealousy arises, because it is not true love. True love knows nothing of jealousy.
Just as light can never meet darkness, true love never comes across jealousy. Jealousy means that it is not true, so let jealousy be the criterion. Whenever your love finds itself in a jealous space, remember: it is not love, it is something else. Observe and you will be able to know what exactly it is.
When love is without jealousy, without possessiveness, it is true love and true love liberates. False love creates bondage. False love creates only misery and nothing else. True love gives you a glimpse of the divine. It makes you aware of a subtle, mysterious presence which people have called God.
To find true love is to find true religion, hence my whole effort here is love-oriented, because I don't see any future for religion without love. Without love Christianity can exist, Hinduism can exist, but not religion. With love Christianity cannot exist, Hinduism cannot exist, but there will be a totally different kind of consciousness on the earth: a religious consciousness. One need not be Hindu to be religious, one need not be Mohammedan to be religious. One can be simply religious, and when one is simply religious one is truly religious, unboundedly religious. But true religion can arrive only through true love.
Seek, search, observe, meditate, and find what kind of love you have been living up to now. Is it true? And the beauty of truth is that if you come to know that it is not true it starts disappearing of its own accord. Just to know something as false is to be free of it. Just the knowing that it is false is enough to disconnect you from it. The moment you know the false as the false you have moved towards the true as the true: you have taken a quantum leap. Almost half the journey is over. You have removed the hindrance - now the doors are open. Any moment the sun can penetrate.
[Anand Sabine] Bliss is not self-conscious; it simply is. If you feel blissful, then it is happiness. If you are bliss, that is a totally different phenomenon. If you feel blissful, sooner or later it will be lost and you will feel miserable. If you are bliss, who is there to feel it? There is no distinction between the knower and the known, the feeler and the felt. All dualities are transcended. Bliss is a state of transcendence, of utter peace, silence. It is not something that happens to you; it is something that you are. In your absolute nakedness you are bliss; m your primitive nature you are bliss.
And sabine comes from the ancient name of am Italian tribe, the sabines. It is a beautiful name; it simply means a woman from the primitive tribe of the sabines.
Bliss is also primitive, bliss is utterly wild. It knows nothing of civilization, hence children know more of it than the grownups because they are closer to nature. They are not yet civilized, they are still primitive. Each child is born as an aboriginal, he is primitive. Then we start working on the child:
sophisticating hmm, educating hmm, conditioning him. We destroy his nature, we impose nurturing on him. We make out of him something totally different to what he was supposed to be, to what nature was trying to make out of him. We make him unnatural, false, phony.
Bliss is natural, spontaneous, primitive, wild. Sannyas is a step towards your primitive innocence.
It is the search for the lost paradise. Paradise has not been lost because of some original sm that Adam and Eve committed. Paradise is lost because of the society, because of the priests, because of the politicians, because of the establishment. The establishment is very afraid of blissfull people and absolutely afraid of those who become bliss, because they cannot be manipulated.
You can destroy them but you cannot corrupt them. You can kill them but you cannot kill their blissfulness and their rebelliousness. You can kill them but you cannot kill their love and their truth.
They start living from their innermost core. They don't care anything about the society, the state.
They don't care anything about the formalities of living: they simply live as they feel. They do their own thing; and the society is very afraid of such people. The society wants you to just be a slave:
obedient, like a machine, not like a man. The society reduces every man to a machine.
The function of sannyas is to de-automatize you so that you can be free from the mechanical again and you can assert your consciousness. It is pure rebellion.
[Deva Bruno: divine darkness]
Darkness is also divine. The night is as divine as the day. The word "day" comes from the same root as "divine"; they both come from a Sanskrit root "dev". But that means that only the day is divine - what about the night? That means that half of life is denied divinity. And if half of your life is denied, you can never be whole.
That has been the greatest calamity in the past: the night is denied because it is dark; death is denied because it is dark; love is denied because it is dark; the heart is denied because it is dark.
Then only the conscious mind remains with you and all else is rejected. Then you are hung up in the head.
This is the misery of man: he has become very shrunken; he has left his kingdom far behind. All that is beautiful has something of the dark in it, because the dark represents depth, the dark represents the mysterious, the dark represents the unknown and the unknowable. The conscious mind is only one-tenth of your total mind; nine-tenths is dark, unconscious - it is denied. And this denial has created a split in man. It is because of the so-called saints that man has become schizophrenic.
The whole of humanity suffers from split personalities.
Sannyas is an effort to bridge, to bring these two separate parts together again, to help them melt into each other. In fact that's how it should be: the day melts into the night, the night melts again into the day, and the circle is complete. That's how one should be: the mind melting into the heart, the heart melting into the mind; the conscious, melting, merging into the unconscious, the unconscious evolving into the conscious. There should be no division, no demarcation. No line is needed to be drawn of where the conscious ends and where the unconscious begins. In life nothing is divided - all is one; but in logic, divisions become very important, definitions become very important, and life is indefinable because it is indivisible.
So I accept the total life as it is. From sex to samadhi, all has to be accepted. This is the great resolution of sannyas: all has to be resolved, all has to be absorbed, transformed; no rejection, no denial, no suppression, no condemnation, no evaluation either. Man as he is, is divine. With all his darkness, with all his errors, with all his mistakes, he is tremendously beautiful. With all his limitations he is God.
This assertion is sannyas, and it has not only to be asserted in words, it has to be lived, it has to be proclaimed through life.