Darshan 23 September 1979
Anand Gulab... Anand means bliss; gulab means a rose - a rose of bliss. Bliss is a flowering.
Without bliss a man remains a tree without flowers. Only when you become blissful do you come to fulfillment - so remember it. This is the right time to begin remembering it, then it goes very deep.
To become a sannyasin in childhood is the most significant thing, because you can start growing in the right direction from right now. There is no need to go astray and then come back. There is no need to create unnecessary, misery-creating habits; from the very beginning one can create the right space for bliss to happen.
Love more and you will be more blissful. Delight in small things, as children naturally do. Never allow your childhood to disappear - that's the most important thing. Let the body grow, let the mind grow, but your soul should remain like a child: innocent, full of wonder. Then flowering happens naturally; one becomes a rose flower.
Anand Champak. Anand means bliss; champak is the most beautiful flower of the East. It can't happen in the West, it needs a very hot climate, but it has the greatest perfume possible: just one flower is enough to fill your whole house with fragrance. And bliss is a fragrance. Just one person, if he is really blissful, can fill thousands of people with bliss.
So by becoming sannyasins, you are both really becoming flower people!
Satyam Maria: There is a very famous statement of Gautam the Buddha, that lies are sweet and truth is bitter. But truth is bitter only in the beginning; in the end it becomes sweet, and lies are sweet only in the beginning; in the end they become bitter.
Lies are poison coated with sugar, hence the sweetness in the beginning. And truth is naked. It does not care about your mind, your comfort, your convenience - it simply asserts itself as it is. It does not
compromise with you, hence the bitterness. It never fits with you; you have to fit with it, hence the bitterness. That's why many people have chosen lies, and very few people are courageous enough to choose truth as their way of life. But in the ultimate reckoning those few people are the winners.
These few people are the Buddhas, the awakened ones.
Unless you choose truth, you cannot live a right life, a life of song and dance and celebration. Yes, in the beginning it is hard and arduous and an uphill task, but when you reach to the peak, the sunlit peak, and the virgin snows of the peak, then you attain to something which you could not have even imagined before; then you come to the imprisoned splendor of existence.
But the journey is long, and it is good that the journey is long, it is good that truth is not cheap, that one has to pay with one's life, because unless we pay for something we never recognize its value.
The more we have to pay, the more we recognize its value. And it is good that it is available only for daring people, otherwise it would be of no use. It would be ordinary, commonplace. Truth is not ordinary; it is extraordinary, it is supra-mundane, it is sacred.
You may feel many times that it is very bitter to swallow it. Remember that it appears bitter only because you have become accustomed to lies. It appears bitter only because you have become accustomed to fictions. It is because of your habits that it looks bitter. It comes as a disturbance, it disturbs your whole life. It has to disturb it. It creates a chaos because whatsoever you think is your life is nothing but a fiction of the mind, it is all dreamstuff. And when truth comes, naturally the whole dreamstuff is disturbed. It is like a ray of light entering a dark room: the darkness is disturbed.
It is the dreamstuff that gets disturbed - don't be worried about it. Just remain watchful and accept the bitterness of truth as a natural phenomenon. Soon you will start loving its bitterness, soon you will know that it is not bitter; it starts becoming sweeter and sweeter every day.
The more you allow it to enter you and to change you and to transform you and to illuminate you, the more sweet it becomes. The day you are totally in tune with it, it is the sweetest thing in existence.
[Prem Andrea... Love and courage are the most significant pillars that support the temple of life] Courage alone, without love, can become violent, can become aggressive. In fact it will become aggressive, because who will be there to prevent it from becoming aggressive? It will become destructive. It will not be a blessing to you or to others, it will be a curse. Hence love is a must. But if love is alone, without courage, then it remains only an idea, it never becomes a reality, because without courage you cannot dare to make your love a reality. It needs all the guts to be loving, because the society is anti-love. It is based on hatred; it lives in hate, it lives on hate, because this whole society is somehow centered around violence.
People are doing violence in a thousand and one ways: through accumulating money, through becoming politically powerful, and so on, so forth. Persons are fighting with other persons, races are fighting with other races, countries are at war with other countries. It seems to be a continuous war. Sometimes it is cold, sometimes it is hot, but the war continues; it seems to never end.
At least in the past, we have always lived under the dark clouds of war. Hence the society is against love, because loving people cannot be used as killers, as murderers. The society has given them beautiful names: soldiers, warriors, generals - but they are all murderers, they are all criminals.
It does not make any difference whether the crime is committed by the state or by the individual; a crime is a crime. In fact individual criminals can't do much crime, they have limitations. When nations do crimes, then there are no limitations. Adolf Hitler alone can't be much of a criminal, but with a Nazi Germany behind him, he becomes the greatest calamity the world has ever known.
The whole society is being prepared for war, hence it can't be for love. It can talk about love, it can preach about love, but underground it goes on preparing for war. All that talk is phony.
One will need great courage to fight against the establishment, the society, the church, the state, to be loving. Love alone is impotent without courage; courage alone without love is violent, destructive.
But when both are together, something tremendously beautiful happens: a great symphony, a great harmony of love and courage. That's what my sannyas is all about.
The name Andrea is also beautiful because that is the name of the first disciple of Jesus. Andrea was the first one to be called by Jesus for initiation. He must have been a man of great love and great courage, otherwise he couldn't have been chosen by Jesus to be the first disciple.
[Prakash Liesbeth: The godliness of light]
Delight more and more in light. Worship light: the sunrise, the sunset, in the darkness of the night, the stars, the moon, or just a candle in a dark room. Let that become your meditation: enjoy light more and more, absorb light more and more, and soon you will be surprised that something inside you starts responding to the outer light. A synchronicity is created, an acausal relationship is created. As you see the light outside, suddenly you see the same thing reflected inside you. There the sun is rising, and something starts rising in you: the inner sun. The sky is full of stars; watching with prayerful eyes, you close your eyes and you see your inner sky also full of stars.
Slowly slowly, one starts learning a deep acausal relationship. There is no causal relationship.
That's what Carl Gustav Jung calls "synchronicity": something is happening outside, there is no direct relationship with it as a cause. It is not inevitable that something inside is bound to happen. If you allow, it may happen, if you cooperate, it may happen. If you remain available, it may happen, but the relationship is not like cause and effect. It is not necessarily so. It may happen, it may not happen; it all depends on your availability.
So be available to light in all its forms, and slowly slowly, you will be surprised that as you close your eyes you are full of light. That is enlightenment, that is realization, that is Buddhahood or Christ-consciousness.