Darshan 26 September 1979
[Benoit... God's giving and our ingratitude.]
Each moment is so precious and brings so many surprises, but we are fast asleep. The guest comes, but the host is asleep. The guest knocks at the door, but the host is deaf. Otherwise the whole existence is continuously giving us a thousand and one gifts, and we are not even thankful to it; we go on complaining. Man only knows how to complain, he has completely forgotten how to be grateful. To be grateful is the very source of religiousness, the very foundation, and to be complaining is to be anti-religious.
Religion is nothing but the feeling of gratefulness towards existence, and the feeling can arise only if we become aware of what existence is giving to us. We have nothing to give in return, hence we feel in deep gratitude. We are not worthy of it all, we don't deserve it; still those flowers bloom, still the sun rises, still the moon comes, and the stars... still God goes on giving, whether we take any note of it or not.
Once you start taking note of it, your life will be transformed. Slowly slowly you will see all negativity disappearing, all darkness disappearing, all death disappearing. Then there is only eternal joy.
Millions are its forms, but the dance is the same and the dancer is one. That dancer is God. We are part of his dance.
Satyo Nicolaas: the mind loves to live in lies... It can only live in lies. It fabricates fictions and remains surrounded by its own garbage. It cannot withstand truth. It is like darkness: it cannot withstand light. The truth is the phenomenon of the heart, it has nothing to do with the mind at all.
Mind even starts creating theories about truth. All that is guesswork, dreaming; it has nothing to do with truth. It is about truth, and whatsoever is about truth is not truth itself. Mind is very articulate in creating patterns of thought, very logical patterns, very systematic.
Down the ages mind has created many systems of thought, but all are fundamentally rooted in some lie. The structure is so logical that it can befool; it has befooled millions of people. You may never be able to find out that the foundation stone is a lie, that the very premise is a lie. You may be lost in the structure and its beauty and its systematizing, its logic, its reasoning, and the structure can be really complicated.
For example, the Hegelian philosophy. It has a great structure. You will be lost in the jungle of the words and you will never come to know that in the very beginning there is no truth. The seed is missing and the tree is there. The tree is bound to be just imagination.
Truth is the experience of the heart. The experience of love is truth, not the conclusion of logic. So immersing oneself in love, dissolving into love, is the way to truth. It is not a question of thinking about it: on the contrary, one has to stop all thinking so that one can feel more, so that the energy involved in thinking is released and can become feeling, so your heart is overflowing with energy.
In those moments when the heart is overflowing with energy there is a contact with existence; your heart starts beating with the heart of the universe. Those rare moments have truth in them. The experience of the harmony between your heart and the heart of the universe is what I call the ultimate truth. It is a musical experience, a poetic experience, an experience of love!
Sangit Narayana - from the mire of the mind to the music of the heart...
Music comes closest in expressing God because music has no words in it; it is pure sound. Hence music can penetrate through the mind to the heart. The mind cannot comprehend music; it is beyond it, it is something illogical. And because the mind is incapable of doing anything with music it cannot argue with it; it cannot be for or against it. It is simply impotent in encountering music, and the impotence of the mind becomes the power of the heart. Anything that makes the mind feel impotent and makes the mind feel that it is inadequate is tremendously significant for the heart, because in those gaps the heart can take possession of you. That's the beauty of music: when you are lost in music, you are closest to God. Just a little more, a few steps more, and you will enter into the temple.
Music was invented by the mystics. Basically music was part of religious discipline. Slowly slowly it became separate, became independent, and that was a calamity for both - for music and for religion both - because without religion music is just sound without any significance; and without music, religion is nothing but theology, logic-chopping, with no heart, with no beat, with no life. Without music religion is dead and without religion music is mundane. When they both meet, something beautiful is born: an alive religion, a sacred music....