Darshan 30 July 1978

Prem means love, mimanso means enquiry into truth. The full name will mean: loving enquiry into truth... and only a loving enquiry succeeds. One can enquire into truth without love; then one is doomed to fail, there is no possibility of success. Love has to be a necessary ingredient in the enquiry. Without love the enquiry remains lopsided: it remains only logic, arithmetic, science, objective. And the objective is only the circumference of our being; the centre is subjective.

The head is not the essential thing in you - it is the most non-essential; the essential is the heart.

So when the heart stops we know that the man is dead. The head can stop but the man can go on living. It is non-essential... useful, but not absolutely necessary. Even a madman lives and even a man of no-mind lives, a Buddha lives. It can be discarded, but the heart cannot be discarded. Even a Buddha cannot live without the heart.

So when the enquiry into truth becomes just a head thing, it never leads you deep into life, into existence. It can give you facts but it can't give you the truth. And facts are millions and truth is one.

Only the heart is capable of leading you into the one. It is the flight of the alone to the alone. That's how Plotinus says it: the flight of the alone to the alone. The heart is alone. It knows nobody else; it exists on its own. It represents god because god also exists on his own and alone. The heart is parallel to god. The heart is the small god within you, and god is the great heart in the existence.

The heart is a miniature god, and god is a cosmic heart. They pulsate together.

The head is useful in the world. Use it, but don' t become obsessed with it. And if love continues flowing and keeps pace with logic then you have both the wings and you can fly. Then the flight of the alone to the alone is possible.

That is the meaning of Prem Mimanso: a loving enquiry into truth. That's what religion is all about.

Philosophy is an unloving enquiry into the truth; religion is a loving enquiry into the truth. Both

enquire into truth but their methodologies are different. Philosophy thinks; religion loves. Philosophy systematises; religion dances. Philosophy proposes, guesses. Religion simply takes the plunge into it, immediate, direct. It encounters truth without the medium of thought.

When thought is there, there is a curtain between you and the truth. When there is no thought but only love, there is no curtain. Remember: thought is a wall between you and truth, and love is a bridge. Destroy walls and create bridges.

Anand means blissful; only that much has to be added to Teresa. Because Christians have been very serious - Teresa was also very serious - and seriousness is a kind of disease.

It is in the service of death; it is not in the service of life. But somehow Christianity has become obsessed with death. Maybe it is because of Jesus' crucifixion, and the shadow of the cross has followed it through these twenty centuries. It is not just accidental that the churches also became graveyards. The cross became the symbol of the religion. I call Christianity, Crossianity.

Religion should not be in the service of death. Jesus was a totally different man; he was not a Christian. He was a man who celebrated the earth. He was very earthly - he was more like Zorba the Greek. Christians have destroyed his image. He enjoyed eating, drinking and merrying. He moved with really beautiful people - thieves and gamblers and prostitutes; he was really a man of the earth. And he loved all without any judgement. His love was so much that judgement was not possible. He was not bent upon making people afraid; rather, he was helping them to become more and more loving and unafraid.

His god was not a god of punishment but of infinite compassion; hence he said 'God is love.' If god is love then there is no possibility of hell. How can a loving father conceive of his children being sent to hell for eternity? And for sins so small that they cannot even be called sins. Even Adam did not commit such a great sin... just a little disobedience. One should not make much fuss about it., Every child disobeys; has to disobey. To be free, to be oneself, disobedience is just natural. If a child continuously obeys the father he will be a dead child, a dummy. Adam did well; because of him man has some grandeur. He was the first man. And my feeling is that god must have been immensely happy. When the child starts disobeying, the father is always happy - happy that now the child is becoming free of him, is trying to stand on his own feet.

Jesus' god is love but the Christians' god is totally different, just the opposite. It has made people very frightened. Teresa was also very frightened. A beautiful woman - had she been in the East she would have become a Meera. She would have danced in ecstasy and loved tremendously and immensely. But the Christian theology killed her spirit.

So I will keep the name Teresa, but will make it totally different by adding anand; anand means blissful.

From this moment think of bliss as your religion. And I can see: it can explode in you! Good.

Prem means love, upchara means therapy. Love is therapy. Love heals the wounds, love redeems; love is the only salvation there is. Don't wait for any other messiah - love is enough. And all the messiahs that come are nothing but reincarnations of love.

To me Jesus is not the son of god but the son of love, a manifestation of infinite love... so is Krishna and so is Buddha. And these people are not philosophers; they are lovers. Plato says that his teaching is not a 'philosophia' but a 'therapia'... and he is right. Real teaching is always a 'therapia'; it is never a 'philosophia'. Buddha is reported to have said 'I am not a philosopher but a physician.'

And I always say that meditation is medicine. Both the words come from the same root. And at the very substratum of it all is the energy of love.

If you can love and if you can love totally - so totally that love is no more a relationship but becomes your very being; not that you love but that you are love - then life is a benediction. Then all is joy. All wounds are healed; they suddenly disappear as if they had never existed. And the same energy that was creating wounds, misery, fragments in life, neurosis, the same energy starts blooming into the flowers of infinity. All that is needed is to know how to redeem your love energy from wrong patterns of life that are destructive to it.

All that has been taught is against love; that is the misery of man. And there is a raison d'etre behind it: the priest and the politician have been teaching things which are against love, because only a person who has missed love in his life can be reduced into being a slave. If a man knows what love is, it is impossible to reduce him into being a slave. He remains freedom, he remains rebellious. He remains individual. You cannot convert him into a crowd - he is never a part of collectivity, he is never part of a mob. He has dignity, because he has a soul.

The mob has no soul and the people who join the mob are the people who are soul-less; by joining the mob they get a kind of identity. They became Hindus, they become Mohammedans, they become Christians. At least they can say who they are: 'I am a Christian or a Catholic or a Communist.'

Religion is never a mob phenomenon; mob phenomena are always political. Religion is basically individual. One has to be oneself and one has to learn how to live in the beauty of aloneness, and only love is capable of that.

Once a man's soul is there, once love is there, you can kill him but you cannot make him a slave.

You can imprison his body but not his soul. He will die laughing and loving, and that is the highest beauty one can attain to.

So remember: my whole approach towards life is that of 'therapia'. That's why this may be the only ashram in India where so many therapies are available. My insistence is: to release the energy called love which has been repressed by the society, and to release it unconditionally. It is there, forced by the society, coiled up inside you becoming poisonous; because whenever any flow stops, becomes dormant, it becomes poisonous. When the river flows, remains flowing, it remains pure.

Purity is part of flow. And love is such an energy that if it is not allowed it turns into hatred; it turns into its opposite. It is the source of all creativity, but repressed it becomes destructive.

Adolf Hitler once wanted to become a painter. When he was a student he wanted to become an artist He had applied for the art school but he couldn't get admission. I read much into this. If he had got admission in the art school he may have become one of the greatest artists of the world. The energy was there. Offended, it turned against itself; it became destructive. Energy is dangerous if it is not allowed to move in a natural way. Repressed, t is dangerous because it can explode. It can destroy you.

My own observation is that a man of love never knows what jealousy is, never knows what possessiveness is, never knows what hatred is. He can't be that foolish. His energy is soaring so high, is producing such valuable diamonds of experience - why should he waste it creating stones to kill people and to throw at people?

Being a sannyasin means getting initiated into the world of 'therapia'. I am not a teacher, and I will not teach you any philosophy. I am an alchemist. I will teach you how to convert the lower into the higher, how to transmute the lower metals into pure gold... because they are the same thing.

Repressed, the lower becomes ugly; expressed, it becomes beauty. Repressed, it creates hell; expressed, the paradise blooms in you.

Prem means love, varda means blessing. Love is the greatest blessing of life. Those who miss love, miss all. They can conquer the whole world, can become very famous, can have all the money and all the power that the world can make available, but they will remain poor, they will remain beggars.

Only when love comes into your being does it enrich you. Everything else is just a cover-up, a deception to create a false idea that you are rich, but deep down you know that you are not. And the more riches you have, the more clear it becomes that you are not. In contrast you start feeling more and more poor.

So the more affluent a society is, the poorer it feels. A poor society never feels so poor because it has nothing as a contrast: it is poor inside, it is poor outside. But when the outside is rich, suddenly with the contrast, you become alert and aware of the inner poverty. That's why it looks almost unbelievable that poor countries seem to be contented. Rich countries become very discontented:

the richer they get, the more discontented. It simply defies all analysis and logic and economics and all psychology. A rich country should be more contented. But poor countries like India seem to be more contented. People living in the slums, in the dirtiest slums, seem to be more contented than people who live in palaces. It is unbelievable but it is a fact.

Indians brag about it very much - they think it is something spiritual. It is nothing. It is not that they are rich inwardly. The only phenomenon is: they are poor outwardly, they are poor inwardly, so they have nothing in contrast, nothing to compare with. But when somebody becomes rich outwardly, the inner world seems to be very poor and pale and dead and dull, stale.

The inner world becomes rich only when love has knocked at the door; and love knocks every day.

It comes with every wind that knocks at your door and with every ray of the sun that knocks at your door, with every call of a bird, with every star that rises in the sky. But we are unaware. Our whole mind is occupied with the futile, the non-essential, the mundane.

[These words are] to remind you constantly not to get diverted. Pour your whole energy into being loving, and you will become a blessed being. Love is a blessing and the greatest gift one can receive from god.

Prachi. It is a strange name but with much meaning in it... a direction for you, a whole programme.

Your name means: love for the East. Prem means love, prachi means the East, the land of the rising sun. The colour orange that I have chosen for sannyas is the colour of the rising sun. It symbolises the East and it symbolises light. It symbolises that the night is over, that the East has become red and soon the sun will be coming. Love for the East means love for light. Love for the East means love for religion, because the East is the land where all the religions were born, just as the West is the land where all the scientific discoveries were made.

The West has not given birth to a single religion. It is strange. Even Christianity is eastern. Jesus learned all his secrets in Egypt, in India. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, Shinto - all the great religions were born in the East; it is not just coincidental. The East has not given birth to any scientific enquiry. All that is great in science has been given birth to in the West.

It represents the two hemispheres of the mind, not only of the earth. The East is intuitive, feminine.

Its functioning is from the heart; hence the birth of all the great religions. The West is reason, logic, obJectivity; hence its approach is scientific.

Science can explore the outer world but leaves man unexplored. It explores things; it cannot explore consciousness. Even if it thinks about consciousness it thinks in terms of it also as being a thing, an object. Even psychology does not go deeply into consciousness but only observes behaviour, from the outside. Even psychology is not really psychology; the word psychology means 'science of the soul'. It is not yet a psychology... very rudimentary.

The objective approach denies that there is any subjectivity in the world. This is such an absurd state. The scientist goes on denying himself. He says 'I am not', he says 'There is no soul inside me.' He believes in the machine he creates but he does not believe in the creator of the machine.

His belief in what he discovers and invents is tremendous but his belief is not at all in the discoverer himself.

Religion is an approach towards the very phenomenon of our being. 'Love for the East' means:

love for that hemisphere of the mind which is intuitive, which is based on love, which is poetic not mathematical - which is feminine, not masculine. The West is masculine, the East is feminine, and all that is great is known only when you are in a receptive mood, in a kind of passive receptivity.

When one is just feminine, then god descends in one. An active search for god is going to fail. One has to wait, and wait prayerfully.

That is the symbolic meaning of [Prachi]. Become more and more eastern, become more and more intuitive; lean more and more towards the heart. And nothing is wrong in the objective approach - I am all for science - but science can only explore the periphery of existence, it cannot touch the centre. And without the centre, what is the meaning of the circumference? Yes, with the centre, the circumference also becomes significant.

We need a world where religion will be the deity of the temple and science will be the temple; but without the deity the temple is empty. The deity can exist even without the temple - just under a tree the deity can exist. A Buddha statue can sit beautifully under a tree - no need for a temple - but if the temple is there, it is beautiful, it adds to the beauty. But a temple without the buddha statue, without a Jesus inside, without god inside, is an empty temple.

That's why in the West more and more people are feeling a kind of meaninglessness; the deity is missing. The temple is beautiful. They have decorated it really beautifully - the walls are made of gold, studded with diamonds. But it is empty... the master is missing. And the master can be found only if you go inwards.

So prachi or the East stands for all these things. It is a symbolic meaning.

[A sannyasin says: I begin working soon with polarity (balancing). Osho checks her energy.]

I will work with you - don't be worried. I will work through you.

Everything is perfectly good. It happens to every groupleader when he starts working, because to work with me is totally different from working anywhere else. When you are working in the West, you are working on your own; you are the sole and the whole. When you work here you have to become a non-entity. You have to disappear completely to give way to me. You have to put yourself aside - you have to become just a vehicle.

That's why in the beginning every therapist who starts working here goes through a few deep changes. But once those changes have happened, for the first time you will know what real work is.

Because then it will not be a burden on your head; it will be just play. The responsibility goes totally to me. You can remain there only available, instrumental. You have only to allow me. And when the ego does not function, then the work becomes a meditation in itself.

If the therapy groups help only the people who participate in them, that will not be good for the therapist. The therapist has also to grow. He has not yet arrived - he has to go a long way. So my way of working is such that it helps the participants, certainly, but it goes on helping the therapist too.

So the therapist is just a representation of me there: his hands are my hands and his heart is my heart. And soon the knack is learned so that you can simply allow yourself to be possessed by me.

Then it is a totally different kind of work. The quality is different and the quality simply soars high.

What you have not done before you will see happening. Your touch becomes magical, because you are not alone in your touch. Slowly slowly it attains the quality of miraculousness; the more you disappear, the more miraculous it becomes.

You start - you are ready. Just for a few days it will be difficult because you will have to change the whole pattern of the work.

[A sannyasin, who is a film star, says he wants to quit and be part of the commune. Should he leave his work quietly or announce it?]

Announcing will be perfect.... Announce it and for the one and a half years that you will have to work, do all that you can do. That will be good - it will bring it to a climax. If you go slowly that will not be good. Knowing that you have to be in it only for one and a half years, put all that you can put into it; bring it to a climax. And always leave things when they are at a climax; never leave things lukewarm. Bring them to a crescendo and say goodbye.