Darshan 10 April 1977

Prem means love, ketan means house - a house of love or a temple of love, a shrine.

Man can function from three centres: one is the head, another is the heart and the third one is the navel. If you function from the head you will go on spinning thoughts and thoughts and thoughts.

They are very insubstantial, dream-stuff - they promise much, they deliver nothing.

The mind is a great cheat but it has tremendous capacities to delude, because it can project. It can give you great utopias, great desires, and it always goes on saying 'Tomorrow it is going to happen'...

and it never happens.

Nothing ever happens in the head - the head is not the place for anything to happen.

... The second centre is the heart. It is the centre for feeling, one feels through the heart. You are closer home - not home yet, but closer. When you feel, you are more substantial, you have more solidity; when you feel, there is a possibility that something may happen. There is no possibility with the head, there is a small possibility with the heart.

But the real thing is not even the heart. The real thing is deeper than the heart - that is the navel. It is the centre of being.

Thinking, feeling, being - these are the three centres. But certainly feeling is closer to being than thinking, and feeling functions as a method. If you want to come down from the head you will have to pass through the heart - that is the crossroads from where the roads separate. You cannot go to being directly, there is no way; you will have to pass through the heart. So the heart has to be used as a method.

Feel more and then you will think less. Don't fight with thinking, because fighting with thinking is again creating other thoughts of fighting. Then the mind is never defeated. If you win, it is the mind which has won; if you are defeated, you are defeated. Either way you are defeated - so never fight with thoughts, it is futile.

Rather than fighting with the thoughts, move your energy into feeling. Sing rather than think, love rather than philosophise, read poetry rather than prose. Dance, look at nature, and whatsoever you do, do it through the heart.

For example, if you touch somebody, touch through the heart, touch feelingly, let your being vibrate.

When you look at somebody don't just look with stone-dead eyes. Pour out your energy through the eyes and immediately you will see that something is happening in the heart. It is only a question of trying....

The heart is the neglected centre: once you start paying attention to it, it starts functioning. When it starts functioning, the energy that was moving in the mind automatically starts moving through the heart. And the heart is closer to the energy centre - the energy centre is in the navel - so to pump it to the head is hard work in fact.

That's why all the education systems exist: they teach you how to pump the energy from the centre to the head and how to by-pass the heart. So no school, no college, no university, teaches how to feel. They destroy feeling, because they know that if you feel you cannot think.

If you feel too much then the energy will be stopped at the heart centre; it will never go to the head.

It can only go to the head when the heart centre is completely denied. It has to go somewhere, it has to find an outlet. If the heart is not the outlet, it will go to the head.

In fact, the whole educational system which has developed all over the world is just to teach you how to avoid the heart, how to become more and more heady and how to pump the energy directly to the head.

So love is denied, feeling is denied, condemned - it is almost a sin to feel. One has to be logical and rational, not emotional. If you are emotional, people will say you are childish - in a way they are literally true, because only a child feels. A grown-up person, educated, cultivated, conditioned, stops feeling. He becomes almost dry, dead wood - no juice flows any more. Hence there is so much misery: misery is because of the head.

The head cannot celebrate, there is no celebration possible through the head. It can think about celebration - it can think about and about and about, but it cannot celebrate. Celebration happens through the heart.

So the first thing for you is to start feeling more and more.... Become an abode of love, a shrine of love, a house of love; this is the first step. Once you have taken this step the second will be very very easy.

First, you love - half the journey is complete. And as it is easy to move from the head to the heart, it is even more easy to move from the heart to the navel. In the navel you are simply a being, a pure being - no feeling, no thinking; you are not moving at all. That is the centre of the cyclone.

Everything else is moving: the head is moving, the heart is moving, the body is moving. Everything is moving, everything is in a constant flux. Only the centre of your existence, the navel centre, is unmoving; it is the hub of the wheel.

Once you enter that, you have entered samadhi.

Sannyas is the first step towards samadhi...

It means pain of bliss - and bliss is very very painful. Not because it is painful, but because it is so unknown and so strange that when it happens for the first time, it is almost as if one is dying. It is a death - the old dies and disappears - and it is a birth too; the birth is also painful. The new is born.

So you are completely destroyed and completely re-created.

So bliss has a pain - sweet of course, delicious of course. One is fortunate if it happens.

It is just like when a woman gives birth to a child - she is tremendously happy and yet in pain. But she is happy that the pain is there, because that pain is not just pain - great life is going to happen through it, a new life is going to happen through it, god is going to create something out of it. That pain is creative.

Anand means bliss, the ultimate state of consciousness where all is joy, uncontaminated by any opposite, by any contrary. It is pure joy - you cannot even call it joy, because to call something joy you have to remember suffering. So in English there is not really any word into which to translate 'anand'.

In Sanskrit we have three terms: one for suffering, one for joy and one which transcends both - that is anand. It is neither suffering nor the so-called joy: it is a totally different kind of joy which has no memory of suffering at all, which is completely uncontaminated by the opposite. It is pure oneness and there is no duality.

Ordinarily it is difficult even to conceive of it. Unless you taste it, it is difficult even to understand it. Because all that we can understand needs at least two things, the opposite is a must. We can understand the figure only because of the background. We call this moment night because of the day, we call somebody good because of the bad, we call somebody beautiful because of the ugly.

The opposite is a must, the opposite defines it.

But anand means the state when there is no opposite, when you have come to the one, when there is no possibility of the other.

The ocean of god has only one shore. It is very illogical - because how can there be only one shore i God is illogical. And the state of bliss is illogical. Those who are attached too much to logic can never achieve it, only for crazy people does it open its door....

Fakir means one who has nothing, a beggar. Bliss means one who has all, all that is worth having, and fakir means one who has nothing - and both these things are two aspects of the same phenomenon.

When you have bliss, you need not have anything at all. You can be a fakir and an emperor - because you have all that you need, more than you need, so nothing else is needed. Renunciation comes easily when a person has tasted bliss - then he can renounce anything, because there is no problem.

People are attached to things because they don't have anything within their being. They hope that through things they may have something, so they go on increasing the things around them. They have much and they don't have anything. And the real man has nothing around him and has all.

So anand means you have all that one can ever have - you just have to look into it. It is there, it is in your very heartbeat. And the word 'fakir' means not to be attached to things. Use things but don't be attached to them; use the world but don't be used by it. The world is very good as a slave - as a master it is very lousy!

Deva means god, arpitam means surrendered, offered, dedicated. And life has to become a dedication, only then is there meaning - otherwise it is meaningless. Meaning comes through dedication, and the greater the object of dedication, the greater will be the meaning. So if one is ready to surrender then it is better to surrender to god than to anything else, because anything else will be less.

There are people who are dedicated to countries - the fatherland, the motherland. That is a very tiny thing to be surrendered to, and foolish, and some adolf hitler will exploit it.

Then there are people who are dedicated to churches - Hinduism, Christianity, Islam. Better than a country, but still a dogma, a creed, a man-made thing, and something which basically divides humanity. One becomes a Christian, another becomes a Hindu, and there is division, there is conflict, there is violence - and the beauty and the irony of it is that the violence is in the name of love!

So never dedicate yourself to anything which divides. To dedicate oneself to god means to dedicate to all - to the whole, to the totality. And by 'god' I don't mean that somebody is sitting there in the sky and managing the world - that is a very childish concept of god. It is good for helping children to understand, but it is simply stupid. There is nobody, there is no person there.

The personality of god is diffused in the whole of existence. He is not somewhere, he is everywhere!

He is in the stone and he is in the flower, he is in you and he is in me... he is in the lowest and he is in the highest, he is in the atomic and he is in the cosmic.

The personality is diffused. He is like salt in the ocean: taste it from anywhere and it is salty, taste existence from anywhere and it is divine.

So god is not a person. It is better to say that existence is divine; there is no divinity. And when I say 'offered to god', I mean offered to divinity, offered to this divinity of the whole - and that's what a religious person really is.

[A sannyasin asks if polarity massage can be helpful for sannyasins.]

The idea is absolutely true, very fundamentally true, and can be developed very deeply - so start working on it. All energies are polar, energy is polar, and the only problem in life is how to create a balance between the polarities.

Man is man and woman too - now the problem is how to have a balance. If you become too much of a man you become too crude and rough, too gross. If you become too much of a woman, you become too soft.

Imbalance gives you a state which is not conducive to happiness. Balance is conducive to happiness - so whenever your energies are fifty-fifty, meeting and merging into each other, creating a symphony, a harmony, then you are open to god. Much bliss is possible and the whole existence can pour into you; you are available, receptive.

All the traditions of the world have been working in different ways. In india we call it shiva-shakti, in china they call it yin-yang - or you can call it negative-positive, man-woman. It doesn't matter what you call it - but one thing is certain, that all things consist of opposite poles, they exist through polarity. Once the balance is lost, there is hell; the balance gained, the paradise is reclaimed.

So start working, mm? then I will see how the work is going. And then if something is needed, I will tell you to add it. But the framework is perfect - you start, mm? Good!