Darshan 19 April 1977

Bodhi means consciousness, awareness, and dhara means a river: a river of awareness. And awareness is a river - it is a stream, it is a flow. It lives only when it flows; when it is not flowing it is dead.

So whenever the consciousness is not flowing, a person lives a dead life.

It is as if the sap in the tree is no more flowing; just like the sap, consciousness is your inner juice.

When it is flowing you are fully alive; when it is flowing perfectly, you live totally. When the flow is less, life is less; when the flow is stuck, stagnant, you are no more living, you are only dragging.

And the whole effort of all the religions is to bring the consciousness flow to its optimum, to its maximum. And people live at the minimum; that is their misery. Whenever you live at the maximum you are blissful - but people live at the minimum. They will do only that which is absolutely needed.

If they are poor it is no surprise; they will remain poor. They will love only to that extent which is absolutely needed, and that too as if with great reluctance - because they have to. The flow is not there; it is as if it is a duty, not a joy.

Mm? the mother loves the child because she has to, the husband loves the wife because he has to, the wife takes care of the husband because she has to. This 'has to' is killing people. It should not be that she has to care, not that she has to do it as a duty, but that she is so overflowing that the sharing is natural. When you are overflowing and you share out of your overflow, you feel grateful to the person who became the opportunity for you to flow into him - not vice versa.

If the mother really loves out of overflow then she will feel grateful to the child, because it is the child who has made her the mother, it is the child who has brought a new consciousness to her being. It is the child who has allowed her to see a new aspect of her life; she will feel grateful. But ordinarily

the mothers don't feel grateful to the child. In fact they want the child to feel grateful because they are doing their duty, and so on and so forth.

We live at the minimum, and life happens only when you are at the maximum. When you exist at one hundred degrees, not lukewarm - from there the transformation, the evaporation.

So one thing to remember with the name is to become a flow and never to feel miserly - not to think that if you give too much, if you flow too much, you will become empty, no! If you hoard you will become empty, if you hoard you will become poor. If you give you will become rich. The more you give, the more you get - and we have infinite sources available.

The only thing to be remembered is to go on giving and sharing, and every day you will find new energy arising, new love, fresh love arising. And a man or a woman remains virgin if he or she goes on giving, because the new energy is always virgin - it is uncontaminated by the past. Only stagnant energy is no more virgin.

Prem means love, mala means garland, mm? And life can become a garland of love - each act of love can become a small flower in the garland. The only thing that is needed is a thread running through all the flowers that joins them altogether, otherwise the flowers will be a heap.

There are people who love, but their love is not a garland - it has no unity, it is fragmentary; so they become a heap.

Love can become a great experience if it is not just a heap of unrelated moments, if something like a thread runs through all the experiences and joins them together into a higher unity. Then many experiences o f love joined together start becoming prayer. That is the meaning of becoming a garland of love.

Each experience of love is a small experience of prayer. Whenever you are in love you are in prayer, but it is a very small glimpse. If you don't put all the glimpses together you will never be able to see what was really happening.

Everybody goes through many experiences, but the wise man is one who makes a unity out of his life, a synthesis - who puts his experiences together and finds what is the most essential thing that has been running through all his life. One love here, one love there - just memories unconnected...

then one becomes fragmented. If all of these experiences become one, a unity, they help you to become integrated.

[The new sannyasin says: Almost every seven years of my life I've gone through a death cycle - my mother died, my father, my uncle - and I just wanted to understand, because I feel in a way that I fear death, and I don't want to fear it because I've had so much death. I want to understand it.]

In fact there is a seven-year cycle in each life, mm? We change each seven years - one cycle is complete. And all great changes happen between the end of the one cycle and the beginning of the second cycle.

First, at the age of seven the child is no more a child; a totally different world starts. Up to then he was innocent. Now he starts learning the cunningness of the world, the cleverness, all the

deceptions, games; he starts learning to be pseudo, he starts wearing masks. The first layer of falsity starts surrounding him.

At the age of fourteen, sex, which was never a problem up to now, suddenly arises in his being. I am not talking about america where things have become so artificial that even a child of nine years will start thinking of sex - through TV and the movies and the whole socially-repressed sexuality on the one hand, and on the other hand through all the advertisements and all the exhibition that goes on in the name of a thousand and one things but which deep down is sex.

So in America something is happening, immature sexuality is happening - but that is an abnormal state. Otherwise at fourteen the child becomes sexual. And his world changes, utterly changes! For the first time he becomes interested in the other sex. A totally new vision of life arises and he starts dreaming and fantasising. And this way it goes on....

At the age of twenty-one, again: now a power trip an ego trip, ambition - now he is ready to go into some power trip, to attain more money, to become more famous, this and that. That is the age of twenty-one; again a circle is complete.

At the age of twenty-eight, again he becomes settled, starts thinking of security, comfort, bank balance. So hippies are right if they say 'Don't trust anybody beyond thirty.' In fact they should say 'twenty-eight', because that is the time from where a person becomes straight. Up to twenty-eight he can be a hippie or this and that, mm? That's why you don't see old hippies: by twenty-eight they have gone back into the old world; they become part of the establishment.

By the age of thirty-five again a change starts happening, because thirty-five is almost the peak of life. If a man is going to die at seventy, which is normal, then thirty-five seems to be the peak. The bigger circle has come to half and a man starts thinking of death, starts being afraid. Fears arise.

This is the age, between thirty-five and forty two, where ulcers and blood pressure, heart attacks and all sorts of things happen, mm? - because of the fear. Fear creates all these things - cancer, TB. A man becomes prone to all sorts of accidents because the fear has entered into his being.

Now death seems to be coming closer: he has taken the first step towards death the day he passes thirty-five.

At the age of forty-two a person starts becoming religious. Now death is not just an intellectual thing; he becomes more and more alert about it and wants to do something, really do something - because if he waits any more it will be too late.

Jung said that all his life he was watching thousands of mental patients, and after all that observation he says that at near about forty to forty-two, every person needs god, and if you cannot supply god he becomes mentally ill. That is happening in the west, because religion has become irrelevant - or people think it is out of date, we are not a religious age, we are scientific and rational people. But the body and its rhythm function in the old way, the same way.

At the age of forty-two a person needs some religion, just as at the age of fourteen he needed a woman or a man to relate to. Sexual relationship was needed; exactly the same happens at forty-two - now a religious relationship is needed. One needs a god, a master, somewhere to surrender, somewhere to go and unburden oneself. If one cannot find anybody then one will follow

Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin and make gods out of them. If you cannot find even them, you will go to the psychoanalyst and go from one therapy to another therapy - in search of the guru! But the psychotherapist cannot be the guru, he himself is moving through the same problems... And so on and so forth.

At the age of forty-nine a person becomes settled about religion. The search is over; he settles. At the age of fifty-six, if things go naturally and a person follows his rhythm, a person will start attaining a few glimpses of the divine.

At the age of sixty-three, if everything goes naturally, he will have his first satori. And if this happens at the age of sixty-three, that he has his first satori, he will die a beautiful death at the age of seventy.

Then death will not be death - it will be a door to the divine, it will be a meeting with the beloved.

So you have noted it well, it is perfectly true. So just think about these things that I have talked of to you and work out your life in such a way that things flow naturally.

And much is going to happen - death and the fear will also disappear.

[A new sannyasin said he had been studying Indian music and making instruments: I don't know if I've been doing the right thing in using it as a meditation; it's a mind thing.]

It is a mind thing, but it has brought you here, mm? so everything is helpful. Music in itself is not much but it can become a door to something which is really great. Once you have contact with that, the beyond, then your music will have a luminosity to it. It won't be ordinary - something will penetrate it.

Music can become a vehicle for meditation, but the real thing is meditation. If it is there then you will have a music to your life: whatsoever you touch will become musical and your whole life will have a rhythm, a harmony.

But good! the art that you have learned is good - we will use it, mm? You will make musical instruments and you will create much music - it is good!

Prem vineeto... It means love humbleness, loving humbleness. And essentially love is humbleness - there is no other kind of humbleness. If humbleness is cultivated without love, it is just a face for the ego, just another trick of the ego. When humbleness comes naturally out of love, then it is tremendously beautiful. So fall in love with existence - and the beginning is to fall in love with yourself.

Once you are in love with yourself you start feeling in love with many many people, and by and by that space becomes bigger and bigger. One day you suddenly find that the whole existence is included in it, that love is now no more addressed to anybody in particular, that it is simply there for anybody to take - it is simply flowing. Even if nobody is there to take it, it is flowing....

Then love is not a relationship, it is a state of being. And in that state of being is humbleness, true humbleness. Jesus is humble in that way; the pope is not humble.

Once each year the pope washes the feet of a poor man - but that is just show, that is not humbleness. Once a year he touches one poor man's feet: that is just a gesture, a meaningless gesture.

The so-called religious people are almost always egoistic people. Even if they pretend to be humble, you can see through their humbleness.

There is a very beautiful anecdote about a mystic who came to see Socrates....

The mystic used to say that he was the most humble man in the world. He used to wear a gown full of holes - dirty, rotten, very ancient. When he came to see Socrates, Socrates looked at him and said 'But through the holes of your robe, only ego is looking at me, nothing else.' And he was right!

So somebody can cultivate poverty and become very egoistic about it, somebody can cultivate humbleness and become egoistic about it. To me, real humbleness arises as a fragrance of love.

It cannot be cultivated, you cannot practise it, there is no way to learn it. You have to go into love and one day suddenly you find that love has flowered - spring has come and love has bloomed and there is a certain fragrance which was never there before: you are humble!

It is not that you practise it - one day you are suddenly surprised that it is there. And the taste of that humbleness is that we are all one, so how can we be superior or inferior? Remember, a humble person does not think that he is inferior. A humble person knows no superiority, knows no inferiority; both have become irrelevant.

A humble person knows only this much, that this whole existence interpenetrates, is interdependent, we are all together. He is not separate, the other is not separate, so how can he be superior and the other inferior? How can he be inferior or the other superior? There is nobody superior and there is nobody inferior. You participate in the greatest saint and you participate in the greatest sinner. In that light of understanding, ego is not found.

So humbleness does not mean that one is egoless, humbleness means that one searched and could not find the ego. So the humble person is neither ego-full nor egoless. A humble person simply says that he looked deep into himself and could not find any ego - so he cannot be either ego-full or egoless; he is simply he. This is what he is, this is how he is, and there is no claim.

But this happens only out of love - so grow into love!