Music is a short-cut to God

Deva means divine, abhavo means absence. The moment you are absent, god is present; and god is present only when you are not. There is no co-existence possible - man cannot encounter god.

That is impossible, as impossible as darkness encountering light. Darkness is possible only when light is not. If the light is, darkness is not. Man is a darkness. So the more capable we are of losing ourselves, the more full of god we are; and the more full of ourselves we are, the less is the possibility of god penetrating us.

One can call it meditation, one can call it prayer, but the most essential thing is your absence, your disappearance. And remember, it is not empty; in fact your presence is a kind of emptiness When you are not, you are so full of god - how can you call it empty? So the absence is divine. It is the greatest possibility... not to be, utterly not to be. And it is not a negative state at all, the most positive, but one has to know it only by knowing it.

A few glimpses come of it in deep love, but only glimpses, momentary flashes. In deep love one disappears, and in that disappearance there is great joy. The absence is so full of something unknown that the absence becomes celebration. So this is going to be your work on yourself:

disappear, dissolve.

Prem means love, diwani means mad - love mad. Love is illogical, irrational, not of the mind at all.

The mind is clever, calculating. Love knows no calculation, *nc, cleverness; love is innocent. Love is always a child: it never ages, it never becomes old. It always remains fresh. And only love is capable of penetrating the reality and its mysteries. The greatest insight happens only through love.

The mind can only play on the surface - it is too clever to dive deep.

A madman is needed to dive deep, because to dive deep is risky: you may never come back. The mind cannot take that much of a risk. The mind is a businessman, love is a gambler, so where the mind feels afraid to go, love simply enters. And all the mysteries are at the centre; nothing is at the surface. The mind goes round and round. It works hard, but its work is trivial. It never touches the essence, never reaches the core of things.

Poets are mad half-mad. Mystics are totally mad. So whenever one is in love one becomes a sort of poet. And if the love deepens one becomes a sort of mystic. Remember: we have to pay with our head - that's the price god wants. Unless one is ready to cut off one's head completely, god remains unavailable. The head represents the ego. The heart is completely egoless; it knows nothing of the 'I'.

That is the meaning of diwani. I am giving you a secret - you will have to discover in your life. Love more, calculate less; be innocent, don't be clever. Cry, laugh, live... but don't pour too much of your energy into thinking. Thinking robs one of energy. Thinking is a kind of exploiter. Avoid it, and then slowly slowly you will see a totally different vision of reality.

By becoming love mad you will become wise.

Deva means divine, akarmo means inaction - divine inaction. Truth cannot be conquered, you cannot fight with it; hence no action is needed. Truth has to be allowed in. You need not go in search of it because it is already here. It has always been here... it is always now. It is within you and without you. There is nothing else than it. So you need not go anywhere. It is not a journey to a goal - it is just an awakening to herenow. And in inaction, in deep inaction, that awakening happens.

The seeker's energy remains involved in action. When you are not seeking, not doing anything, the whole energy is available. You are unoccupied, full of energy, vibrating, pulsating; in that very vibration, in that very pulsation, truth happens One has just to be alive here and now... and truth happens.

Truth is a happening in deep inactivity. Hence the importance of meditation. Meditation is nothing but a learning to be inactive, to be unoccupied, an art of not doing anything. Or you can call it an anti-art, because every other art teaches you to do something and meditation teaches you not to do.

And not to do is to be.

Veet means beyond, samayo means time - beyond time. Time is, the only problem. If one can transcend time, one has transcended mind. Time and mind are two aspects of the same phenomenon: if you can kill one, the other is killed automatically. The mind continuously creates time, because to live it needs time. It can live either in the past or in the future; it cannot live in the present, hence the present is not part of time. It is said to be so, but it is not. Time consists of past and future; the present is just a gap between the past and the future. The present is non-temporal just an interpenetration of eternity into time.

All the methods of meditation that have been developed down the centuries are nothing but efforts to approach this interval - how not to be in the past and not to be in the future so that you can enter into that tiny gap of the present. Once you enter into that tiny gap you have gone beyond time and beyond mind.

To live in the present is to be a sannyasin. To live in the moment and moment-to-moment is to be a sannyasin.

Start dropping the garbage that the past creates. It is just futile. It is no longer anywhere except in your mind; it is just a ghost. You cannot go back to it so why waste time in thinking about it?

Whether it was good or bad both are irrelevant now. And don't move into the future, because there is no way to go into the future. You can only go into the present. Playing with the future is avoiding the present, and to avoid the present is to avoid life and to avoid god.

Slowly slowly one has to learn how to drop these explorations into the past and the future. Whenever you catch yourself red-handed - flittering in the past or in the future - pull yourself back to the present. Anything will do in the present: this sound of the music, the sound of the insects, the train passing by... anything that is present will do.

Bringing yourself again and again to the present will make you capable of going less and less into the past and the future.

And one day the miracle happens: you have entered into the small gap called the present. Suddenly you are out of the womb of time, and the world is tremendously different. Then everything has the quality of eternity, deathlessness. That's what in the East we have called freedom. Then you are no more a slave to anything, all chains have disappeared. In that freedom there is bliss.

Deva means god, homa means dedicated - dedicated to god. And remember that life has meaning only when you are dedicated to something greater than yourself. If a man has nothing in his life bigger than himself, he will live an utterly insignificant life; it will be a drag. He will never know what meaning is. Meaning arises only in the context of something bigger than you. And meaning is life.

Without meaning, one only goes through the empty gestures of living; it is not life.

Take a leaf from a tree, separate it from the tree - it is dead. Joined with the tree it is alive. Life comes only if it is part of the big tree. If it is no more part of the big tree it is dead. Take the tree out of the earth and it is dead. The tree is alive only if it is part of the earth. Take the earth away from the sun and it is dead. Life arises only when it is part of the solar system, and so on, so forth.

God means the ultimate centre of existence. If you can relate with that centre you will be more and more alive. God means the whole, the total. Poor is the person who lives without god.. utterly poor and pitiable, because his life will be futile, empty of all poetry, all song, all rejoicing.

He will live and yet he will not know what life is all about. That is the meaning of your name. Start searching for greater values so that you can look upwards to the sky. Think in terms of the vast.

Relate with the stars and the clouds and the rainbows. Have a dialogue with existence and feel part of this beautiful cosmos.

That's my concept of how a sannyasin should be.

Deva means god, dasi means servant - a servant of god. And that's what makes a person a king, a queen. To be a servant of god is better than being an emperor, far better, because only the servants of god have known the splendour of life... they have known the beauty of existence. Not Alexander, not Napoleon, but a Christ, a Buddha. And those are the servants of god - utterly humble, nobodies, who have completely disappeared into the service. They live not - god lives through them, they have become vehicles. They speak not; god speaks through them. They have surrendered themselves totally - they have no will of their own.

That is the meaning of 'dasi': having no will of one's own. Let thy will be done - that is the meaning of 'dasi'. And the beauty of it, the purity, is tremendous.

[Dasi asks about making stringed instruments] There are a few sannyasins who are doing it and are experts. You can learn perfectly good, something beautiful. Create as much music in the world as possible.

That's very good - that's a great service to god. You can learn and can start doing it. Good!

Anand means bliss, blissfulness, hafiz is a Sufi name for god - blissful god. And always contemplate on god as blissfulness. Let bliss and god become synonymous in your being; they are two names for the same phenomenon.

Don't think of god as the creator, because god is not the creator but creativity itself. The moment you think of god as the creator you have created a division: the creator and the created. Then he is the creator and. you are the creature, and how can the creature be the creator? That's why Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, don't like the things that the Upanishads say, like 'Aham Brahmasmi - I am god,' or like the Sufi mystic declared 'Ana I haq - I am truth.'

Jews could not forgive Jesus because he declared himself god, and even though Christians follow Jesus they say he was the only begotten son of god, that nobody else should try it again. There is a constant fear - how can the creature be the creator? The painting cannot be the painter, true; and the poetry cannot be the poet, true... but in the first place to think of god as the creator is wrong.

God is creativity. God is not separate from his creation. He is not a painter and the world is not a painting. He is a dancer and the world is a dance, and they are together; you cannot separate them, no separation is possible. You cannot take the dance away from the dancer or the dancer away from the dance. And once you think of god as the dancer, immediately a very blissful god arises in your being, because only bliss can dance. There is no possibility of anything else out of bliss than dance, a song, a celebration.

Don't be serious about sannyas. It is a non-serious approach towards religion, a festive approach towards religion. It is fun to be a sannyasin.

It has nothing to do with those old attitudes of holier-than-thou. It is a beautiful game, a play, a leela.

Then suddenly the whole meaning of religion changes. Then you are no more concerned with the priests and the churches which look like graveyards, where laughter is not allowed, where to dance and to sing is not allowed, where to be serious is the right way to be - stiff and serious, not relaxed and rejoicing.

If you can rejoice wherever you are god is there around you. If you can move in dance he is bound to be there because he is dance. And whenever you have a real laugh spreading all over your being, he is there because he is laughter!

There is a Hassidic saying that god loves stories. So when a great Hassid master died, his disciples said 'Master, are you ready to face god?' He said 'What are you talking about? The whole of my life I have been telling such beautiful stories to you - he will be waiting for me! He will ask me "Tell me a few beautiful stories." And I will tell him "That is my preparation - I have not prepared anything else but I know a few beautiful stories." I know that god loves beautiful stories!'

This is a totally different kind of preparation from the preparation that an ascetic does: fasting, torturing the body, continuously guilty, feeling afraid, frightened, having nightmares of hell and longing for heaven. He is stupid, and the idea of god that he has is nothing but his own idea.

This Hassid master seems to be perfectly right: 'What else? I can tell a few beautiful stories. God will ask and I will tell him then. That is my preparation.' This is a non-serious approach.

Prem means love, islam means surrender - love and surrender. These two steps are enough to reach the ultimate. And they are not really two, because love prepares you for surrender; it is the beginning of surrender, and surrender is the climax of love. So they are not really divided, there is no demarcation line between them, but in the beginning it starts as love and in the end it is concluded as surrender.

Start loving... and I am not saying 'Love god', because how can you love god? You don't know anything about god.

How can you love something unknown? So I am not bringing god into it at all. When you are ready he will come in. Start loving people, animals, trees, birds, flowers. There are so many beautiful things all around... start loving. Pulsate more and more as love. Don't miss any opportunity to be loving. If you can be loving to a rock, be. Just the touch of a loving person or just the hug of a tree...

because it is not a question of to whom you are loving; the question is that you are loving. Whether the rock receives it or not, that is the rock's business; you need not be worried about it. Whether the rock responds or not, that is not your problem either; that is for the rock to decide. One thing that you have to be constantly aware of is that you have been loving, that you have not missed a single opportunity to love.

The more you love, the more your heart opens; the more you love, the more the golden flower opens. The more you love, the more you surrender. And the surrender is not towards somebody in particular. It is just that as love grows you suddenly feel a new capacity of surrendering arising in you... for no reason at all. In the first place it looks very strange. The mind asks to whom to surrender; it is not a question of whom.

There are moments when you will simply feel like surrendering to the earth. Then lie down on the earth and surrender to the earth. And there will be moments when you will feel like Lying down and surrendering to the stars - surrender to the stars. Just go with the feel, flow with it, and slowly slowly, as love becomes surrender, one day suddenly the world has disappeared and all over the place is god. The rock that you touched was one form of god, the tree that you had hugged was another form of god, the earth that you surrendered to was part of god, the stars that you talked to were nothing but god listening to you in a certain form. All the forms are his; he has no definite form of his own.

All bodies are his but he has no body of his own - or the whole universe is his body. But don't bring god in; there is no need to think of god. Think of love, start loving, and the day it starts becoming surrender, be ready: the guest is coming, and at any moment the guest will knock on your door.

And that moment is the moment of great bliss - when the guest knocks on your door and you become the host. To become host to god is the ultimate experience of joy. You have arrived... now there is nowhere to go. You have found your home, your original source. Now there is only contentment, infinite contentment.

[A sannyasin asks: When I wake up I feel that my eyes are very tense and my mouth is closed tight, so I try consciously to relax it... since ten, twelve years.] Just do one thing: every night before you go to sleep, sit in your bed and start making faces - just as small children enjoy doing. Make all kinds of faces - good, bad, ugly, beautiful, so the whole face and the musculature start moving. Make sounds, nonsense sounds will do, and sway, just for ten to fifteen minutes and then go to sleep. In the morning before you take your bath, again stand before the mirror and for ten minutes make faces. Standing before the mirror will help more: you will be able to see and you will be able to respond.

All that you have done is that in your childhood you have controlled your face too much. It looks... I can see it: it is a very controlled face, very disciplined.

On your face you have the quality of a marble statue. You have repressed all kinds of emotions. You have made your face absolutely non-expressive; nobody can judge from your face what your feeling is.

Mm, here is Mukta - she is just the opposite. She cannot hide any feeling. If she is angry with me, immediately I know; if she is happy, I know. Just the moment I see her, I know how she is.

Impossible for her! But you have a very controlled face, so this control has to be dropped.

So in the night for ten to fifteen minutes make faces, make sounds, and enjoy it just like a small child, and in the morning before the mirror, so you will become an expert. Within two, three months it will be completely gone. Don't be worried!