Chapter 16

Prabhu means god and prakash means light - God's light. And that's what every human being is.

So feel more and more full of light. That's the way to come closer to the original source. Feel more and more full of light. Whenever you close your eyes, just see light streaming all over your being. In the beginning it will be imagination, but imagination is very creative, and to you it is going to be very creative.

So just imagine a flame near the heart and imagine that you are full of light. Go on increasing that light. It becomes almost dazzling... dazzling! And not only you will start feeling it; others will also start feeling it. Whenever you are close to them, they will start feeling it, because it vibrates.

It is everybody's birthright but one has to claim it. It is an unclaimed treasure. If you don't claim it, it remains dead, buried under the ground. Once you claim it, you have claimed your own inner being.

Light is going to be your centre of focus. So wherever you see light, feel deep reverence. Just something ordinary - a lamp is burning, and you just feel a deep reverence, a certain awe. In the night there are stars... just watch them and feel connected. In the morning, the sun rises. Watch it and let the inner sun also rise with it. And whenever you see light, immediately try to make contact with it - and soon you will be able to.

Imagination is going to be your path, so never deny imagination. It is the only creative faculty in man, the only poetic faculty, and one should not deny it. Denied, it becomes very revengeful. Denied, it becomes a nightmare. Denied, it becomes destructive. Otherwise it is very creative. It is creativity and nothing else. But if you deny it, if you disown it, you start a conflict between your own creativity and yourself, then you are going to be a loser.

Science can never win against art and logic can never win against love. History can never win against myth and reality is poor compared to dreams, very poor. So if you carry any idea against

imagination, drop it. Because we all carry it - this age is very anti-imagination. People have been taught to be factual, realistic, empirical and all sorts of nonsense. People should be more dreamy, more childlike, more ecstatic. People should be able to create euphoria. And only through that do you reach to your original source.

That is the meaning of God being creative, or of God being the creator. He must be a tremendously imaginative person. Just look at the world! Whosoever created it or whosoever dreamed it, must be a great dreamer... so many colours and so many songs. The whole existence is a rainbow. It must come out of deep imagination.

In the East Hindus call 'maya', illusion, God's greatest power. They say God creates through maya.

'Maya' means the dream faculty, the imaginative faculty. Take the imagination from a poet and he is an ordinary man. Take imagination from God and He is nothing. Take imagination from a painter and he remains a technician. All glory is lost. And man is losing religion because man is losing imagination. And as I can see you, a great imaginative heart is there in your heart, waiting to flower.

Help it.

So be emphatically imaginative. Allow it full functioning and everything is going to happen through it. God is to enter in you through your dreams. So dream... and dream with a full heart.

A dream has its own reality, a separate reality, but its own. And it is closer to the reality than what we see with our eyes in the outside world, because it is closer to the subjectivity. So don't be worried that it is imagination, don't bring in that question. Just move into it, allow it, play in it.

Much is going to happen, so be expectant!

[A sannyasin, recently arrived from Italy, said things were going well there save for the usual difficulties.]

Difficulties are always there. They are part of life. And it is good that they are there, otherwise there would be no growth. They are challenges. They provoke you to work, to think, to find out ways to overcome them. The very effort is essential. So always take difficulties as blessings.

Without difficulties, man would be nowhere. Bigger difficulties come - that means that God is looking after you. He is giving you more challenges. And the more you solve them, the greater challenges will be waiting for you. Only at the last moment, difficulties disappear, but that last moment comes only because of difficulties, otherwise it will never come.

So never take any difficulty negatively. Find something positive in it. The same rock blocking the path can function as a stepping stone. If there were no rock on the path you would never rise up.

And the very process of going above It, making it a stepping stone, gives you a new altitude of being.

So once you think about life creatively, then everything is useful and everything has something to give you. Nothing is meaningless. And when your vision becomes wider, everything falls together and becomes a whole, an organic whole.

Friends are needed and enemies too, otherwise friendship will lose all meaning. Light is needed but darkness too, otherwise light will be just flat; it will not have any depth. Flowers are good and thorns

are also good... a great necessity. Without thorns, flowers won't be so beautiful. Against what will they be beautiful? Thorns become the background. Pleasure is there because pain is there. Without pain there would be no pleasure.

So a man of understanding accepts all and tries to find how to use everything creatively. Then one fee!s thankful to God for everything that has been given: pain and pleasure, birth and death, beautiful high moments and very sad low moments. For all, unconditionally, one feels grateful.

That's what a religious man is - an unconditional gratitude.

[A sannyasin says: Every day is different.]

Every day is different, and if sometimes you cannot see the difference that simply means that you are not seeing rightly.

Nothing is ever repeated. Repetition does not exist. It is always fresh, utterly fresh. But if we look through the past, accumulated thoughts, the mind, then it can appear like repetition. And that's why the mind is the only source of boredom. It makes you bored because it never allows the freshness of life to be revealed to you. It has a certain pattern. It goes on seeing things in the same pattern.

If life seems to be repeating itself, then always remember it is not life, it is your mind. The mind makes everything dull, flat, one dimensional. Life is three dimensional but the mind is one dimensional. Life is very colourful. The mind is just black/white. Life is like a rainbow. Between black and white there are millions of nuances of light and colour and shade. Life is not divided between yes and no. The mind is divided. The mind is aristotelean. Life is non-aristotelean.

And once you have a fixed idea - as we all have because we have been brought up that way....

We have been hooked from the very beginning with the mind, so much so that we have completely forgotten that we are separate from it. Your mind is not like a dress; it has become like your skin.

You can't see how to get out of it, how to jump out of your skin. It is not a dress, so you cannot undress.

It has become so close. It has been taught and forced through praise and punishment and through all sorts of manipulations, so that one has become completely fixed with the window. One cannot move, and the frame of the window has become the frame of existence. You look from the window towards the sky. The sky seems to be framed. The frame is not there in the sky. It is your window.

But if you don't know how to come out of the window, the sky is framed. Otherwise the sky is unlimited.

I can see that you are feeling new every day because the mind is getting a little looser. Sometimes there are moments when you can slip out of it. They are rare moments, not very often, but even if once in a single day for a split second you can slip out of the mind, that is enough to fill twenty-four hours with beauty. That one drop becomes almost a nectar. It is enough for twenty-four hours to live and delight and thrill and vibrate in a totally new way. And, by and by, more and more moments will be coming because the more you understand how to.... It is a knack - slipping out of the mind. It is not a technique so it cannot be taught.

You can catch it, but it cannot be taught. It can be caught but not taught.

And that is the whole meaning in the East of 'satsang' - to remain with someone who is without a mind... just in his presence, in deep love... so that something becomes like an infection and you start finding the knack of it. By and by you slip out of the mind. In the beginning they are rare moments, then they are more easily available. Then one day suddenly you see that for moments, for minutes, you have been out of the mind. When you are out of the mind, you are also out of the body.

In fact when you are out of the mind, you are out of time and space. Then there exist no limitations of any sort. You are simply one with this expanding universe. You are made of the same stuff as this whole blissful universe.

You come back again and again into the body, but then the body is also totally new because your vision has changed. Then it is no more a body of death. It is a body of life. It is no more condemned like a sin. It becomes a shrine, a temple of God. And one day the ultimate revelation happens - that the mind is also beautiful. But that happens only when you have been very much out of the mind and then you come back into it. You are free of it then.

It is as if you are imprisoned. In the prison there is a beautiful garden but how can you enjoy it? It is a prison garden. Yes, roses are there - better roses than you can find outside - beautiful trees and beautiful flowers... the moon also comes and the sun, but how can you enjoy it? You cannot even see it because the imprisonment is so much. You are in slavery all around. You are crushed, so how can you enjoy the rose?

But one day you are freed from the gaol. For the first time when the message arrives that you are free, you can look around. Now roses are roses because you are free. Now they don't belong to your bondage; there is no bondage now. For the first time you can see the beauty. And if you come as a visitor back to the gaol some day, you will be able to enjoy it tremendously because it is no more a gaol to you.

The same happens when you are in the body and in the mind like a slave. You cannot enjoy it, you don't know the beauty of it; it is impossible. But once you start slipping out and coming back, slipping out and coming back, by and by you become aware of the sheer delight of the body and the sheer delight of the mind. Then you can enjoy both.

And that's what my insistence is: that a real man of understanding enjoys both the worlds together because he is no more engaged anywhere. He is not of this world and he is not of that world.

Both the worlds are two alternatives in which he can move freely. He can enjoy food, he can enjoy clothes, he can enjoy a house, he can enjoy a friendship, a love affair. And he can enjoy prayer and meditation and God. And all alternatives are available to him. He does not exclude anything. His life is inclusive. He has no denied part.

Then one becomes whole. One becomes healthy. All wounds heal. One becomes holy. So allow these moments and when they come, cherish them. Chew them and digest them so that they come more and more. Make more and more friendships with these moments so they start almost hanging around you.

The more you love these moments, the more they will be coming. They will become your welcome guests. And one day it happens that just out of sheer accumulation, a point comes... just as when

you heat water to one hundred degrees and the water evaporates. Go on collecting these small moments, one degree by one degree. One day, one is simply surprised - it comes to the one hundred degree point and suddenly there is a one hundred and eighty degree turn, a conversion.

Then this world is never the same again. God has entered into it. He is luminous everywhere.

People are not aware, that's why they go on living the way they do, otherwise they would be simply shocked at how much they are missing. We are living at the minimum when the maximum is available. We are living in the porch of a palace. We have made our houses there and we think everything is perfectly good. We are just in the porch and the palace is just near by! Just a little effort and the doors of the palace can open. But we have not even knocked. Jesus says, 'Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you. Ask and it shall be given to you.'

Seek, knock, ask... just for the asking's sake. But we never knock at the door of life.

That knock is what meditation is all about - not being ready to live at the minimum, a revolt against the minimum and an effort to live at the maximum, like a torch burning from both ends. Many people have settled, millions have settled for nothing, when all is possible.

So something is growing. It is bound to be very fragile in the beginning. One can lose its track very easily, so don't lose it. And when these moments come, drop everything. Those moments are of prayer - when you see life new, when your eyes are clear and there is perception and clarity. Just enjoy those moments - it is pure enjoyment - so they come more and more. Whatsoever you enjoy comes more and more.