Darshan 14 September 1977

Prem means love, prasava means birth - birth of love. And let sannyas be a birth of love... a birth in love. Live love as intensely as possible; let that be your doing. Everything else in life is a means; the end is always love. And if the means fulfill love then the person is sane; if the means don't fulfill love then the person is insane. Sanity has only one definition: that your means should fulfill the end.

If one can manage that - the harmony between the means and the end - then one is sane. When your means don't fulfill your end and you go on doing them and you never arrive anywhere - no fulfillment, no flowering - then you are neurotic. There is no harmony between means and end.

If you want to go to the river and you start moving in the opposite direction, then you are neurotic.

If you want to go to the river and the river is flowing east, you have to go east, not west. Then you are healthy, sane. According to this definition there are very few people who are sane. Ninety-nine percent of people live a life without love, hence it is meaningless, hence it is without poetry, hence it is without romance. They simply drag - there is not that quality of dance in their life. They are not thrilled and delighted but live as if fulfilling a duty. A serious duty has to be fulfilled but there is no joy in it.

Love is the fufillment of life's whole effort, endeavor. So whatsoever you do, remember one thing, that it should somehow become related to love, only then is it worthwhile.

Even if you are cleaning the floor it should be a fulfillment of your love. Somebody is coming you love and you are preparing the house. Or you are cooking food - your son is coming, your friend is coming and it is out of love. Make every act of your life dedicated to love and sanity arises out of it. Wholeness, saintliness, and all that is beautiful, will follow automatically, just let this be your criterion.... This is the meaning of... prem prasava: birth into love, birth for love....

Deva means divine and vihan means morning - divine morning. And let this be the beginning of a

great day. Sannyas is just the moment before the morning. The orange is the colour of the sun. It represents life, represents expression - just as flowers start opening when the sun is there....

[A sannyasin, who works as an ashram guard, asks if he should do any meditations; he enjoys guarding.]

Yes, that can be of immense value - it can become zazen, just sitting there silently, watching the trees and the birds and the sky, and nothing in particular to do but just being there. A watchman can become a great witness very easily; it is one of the best things. You have only to be alert, that's your job, and to be alert is the whole of religion.

So in fact there is no need... You can simply be more and more watchful; enjoy the feel of it. And don't think about it as a job; think about it as a meditation. Then you will be transformed by it. And it is only a question of attitude. If you think about it as a job, you miss the point. Then you are most concerned about the time - that you have to go when your time is over; you are looking at the watch.

There are a few people working in the office who go on looking at the watch; they are missing an opportunity .

It happened in the french revolution - a very rare phenomenon - that people went berserk destroying things. But one thing particularly was destroyed all over paris - all the clocks, watchtowers, church clocks, schools, colleges. People were shooting the clocks. It was mysterious! Why? Why were people destroying the clocks? Then only by and by did people become aware that there was some hidden meaning. Maybe even the people who were destroying those clocks were not aware of it.

Those clocks had destroyed their whole joy of life; they had reduced the whole of life to work.

Time is destructive to eternity. Time is mind. When you slip out of time you slip out of mind. So sitting there, slip out of time. Just be alert, as if nothing else is important. Just being aware is the only thing you have to do. And enjoy it, cherish it. Don't make it a serious effort that you have to be alert, just playfully be alert. There is nothing else to do; why not be alert ? And when you are alert you will see the greenery of the trees has changed; it depends on your alertness.

When your alertness is very dim, trees are green but not psychedelically green. When your alertness is a little more, you become more sensitive, more open. Trees change - they have more greenness.

When you become a little more alert, the greenness is not only greenness - it is throbbing life. When you become a little more alert, the tree becomes luminous. It is not only green - it is a luminous green; a light is being diffused by that greenness.

It depends on how alert you are. As you go on becoming more and more alert, you will find life becoming more and more of a celebration. The more dull you are, the more dull life is; it is exactly the way you are. If you are dull, life is dull. If you are alert, life is alert. To change the whole world there is only one simple key: change your alertness.

It seems perfectly good - you continue, mm? Good!

[A couple ask about their relationship. The woman says: I love him and hate him and I want to go away and I don't want to ever leave him. I have never known anything like that before!]

So you are really in love!...

Love is the only problem! Once love is not there there is no problem left! There is nothing else left....

Love brings both - the peaks and the valleys. The higher the peaks, the deeper will be the valley, and one has to learn to accept the negative part of it; it is always there. If you want to drop the negative part, the only way to drop it is to drop the positive part, but then the whole love is dropped.

You cannot drop just the hate part. Love is not just a love relationship; it is love-hate relationship.

It is being in a constant turmoil. There will be moments of peace just as there are moments of peace in war. And they are beautiful, mm? because against the background of the conflict, when those moments come they are beautiful. Against the noise comes that silence, and it is beautiful. But it has something very basic in it that needs to be understood: if you love a person you want to come close, but there is only a point up to which you can come close. Beyond that the privacy of the other person starts.

The moment you start interfering with his privacy or he starts interfering with your privacy, fight starts. We allow the other only to a certain extent - and nothing can be done about it - otherwise your soul will be destroyed. He wants you to be close to him but he does not want to be completely effaced. Otherwise you will take him inside you. Then he will become afraid: 'This woman is going to kill me!'

You would like him to be very close to you but only to a certain extent. And by and by you will know, by and by you will watch and you will see where the point comes where you start overlapping on him or he starts overlapping on you. Immediately the energy changes: you start pushing him, you start going away. That's part of it; you have to go away.

When you are again distant to a certain extent, you start feeling love for the other and you would like to come close. Mm? that's why it feels like being a yo-yo, but love is a yo-yo. It is coming together just to separate again; it is going apart just to come back again.

That coming together and the joy of it depends on going away. If you don't go away, then you are stuck; then there will be no joy. It is just like you eat; then for six, eight hours you fast. You cannot go on eating twenty-four hours a day. Otherwise all joy of eating will be destroyed - you will feel nausea. So for six, eight hours you forget about food - again hunger is there and again you are asking for food, longing for food.... And you will eat! And the moment you eat the hunger starts disappearing. So the first bite has a different value; the second bite has less value than the first; the law .of diminishing returns. It is not only economical; it is a very fundamental law. The second bite is not so satisfying as the first, the third will be less, the fourth will be less, and so on, so forth, and after thirty minutes you are finished. If somebody forces you now, you will say, 'What are you doing?' You will start fighting.

In my family it was a usual affair. My father is so much for giving food to people that he will invite people and he will force them, almost physically! Almost physically he will go on putting ladoos in the mouth! Unless it becomes a fight, unless the person starts almost being angry and in rage... but that was how my grandfather was too. And he used to say, 'This is our family tradition - that unless the guest starts fighting, you have not served him well! Unless he starts thinking, "I will never come back to your house!"...'

There is a limit - you can eat only so far. Beyond that is nausea, vomiting, indigestion and problems.

So you stop and you forget food for a few hours. It is the same with love. Love is food - food for the soul. You cannot eat it for twenty-four hours a day. So a real love affair is a constant honeymoon/divorce, honeymoon/divorce. That way it goes - like a yo-yo.

So it is perfectly good! If you want a love affair this is how it is to be. If you want a marriage - nice, secure, no fight, nothing, goody-goody - then you can manage that too. But that is not worth much.

One has to pay for every joy, remember it! You cannot avoid paying. The fight is the payment, the price. If you desire that joy of being together, of melting and merging into each other, then you will have to suffer the pain of going away again and again.

And remember: love is the only problem! Once you have gone beyond love the world is finished; then you will not be coming back into the world again. That is nirvana - gone forever.

And that's why I go on helping my sannyasins to be more in love - so that you can see all the joy and all the misery of it, the ecstasy and the agony. Watching, moving into it, living in it, experiencing it, one day you will go beyond it. That day - when you go beyond love - is the day of meditation.

Then you start being happy just in your aloneness; then you don't need the other.

These are the two steps towards god: love - you are happy but somebody else is needed, your happiness has a kind of dependence, the other is needed. You are not enough unto yourself, you are half, and only when the other is there do you feel a kind of wholeness. When the other is not there you start being miserable; something is missing. But through the experience of love, the authentic experience of love - which is not possible in marriage because marriage is bogus... Nobody can go from marriage into meditation, it is impossible, because the man has missed the first step.

It is only through love - the anguish and the ecstasy of it - that you learn, that you see, that you visualise, that you become capable of coming to certain conclusions. And the greatest conclusion that one arrives at spontaneously one day is that if one really wants to be eternally happy, then that happiness has to be in aloneness; it cannot depend on the other. That which depends on the other certainly depends on the other - you are not the master of it; you are a slave. And that's why there is conflict: nobody wants to be a slave.

Freedom is a higher value than love, and the whole conflict is between these two values: love and freedom. But you can know only that freedom is a higher value than love if you have been in love.

Going through experience beyond love, you arrive at freedom. I'm not saying that you become unloving, no. Then a different quality of love arises in you which is more like friendship, not like lust.

Then you can give your love to anybody who is available but you are no more dependent on it. Then there is no more any honeymoon and no more any divorce; it is just a pure sharing of energy.

If nobody is there you are perfectly happy, not an iota less. If somebody is there you are perfectly happy; there is no difference between your aloneness and your togetherness. That's what meditation is - but that's a higher state... higher than love. My emphasis on love relationship is basically so that I can drive you towards the beyond.

So let it be so - go into it... go into it as totally as possible. And both sides have to be lived totally. When you are miserable, then be really miserable and when you are happy, then be really

happy. And it will be driving you almost mad because one moment you are so miserable and another moment you are so happy. And the distance is so much that to travel continuously from these two distances from one to another is almost like going from one planet to another. But that will make you mature, integrated, and capable of being alone one day.

You continue! Good!