Darshan 10 August 1979
Prem Anastasia. Prem means love; anastasia means resurrection.
Love is the only energy that never dies. Each death only becomes a new birth. Everything else is momentary, except love: love is timeless.
That's why Jesus says love is God. Love is our only experience through which we can have a glimpse of what God is. Love comes closest to God's reality. Love is almost a reflection of God.
Hence it dies, disappears, but revives again, resurrects again. To know love is to be religious. To be love is the end; the goal is achieved.
Prem Anna. Prem means love. Anna has three meanings: the first is prayer, the second is grace, the third is compassion. All three meanings are tremendously significant and all three are rooted in the experience of love.
First, love becomes prayer; second, love becomes grace; and third, love becomes compassion.
In these three steps the whole journey is completed. These are the basic qualities of a spiritual consciousness. It will be prayerful. Prayer means gratitude. It means that whatsoever God has given is more than needed. It is an overflowing thankfulness. It is an expression of gratitude, that "I am not worthy, yet you have chosen me to be alive. I have not earned it, yet you have showered it on me. It is a gift." To know life as a gift is the beginning of prayer.
And the moment you start feeling prayerfulness, a great beauty starts surrounding you; a softness, a feminineness, a roundness - all those create grace. One is surrounded by an aura of grace, but only when the heart is full of prayer. And prayer never remains inactive. First it transforms you, and brings grace to you, beautifies you, and then it starts reaching to others. That's what compassion
is: you start sharing your joy. But everything begins with prayer, and prayer itself is nothing but the fragrance of love.
Be love and all else shall follow of its own accord.
Anand Mario. Anand means bliss; mario means prayer.
Prayer can either be serious or cheerful. If it is serious it is ill, unhealthy; something has gone sour in it. If it is cheerful, dancing, rejoicing, then it is healthy and whole. Ordinarily people pray only when they are sad, miserable; hence their prayer never soars very high. It cannot reach to the ultimate. It has no wings, it cannot fly. It cannot take you to the core of the mystery of existence. Because it is out of your misery it is heavy; because it is out of your sadness it knows nothing of dance. It cannot laugh, it knows nothing of laughter.
Because of this kind of prayer the so-called saints are really pathological people, psychologically ill. Flowers cannot bloom in their being. This has to be remembered: prayer should be playful. It should not be serious, it should be sincere, certainly, but not serious. It should be silent but not sad.
It should be capable of love, laughter, lightness. Unless it is rooted in delight it cannot take you very far.
My whole approach towards prayer is that of playfulness. Churches have become very serious.
They are almost cemeteries. They are not temples of life. Death is worshipped there; life is not enjoyed. A healthy prayer is nothing but a rejoicing in life and all its gifts. And life is beautiful. Each moment is full of surprise, and each moment brings tremendous possibilities of being ecstatic; but unless you are in a prayerful mood, receptive, laughing, dancing, you cannot receive those ecstatic gifts. You remain closed.
Prayer means the opening of the heart, just like a bud opening and becoming a flower... Then the flower enjoys the sun rays, the wind, the rain. Then the flower is laughing; it is laughter. It is a song.
And a tiny flower is not as tiny as it appears, because it goes on pouring its fragrance into existence.
It gives, it not only has. It not only gets, it gives too, it shares; it shares its whole spirit.
Become a blissful prayer a cheerful prayer and then God is not far away. In that very cheerfulness he is found.
Anand Dominique. Anand means bliss; dominique means blessed by the lord.
Bliss is not an achievement of man. Man cannot attain it by his own efforts. Man has to be on the receptive end: he has to be open and vulnerable. It is always from God's side that the blessing comes. Bliss is a blessing from God. It is available to everybody but very few people are capable of absorbing it. People remain closed. They are not sensitive enough. They cannot allow it to enter; they are very afraid. They are always on guard, holding themselves back. They are so afraid that they create an armor around themselves so nothing can penetrate.
Sannyas means dropping your armor, becoming defenseless. It is risky, but the payoff is tremendous. Once you gather enough courage to drop all defenses, God simply starts pouring into you from every nook and corner. He rushes towards you from every direction. That is the meaning of dominique: blessed by the lord. Bliss is a blessing. You cannot achieve it but you can receive it.
The ego always wants to be the achiever, hence the ego is a barrier. One has to put the ego aside, the ego can bring only more and more misery to you. The greater the ego, the greater is going to be the hell. No ego and the hell disappears. Egolessness is what paradise is all about. It is not a geographical place somewhere above in the skies; it is a psychological space of egolessness.
Drop all defenses, let the ego disappear, be open, trusting, ready to risk for the unknown, and bliss starts descending in you; it comes from the beyond. And once you know the knack of it, how to let it in, things become very simple. Life becomes spontaneous, life loses all complexity: it becomes so simple and so innocent that you are a child again. And to be a child again is to be a saint.
Prem Michael. Prem means love; michael means godly, divine, godlike.
Love has three dimensions. One is animal-like: it is only lust, a physical phenomenon. The other is man-like: it is higher than lust, than sexuality, than sensuality. It is not only exploitation of the other as a means. The first is only an exploitation; the other is used as a means in the first. In the second the other is not used as a means, the other is equal to you. The other is as much an end unto herself or himself as you are. And love is not an exploitation but a mutual sharing of your being, of your joys, of your music, of your pure poetry of life. It is sharing and mutual.
The first is possessive; the second is non-possessive. The first creates a bondage; the second gives freedom. And the third dimension of love is godly, godlike: when there is no object to love, when love is not a relationship at all, when love becomes a state of your being. You are simply loving - not in love with somebody in particular, but simply a state of love, so whatsoever you do, you do it lovingly; whomsoever you meet, you meet lovingly. Even if you touch a rock, you touch the rock as if you are touching your beloved; even if you look at the trees, your eyes are full of love.
The first uses the other as a means; in the second, the other is no more a means; in the third the other has completely disappeared. The first creates bondage, the second gives freedom, the third goes beyond both: it is transcendence of all duality. There is no lover and no beloved, there is only love.
That's the ultimate state of love, and that's the goal of life to be attained. The majority of people remain confined to the first. Only very rare people enter into the second, and rarest is the phenomenon which I am telling you is the third. Only a Buddha, a Jesus... There are a few people here and there, they can be counted on one's fingers, who have entered the third dimension of love.
But if you keep your eyes fixed on the faraway star, it is possible. And when it becomes possible, you are fulfilled. Then life lacks nothing, and in that fulfillment is joy, eternal joy. Even death cannot destroy it.
Prabhu Anama. Prabhu means God; anama means nameless.
God has no name. All the names are invented ones. The Christian, the Hindu, the Mohammedan - all those names are arbitrary. People have been fighting for those names, killing each other, and God has no name at all. God is this nameless universe, this vastness, this infinity, these millions and millions of stars, planets, the earth, the sun, the moon; all this, this totality, is God. This totality is so vast that it cannot be contained in a name. No word is adequate enough to express it.
This has to be constantly remembered because down the ages we have been taught names, theories, philosophies, ideologies, and they have become so important that we have completely forgotten the reality.
The word "rose" has become more important than the rose itself. But remember, the word "rose" is not the rose and the word "god" is not God, and the word "love" is not love itself. We have to drop the words and enter into realities.
Language is absolutely useless as far as reality is concerned. Language is good when you are talking to human beings: it is convenient, it is communicative - but when you are talking to the stars it is a hindrance because they don't understand any language. And when you are addressing the whole existence the only way to address it is to be utterly silent, to be utterly devoid of all words and all philosophies and all religions. One should not be a Christian and one should not be a Hindu and one should not be a Mohammedan if one really wants to commune with reality.
And to be a sannyasin means the first step into reality, beyond words, beyond language, beyond scriptures.
Deva Agar. Deva means divine; agar means a house, a temple - a house of God, a temple of the divine.
Each being is a house of God, each being is a temple of the divine. If we are not aware of it we go on living a very miserable life; if we become aware of it, life becomes sheer ecstasy. The only difference between a Jesus and you, between a Buddha and you, is that of awareness. They have awakened and you are fast asleep, otherwise there is no difference at all: the same God who resides in them resides in you. But in you something is asleep; in them something has become awakened.
The word "buddha" means the awakened one, whose sleep is gone.
We are in a metaphysical sleep. It is just as in the night when you fall asleep you start dreaming and the dreams appear real, absolutely real; you trust them, you believe in them. In the morning when you wake up it looks so ridiculous - how could you have believed in them? But when they were there and you were asleep, you believed them. The same is the situation on a higher plane: when one becomes metaphysically awake one cannot understand how one could have believed in money so much, in power politics so much, in name and fame so much. How could one have believed in the body so much knowing that death is happening every day, all around? How one went on living as if one was not going to die at all!
But right now when you are metaphysically asleep all these things seem to be very real. Somebody insults you and it looks so real, somebody praises you and it looks so real, but when you become metaphysically awake, meditatively alert, all these things start fading into dreams. Then it doesn't matter whether you are insulted or praised. Nothing that matters right now matters at all.
Your name will remind you continuously that a god is hidden inside you. You have to search for him, and the only way to search for him is by becoming more aware, more alert, more mindful. All the methods of meditation are nothing but techniques, devices, to bring awareness to you, to shake you up, to wake you up.
Prem Nayana. Prem means love; nayana means the eye - the eye of love.
God is not known through logic, God is known through the eyes of love. God is not a conclusion of great argument, it is an insight. It is not the end product of thinking but an experience of feeling.
And just as we have eyes to see the world without, hidden behind these two eyes is a third eye which can look inwards. It is a metaphor, it is not a physiological phenomenon. It is not that by dissecting the body you will find the third eye somewhere. It is a poetic way of saying that when we close our eyes and we stop looking outwards, a new insight arises in us which looks inwards.
And only by looking inwards does one find God, because God is not there outside; God is your very potential, your very ground, your very being. Of course once God is known as your inner reality, as your subjectivity, you will find him everywhere, but you will only find him outside when first you have encountered him inside.
Hence worship does not help much; only meditation helps. After meditation worship is possible, but then one does not go to worship in a church or in a temple: one's whole life becomes a worship.
Then one walks and it is worship, and one sits and it is worship, and one sleeps and it is worship.
Because now everything is so full of God, how can you do anything else but worship? A tremendous prayer goes on arising in you. Waking, sleeping, it continues; it becomes an undercurrent.
But first God has to be encountered within; then he is without too. But nobody has first known God without. That has never happened and that is never going to happen. That is impossible. The first taste has to be subjective, then it can be objective too.