Darshan 20 August 1979

Atmo Kim. Atmo means the innermost self, the supreme self; not the ego, but the self.

The ego is superficial. It is in fact given by others to you; it is not yours. It is based on the opinion of others. Somebody says you are beautiful, somebody says you are intelligent, somebody says you are kind, compassionate, and the ego is gathering. That's why when somebody says something which goes against your ego, it hurts. Everybody was saying you are so beautiful, then somebody some day says you are ugly, or that you are unkind, cruel, or that you are unintelligent; then the problem arises. The ego goes on repressing the negative and goes on magnifying the positive. It is a soap bubble: it can burst any moment. Just a pin-prick is enough to burst it.

The self is that which you bring with you, with which you are born, which is your reality; not conferred by others on you but given to you and by God himself. And this self can only be known when you become egoless, otherwise the ego goes on confusing you. The ego is the false self, and if the false self is there it is very difficult to know what is real; the false has to be discarded before the real can be known.

And kim means ruler, so your full name will mean self-rule, self-ruler, one who rules oneself... and that is the true kingdom - to be a master of one-self. But the ego never allows that kingdom to be yours. The ego is a pretender and keeps your eyes clouded. It has to be completely dispersed.

Sannyas means surrendering the ego, but by surrendering it, one conquers oneself, one becomes a ruler of oneself. And to rule the whole world is nothing compared to that beauty of ruling oneself.

Anand Atul. Anand means bliss; atul means immeasurable, incomparable, unique.

Bliss is always immeasurable, it is infinite - all measures are finite - there is no way of measuring it.

Bliss is also incomparable: you cannot compare it with anything else in existence. You cannot even

compare your bliss with somebody else's bliss, because it is not matter. It has no form, no shape, no weight - how to compare? - it has no color, no taste. There is no way to compare. One simply knows one's own bliss; one cannot know somebody else's bliss. Inference is possible, knowing is not possible; hence it is unique too. When it happens, it happens in such a unique and original way; it has not happened to anybody like that before, and will not happen to anybody like that again. It never repeats itself. By being blissful one for the first time becomes individual, because one cannot be an individual unless one has something unique and original.

And by becoming blissful one becomes, for the first time, part of God, because to know something infinite is to know some aspect of God. Bliss is one of the aspects of God.

God has three aspects: satchidananda. Sat is his first aspect; sat means truth. Chid is his second aspect; chid means consciousness. Anand is his third aspect; anand means bliss. This is the real trinity, not the father and the son and the holy ghost. That is very anthropocentric; that is very childish, juvenile, that whole idea of father and son and the holy family. And the family is not even complete because the mother is missing. The male chauvinists of the past did not allow a single woman in the trinity. It would have been very easy to convert the holy ghost into the mother. Mother, father and son would have been far more human. But they could not allow a single aspect of God to be feminine.

Satchidananda has nothing to do with male and female; in fact at that state of transcendence nothing can be male or female. One goes beyond it. In the deepest meditation you will also go beyond it.

You may be in the male body or you may be in the female body, but the body is left far behind. When you reach to your center you are pure consciousness, pure truth, pure bliss.

Anand Theo. Anand means bliss; theo means God's gift.

Bliss is never an achievement, hence one cannot desire it. It cannot be made a goal. You cannot be ambitious about it. If you are, that very thing will be the hindrance. Bliss comes when you are not asking for it, not searching for it, not seeking for it, not desiring it, not even waiting for it. Then it suddenly comes, because this is something unique: not to desire bliss, not to ask for it, not to expect it, not to hope, not to wait. This is what meditation creates: this space of utter silence and stillness, of absolute desirelessness. In that moment, without your asking, it simply enters you. It overfloods you.

Seek and you will go on missing it. Do not seek, drop all seeking, and immediately it is yours. It is a gift of God, but only those who can be absolutely silent are worthy of receiving it. It is not impossible, but we make it impossible by desiring it. That is the only problem that one has to solve.

You can desire money: without desiring you will not get it, it is not a gift. You can desire power, prestige: they will not come on their own. You will have not only to desire, you will have to fight for them; you will have to be constantly struggling for them; you will have to be aggressive and violent for them. Even then nobody knows whether you will attain or not, but that is the only way to attain:

you can hope for the best.

But bliss cannot be desired, hence all the great Masters of the world have been teaching a single thing: desirelessness - because the moment you are desireless, you open up; all tension is gone, all anxiety disappears, all anxiousness disappears. And in that opening the beyond penetrates you.

Anand Christine. Anand means bliss; christine means a follower of Christ. It does not mean Christian.

A Christian is Christian only because of his birth. His Christianity is only a formality. It is a social phenomenon; it is an accident of birth. If he were removed to a Hindu home after his birth he would be a Hindu and he would never remember that he is Christian. So Christianity, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Buddhism - these are just part of upbringing, they don't really make you religious. One has to choose very consciously, not accidentally. Religion has to become a commitment, consciously made, then only is it real.

Now, becoming a sannyasin is a conscious effort on your part. You are deciding it. It is not decided by birth; it is not decided by your parents; it is not decided by anybody else; it is your own longing.

This makes you a real follower of Christ.

And the second thing to remember: Christ has nothing to do with Jesus personally; Jesus is only one of the Christs. Moses is a Christ also, Buddha is a Christ also. Lao Tzu is a Christ also. Christ is a state of being; many have achieved it, many will achieve it. Christ simply means one who has attained to god-hood, one who has been welcomed by God, crowned by God. That is the literal meaning of the word: one who has been invited by God to become a guest in his house.

So forget all association of Christ with Jesus. Jesus is one of the Christs. Learn as much as you can learn from him but don't forget that there are other Christs also; they have their own beautiful messages. And all those messages have to become part of your inner being.

One who loves Jesus and Krishna and Buddha and Mohammed without any preference, without any prejudice, who loves all of them simultaneously, equally, becomes infinitely rich... obviously. His consciousness becomes a garden which has many flowers and many perfumes.

Be a blissful follower of the state called Christ. Don't be attached to persons. Remember always that Christ is just like Buddha; these are states. Jesus, the Christ; it is not his name. Gautam, the Buddha; "the Buddha" is not his name. Mahavira, the Jinna; "the Jinna" is not his name. The Jinna means one who has conquered himself; Buddha means one who has become fully awakened; Christ means one who has been crowned by God. They all mean the same in different ways.

Svatmo Sietze. Svatmo means self; sietze means conqueror - one who has conquered himself.

That's the whole pilgrimage of religious consciousness.

There are two kinds of victories possible in the world. One is extrovert. You can accumulate money, you can have a big kingdom, you can become an Alexander, a world conqueror. That is one of the possibilities of being victorious, but it is a superficial phenomenon: death comes and destroys everything that you have made, and death comes sooner or later, unavoidably, inevitably.

There is another kind of victory which death cannot destroy. That is introvert: you move inwards, you penetrate your own interiority. Meditation, prayer - these are both methods of conquering yourself.

And when one has conquered oneself, when one has arrived at one's own innermost core, great bliss descends. It is a bliss that has a beginning but has no end, a bliss which happens in this body but is not part of this body, and a bliss which happens in time but comes from beyond time.

To conquer oneself is to be fulfilled. Then one can die restfully, relaxedly; life has not been a wastage.

One has bloomed, one has flowered, one has made life as rich as one could. One has contributed one's share of joy of love, of celebration.

Anand Carmel. Anand means bliss; carmel means a garden - a garden of bliss. That's exactly the meaning of paradise: a garden of bliss, the garden of Eden, God's garden.

We have not lost it; we are still in God's garden, because there is no other place to be. The whole idea that Adam and Eve have been expelled from the garden is nonsense. Where you can expel them to? Wherever they are they will be in God's garden, because the whole existence is his garden.

Expulsion is impossible.

They have not been expelled; they have simply fallen asleep. That's what happens by becoming knowledgeable: eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they have fallen in a deep sleep.

Knowledge is almost like anesthesia: it drugs you, it makes you drowsy; it takes away your awareness and alertness.

Watch how alert children are. The moment they start going to school their alertness is lessened every day; by the time they come from the university, look into their eyes at what has happened:

they have fallen asleep. Now they know much but they are not conscious. Before, they knew nothing but they were conscious; now their consciousness is covered by layers of knowledge. Their consciousness was a clear sky and the knowledge is like dark clouds.

That's what has happened to Adam, and it happens to every Adam and to every Eve. It is not something that happened once and forever; it happens each time a child is born. He is born in God's garden, then he eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And if he does not eat it, then there are serpents all around to force him to: the parents, the teachers, the society. In every possible way he is forced to eat the fruit of knowledge.

Nobody seems to be interested in his consciousness; everybody seems to be interested in making him more knowledgeable. Why? Because knowledge can be used by others; consciousness cannot be. Knowledge is utilitarian; consciousness is just like a beautiful flower. It has no utility - tremendous ecstasy, but you cannot put it to use.

The society needs people for certain work to be done. The society does not need people really; it needs functionaries. It needs a clerk, a station master, a deputy collector, a prime minister, a president; it needs functionaries. It does not need people, it does not need persons. And that work can be done through knowledge only. What the serpent did in the garden of Eden, schools, colleges and universities are doing all over the world now. The business of the serpent has become really vast; thousands of universities, doing the same job...

By becoming a sannyasin one is deciding to wake up. Knowledge is sleep and one has to wake up from knowledge; one has to be innocent again. One has to become unknowledgeable again.

One has to pass through a process of unlearning: all that the society has forced upon you has to be put aside so that your consciousness can express itself again. That is rebirth. And to be reborn as consciousness is to enter into the garden of God again. In fact, we never left it; we have always been in it, but we have fallen asleep.

The function of the Master is to shake you, to shock you, into wakefulness. It is a thankless job, because to shock somebody, to shake somebody, is bound to be a thankless job.

That's why Jesus was crucified: he shook people too much, he shocked them beyond their tolerance. He seemed to be too compassionate and in such a hurry to help that he annoyed people tremendously.

That's what Socrates did. His whole life was just shocking people into awareness: questioning, enquiring, creating doubt about their knowledge, creating skepticism of all that they had believed before. A single man and the whole of Athens was annoyed. A single man was disturbing them too much; he was not allowing them to sleep peacefully. He was a nuisance.

All the Buddhas have always been nuisances to the people who want to sleep and dream. And sometimes it happens that people are dreaming beautiful dreams, and you start shaking them... It is not their fault that they become annoyed. If they crucified Jesus, they have to be forgiven; if they poisoned Socrates, they cannot be condemned. What more can you expect from sleepy people, unconscious people?

So remember, your name means bliss garden, garden of God. And it is all around, within and without; we are in it. I am in it consciously; you are in it unconsciously. By becoming a sannyasin you are asking me to shake you up, to wake you up. Even if sometimes I am hard, forgive me! And constantly remember that the Master has to be hard if he really loves you. If he cares, he is bound to be hard. If he does not care, then there is no question: then you can be left alone to sleep and dream, to your heart's content.

But I cannot leave my sannyasins alone! They have to be awakened, whatsoever the cost! At any cost, awakening has to be achieved. Without it life is meaningless; without it there is no life really; we only drag. We vegetate and call it life. This is not life.

Your sannyas will become the door for the true life, the real life, the life that is lived in God, in his garden.

Anand Himalayo. Anand means bliss; himalayo is the name of the greatest mountains of the world.

Literally it means the house of peace, silence. And the Himalayas are the most silent place in the world. They are still virgin, unpolluted, uncorrupted. It still has the flavor of the ancient days. Moving into the deep Himalayan ranges you start feeling no more part of the twentieth century world. You go back at least ten thousand years, when humanity was in a totally different stage - very innocent, childlike. Those were the days of poetry, not prose; those were the days of religion, not science.

Science is mundane, ordinary. Religion is a flight of the alone to the alone; and listening to the Himalayan silence, suddenly you become aware of a silence within you There is a silence without, there is a silence within. But the silence without has been completely disturbed by the society; it has disappeared. And because it has disappeared you have become almost incapable of knowing the inner silence; nothing triggers I am creating here a small, alternative world of people who can again live in innocence, silence, peace, who can again live not as extroverts, but deeply rooted in their own inner being, who can live from within.

Just as there is a Himalayan silence and peace and bliss outside, I would like you to create a Himalaya within. It is possible - arduous, difficult, but not impossible. And because it is arduous and difficult it is a great challenge, worth accepting. There is no greater challenge than that. And to know the inner peace is the beginning of knowing God. To know the inner silence is the beginning of knowing the eternal silence of existence itself.

[A sannyasin says: I want you to help me to find out where I deceive myself.]

That will happen, nothing to be worried about. You are already becoming aware of it. How many groups have you booked for?

[He answers: You have given me four, and six Samadhi sessions.]

Everything will be settled. You will become capable soon. The moment you know where you deceive, the deception disappears. You need not do anything else than know. Understanding is transformation; knowing is enough to be liberated. The problem is just that we don't know where we are deceiving. Once we know that this is the point where we are deceiving, immediately the change happens; not even an instant is lost.

It is going to happen, just wait a little: I will be after you!