Darshan 17 July 1978
Deva means god, nirguno means unconditional, formless, attributeless, qualityless. God can be conceived of either in the form or in the formless, either as the world, the manifested, or as the seed, the unmanifested. The form arises out of no-form and falls back into the formless again. Everything comes out of nothing and goes back to nothing, so nothing is not against existence; it is the very source of it.
This is one of the greatest contributions of eastern insight into life, that even zero is not just zero; it is potential, potent, pregnant, with all. All come out of it and finally goes back to rest into it. Nirguno means that state of ultimate rest when waves disappear into the ocean, when the trees disappear back into the seeds, when man disappears back into god....
The source is our goal - we have to come back home, and nirguno is the name of that home.
Jaya means victory, deepa means a lamp a lamp of victory, a light of victory. The real victory consists of conquering oneself. To conquer others is not real victory. To conquer others is easy and to conquer others is to become more and more ugly in your inner world, because it comes through violence; it is destructive.
To conquer oneself is creative. It makes one more and more beautiful because it comes through love, through compassion, through meditation.
The effort to conquer others is just an effort to hide the fact from one's own eyes that one has not yet conquered oneself. It is creating a facade around yourself. It is an effort to cover up one's inferiority.
And these are the only two ways to live life. One is the way of the politician who tries to conquer others. That arises out of inferiority, all politics arises out of inferiority complex. That is not the way of the really superior man.
The real, superior man conquers himself; that is the way of religion. To know others is not of much worth, because death will take all that know-ledge away. There is only one thing death cannot take away from you - that is self-knowledge. And by conquering oneself that light arises in oneself in which one knows who one is.
Anand means bliss, jamia means god. Bliss is the very core of god's existence. It is not a quality among many qualities - it is his very heart, the spirit. So a man who is really in search of god should be in search of bliss. One can forget about god and if one goes on searching for bliss, one day one is bound to arrive at god. In fact the search for god leads people astray because then they become more and more involved in theologies - Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan - and there are a thousand and one ideas about god. It is a great confusion, and rather than arriving anywhere people become more and more confused. Or if they stick to one idea, to one particular ideology, then they start creating a hallucinatory world of their own.
We don't know god so we cannot start by belief. All belief is false. The question is then very relevant:
from where to start, the journey has to be started somewhere. My suggestion is: start as a search for bliss - which is natural, which has nothing to do with theology. Religions have come and gone, many religions prevailed and are found no more, and all these religions which are in existence today one day will be gone and forgotten forever. But one thing continues - the search for bliss, and not only in man: in animals, in birds, in trees. This is the only search that joins us with the whole of existence. This permeates the whole. Everybody in every way is trying to find out what bliss is, how to be more blissful.
To me, bliss is another name for god. Once you drop the idea of god and searching starts for bliss, you are on the right track - you cannot be misguided. Because bliss is neither Christian nor Hindu; bliss is neither eastern nor western, neither black nor white. Bliss is simply bliss - it knows no definitions. It is an simply bliss - it knows no definitions. It is an ineffable experience.
Prem means love, bodhi means awareness, satva means in essence - in essence, love and awareness. And this is the highest synthesis that is possible for human consciousness, the ultimate peak. There is nothing beyond it. There cannot be anything beyond it.
It is very easy to be loving - it is very difficult to be loving and aware. Vice versa is also true:
it is easy to be aware but it is very difficult to be aware and still be loving. Loving needs as a requirement a kind of drunkenness. And love is extroversion - you relate with the other; love is focussing on the other. Thou becomes more important than I. In love the arrow starts moving towards the other; in awareness the arrow starts moving inwards. The thou disappears and only I remains; it is introversion. Love is relating, communicating, communion; awareness is solitude, aloneness, meditation.
Because of this dichotomy a great problem has arisen down the ages: people who have been loving never become aware. They were good people, beautiful people, but something was missing: they were not luminous, their inner soul remained dark.
And there have been people who were aware but then they escaped from the world. They moved into the monasteries, they became monks and nuns, just to avoid love, relationship, people. They become very aware, very luminous, but there is nothing to illuminate. Light is there but it falls on nothing.
The man of love has somebody to illuminate but has no light, and the man of awareness has light but nobody to illuminate. And this is the problem that has to be solved, that has to be tackled: a person should be in the world and yet be not of it. A person should be capable of love and yet be aware. A person should not choose between god and the world; there should be no choice. A person should live choicelessly, without choosing. This is the greatest task and the greatest challenge, but it is possible. The future religion is going to be based on this phenomenon and on nothing else.
The past religions have become out-of-date. Either they were religions of love, devotion, drunkenness, or they were religions of awareness, meditation, but both had chosen sides. And the moment you choose, you become lopsided. The moment you choose, you are impoverished, because whatsoever has been left unchosen will never become part of your being. You will never be as real and as whole and as rich as you could have been.
My whole teaching is: you can eat the cake and have it too. And this is the meaning of your name:
you can eat the cake and have it too.
[These words] will become a challenge: be more loving and yet be alert, serve people but be very alert. Communicate with people, relate with people, but never lose track of your own being. The arrow has to be double-headed, pointing to the I and the thou simultaneously.
The challenge is great, but once it is fulfilled life really knows what blessings have been made available for us. In other words, I say that a man, according to me, a total man - and a total man is a holy man because he is a whole man - has to be both Zorba the Greek and Gautam the Buddha.
And this is in essence the message for the future: we have to create a new kind of world, a new kind of religion, a new kind of milieu, a new kind of atmosphere, a climate, in which Zorba the Greek becomes Gautam the Buddha.
Veet means beyond, Vitarka means logic, argumentation. Truth is beyond logic, god is beyond argumentatiom... so is love, so is beauty, so is all that is in any way significant - music, poetry, dance.
Remember: that which comes under logic is bound to be ordinary, mundane, of the marketplace.
Logic can have a grip only on the superficial. The essential eludes it, it cannot touch the real. It can only go on playing with the imaginary, the man-made. The god-made remains untouched by it, unavailable to it.
So those who want to love, those who want to be blissful and those who want to have a life of celebration, have to drop logic and argumentation, in toto. They have to live without heads. They have to function from the heart. They have to help their heart to spread all over their being.
Prem means love, hasid is a Hebrew word it means pious, pure, innocent. And love is love only when it is innocent. The moment it starts calculating, it is no more love. The moment it becomes contaminated by knowledge it is something else. Love is love only when it is pure. And by purity I mean when it has no motivation in it. Motivation brings impurity. If you love somebody for something then it is impure. If you love for love's sake then it has purity, and tremendous energy is released out of that purity. In that explosion of purity, innocence, one comes to feel that god exists. There is no other way to know god. God is known only when the lightning of love is there, the sudden lightning of love. And the heart is so pure and pious and so innocent that it knows neither past nor future; it knows nothing. It functions out of that state of ignorance.
Blessed are the ignorant, for theirs is the kingdom of god. The knowledgeable person goes on missing. Become a hasid - pure, simple, innocent, non-calculating.
This will be your new name: Ma Prem Sakina.
Prem means love, sakina is a Hebrew word, it means the in-dwelling spirit. The full name will mean the in-dwelling spirit of love. Love is our very soul. The body lives through breathing; the soul lives through love. Just as the body will die immediately if breathing stops, the soul dies if love stops.
And millions of people in the world are soul-less, because love has not happened. They live like bodies, machines. They are zombies, robots, functioning perfectly well, efficient, doing everything as is needed. They do all kinds of things and then one day they die, and without having lived at all, because to live the soul is needed, and that is missing. Love creates it.
It is in the soil of love that the soul arrives. So those who really want to become soulful, godful, have to learn the art of love, and that is the greatest of arts, all other arts are trivial compared to it.
One can compose good music but if there is no love in it it will remain just a superficial, technical phenomenon. One can write beautiful poetry but if there is no love in it, it is just language and grammar - no soul in it. People can go on doing all kinds of things but it will only be an appearance; something inner Will be missing. It may be a beautiful body, a beautiful corpse, but even if a corpse is beautiful, it is a corpse. Sooner or later it just starts stinking and sooner or later we have to dispose of it.
The whole of humanity stinks. It is an ill state of affairs. Everyone seems to be in a very strange space; people are doing all kinds of things and still something goes on missing. The meaning is missed.
Meaning is found only through love. So love more, allow love to happen in life in as many ways as possible. And the moment love starts happening, god has started happening.
Deva means divine, kiran means a ray of light. There is no difference between man and god, no difference in quality. The difference is only of quantity. If god is the sun, then man is just a ray of it; if god is the ocean then man is just a drop of the ocean. The difference is of quantity, not of quality.
That is the message in your name. Remember it: respect yourself as one should respect god, and respect others too.
Respect the whole existence. Reverence for life is prayer. And one cannot respect others if one does not respect oneself All is divine. The whole is an organic unity and we are not separate from it. We cannot be without it and it cannot be without us. The ray cannot exist without the sun and the sun cannot exist without the rays; they are involved with each other, they are expressions of the same . energy. So man is part of god, vibrant with god. One is not to achieve god - one is already it, one has only to remember it.
Your name is to remind you that maybe you are just a ray, but the ray contains all the suns possible.
If we can understand a single ray of light we have understood the whole phenomenon of light. If we can know a single drop of ocean water, we have known all the oceans - past, present, future, of this earth, of other earths.
So man is a miniature cosmos, a very small world, but one which contains all. The discovery is a great adventure - to go into oneself is to go into the innermost part of reality, the interiormost part of reality.