Darshan 13 September 1978

Anand means bliss, Baul is one belonging to a secret society of mystics. Just as Zen is in Buddhism and Sufis are part of Islam and Hassids are part of Judaism, Bauls are the flowering of the Hindu tradition; they are the highest flowering. But to understand the highest becomes very difficult.

The higher a truth is, the greater is the possibility that it will be misunderstood. The lower a truth is, the greater is the possibility of its being understood. The lowest truth can be understood because everybody lives on that level. The highest reaches are beyond the clouds - only a few people reach.

Those who reach, even they cannot relate to others what has happened to them; hence they are called mystics.

The word "mystic" comes from a Greek root which means one who cannot speak - it is a beautiful word - one who suddenly finds himself dumb. He has known the truth, but in the very knowing of it he has become dumb. All words have fallen short. Grammar makes no sense any more, logic appears stupid. Language rather than communicating seems to be a hindrance. So those who have known those highest peaks of life, grandeur and splendor, are so wonder-struck that they fall dumb, they cannot speak.

Hence mysticism has another meaning: the secret doctrine - the doctrine which cannot be told but can only be conveyed in secret intimacy, not through logic but through love. Maybe between a Master and a disciple in a certain moment of intimacy, the transfer.... But there is no way to say it, there is no way to be articulate about it, because whatsoever we can say about it is going to falsify it.

Lao Tzu says, The Tao that can be said is not the true Tao." The moment you say it, it has become a lie.

Our words are so contaminated with our lies, with our pseudo lives, with our pretensions. Our words carry all the poison that we are. The moment we bring truth into our words it is no more the purity it

was, it is no more the freedom it was. It is like: truth is a bird on the wing, and the moment we put it into a word, it is the same bird but in a cage. It looks the Same but it is not, because where is the freedom? That was the beauty. And where is that open sky? That was its soul, and all that is gone.

A caged bird is a dead bird, it is a corpse; and a caged truth in a concept, in a theory, is a dead truth.

So another meaning of "mystic" is: something that cannot be said but which still can be transferred in an energy communication, in love, in intimacy... just like a flame that moves from one lit lamp to another unlit lamp.

Bauls were great mystics of such beauty and depth that people started thinking that they were mad.

So the literal meaning of the word "baul" is mad; it means: the mad mystic. Their whole life was so utterly different, so radically different from the ordinary life, that naturally they looked mad. They danced, they sang, they moved like madmen, traveling up and down the country singing songs of joy, of celebration. Naturally they looked mad, because in a world of suffering how do you conceive of celebration? In a world where everybody is miserable, the man who is dancing and has laughter in his soul looks simply out of place, outlandish, mad, stoned, not in his senses. Hence the word "baul" - it means the mad mystic.

Slowly slowly they have disappeared; very few Bauls are still alive. But the glory is gone because this country no more welcomes the real mystic. It still talks about mysticism, in fact talks much about mysticism, but its heart has become materialistic.

In fact Indians are very surprised seeing the Westerners coming to India in search of meditation, in search of inner truth. They are puzzled - they cannot believe their own eyes, because their whole mind is in search of better houses, more money, more science, more technology. They are sending their children to the West - to Oxford, to Harvard, to Princeton. They cannot believe why rich countries are turning towards the East. A great revolution is happening in the world: the West is becoming East and the East is becoming West. It is a dangerous situation, because if the East becomes the West and the West becomes the East, the whole dichotomy will go on persisting again.

My effort here is to dissolve East and West utterly, completely, so that man can become whole. And a whole man will have science as much as religion. A whole man will love the good things of life as much as the interior joys and celebrations of life. A whole man will use his logic when he explores the world of matter and will use his love when he explores the world of consciOuSneSS. And to be capable of both is to be a sannyasin.

Sannyas has to be the meeting of the East and the West, of the spiritualist and the materialist, of Zorba the Greek and Gautam the Buddha.

One has to be a mother to existence. The love of the mother is the purest kind: it expects nothing.

It has no demand - it simply gives; its joy is in giving. The mother is happy if the child is happy. The mother is utterly identified with the child: his joy is her joy, his misery her misery.

If one can love the existence like a mother then one has learned how to pray, because prayer is love for love's sake... not asking anything in return. Love is not a bargain; it is an overflowing. And the mother is the symbol of overflowing love. The child is a stranger, but the mother pours her love on the child. The child's future is unpredictable but the mother goes on pouring her love. The mother cannot know what the child is going to do to her in the future - the child may even murder her - but that is irrelevant, that is not the point at all. The mother is unaware of the past of the child, unaware of the future. But to the stranger who has come in the form of the child, she gives all that she has.

Existence is also a stranger. We don't know exactly what it is, why it is, from whence it has come, to where it is going. Neither is the past known - the beginning is not known - nor is the future, the end, known. If we can love this strange moment, that is prayer. Religions have tried to create predictable gods; that's why their gods are plastic. The real God I is this existence in all its unpredictability. To love this unpredictable existence is to be a really religious person. Only the heart of the mother can do it.

And just one thing more: If you are a mother to existence, existence becomes a mother to you. It simply responds by the same token, it echoes. It gives you back what you have given to it.

Anand means bliss, salam means peace. Peace can happen without bliss too, but then it is dead, it is negative. It is just absence of tension, but there is nothing positive in it. It is like a corpse. The corpse is no more ill, that is true, because no corpse can be ill. But the corpse is not healthy either, because no corpse can be healthy. A corpse can neither be ill nor healthy. So one can have a kind of peace which is like death: you are not tense, you are not disturbed but you are not celebrating either. And that's the cheapest way to attain peace: just dull yourself, slowly slowly become more and more insensitive, and one day there is a kind of peace.

That's what happens in the monasteries; that's what you will find in the so-called saints: they are peaceful but the peace has no value in it. It is the peace of the cemetery, not the peace of a garden.

Peace has to be blissful. It should be vibrant. It should not be only an absence of noise; it should be the presence of music. And that's my whole approach towards meditation.

There are many meditation techniques which can give you peace and easily and cheaply... but they will not give you bliss, so that peace will be a kind of deep sleep. You will feel good - you will feel less disturbed, less perturbed, less anxious - but no positive achievement. Unless something is achieved positively, something starts growing in you, flowering in you, the peace is meaningless.

The East has lived for long in that dead peace; that's why life in the East has become poor, ugly.

But people are peaceful. They are less tense, certainly; they suffer less anxiety, suffer less from madness, but that is not anything worth-while.

Peace should be capable of dancing, peace should be capable of being creative. Peace should be felt as a presence, a vital presence; not just the absence of illness but the presence of well-being.

So I make a condition: that is bliss. Bliss has to come first and then peace should follow. One should become peaceful, dancing, singing, loving. And then it has a totally different dimension and a totally different meaning. Then it takes you to God. Otherwise it is very easy to slip away even from being human. The people who go to the mountains and live in the caves become dehumanized. You can see a kind of peacefulness in their eyes - the same that you can find in the eyes of a buffalo or a cow - but that is not Buddhahood.

The eyes of a Buddha are aflame with the unknown. He is pulsating with the divine! He has gone beyond the human, not below the human. Below the human, beyond the human, both look alike; they are not.

So start by being more and more blissful and then you will find that following bliss, of its own accord, comes a peace which you have not cultivated, for which you have not made any effort whatever. It comes of its own accord; it comes as a by-product - a by-product of being blissful.

Prem means love, sundaro means beauty. Love beautifies, and only love beautifies; everything else makes man ugly. The moment one is in love, beauty descends. Suddenly one is luminous, suddenly one is no more ordinary. The very touch of love is transforming. It changes the lower metal into the higher gold. Love is the secret of all alchemy; it is the philosopher s stone. And people have completely forgotten it. Love is one of the most forgotten things in this world - although people talk much about it. In fact they talk much about it because it is being missed in their lives; they substitute by talking.

Lao Tzu says, "There was a time when nobody used to talk about God because God was so herenow. Life was so full of God that nobody bothered to talk about it. Then there came the days of fallen humanity when people started talking about God." So is the case with love: when love exists nobody talks about it - there is no need. When it doesn't exist, poets write about it, painters paint about it, musicians compose music about it, dancers dance it, but even all their efforts cannot fill the gap that is left. Love is the most talked about thing in the world because it is really terribly missed, awfully missed.

And people are trying to become beautiful in all kinds of ways: painting their faces, finding better clothes, changing fashions, doing this and that, and plastic surgery and all. Still they feel that something is ugly. It is not a question of what kind of body you have: the real question is what kind of soul you have. Even the very homely body full of love becomes, divine.

It is said - and there is a possibility of some truth in it - that Jesus was an ugly man. But the disciples never say anything about his ugliness. That too has some truth in it; they may never have come to know his ugliness. They had known his love. He may have been an ugly man but because the disciples had known his love they had known only his beauty, so they don't talk about his ugliness at all; they never came across it. Maybe the people who were full of hate towards Jesus thought about him as ugly. So both may be true: the disciple's tradition - not saying a single word about his ugliness - and the oral tradition that continues which says he was an ugly man. Both may be right.

It is possible to have an ordinary body and yet have an extraordinary soul. Just the vice versa is also possible: to have a very beautiful body and a very ugly soul. That too happens - it happens more often - when a person has a beautiful body he forgets all about beautifying his soul He thinks he is beautiful. He believes that he is beautiful so there is no need to search for any higher beauty. That is the misfortune of the so-called beautiful people: they remain ugly.

My observation is that there is only one miracle that transforms everything - ugliness into beauty, falsehood into truth, illusion into reality - and that miracle's name is love.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says he lives in a gay community which is very ego-oriented... ]

I understand your difficulty, but you will be able to face it - no need to be worried. You are ready. So the fear will remain only for a few days. Once you have reached there, you will be surprised at your new energy: you will be able to face all that nonsense. And it is not going to distract you or disturb you. Something has started settling within you - it will persist.

If something is imposed from the outside it is not reliable. But if something starts growing like an insight one can rely on it. Now it is your insight. And I am not in favor of creating a character around you. In fact I destroy all kinds of character. I make you utterly free from the outside so that your only responsibility remains towards your inner center, so that you are answerable only to yourself and to nobody else. And I destroy all kinds of structures around you so that you can face each new moment as it comes, without any prepared, readymade program; because all readymade programs fall short. Life goes on changing and the programs are always stereotyped, settled, fixed, dull. They lag behind; they are never equal to the situation. That is the misery of millions of people in the world:

they always feel themselves lagging behind. They are never true to the situations - they cannot be, because they function out of a program.

I don't give you any program. So in the beginning one feels a little shaky because one has always depended on a certain program; now you don't have any program. One feels a little afraid, apprehensive about what is going to happen. But don't be worried. Now you are more conscious than you were before, and that consciousness is the only shelter, the only protection, the only security there is. That consciousness is capable of managing, of accepting challenges, of responding, and of responding adequately. Because it has no program it always responds in the present; hence its adequacy. It is always relevant, and one never has any regrets. As you see situations, and your acceptance of the challenge, and your capacity to deal with problems, a great confidence will arise in you. For the first time you will feel on your own.

So Los Angeles is not going to disturb you at all - it is going to become a situation, a provocation. It will throw you back, deeper into your center than anything else can do. Just go and face the reality there. We have to learn to face all kinds of realities. I don't want to make you escapists; I want you to live in the world, in the density of it, and yet be capable of transcending it.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says she's afraid of working in the west because she has never been by herself.]

It will be a good experience. One has to be on one's own some day or other. It is not good to always be dependent; otherwise one remains un-grownup. One has to go into all kinds of difficult situations, dangerous situations. Only then does integrity and maturity arise, and maturity is one of the most valuable things in life. So don't be worried; accept the challenge. Even if the fear is there, go in spite of the fear.

And always remember that people everywhere are just like you... just as afraid of others as you are! Remember always that behind the skin everybody is just like you - with the same problems, the same fears, the same apprehensions, the same defenses, the same pretensions. To understand oneself is to understand the whole of humanity, because people are not as different as they look.

Maybe the shapes of their noses are different, and their heights are different and their color is different, but these are irrelevant things. Deep down, basically, they are all un-grownup, all are afraid of the other. Feel love for them and feel compassion for them. And the experience is going to be of some value.

[A sannyasin, leaving, quotes Meera on Krishna: 'Your arrows will pierce my heart." That's true... and it is good!

They will go deeper and deeper. They are going to kill you, and only when you are completely consumed, you are. That which is consumed is the false you and that which comes out of the fire is the real. The myth of the phoenix is not just a myth: it is the story of man, the story of spiritual rebirth.

Each disciple has to be a phoenix. He has to be consumed by the fire the Master is. And out of that, out of the ashes, a new being is born... the resurrection. And that is your eternal life.

The false has to be taken away for the real to be; the false has to cease, it has to make space for the real to come in. And it is happening. The arrows have penetrated the heart. It is painful too, but this pain is very sweet because it is not destructive, it is creative. When you know that it is taking you higher and higher then even pain becomes pleasure. When you know that it is the price one has to pay and the reward is not far away, then one is ready to pay; whatsoever is required to be paid, one is ready to pay it.

And one has to die - only then can God be.

[A sannyas, leaving, had not been wearing her mala in the west.]

Drop all fears, and don't be clever, because that too is part of fear. Cleverness is just a way to hide fear. It is like putting a rose flower on a wound, but the wound remains! So no need to be afraid, no need to be clever.

And don't be defensive about me. We have to be as offensive as possible, not defensive, because this is a revolution! We have to attack the very roots of the society. Repercussions are bound to be there, and we are doing it deliberately and knowingly. So there is no question of being worried.

And it is always so: in the beginning the society reacts very negatively - out of fear. That too is out of fear. It is a good sign that it has become afraid. And I am taking it as a very beautiful sign: if Germany is afraid of me then everybody will become afraid sooner or later! They are in fear - they want to defend. You need not be defensive. You have to be open and aggressive and expressive, because whatsoever we are doing is right. It has to be fought for.

We are not to hide it. Become more articulate, face the people, face the press - because you will have to do that - and once you have started encountering them you will start enjoying the whole trip.

It is really beautiful!

And I am with you - just go and give a good fight in Germany. And don't be worried, never be worried, because there is nothing to worry about: we have nothing to lose. The society has to be worried because they have something to lose. What can we lose? We can only gain. If they are negative, if they are pOSitive, we gain all the same. By their becoming negative many people are going to come just to see what is the matter.

So just go, and this is a good climate, this moment. Mm, I don't go anywhere, otherwise I would have liked to come to Germany!

"Sambuddha." It means the awakened one. Man is asleep. Even while he is awake, he is not awake.

This waking state is just a kind of subtle sleep - dreams Continue. Even while you are awake there is a substratum of dreams, a continuum. This is not true awakening. The true awakening is when there is no thought in the mind, no dream in the mind, no desire in the mind... when the mind is utterly empty of all content and there is only pure consciousness, when the sky is utterly empty of all the clouds. That is true awakening: consciousness without content. That's the goal of all meditations, and that's the search of all the religions: now to come to a metaphysical awakening.

We are living in a metaphysical sleep. People are sleep-walkers, somnambulists. They are born, they love, they hate, they make war, they kill each other, they commit suicide, they go mad, they die, but all in dream. It is very rare for ordinary people to have a few moments of awakening in their whole lives. Gurdjieff used to say that even if for seven single seconds man can be alert in his whole life, that is a miracle. But this is what we think life is. This is not life. The real life begins only when you start becoming more and more aware, alert, watchful.

This word "watch" contains all that is essential in all the religions. Jesus uses it again and again:

"Watch." Buddha uses it again and again: "Be mindful. Gurdjieff, again and again: "Remember." Sufis call it jikr - don't forget!

When this effort succeeds, that state is called "sambuddha". One has come home, one is awakened.

Start it!