Darshan 24 September 1978

Prem means love, prartho means prayer. Love is not an act. It is a state. You cannot do it - you can only be it. And love is not a relationship either; it is a participation. In a relationship two persons become entangled with each other, intertwined. They create slavery for each other, a mutual kind of bondage. In participation they come close, they come very close, they come into a kind of togetherness, but they are not intertwined. They are close but not dependent on each other. They are close and yet free. Their freedom remains intact; then it is participation. If freedom is destroyed, then it is relationship. Freedom is the very criterion of whether love is real or not. If love destroys freedom then it is not worthwhile. Then it is something else masquerading as love, pretending to be love. The deeper you go in love, the freer you become. Freedom means you are free to come close or to go far away. The other will not hinder you in any way, the other will not interfere with your space and you will not interfere with the space of the other. You both will have tremendous respect for each other's independence. Then it is participation.

So love is not an act - you cannot do it. If you are ordered to do it, you will find it impossible to fulfill the order. At the most you can manage to move in the empty gestures of love but there will be no love in it. And that's what happens in the world: parents say to the children, "Love us - I am your mother, I am your father." The child has to love, and the falsity enters. The child is not allowed to feel love. He is ordered, "Kiss daddy"... whether he feels like kissing is not the point at all. He has to do it. Hence people learn from the very beginning that love is some kind of duty that can be done, an act that can be fulfilled. It is not - it is not an act at all. It is not within your doing capacity; it is beyond you. It comes when it comes. When it is there you are overwhelmed by it; when it is not there you can only wait. You cannot do anything at all. There is no way to bring it into being.

Once this has been learned - that love is a state that happens, not something that can be managed to happen - a great insight has entered in your being. And when the second thing is learned - that it is a participation, not a relationship - then another insight has entered in you. And the third and

the greatest insight about love is that at its highest peak it becomes prayer. Then two lovers are no more going downwards.

Sex has a downward pull, love has an upward pull. Sex brings you closer to the earth, it is earthbound. It is under the law of gravitation. Love is not under the law of gravitation, it is under the law of grace - it pulls you upwards. When two lovers are in a participation, in a state of love, they both start rising higher... as if the smoke from incense is going upwards. It is a very subtle process of going upwards. That upward movement is prayer.

Prayer is not that which is done in the churches and the temples; that is just a ritual. Prayer is that which is done in the climate of love, in the temple of love. When two or more persons are so overwhelmed by love that they all meet and merge and disappear into each other, they become one great current of energy and the energy starts rising upwards and it starts having a dialogue with the sky.

Sex is a dialogue with the earth, prayer is a dialogue with the sky, love is just in the middle of the two - it is a link between sex and prayer, between earth and sky; it is a bridge.

Deva means divine, atikramo means transcendence - a divine transcendence. Man is the only animal who is aware of himself, and man is also the only animal who can go beyond himself.

Transcendence means "going beyond the self." But to go beyond the self the first thing that is necessary is the awareness of the self. No other animal can go beyond itself because it is not even aware that it is. It is but unaware that it is. Man is and is aware that he is. Hence the anxiety in life. No other animal suffers from anxiety, cannot suffer. Because the animal is not aware of himself he cannot be afraid of death, he cannot think of death. He cannot think of respect, disrespect, fame, prestige, respectability. He cannot at all be concerned about himself; he cannot become self- conscious, he cannot suffer from the pain of self-consciousness. Hence he remains in a kind of deep sleep.

Man is a little bit alert - not awake, not asleep, but in the middle... just as it happens in the early morning. You are neither asleep nor awake. You can hear the milkman knocking on the door and yet the dream persists, and you take another turn and you go under the blanket. You can hear your woman preparing breakfast, you can hear the children getting ready to go to school, but in a very vague sort of way. Nothing is clear - hazy, foggy - and you go on slipping back into sleep. One moment you surface and you hear something, another moment you have gone down again and again you are in your sleep and a dream persists. So this is the state between waking and sleeping; it is exactly where man is.

He is no more as asleep as an animal, he is not yet as aware as a Buddha... a little bit aware, a little bit unaware, hence torn apart. A part wants to wake up, a part of the mind says, "It is time - you have to go to the office - get up!" And a part says, "Just a little more, five minutes more - it is not going to disturb much. You can afford five more minutes of sleep. And it is so beautiful and so sweet...." And you are torn apart. Man is pulled between these two directions: the animal and God. God means total awareness, transcendence of the self. Animal means total unawareness. It is below the idea of the self - God is above the idea of the self.

But one cannot go back; one can delay awakening, but one cannot go back. Man cannot fall asleep again and become an animal; that is impossible. We have passed that point, we have crossed that boundary. That is no more our world, although great nostalgia is there. The body is accustomed to being an animal and it knows the joys of being an animal. It knows the peace and the calm and the unworried state of an animal. It knows the spontaneity, the naturalness of the animal. The body has lived for millions of years like an animal. That idea is there - the body would like to go back - but the mind has tasted something of awareness too, and that taste cannot be forgotten.

The only way to get out of this conflict is to become more and more aware... to become so aware that the shadow of the self disappears in that light. That is transcendence: when there is only awareness and no center to it - nobody aware, just awareness. You are full of light, but there is nobody to claim, "I am enlightened, I have become a Buddha." If somebody claims, "I have become a Buddha," he has missed. To be a Buddha means that now there is nobody inside; it is pure emptiness, it is virgin nothingness. And that is the goal.

Initiation into sannyas is initiation into that virgin consciousness.

You are entering a new dimension of your being with your sannyas. Much will have to be done, much needs to be done, but it is not impossible. It is hard, it is arduous, because to change is always a death and a rebirth. But whatsoever is going to die is just the past - which you cannot live any more, which you cannot claim back, where you cannot go - and what you are going to gain is the future, and the infinity of it. It is risky, but the risk is worth taking.

I teach how to risk... I persuade people how to risk. The journey is long - although I go on saying that it is not so long.

I have heard: A great emperor got lost in the jungle. He had gone hunting, lost track of his friends, and the whole day wandered around and could not find the way out. By the evening he came across an old man and a woman sitting under a tree - beggars. He asked the old man, "Can you show me the way to the town and tell me how far it is?" The old man said, "It is ten miles." The emperor was so tired, so dead tired, that ten miles appeared to be almost like ten thousand miles. He was not able even to take a single step more; he was just on the verge of falling. Seeing the situation the old woman said to her old man, "Make it two miles - look at the man, how tired he is. Make it two miles!" And that's my effort: when it is ten miles I make it two; when you have passed two I make it two again. Slowly slowly, step by step, those ten miles are completed. Even ten thousand miles can be completed. The journey is long, the journey is arduous, but it is not impossible. It is a great challenge, the greatest, and when you accept a great challenge, you grow with it.

So take sannyas as a great challenge, the greatest of your life, because it is through sannyas that all that is beautiful, valuable, can become possible and can become available to you.

Deva means divine, sankalpo means decisive. Sannyas is a very decisive step. It is a turning-in.

You will never be the same again. It is as if you become discontinuous from your past, as if you start a new life from abc. It is a conversion.

When a Christian becomes a Hindu I don't call it a conversion; when a Hindu becomes a Christian I don't call it a conversion, because the man remains the same. He used to worship Krishna and now he worships Christ... and Christ is another name of Krishna. First he used to go to the temple, now he goes to the church. He has changed his ritual but he is the same person. First he used to read the Gita, now he reads the Bible... with the same fanaticism, with the same obstinacy, with the same prejudiced mind, with the same closed heart. Nothing has changed - it is not conversion.

I don't make you a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Buddhist; I don't give you another creed to cling to, I don't give you another dogma to be fanatical about, I don't give you any ritual to replace. I simply give you an insight into your own being - and that insight is conversion. You become a changed person. You may still go on doing the same things but you are not the same person. You function from a different center.

There are three possibilities of real conversion. First: the conversion can be emotional. You can be affected by me emotionally - your heart starts beating faster. You can be in a love kind of relationship with me. It is good but it is partial, and one cannot depend long on emotions. Today they are there, tomorrow they are not there. They come from the blue and they disappear into the blue any moment.

And an emotional kind of relationship cannot be very stable either; it is founded on the sands.

The second kind of conversion is intellectual: you are convinced about what I say. It is a logical conviction, rational, conscious, but again it is partial. Good, but only your head gets involved and your whole being remains outside of it. Then you will become more philosophical. I will become your philosophy, but that will remain verbal. You will talk about me, you will discuss me, you will argue for me, but that's all. It will be more stable than the emotional, but it will be less significant than the emotional. The emotional has intensity, depth; the intellectual has length, stability. It remains for a longer time but it doesn't go very deep because it never touches your heart.

The third kind of conversion is total: all of you is involved in it. Your head is involved in it, your heart is involved in it, your body is involved in it - all that you have is involved in it, you as a total being are involved in it.

Sannyas can be a transforming force only if the conversion is of the third kind: if you are with me in totality, if you start feeling me not only in the heart, but in your guts too, if you not only start thinking about me but you start breathing me too. It is not only that emotionally you are with me, but existentially you are with me. You dissolve your identity, you forget your ego. You come to me with absolute openness. Nothing is being held back. You come unconditionally, no strings attached.

Then sannyas is a flame - it can consume you and it can give you a rebirth.

Hence I call sannyas a great decision in life. It is not frivolous, it is not just curiosity. It is risky, it is a gambling. It is going into the unknown. It is leaving the familiar shore for the unknown shore. You cannot even dream about the unknown shore - it may be, it may not be. It is like Columbus sailing for some America which he thinks must exist, but who knows? It is risky. There may be some error in his calculation - the earth may not be round, nobody has known, nobody has gone around the earth; it is just an assumption.

You see me, but you can't see where I am - that you only assume. You can see my form but you can't see my reality, because that reality has no form.

You can only have vague notions about it. Still, you decide to go on this journey. Even the decision itself is of great value. It integrates, it makes you one, because it needs courage.

Deva means divine, anubhavo means experience. God cannot be known, God cannot be seen, but God can be experienced. God can only be experienced. It is like music heard, fragrance smelled, food tasted - it is an experience! Of course, when you experience music you experience only through one of your senses. And when you taste food you experience it only through one sense. God is the experience of your total sensitivity. It is music heard, fragrance smelled, beauty seen, taste tasted - all together; hence is is inexpressible. If it was of only one sense we could have expressed it. It is multi-sensual, it is multi-dimensional.

And our language has no words for multi-dimensional things - it can express only one thing at a time - because our language is based on our senses and our senses are separate. The eyes see and the ears hear; the eye cannot hear and the ears cannot see, so we don't need words in which eyes and ears participate. Our words are attached to the senses and God is the experience of our totality, of all our senses, simultaneously. Hence the elusiveness, the mysteriousness, and the inexpressibility of it. And that's what we are trying to make available here.

This place is just an occasion. If you are ready to jump in, you will be immensely benefited. So don't remain a spectator; become a participant, because these things cannot be observed from the outside. One has to go in, one has to become an insider, and that's what sannyas is: you are becoming an insider. But one can become an insider formally and may yet remain an outsider.

So there are two initiations: one initiation is in the formal sannyas. The second initiation is when you are really possessed by me, when you have given me total freedom to work upon you, when you have said yes in the absolute sense; then the second initiation happens.

The first is happening this moment; pray and aspire for the second to happen soon. And that happens in your inner world. You will know when it has happened. When the yes has arisen and you have started doing things without any idea, judgment; without any idea of whether it is good or bad, but just because I have said to go into it, so you are going into it, then you have become innocent. Then you start functioning from that innocence, and that is real initiation.

But the first is needed for the second to happen. The first is outer; the second is inner. And I can see that the second is going to happen soon. I can see it just as a sculptor can see the figure of Christ in a block of marble.

I have heard: One sculptor was working on a marble piece, chipping and chipping and chipping, and a boy from the neighborhood would come and sit there and watch. Slowly slowly the figure started coming up. Weeks afterwards the figure was absolutely visible, then more weeks went by and the child would come every day and would sit there and watch; he had seen the whole process. After months of work it was no more just a block of marble - it was a beautiful image of Jesus.

When it was finished the boy asked the sculptor, "Sir, can I ask one question? How could you know that Jesus was hidden in this block of marble?"

Just as a sculptor can see a Jesus in a block of marble I can see in people what is hidden in them.

Of course, you will have to go through much chipping, many chunks will have to be cut off. And it is painful, because you have always thought of them as your being; they are not. They will have to be taken away, many things will have to be taken away; slowly slowly the new man emerges.

That is the function of a Master: to see in people the potential, the possible, and to help them to realize it.

[A sannyasin couple are present. The woman says: We have been in relationship together for seven years. I am surprised that we are still not separated because here many relationships drop.]

That's good. So you are destined to be together it seems! If you have survived here it will survive!

It's good. There is no need to separate. If one can be in one relationship long enough, slowly slowly it gains depth, intimacy. In a fast-changing world everything is changing fast - relationships also.

Just as people are changing their jobs, changing their style of life and their clothes and their cars and their houses, naturally they are changing their relationships too, but then something immensely valuable will be missed.

There are a few things which need time to grow. If you don't give time for them to grow they will never grow. All trees are not seasonal flowers. If you are in a hurry then you will get only seasonal flowers. Mm? They come fast, they go fast. Within six weeks they are there and within six weeks they are gone; the whole life span is three months. But if you want the great Cedars of Lebanon, then they take hundreds of years to grow. And so is the case with love.

Sex is a momentary phenomenon - you can easily change your relationships - but when two persons live together long enough, only when they live together long enough, do some edges slowly slowly start disappearing, some conflict starts dropping. They start understanding each other on an intuitive level. When people are together long enough there is no need to say anything - they understand. If you are not feeling good, he will understand. You may not have said anything at all, you may not have even showed it, but he will understand. Something deep in his heart will start feeling that something is amiss.

This is intimacy, when intellectual communication becomes secondary and intuitive communion becomes primary. And then you care for each other; you are not just there to exploit each other - caring is born. You stop the old ideas about how the other should be; slowly slowly they are dropped.

In the beginning every love relationship is a kind of conflict: the woman wants the man to be according to her idea of a man, and vice versa. It takes a long time to learn the lesson that nobody can change anybody, that the other has to be accepted as he is or she is, that not only does the other have to be accepted but respected too, that the other has a certain dignity that should not be interfered with....

It is perfectly good. Be together, and go on growing in this intimacy.

Sushilo means the virtuous one, but to me virtue is not something imposed from the outside. If it is, it is pseudo. Real virtue is something that wells up within, that comes to the surface but originates from the very center of your being. In real virtue you are not in a kind of constant conflict. You are not doing it - it is simply happening; it is natural and spontaneous, otherwise it is just a pretension of virtue.

And that's how the so-called virtuous have become in the world: they have managed a certain character around themselves, but that character is not in tune with their consciousness. In fact it is constantly in conflict with the consciousness. They are not living their consciousness - they are living some commandments that have been given to them from the outside, maybe from Moses or Christ or Buddha or me. The commandment has come from the outside and they are acting it out in their lives. But their inner consciousness remains aloof, detached from it; it has no participation with it. It does not nourish it - in fact it feels caged, imprisoned in it.

So my vision of virtue is not that of an imposed character - because that is how people become prisoners; my vision of virtue is that of freedom. One should live moment by moment, never deciding ahead but leaving the moment to decide itself. And the decision always has to come from the consciousness, not according to some scripture. And whatsoever it is, one has to be it.

It is dangerous, it may not coincide with the idea of the society, but I say it is better to fight with the society than to fight with yourself, because in fighting with society nothing is destroyed, but in fighting with yourself you commit suicide.

Jesus fought with society - the society murdered him - but that is far more right than to yield to the demands of the mob and the masses, to yield to the stupid mind, the mediocre mind, to yield to tradition. That is suicide. It is better to be crucified - at least you die with dignity. Jesus died with immense dignity, a beautiful death, carrying his own cross on his shoulders... a right kind of death.

Millions die but they die a wrong kind of death, because they yield, they surrender, they become slaves.

Just the other night I was reading about this murderer, Charles Manson. When the court sentenced him to death, he laughed. He said, "Ha, ha! What are you doing? - trying to kill me and I have always been dead!" I liked that statement: "I have always been dead. You killed me when I was a child. My parents killed me, my society killed me, and because everybody killed me, I took revenge - I murdered innocent people. And now you are sentencing me to death? Ha ha! Trying to kill a dead man! I have never been alive." But that's how millions of people are: they have never been alive - they were born dead or were immediately killed the moment they were born, or we started poisoning them and sooner or later we got hold of them. My own feeling and observation is that by the time a girl is three and a boy is four they are butchered.

Jesus lived a long life - thirty-three years - a really long life, because people die at three or four...

although these dead people think, "Poor Jesus, died when he was only thirty-three." They feel sorry for Jesus. He lived those thirty-three years with intensity, with passion. He burned his torch of life from both ends together, and died aflame with love and life, with prayer on his lips, with compassion in his heart. But he didn't yield. This is virtue.

Virtue has to be rebellious, because to live according to your consciousness is going to create many many problems for you. But those problems are creative; they are not pathological. They are not to be solved or explained or explained away; they have to be faced, encountered. Virtue has to come just as you draw water from a well: virtue has to be drawn out of you. Hence virtue is a kind of education, a drawing out.

So here I am not going to give you a character, but help to destroy all character that you have and to leave you free to yourself, alone, so that you cannot lean upon anything and you have to fall back to your own source and you have to search there. All the answers are there, all the joys are there, all the songs are there. Once you have stopped looking outside, stopped looking towards authorities to order you to do this and that, immediately your own consciousness takes possession of you and starts directing you, and then life is a celebration.

[To a sannyasin just arriving.]

Start meditating, and start feeling at home, because you are going to stay long, mm? So don't be in a hurry - go slow, feel things and allow things to happen.

Ninety-nine percent of things have only to be allowed to happen. You have to do only one percent.

That one percent triggers the process for the ninety-nine percent, but the major part happens on its own. Just the minor part, the beginning, the first step you have to take, and then things start happening. It is a chain reaction. Once the process is triggered, it doesn't stop!