Darshan 28 September 1978
Prem means love, sanjaya means a special kind of victory... not just victory but a special kind of victory. In English there is no word to translate it. Victory is possible in two ways: one is through coercion, violence; the other is through love. And the ways of both are totally different... not only different but diametrically opposite. In the first kind of Victory you rape the other person's being.
That is the meaning of violence: that which violates the other's being. So only on the surface can you be victorious. Deep down the person will remain antagonistic to you; deep down the person will wait for a time to take revenge. So the victory is only a shadow victory. The heart has not been won, the heart remains totally antagonistic, inimical.
Another kind of victory happens - that is sanjaya - through love. Not that you coerce the person or violate his being; it is not through force but through Surrender. You surrender to the other person in tremendous love, trust. There is respect for the other, reverence. The other is so revered that he cannot be violated. You cannot treat the other as a means; the other is an end unto himself. With this reverence, with this surrender, a totally different quality of victory arrives. The heart of the other is won and there is a meeting. Two persons slowly slowly dissolve into one person, one presence arrives.
That is the meaning of sanjaya. It is not an ordinary kind of victory, but victory that comes through love, through surrender.
Anand means bliss, gramyo means wild, primitive, innocent. Bliss is possible only when one is in a natural state. Man is living in a very unnatural state. Man is the only animal who has gone unnatural; otherwise the whole existence is natural. Man has fallen out of harmony, and the misfortune
happened because man started improving upon himself, he started having dreams about himself, about how he should be. That was the beginning of the poisoning. That was the most unfortunate moment in human history when "should" entered human consciousness.
When you are simply in the "is" you are natural. When the "should" enters, you start becoming unnatural because you start trying to improve upon your being. You start pulling yourself this way and that, pushing yourself this way and that; you start manipulating yourself, and the innocence is lost. And because you have to become somebody, you start pretending that you are already that somebody. Falsity enters; a kind of pseudo personality starts growing around you. You start deceiving others and you start deceiving yourself too.
This goes on and on, and for centuries this is the way we have lived; now it is almost impossible to find what our original face is. So many commandments, so many shoulds - they are like mountains on our heart - and nobody can become anything other than what they are; that is a fundamental law.
A rose can only become a rose, and the moment a rose starts dreaming of becoming a lotus, the rose will have to go to the psychiatrist. It will become neurotic, it will be split, it will become schizophrenic. It will not be one any more. That image of the lotus will be a constant pressure, a tension, an anxiety, of "I have not made it yet and I have to make it. Time is fleeing fast, and who knows? By the evening I may be gone... without becoming a lotus?" And despair arises. And because the whole energy of the rose becomes entangled in the idea of being the lotus, it cannot bloom as a rose. The energy is diverted. It cannot become a lotus because that is not in its nature, and it cannot even become the rose, which is in its nature. This is how man is living.
My approach is that we should drop all shoulds, that we should start accepting our nature, our reality, whatsoever we are... not in despair, not in hopelessness, but in tremendous joy and gratitude. This is the way God has made you, this is the way he wanted you. To deny this and to try to become somebody else is to deny God. To accept God means to accept oneself. And the acceptance has to be of great rejoicing - that he has made you this way and only this way; he has given you a unique quality and a unique individuality. Relish it, celebrate it, and then bliss comes of its own accord.
And it is not only that you become blissful, you become a blessing to others too. A non-tense person is a blessing; his very presence is a blessing to the world. A tense person is a curse. There are people who are so tense that whenever they come close to others they immediately make others tense.
I know one woman - I have known her for many years - well-educated, she is a professor in a university. But all her friends and all the people who have known her have known one thing:
whenever she comes close to them, something goes berserk in them. Not only that - if she comes into a group, people start fighting with each other. And the woman remained completely unaware of the fact. Her whole family was destroyed, her children were destroyed. Her husband escaped and since three years nobody knows where he is. Friends sooner or later leave her, because it is so difficult to be friendly with her... and she is a good woman.
I asked her, "What do you carry in yourself?" And slowly slowly she revealed her heart, that she is very split. She is carrying two persons with her, and there is a constant fight within herself. She is a woman of great will so she has forced herself to remain one, but that is only on the surface - deep down she is mad. But just because of the will, she is carrying on, pulling on somehow, with a strong face on the surface. Deep down two persons fighting, and that fight has become so deep that the moment she comes close to anybody, her forceful personality - split, divided, constantly fighting - immediately affects the other person. Something starts splitting in the other person.
This is what Carl Gustav Jung discovered as the law of synchronicity, not cause and effect. She cannot cause this in anybody, but just because she has such a vibe, any weaker person, weaker than herself, will immediately start vibrating in the same way, will imitate her, and both will be unaware.
And because 't she is constantly fighting within herself, a civil war going on, if she is in a group people start fighting - people who were not fighting just a moment before. And I saw it!
I told her, 'Leave, drop this will. Allow these two persons to have a good fight; then there is a possibility of reconciliation. Instead of being two you have become three. It is better to be two than to be three. Now this is creating a third personality, so at least drop one." For six months she was mad. She dropped , that will and became split, but slowly slowly that madness disappeared and she has become one of the most tranquil, calm and cool persons. Now people have a totally different experience of her being.
When a person is tense - and any person who has some idea about how to be, what to be, where to be, is bound to be tense - he is pulled between his present and the future, and the gap is big, in fact, unbridgeable. He is pulled apart. He is a curse, and this type of person is all around. The whole world consists of them, hence after each few years a great world war is needed; somewhere or other a war is a must. It is a release, a catharsis.
In just the same way, when a person lives in the present with no image, with no idea - the rose is happy to be a rose - a great blessing arises. His very presence becomes a soothing presence in existence; wherever he moves he showers life, love. But for that one has to become natural.
"Gramyo" means as natural as a primitive person, like an aboriginal, one who has not known civilization yet, one who is almost like animals and trees and rocks. Allow that quality... and it is there! We are not to bring it from anywhere else - we have already got it, but we have never allowed it to have its expression. We have been enforcing things on top of it and creating a mess. This whole energy can become a bliss.
And remember: one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created and energy cannot be destroyed; energy can only be transformed. When you are tense your energy becomes involved in tension; when you are non-tense the same energy becomes bliss. Energy can never be created and can never be destroyed; that is impossible. The total amount of energy in existence is always the same. So the only question is: where to put it? In the future? - then you are tense. In the present - then you are non-tense.
If you put your heart in shoulds then you will remain in anxiety. Put your heart in the isness, this moment, now, here, and suddenly the energy is released from tension, relieved, and there is great relaxation, and that relaxation is bliss. That's what sannyas is all about.
I am not giving ideals to you. I am taking ideals away from you. I want to give you that which you already have: your nature, your intrinsic nature.
Deva means divine, pagal means mad - mad for the divine. And less than that will not do. God is available only to mad people - not the so-called ordinary mad, but there is a totally different madness: a madness with method. The ordinarily mad person falls below mind, uses his mind.
The mad person I am talking about goes beyond mind. He also loses his mind. Both are similar in that both lose the mind, and yet they are as far away from each other as possible - because one falls back lower than the mind; the other goes beyond, becomes higher than the mind. One becomes irrational, the other becomes supra-rational. But the suprarational man also looks mad to other people.
Jesus looked mad, Buddha looked mad - all the mystics down the ages looked mad... mad because they wouldn't follow our ideas, mad because they tried to live in their own way, mad because they lived in the world and yet were not worldly. And that is my definition of sannyas: love the world but don't be worldly, be in the world but don't be worldly. Certainly you will become a stranger, an outsider, because you will have a different flavor to your being and people will not be able to understand you. They will, of necessity, misunderstand you.
That has been the fate of all God-seekers, and that is going to remain so forever, because in a world where people seek money, where people seek power, where people seek respectability, to seek God, to seek meditation, to seek silence, to seek love, looks absurd. Where everybody is ambitious and is in search of more and more worldly power, not to be interested in it looks mad. The reality is that the whole world is mad, but the mad are in the majority.
It is like there is somewhere in Mexico a small valley where an old, ancient tribe exists - just a small tribe of seven hundred people. They are all blind, because a certain fly exists there, and once that fly bites the person he becomes blind. All the children are born with eyes, but within four or six months at the most they all become blind. That valley of the blind has always believed that everyone is blind.
When the first man from the outside entered the valley just three hundred years ago, they could not believe it - they all laughed at the whole absurdity of it - that somebody could see.
He was at a loss as to how to explain to those people, but he was a very loving person so he started living with those people and started trying to help them to understand what eyes are and what they were missing. He started studying to find out what the matter was. Why had all these people gone blind? And he was surprised - every child was born with eyeS and then somewhere.... He found the root cause of it, he searched and found out where the problem was arising.
By that time he had fallen in love with a woman of the valley but the tribe rejected him. They said, "Unless you are ready to become blind you cannot marry this woman. We have never married our girls to anybody other than the blind. Either you have to lose your eyes or you have to lose the woman." And because they were in the majority the man looked foolish.
That's what happened with Socrates - a man with eyes in the valley of the blind. That is what is happening with me - a man with eyes in the valley of the blind. And that is going to happen to everybody - whoever becomes alert to the reality of life, of the truth of existence, will become strange, will be an outsider. Then his path will not cross anybody else's path; then he cannot follow the people who move on the superhighway. He will be an outsider, a foreigner everywhere. But it is a great blessing to have eyes, even in the valley of the blind.
My whole effort here is to create as many mad people as possible, because the so-called sane are not sane - they are really mad. And the effort to create mad people is an effort to create sanity. Be as mad as Jesus, be as mad as Socrates - after truth, after God - and you will attain to ultimate sanity.
[A sannyasin, leaving, says Leela group leader saw something in his chest like a black cloud: When it changed I felt differently. Instead of feeling above things, I felt part of them, with people.]
Very good... that s very good. It must have been there, a dark shadow on the heart. Many people have that, and the reason is that we have all been trained to be egos. That shadow is of the ego - the ego is a dark cloud; it hovers around the heart. And it keeps you feeling that you are superior, holier-than-thou, higher than others, special, extraordinary. In a thousand and one ways it goes on making you feel above others. And that is a very very destructive attitude towards life, because nobody is higher and nobody is lower. In fact, we are not separate and therefore able to be higher or lower. To be higher or lower we would have to be separate entities, and we are one!
Even Jesus is not higher, nor is Judas lower. Jesus and Judas are both aspects of the same coin:
Jesus cannot exist without Judas, and neither can Judas exist without Jesus. The saint and the sinner are two aspects of the same phenomenon. We are all one, and to feel part of the whole is a great relief, because to keep oneself above is an unnecessary effort. It is trying to pull yourself up by your own shoestrings. It is heavy work, it is suicidal, it kills people. But before they kill themselves they kill many others too, because whenever you feel superior to somebody else, you have hurt him.
You may not have said a single word - you just passed by the person and you felt yourself higher and above and holier - but you have hurt the man, you have wounded the man. He may not know, you have not said, but the wound has happened. That very energy passing by has created a wound inside him; violence has happened. One need not carry a sword to wound people. All that one needs is a strong egoistic image of oneself, that's all. That is enough to destroy, harm, poison. And when you feel higher and above others you will never feel happy, you will always feel sad, because your whole energy will go into this and it will never be available to be happy, blissful, dancing, singing.
It is very good that you became aware of it, and then when it left you also felt you are part of this whole cosmic drama. We are one with it... just playing different roles; nobody is higher, nobody is lower. And once this ego and its shadow is no more there, one's being is full of light. That very light creates delight. Delight is its byproduct. When you start feeling full of light inside, outside delight is released. You have the quality of dance then, a smile spreads all over your being and great love happens without any effort. Grace surrounds such a person. And that's what makes life worth living.
So never allow that shadow again. Whenever you start feeling it coming, just relax and become part, just be ordinary. And remember one thing more: don't start feeling ordinary in any extraordinary way, otherwise again the same trip comes in from the back door. Don't start feeling humble or again the shadow will enter. I am not saying to be humble, because humbleness is nothing but another ego trip. I am simply saying you are not, how can you be egoistic? How can you be humble? You are not, so how can you be a saint and how can you be a sinner? Only God is. The whole is. The ocean is - waves are not.
So remember it: the old habit may come again, and again will start dragging you along the old track.
The moment you catch hold of yourself red-handed, relax, have a good laugh, and Start mixing with life again. The more you mix with life and with people, the more relaxed you will feel.
You must have carried something, but don't allow it again. And I am saying this because it will come: whenever you are unaware it can come again. These are just habit patterns and habits die hard; they become almost autonomous. Whenever you are not looking in, those habits will start functioning mechanically. So for a few months you will have to keep alert and you will not be able to forget about it. For three or four months remember as much as possible; then the old habit loses its impetus, its momentum, its energy. And once you have not traveled on it for long, energy automatically starts moving in the new direction.
It happens many times in groups that you become aware of something - something is relaxed, something changes - but outside the group if you are not alert you will be a victim again. The past is heavy and strong, and whatsoever has happened is very delicate right now, unless you go on nursing it, feeding it ....
So keep the old habit unfed, starve it, and give the whole energy to this new experience of being in the world, with the world, part of the whole, neither higher nor lower. This insight will start growing and may become one of the significant milestones in your life.
Lolita: It means moving towards God, a movement towards God. Life is not static - it is a constant movement. It is like a river, and just as the river moves towards the ocean, life moves towards God.
Nobody is going anywhere else. Even people who don't believe in God are moving towards God, even people who are absolutely against God are moving towards God. It does not depend on your will; it does not depend on your idea and belief and philosophy. Life itself is moving towards God.
This is a fact; it is not a question of believing or not believing. I have never come across a man who is not moving towards God; it is not possible in the very nature of things.
There is no alternative, there is no question of choice.
But the people who are moving consciously move faster, and that makes the difference, and a great difference too. The people who know that they have to move towards God avoid many many distractions. Others get distracted easily. In fact in others' lives distractions become goals, because their real goal is completely unknown to them, so there are small distractions - have more money, have more power, have more bank balances, have this, have that. Their life becomes a life of having things - they lose all awareness of being. They are also moving towards God but in a very zigzag way. They may take many lives to reach, because they don't have a direction and they don't have any sense of direction either. They don t have any idea of what they are doing with their lives, and why, from where they are coming and where they are going. They are completely oblivious of the whole thing.
Just in the middle they are dreaming of a few things and rushing after dreams like small children running after butterflies or playing with toys. Children are playing with toys and your so-called adult people are alsO playing with toys. Their toys are different but toys are toys; their size and their value does not make much difference.
By giving you this name I want you to become alert, aware, so that you can gather together your being, so that you stop being distracted, so that you can pour your whole energy towards the ocean, so that you can reach faster. And if one is really alert, one can reach in a single moment. It becomes a quantum leap.
So you have to use your name as a criterion. Whatsoever you are doing, judge it on this criterion:
whether it is going to help you to move towards God. If it is going to help, it is good, do it, and do it totally. If it is not going to help, don't waste time.
This is the difference between wants and needs. The person who lives through wants becomes distracted. He says, "I want this, I want that," and he goes crazy because he wants so many things and he cannot manage. He is always frustrated, because whenever he achieves something that he had wanted so long, he feels simply foolish that he wasted so much energy, time, life. Now he has achieved it, and he seems to be getting no joy out of it. The whole effort seems to be meaningless, ridiculous. But before trying to understand he starts jumping into wanting something else. He says, "So this is not the thing; then it must be something else. Let me have this, let me have that." A need is that which will help you to move towards God; a want is that which will only distract you.
A need is a reality; it has to be fulfilled. Needs are very few; they can be easily fulfilled. And wants are millions and they cannot be fulfilled ever. Not only in one life, in millions of lives they cannot be fulfilled.
So always see whether it is a want or a need. If it is a need, fulfill it. If it is really needed .... And what do I mean by saying "if it is really needed"? I mean if it is going to help your growth, to make you more mature, more alert, more loving, more open, more present. Is it going to make you more intelligent, more blissful, more rooted, centered? These are the values. Is it going to give you a kind of integration? Is it going to make you more alert, aware, conscious? Then it is good, it is a need.
Fulfill it. Then your way towards God is straight.
Jesus says, "Straight is my way and narrow." The way is straight and, yes, it is narrow too - narrow because only one can pass on it; you cannot take anybody else with you. It is so narrow that only one can pass on it - God is available to individuals not to crowds. Each has to move on his own, alone, utterly alone. And it is straight if you are alert.
Just think of a river going towards the south and then towards the north, and then going to the east and then going to the west; it will just be wasting itself and may get entangled in some desert unnecessarily. But the river follows the shortest course, the straightest way possible, the shortest distance between two points.
One point is you, the other point is God. God means the whole, the ocean of existence. We are small riVers moving towards God.
That is the meaning of your name: judge everything according to whether it is going to help your movement. If it helps, it is virtue; if it doesn't help, it is sin. And you will be surprised: ninety percent of your life is unnecessary, and that is what goes on creating so many problems - that ninety percent of your life. The ten percent of your life will be really beautiful, and then it is unhurried and you have enough space and enough time and you can live at ease. You can be a let-go, and God happens only when you are a let-go.
[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I feel mixed up. One side of me is that I feel at home here and the other side is that I'm still enjoying my games in the West.]
Then you have to be in the West a little time more, because to be here will be beneficial only when your total heart is here. So just a little time more; those games will be soon finished. They cannot keep you interested for long, and it is better to finish them rather than suppressing. If you decide to be here right now you will be suppressing something, and then sooner or later you will have to go, so it is better to finish those games. Just go and get involved in those games. Let them go through experiencing them. And it is not going to take a long time - soon you will be finished with the West and then it is good to be here.
Even if a little part in you wants to be there then I will suggest you be there. I don't want you to be here half-heartedly, because then I cannot work on you; then it is better to be here for a few months and then go again. But this is just a transitory period. I have put the time bomb in you... so it will take a little time and then it will explode! Nothing to be worried about.
I think one time more or at the most, two times more, you will have to go, that's all. Then the whole idea of going will disappear. And when the whole idea of going disappears, you will be really here, totally here. Then being here will have significance, a spiritual significance, because my work can be done on you only if you are totally available to me. If even a small part is not available to me, work cannot go as deep as it should go.
So this time go and have those games. They are games and you know they are games, so they cannot keep you long. But a certain maturity is needed, and that is coming.