Darshan 29 October 1976

Prabhu means divine, and vairag means renunciation - divine renunciation. And renunciation can either be human Qr it can be divine. When it is human it is futile. When it is your doing it is not of much worth. But when it is God's doing it has tremendous value. So I don't teach that you have to practise renunciation. I simply teach surrender and to just start moving with His will. Wherever He leads is the destiny. Even when His ways are sometimes contradictary, inconsistent, don't mistrust.

The path is zigzag; it is not straight. It cannot be because it is not logical. It is not rational, it is not linear; it is not one single line - it is very complex. It is just as if you move in hilly country, in the hills.

Sometimes you are going towards south, sometimes you are going towards east, sometimes you are going up and sometimes you are going downward, going down, but still you are moving towards the peak all the same because the path goes round and round. Many times you come to the same view, of course on a different altitude. You come again and again many times to the same point but never on the same altitude. The path is zigzag, round-about, multi-dimensional, circular, because the path is towards the peak of human consciousness.

If you practise renunciation it never goes beyond you. Whatsoever you practise remains below you.

If you are angry, whatsoever you practise will be poisoned by your anger. If you are violent, you may practise love, but in your love there will be violence. It is natural because it is your practice. How can you practise something which is beyond you? How can you reach for something that you have never known before? You move always in the known. You move in the past, in the mind, in time.

That's why I call it a divine renunciation. It is not that you renounce - you simply annihilate yourself.

You simply say to God, 'I will not stand in Thy way. Now I am available, and wherever You lead, I am ready to go. If it is life, I'm ready. If it is death, I'm ready. If it is pleasure, good. If it is pain, good.

Now I have no say of my own.' This I call divine renunciation. It comes like a light. It comes like a ray from the unknown into the darkness of your mind. Then something of the beyond penetrates you.

Man can be saved only from the beyond. That is the meaning of the christian myth that Christ is the saviour. If it is understood rightly it means that only from the beyond is there a possibility to be saved. That is the meaning of Christ being the son of God: it means that he comes from the beyond.

That is just a metaphor that he is a ray from far away, that he is not part of this earth. He is on the earth but he is not part of this earth. He comes from some unknown source. And only that which comes from some unknown source can take you to that unknown source.

Divine renunciation means that you simply leave everything in God's hands... you relax. That's what I see as your direction for the future. You are not to struggle for it and you are not to make arduous effort for it. Simply relax into a deep prayer and the help will be available. It is always available, only we never listen to it.

[A sannyasin says she wants to be strong in spirit.] ... You will have to understand the paradox. If you want spiritually to be strong you have to be absolutely weak. That's why I was insisting on knowing what you meant by being strong, because if you want to be strong in the world, there are other ways. You have to have a very strong ego, will power, resistance. violence, aggression, ambition, competition, greed. You have to develop all sorts of diseases if you want to be strong in the world. But if you want to be strong spiritually there is no problem.

You have to drop all these diseases and you have to drop the very idea of the ego. One is simply nobody - and out of that nobodyness a strength arises which is not of this world, which is totally different, which is not in fact your strength - it is God's strength through you. That is the meaning when Jesus says, 'Be poor in spirit.' and 'Blessed are the poor in spirit because they shall inherit the kingdom of God'.... 'The poor in spirit.' One has to be spiritually non-existential - just a nobody. And out of that nobody-ness you are strong. Then nobody can defeat you because there is nobody to be defeated. Nobody can kill you because there is nobody to be killed. But this is a totally different kind of strength.

Jesus is strong in this sense. He was crucified. His disciples were waiting for some miracle.

Their idea of strength must have been a wrong idea - not at all spiritual. They were thinking that Jesus will show his power - he will do some miracle - but nothing happened. Jesus simply died in a tremendous surrender, in a total let-go. And at the last moment he uttered the words 'Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.' He simply annihilated himself completely. He became nobody, an emptiness. That's his beauty. If he had done some miracle he would have been an ordinary man, because then he would have relied upon his own will. He trusted God. He said, 'Do whatsoever you want to do. If you want me to die on the cross - that's perfectly okay. If it is your will for me to die, then I welcome it. If you want me to survive, you decide. I am nobody to interfere.'

The spiritual strength arises when you stop interfering with God... when you don't have any will of your own, when you simply trust. Trust is power, but not your power - it is always God's power. You become a vehicle, a passage.

Kabir has said that a man becomes like a bamboo flute - empty, just a passage. And once you become a bamboo flute - completely empty - God starts singing through you. So don't hinder Him, and never ask for any strength of your own, because your strength will be poisonous. Only His

strength can be a saving force. Man's strength is suicidal. The stronger the man becomes, the more dangerous he proves to be to himself and to the human society.

That is the difference between science and religion: science tries to make man powerful; religion tries that the man should be completely powerless so that God's power can flow through him. So be empty! That's what sannyas is all about. And if in that emptiness you feel that you are defeated, then that is God's will. Enjoy your defeat... celebrate it! And that will be your gift.

[The Tao group are present. The leader says: People were crazy. It was a particularly crazy group.

So I liked it very much.] Because if in the group people remain sane, nothing will happen. Sanity is their problem. They have been brought up to be sane; they have been disciplined to be sane. They have been forced and imprisoned in sanity. Sanity is a very narrow thing, and they have lost contact with their vast being. Only in craziness are they able to make contacts again. Only when they are crazy can they reclaim the discarded. Because it is discarded it looks crazy. Because it has been rejected they have denied it. They have closed their doors against it, and they have completely forgotten about it.

When it erupts into consciousness, when it again possesses the consciousness, it feels crazy. It is natural - it is not crazy. In a natural world no person will be insane.

In primitive societies it still happens. If you go to a deep primitive community living somewhere in the Himalayas, you will not find a single crazy person in the whole community. It is miraculous! Why is nobody crazy, nobody insane, nobody mad? - because the whole community is so natural that craziness is accepted! It is not denied; it is not condemned. Either you can say that nobody is crazy or you can say that the whole community is crazy - but there is no division; that much is certain.

Between sane and insane there is no division.

The more cultured and civilized a society is, the more is the possibility of people going insane. That's why America is more prone towards insanity than any other country. The more cultured, the more educated, the more civilized, the more affluent, the narrower people become. You start moving in a tunnel which goes on becoming narrower and narrower and narrower. You start feeling suffocated.

Those who are courageous run out of the tunnel, and the people who live in the tunnel, they call them crazy. They force them into hospitals, into mental asylums. They force them to be treated. But it is really unjust. The society takes revenge on these people because they don' t conform to the narrow tunnel, and they want a vaster and bigger life, a fuller and richer life. They are punished for it.

Here in our group this should be one of the points to be remembered - not that you have to directly put some pressure, but just help, persuade. Let there be a climate where people can come out of the tunnel easily, where they feel that they will be accepted even if they go crazy and that nobody is going to condemn them. Mm? Just a tremendous feeling that they are accepted and welcome whatsoever they are. And that is one of the purposes of the groups. Very good!