Religion: Allowing God to Find Us

Deva means god, svarupo means self-nature. God is our self nature. God is not separate - god is our very being. He has not to be attained, only discovered. He is hidden in us; there is no need to go anywhere else to find him. One has to be silent enough and relaxed enough to feel him. It is not a journey, it is already the case: we are in god, god is in us. And god is not a person - you cannot worship him; there is nobody to be worshipped. The worshipper is the worshipped. The arrow has to turn inwards.

We are focussed outwards, so god has fallen in the shadow, and the obvious has become impossible and the impossible has become our very search. God is very obvious. 'One does not even have to go outside one's room,' says Lao Tzu, 'to find him.' And I say 'One does not even have to go outside one's body.' One is it. That is the meaning of svarupo: it is your very nature, your very ground. 'Thou art that' - when this recognition arises, all misery disappears and all darkness, and one is transported into a totally different kind of reality. With the change of vision, the whole world changes.

So don't look for god in the churches, in the temples, in mosques; he is not there. Look for him within. And god is not a goal somewhere in the future. He is our very source. We have just to be a little calmer to feel him. The turmoil in the mind does not allow us to feel, the noise in the being does not allow us to hear the still, small voice within.

Deva means divine, asangato means inconsistent, self-contradiction - divine inconsistency or divine contradiction. Life is not logical, so those who search for consistency in life go on missing. Life consists of contradictions. It is a constant balancing between contradictions - day and night, love and hate, life and death, summer and winter, man and woman. If one looks deeply into life one will find that contradiction is the rule, not the exception. It exists through paradoxes.

The logical mind insists on consistency - then it has to choose. And whenever you choose, you can only choose half and the other half has to be denied. That's what has happened down the ages: those who choose the body deny the soul; they have to, to be consistent. Those who choose the soul have to deny the body; they have to deny the body to be consistent, otherwise they look inconsistent. If god is, then they have to say that the world is illusory, 'maya'. If the world is true, as Marxists say, as Communists say, then god is just an illusion.

The whole of philosophy up to now has been a kind of choice: either/or. My whole teaching is not of either/or, but of both/and. Don't choose. Choice makes a person lopsided. One becomes a materialist, another becomes a spiritualist, and both are half-half: half dead, half alive. Both are missing the totality, and the reason is their chronic insistence on consistency. They are not courageous enough to accept the contradiction, they are not courageous enough to accept life as it is. They have a 'should': it should be like this.

We cannot impose anything on life. It doesn't care a bit about our logic, about our mathematics, about our minds. It goes on its own way. It is dialectical. And it is good that it is dialectical and not logical. If it was logical it would be flat. Just think of a world of only women, no men - it would be a flat world - or of men only and no women; again it would be flat. Just think of a world where only pleasure exists and no pain; it would be a flat world. Even pleasure would become nauseating, unbearable. People would want to vomit it. It would not be possible to digest it any more. Just think of a life of only roses and no thorns. People dream of that life but they don't know - that life would be utter boredom. Those thorns are a must. They make life a challenge, a struggle, an adventure; they make it worth living.

I am all for this self-contradictoriness of life. That's why many people are so puzzled by my statements, because I contradict, and I constantly contradict because I believe in life and not logic.

I have to contradict to be true. Consistency is always false; truth is always inconsistent. It has to be big enough to contain the opposite polarity in it. And I also contradict continuously as a method so that you don't cling to anything. I don't give you a certain philosophy of life. I give with one hand and I immediately take it away with the other hand, because I don't want to tell you the truth - it cannot be told.

All that my effort is is to provoke the truth in you, not to tell it to you. Confusion is my method. You can call me a 'Confusius', but life is that.

Deva means divine, dhyano means meditation - divine meditation. Man can do meditation on his own; that remains a human effort. It is good - it leads to a certain point, but only to a certain point; it cannot lead you the whole way. It stops at a certain point because man has limitations.

When it stops, one has to surrender. In that very moment one is taken over by the divine energy of existence; then you are no more the doer. Something possesses you... you are simply riding on a magical wave of energy. You cannot understand what it is, you cannot analyse it. It is so vast and it is so mysterious that there is no way to catch hold of it. You can only ride on it, and it takes you to the beyond.

These are the two steps of meditation. The first step is the human step. You start trying: you dance, you sing, you sit silently. This is human effort - it is a must. The second can happen only if the first has been done to totality. Dancing, dancing, dancing, a moment comes when the dancer disappears, the dancer melts into the dance and is no more. Suddenly a great energy descends in you, one knows not from where - or from everywhere - and you are uplifted. That moment is divine meditation: when you exactly see that you are not the doer of it, you are just an instrument, a hollow bamboo, and somebody has started singing a song through you. You have become a flute, but the notes are not yours; you are just a passage.

Hope that moment comes soon. It can come. It is everybody's birthright; we just have to claim it, we just have to put all that we have at the stake of meditation. If somebody goes on meditating half-heartedly then this moment never comes. One has to be totally into meditation. Put all that you can, don't save yourself, not even a bit. And whenever it happens that you have put yourself totally into it, the second step is taken, and that second step is the real experience of meditation. Before that is only preparation. Man can only prepare; the real thing happens through god or through the whole. Man can open up... then god descends in that emptiness, in that opening.

That is the meaning of your name. It will remind you again and again to put all that you have into the effort. Don't hide, don't withhold, don't be lukewarm. Meditation has to be an utterly passionate affair, a love affair. And when meditation is really a love affair it brings you to great orgasmic experiences, and those orgasmic experiences are far deeper than the sexual orgasm. That is nothing compared to those orgasmic experiences. And after those orgasmic experiences, the cosmos descends in you. You disappear and god is. That is the moment of deva dhyano.

Deva means god, layo means dissolved in - dissolved in god... just like a river dissolves into the ocean or sugar dissolves into water. Man is not an island, but people think of themselves as separate from reality, and the very idea of separation creates nightmares because it is against the truth.

Anything against the truth is going to create misery and hell.

We have been brought up in such a way and we have been taught again and again that we are separate. The society cultivates the ego. It depends on it, because only the ego can be manipulated, only the ego can be made ambitious, only the ego can be forced to do things.

A man who has no ego will not be of much use - not at least for this neurotic society.

He will need a totally different kind of society because he will function in a different way. His function will be love, and this society functions through hate. All the smiles are false and pseudo, because if competition is the foundation of the society, how can we be loving to each other? Everybody is our enemy, everybody is a competitor, and everybody is fighting for his own survival. This society is violent, and violence is possible only if the ego is cultivated.

An egoless person will be a non-violent person; he will be loving. He will not be a competitor, he will not be jealous. This society cannot tolerate such a man. He will be sane, and this society is insane.

And insane people become very angry whenever a sane person comes into the world. They crucify him, they poison him, they murder him.

The revolution that brings joy and celebration into life comes through this understanding that we are not separate from existence, that we are part of the continent, not islands.

In deep love sometimes that moment comes like lightning. Love is the experience when two persons feel that they are no more separate. That's the beauty of love, and that's its religious quality. That's why Jesus says 'God is love.' He says 'God is love'; I say 'Love is god.' It is only for a few moments in deep love that one feels that the idea of being separate is false, pseudo, absurd. But those moments come and go and we are again separate. In meditation that moment slowly becomes our whole being. That becomes our very climate - that we are one with the whole.

Then trees and the mountains and the stars are not separate. Then we are all manifestations of one reality. In that vision of oneness is bliss, is benediction. All fear disappears, because there is nobody else to be afraid of, and love wells up, tremendously, because all is ours. 'I' becomes false, and 'we'

takes its place. And the 'we' includes not only men and women; 'we' includes all - the rocks, the rivers.... That vision of unity, of oneness, is what god is all about.

Deva means divine, nadama means sound, melody, music - divine melody, divine music, divine harmony. And there is a music which is constantly present in everybody's being. But we can hear it only when all inner talk stops. Once it is heard, you have heard god. God does not speak in language - he speaks in music. Music is a pure message... truth uncontaminated. You need not interpret it, you need not analyse it. You need not bring in your intellect to understand it, still you understand.

Music does not say anything in particular, but it still says a lot. It speaks to your guts, to your very cells, to the very fibres of your being. It is cosmic language, without words, because words can be misinterpreted And words are always misunderstood. It is a wordless message.

God has always spoken in music, as music. And he is always speaking; it is a constant sound inside you. Without it you cannot survive for a single moment. It nourishes you, it keeps you alive; it is your very source of life. But our heads are so full of noise, the inner talk is so continuous... waking, sleeping, it goes on and on; it does not give you a gap.

Meditation is nothing but creating those small gaps when the inner talk stops, when suddenly the road of the mind is empty and no traffic moves and the inner sound bursts like an explosion. It cleanses, it purifies, it transforms; it is alchemical.

That sound is called 'nadama'. It is not created by you; you are created by it. You are just a note of nadama, just a note of that eternal music.

And once you have caught hold of a single note, then there is no problem. Then you can search for the very source through it. A single ray of light can lead you to the very sun from where it comes.

Jesus heard it, Buddha heard it, and anyone who has ever heard it has been no more part of the earth, has become part of the sky, has been no more part of time, has become eternal. And unless one becomes that, one suffers. Suffering is because we are missing our own treasure. Suffering is because we have not been able to see our own kingdom.

[To a sannyasin who has been living in a cave in the mountains] That always happens: if you live in the mountains too long then you become habituated to the mountains and the silence. These are just habits of the mind. Then you come back to the marketplace, to the world, and you will feel disturbed. After a few days the disturbance will disappear; the habit will be dropped, and then there will be no problem. But for a few days there will be a turmoil - just the change, and it is a great change.

If you really want to grow then it is good sometimes to come into the world, to face the world, to encounter the problems that it creates and remain alert that your peace and silence are not disturbed by it. Keep your cool. Let the turmoil be there all around you but you remain the centre of the cyclone. Then go back to the mountains, be there, enjoy; come back into the world. One day, when you start feeling that now there is no problem, no difference - whether you are in the caves or in the marketplace it is all the same - then you have really attained peace, and that is yours. If in coming to the world your peace is disturbed, then it is not yours; you have borrowed it from the mountains. It is not true - it is only a new conditioning.

So if you really want to grow then my suggestion is: be here and go again, come back, and go on moving between these two poles - the mountains and the market. Don't get fixed at one point, remain moving, and one day you will be able to find the balance between the two. And you will be able to be just a witness; if you are in the mountains you witness the mountains, if you are in the market you witness the market but you remain the same, undisturbed, undistracted. That is true peace.

That's why I have not chosen the Himalayas. I love the Himalayas, but I have not chosen it for my people because that will not be true peace and they will all be in an illusion. They will all think that they have attained great silence, etcetera, and whenever they go to the world all will be shattered. I have chosen the world. If something has to grow, it has to grow here so nothing can disturb it; then you can go anywhere. Even if you are thrown into hell, nothing will be disturbed. That's why I have chosen India. Hell is far better! In hell you will simply feel that you have been promoted!