Whenever you are Total you are with Me

Prem means love, unmado means madness - a loving madness. And that is the greatest sanity in the world. One who is not capable of loving madness is not even capable of living. He only thinks, never feels. And life is not a thought; it has to be felt, lived. Those who cannot live and feel remain hung-up in the head. Their life becomes only a dream phenomenon - it has no objectivity. It is all thought stuff, and thought is nothing but a form of dreaming. Dreaming is thinking visually, and thinking is dreaming conceptually; they are two aspects of the phenomenon called dreaming.

Real life starts only when you start feeling. But feeling looks like madness to the head. It represses feeling, emotions, sentiments - and they are the real juices of life. Through them one comes closer to god, and only through them. God is not a concept but the uttermost orgasmic experience of love.

When one can feel one with the whole existence, that experience is god. It is making love to the whole, it is being loved by the whole. It is a love experience.

That's why Jesus said 'God is love.' It is literally so - it is not a metaphor.

Veet means beyond, dvesha means jealousy, possessiveness, competitiveness, any kind of conflict.

And to go beyond jealousy is to go into love. It is jealousy that does not allow people to grow into love. And to go beyond possessiveness is to go into god, because god cannot be possessed, and the people who are interested only in possessing remain godless. God cannot be possessed; on the contrary, you have to be possessed by god.

There is a statement of William Blake, and I love it. He says 'Religion is love and not property.' Love is never property. To educe love to property is to kill it. On the contrary, you have to be so available to love that it surrounds you, possesses you, holds you, becomes your very soul. Not that love is in your hands but you are in he hands of love.

Jealousy, possessiveness, kills the very quality of love and transforms it into a form of hatred. On the surface it pretends to be love and deep down it is just the opposite. Then the mask is of love and the reality is of hate. And hate has learned the trick of masquerading as love. It even knows how to deceive people, it even moves in pious forms.

The closest to the devil is the priest. And there is every possibility :hat the priest represents the devil and not god, because the devil is clever enough. He cannot manifest himself in his naked truth; he has to take beautiful forms. You are deceived by the form, but by the time you become aware of the reality it has already poisoned your being. You have already swallowed it; then you become aware that it was poison. So the poison is sugar-coated. That's what our so-called Love is: poison sugar-coated. The real love knows nothing of jealousy, and real love becomes prayer.

So that is going to be your work: never be jealous. And always remember that there are many forms of jealousy - drop all those forms unconditionally. And the more you become rid of jealousy, the more you will find springs of love flowing... and that is joy! That is really being grateful to god. Then life becomes weightless, one starts growing wings.

The jealous person remains tethered to the earth. He creeps, he cannot fly. He is so heavy that he goes on down and down; gravitation functions on him, not grace. The more jealous he becomes, the more loaded, and the deeper he falls into darkness. In fact, that is what hell is all about: falling into a deep darkness, becoming so burdened that one cannot fly.

Whenever we think of hell we think of somewhere deep down. It is not just an accident, because all over the earth, in different times, by different races, hell has always been thought of as being somewhere deep down, and dark. One falls into hell. And heaven has always been thought of as something above. It cannot be just accidental, because without any exception whenever people think of heaven they look up. There is a subtle hint in it - that heaven is going higher and higher, above the clouds, above the stars, becoming so weightless that you can fly, so weightless that gravitation cannot function on you any more.

And this is the secret of becoming weightless... become non-jealous, non-possessive.

One should respect oneself, one should love oneself, one should worship oneself... because we come from god, god is our nature. We are not sinners, we are adventurers. Man has not fallen from god, man has not committed any sin. It is just god himself exploring himself. It is an adventure of self-discovery - just as one has to look in the mirror to see one's face. You cannot see your face without the mirror; even to see one's own face something else is needed to reflect it.

The world is a mirror. God has created it to reflect himself; it is his effort to discover himself. God wants to know who he is, and without the other this is not possible. This is very strange but this is how things are: one comes to know oneself only through the other; that's why love is so revelatory.

When you love somebody he becomes your mirror. Love is self-knowledge.

God is deep in love with the world, naturally - just as a musician is in love with his creative music or a painter is in love with his painting. God loves the world immensely. It is his creation, and for a particular purpose. The purpose is: god wants to see his own face. In millions of ways he is exploring himself: in the animals, in the trees, in the stars, in man; they are different ways to explore.

This is my vision and this I call true religion. The true religion has no idea of sin at all; the true religion is so innocent that it knows nothing of sin. And the idea of sin has condemned people so much that they have forgotten all their glory, they have forgotten all their splendour. The priests have condemned man so much that he feels ugly, unworthy, worthless. This is just a strategy of the priests to exploit man. You can exploit man only if you can make him feel guilty.

My work is to undo what the priests have done, to destroy all guilt and instead to create self-love.

And whenever one loves oneself, one becomes capable of loving the whole existence.

Love and god are one, but love is only the seed and god is the flower; so they are one and yet are not one. Love is the beginning and god is the very climax of it; love is the first step and god is the last in the same process. So they are one and yet separate.

It is just as the seed is separate from the flower - it is the same continuum: the seed will become the flower. The flower cannot exist without the seed, the flower will never come into existence without the seed, but still, you cannot call the seed the flower. It has to go through a long process of dying, of transformation, and it has to pass many stages. Love is the lowest form of god, and god is the highest form of love; it is a ladder. You can think of love as the first step of the ladder and god as the last step of the ladder. They are one because they are part of one ladder, but they are still two because one is the beginning and the other is the end.

So one has to keep both things in mind. If you forget one, your whole understanding of love and god will be faulty. There are people who think that if they are one, then why not simply god? Forget all about love! If god is love then there is no need to talk about love; god is enough. This has been the attitude of many religions in the past - that god is enough, forget all about love - but then people became unloving, and an unloving person never knows what god is. He worships, he prays, but all his worship and all his prayer are empty gestures. He has missed the whole point. The first step in the chain has been missed - now you cannot go to the second step; there is no way. In the past many religions with the same argument dropped love. God is enough, and 'god' is such a beautiful word, so why use love?

Buddha never used the word 'love', never; he did not even mention it. And he is right, because god is enough. As far as he himself is concerned, it is true. But what happened to his disciples and the followers? They became anti-love. They became very very life-negative, because love means life.

They became deniers of life, escapists; they condemned the whole of life.

The same has happened from a different angle in Tantra. Tantra says there is no need for god; love is enough. So Tantra became slowly slowly entangled in sexuality and disappeared into sex.

I want you to remember both: love is god, and yet there is a distinction - a distinction in oneness.

So I have given you the name 'Prem Sadhya': love, the goal, the end, the ultimate end. Begin with love and bloom into god. Use love as a jumping board, because that's all we have. God is just a word now; it means nothing because it has no existential roots in us. But love we know - we know at least a little bit - so we can start with love and slowly slowly grow towards god.

As love deepens it becomes divine. One day suddenly you realize the truth, that love has taken a new form - the form of prayer - and from that very moment, love is sacred. It has transcended the body, the mind; it has gone beyond. Not that it is against the body or against anything, but it has gone beyond. It has become something more... something new has started happening.

Hence I use both the words again and again. Love is your existential state; you can begin with it.

It is already a given fact. God is not yet a given fact. God has to be searched for through love, in love. When love becomes a crystallized phenomenon, not a relationship but a state of being, then suddenly it is no more love: it is god. But that is the ultimate. And the goal has to be remembered so we are not lost in the journey itself, otherwise there are many sidetracks. If you keep the goal in mind, then you go straight to the goal like an arrow. If you forget the goal then there are many sidepaths, by-paths, and from each stage you can bifurcate into so many dimensions that you may never reach god.

So your question is relevant, meaningful. It has been one of the most argued about questions in the past. A few people decided for god, against love, a few decided for love, against god, and both went wrong. I want to keep both together.