Learn how to Weep in Blissfulness

[A sannyasin says: I am scared and sad because I have to leave you.]

That's natural, but no need to be sad. In fact this going away can be used as an opportunity to come closer spiritually rather than physically; and that is real closeness. Real closeness is what love is all about. Physically we can be close and we may not be close at all. That is what is happening all over the world: people are physically close but worlds apart; no communication, no meeting ever happens. People have become almost like parallel lines: running very close but never meeting anywhere. Even those with whom we think we are close - parents and children, husbands and wives, friends - even they are just parallel lines.

One needs to know that real closeness has nothing to do with space and nothing to do with time either. Real closeness is that of feeling. It is of intensity; it consists of intensity. If you can feel for me intensely there back in Germany, immediately you will be close.

So make it an opportunity. Always use all opportunities to grow. When you are here, enjoy that - the physical closeness; when you are far away, start thinking of spiritual closeness. Make a rhythm - and both are fulfilling. So just go. Sadness is natural but you can make it a stepping-stone and you will rise to a new vision of love, intimacy....

The relationship between a master and the disciple is the closest relationship. Even lovers are not that close, cannot be, because even lovers are limited through their egos, and egos are always in conflict, always in clash. Egos are always trying to dominate the other, and hence conflict is natural.

This is the only relationship of all the relationships that are possible in the world where a willing surrender happens, where you are not being dominated, but of your own accord have stopped fighting. Out of love and trust you have stopped defending yourself. Out of love and trust you have seen that the other is not the enemy so there is no need to fight, and when fight disappears the energy that was involved in fighting is released, and that energy gives food, nourishment, for the soul.

So just go and try it. Feel me intensely, as intensely as possible, at least once a day, and you will be suddenly surprised that all distance between you and me disappears. Then that experience will be of immense value to you.

Prem means love sampurno means total. The moment love is total, god is available. Partial love is human - total love is divine. Partial love is a mixed phenomenon of ecstasy and agony. Total love is pure ecstasy, just as total lovelessness is pure agony.

The old way of saying it is: 'Hell, heaven, and the earth just exactly between the two.' Hell means no love, absolute absence of love, heaven means total love, and between the two is the human existence, the earth - a little bit of hell and a little bit of heaven. Hence the anguish of human life, because man has a double being. Man is not one; man is basically two, dual, torn apart between heaven and hell, between the animal and the divine, between the body and the soul. This anguish is not a curse - it is a blessing, because no animal suffers from it, only man. And not even all men, but only the highest quality.

Animals are at ease with a loveless world. Man is in a great unease. He aspires, he longs for something of the beyond. He tastes a few moments of joy. He knows how love tastes, although those moments are very fleeting. They come like lightning and they are gone but they leave the taste on the tongue. It is through love that man started searching for god, because love has given the taste. Now, man cannot remain as he is. Now he has to go into that state where love becomes a totality, where love is not just a momentary phenomenon but becomes a state, a continuity.

Love to me is the very soul of religion. If one can love then nothing else is needed. Through love one will come to know all the Bibles and all the Vedas... because they are nothing but by-products of love.

So this is the meaning of your name. Let this become your actuality too: aspire to the beyond, aspire to the whole, aspire to the total. Man is man only when he tries to surpass himself.

Deva means divine, kavito means poetry. Poetry comes closest to prayer, to reality, to god, because poetry has something of the intuitive in it. Prose is logical, poetry is illogical, or supra-logical. Prose is mundane, poetry is sacred. Poetry has something mysterious in it, something that can be felt but can never be really understood. Your heart is stirred by it but your head remains in wonder; it cannot figure it out. And the greater the poetry is, the less is the possibility to understand it.

Once it happened: A great poet was approached by a professor of literature. He was teaching the poet's poetry in the university, and he came across a passage that looked absolutely absurd. He tried hard for many days to think what it could mean and he could not figure it out, so finally he decided 'Why should I not go to the poet? - the poet is in the same town.'

So he went to the poet and the poet said 'Yes, when I wrote that, two persons knew the meaning, but now only one knows.'

So the professor said 'Good. That one must be you.' The poet said 'No. When I wrote the poem I and god knew the meaning - now only god knows.'

So what to say about others? Even the poet in his non-poetic moments will not be able to figure it out, what it is. And those poetic moments are few and far in between. They are visitations of the beyond. They come like a breeze - you cannot invite them - and they go like a breeze. You cannot catch hold of them.

The moment the poet dies, poetry is born. And as the poet comes back into existence, the poetry disappears. That's why in the ancient days poets never used to sign their poetry. Great poetry exists in the Upanishads, but nobody knows who wrote those pieces of eternal beauty because the poets never claimed that those were their works. They knew one fact certainly, that when they were not, poetry flowed and when they came back, poetry stopped, so how could they claim it was theirs? It was not their possession. Something from the unknown flowed. And that is the meaning of prayer.

You cannot do prayer. If you are there prayer is not possible. You can only die, you can disappear, and in your very disappearance, prayer arises.

Prayer and poetry are synonymous. If poetry has no prayer in it, it is just a composition, not poetry, just a game with words. If poetry is really poetry it has the fragrance of prayer in it. You may not be able to catch hold of it where it is but it is there somewhere in the gaps - between the words and between the lines it is somewhere there. One has to be very meditative to understand poetry and one has to be very very ready to die as oneself to give birth to poetry.

All that is beautiful is contained in the word 'poetry'. Music is poetry in sound, painting is poetry in colour, sculpture is poetry in stone. Buddha is poetry walking, talking, sitting... an incarnation of poetry. So is Jesus, so is Krishna. The highest peaks of human consciousness have been nothing but pure poetry. They may not have written a single poem; that is not the point. Their whole being is poetic. The way they walk is poetry, they way they look is poetry.

Giving you this name is just an effort to provoke poetry in you. My whole work here consists of one thing: to provoke you into creativity, to provoke you into awareness, to provoke you to your potential.

[A sannyasin says: "The distance between me and others, between me and you grows smaller so slowly."] No need to force it; everybody has to follow his own pace. Great patience is needed - don't be in a hurry. These things are not like seasonal flowers; they are like cedars of Lebanon: they grow slowly, they take years. Because the roots have to go deep it takes time. Seasonal flowers come within weeks but within weeks they are gone too.

Never be in a hurry, because all that is beautiful and great takes time. The modern world has become very ugly for a single reason: everybody is in a hurry. Then nothing deep is possible. Everybody is so impatient. Love is not possible because love needs time. Intimacy grows very very slowly...

years of being together. My own observation is that unless two persons have lived many many years together, love does not bloom. In fact, by the time people are getting old, love blooms. What youth knows is not love; what youth knows is only chemistry, physiology, sex, but not love. These are not bad things because love grows in these things, but love needs deep roots first. It takes years. But the modern love is finished by the time the honeymoon is over or even before.

Everybody in such a hurry! People want things immediately, and if they think it is not going to happen, then: Change the partner, find somebody else. Maybe it is not going to happen here; this is not the woman. this is not the man. They have to look somewhere else and they have no time to waste. And this will go on happening with everybody, because they don't know that love will take time. You will have to go through many things - ups and downs, positives and negatives, dark nights of the soul and joyous dance. You will have to pass through all these things; then something seasons. Love is a seasoning.

If you want to learn music it will take years. Pop music won't take years, that's why it is not very musical; it is more or less making noise. If you really want to go deep into music then years and years of waiting, patience, work... then something starts happening. But those who are not patient will never know.

This relationship that is growing between me and you cannot be hurried. All hurry will be disturbing.

Let it grow in its own way. Move slowly. Those slow movements are very solid; they crystallize you, and before you take a new step, the old step has to become absolutely solid so that it can function as a jumping-board for the new. If the old is still not settled and you take a jump, you will have to go back because something will remain lingering in the past.

The modern mind needs psychoanalysis for the single reason that people have not lived their past; they have been in such a hurry. When they were children they didn't live their childhood; they wanted to become grown-up and they were in a hurry. Now many things have remained incomplete in the childhood. Psychoanalysis will take you back to the childhood; even drastic methods may be needed, for example, Primal Scream. These are for nothing but to complete some experiences that you have left incomplete in the past.

Now many people come to me and they ask why I don't give therapy groups to Indians. It is not their need. They have been moving very slowly, in fact, too slowly; their whole being is lazy. If they are missing, they are missing on the other extreme. They are not missing through haste: they are missing through laziness, indolence. They have become almost stagnant; that is their misery. And the Western man's misery is speed, haste; everybody is chasing after shadows. People are not worried very much about where they are going; their whole worry is whether they are going with speed or not. They may land in hell - that is not the point. The real thing is that they are going with speed.

I have heard that an aeroplane was in danger. The pilot came on the 'mike' and told the passengers 'Don't be worried. There are two pieces of news for you; one is good news, the other is bad news.

The good news is that we are moving with great speed. The bad news is that we are lost. We don't know where we are moving to.' This is the situation: we are moving with great speed but where we are moving to nobody knows... in fact, nobody cares. We go on improving upon the speed.

If the childhood is lived slowly there will be no need to go back through psychotherapy or Primal therapy. There will be no need to go back at all - it is finished! Remember one very fundamental thing, that any experience that is finished, completed, drops from the mind; it doesn't hang around. It is not a cloud hanging around you any more. But if you are in a hurry then everything hangs around because nothing is ever complete. You are taking your breakfast but in such a hurry that you are simply stuffing. Mm? in your mind you are already moving - you may have reached the office. And when you are in the office you are not there - you may be already reaching home. You are always ahead of yourself. This is driving people crazy!

So they don't enjoy the taste of the food, they don't enjoy the beauty of their work or the creativity of their work; there is nobody to enjoy. They are always ahead, running faster than their present; they are always in the future. So everything remains incomplete and all that is incomplete demands completion; it gathers, it becomes accumulative. By and by you are so burdened that you don't know what to do, how to sort it out, this whole mess. Either one goes mad - which is only a way to avoid this mess - or one commits suicide. But these things don't help. You will be back again in the world in another womb, and you will continue the same nonsense again.

Use this time being with me. This opportunity has to be used. And the first thing I would like to tell you is: be very patient. You are moving, but you are growing like a cedar, not like a seasonal flower...

and it is good. Enjoy this slow movement. Something beautiful is going to grow. But it is just like the child takes nine months in the mother's womb, mm? If the mother is in a hurry there will be a miscarriage and the child will be born dead. Wait!

There is an ancient story about Lao Tzu, a beautiful story - utterly false but of immense significance - that he lived in his mother's womb for sixty-two years. So slow! The mother must have been a woman of guts (laughter) obviously, otherwise she couldn't give birth to a man like Lao Tzu. Sixty- two years - by the time he was born he was already old; all his hair was white. He was born wise, enlightened; nothing was left. He was born mature, absolutely mature.

What I take from this parable is the beauty of patience.

[To an art professor] I like your paintings very much. Meditate and do a few groups. Something new will arise out of the meditations... because painting can come out of the mind, can be beautiful, but cannot have that depth which it will have if it comes through meditation, when it comes from no-mind. When it doesn't come from you, when you are just a vehicle, a hollow bamboo, just an instrument in the hands of the divine or the whole, then painting has a totally different dimension to it.

Gurdjieff used to call it 'objective art', because it will not have any impact from your mind, from your subjectivity; it will be free of you. It will not be a projection of your desires, memories, imagination, conditioning. It will be completely free of you, and then it has tremendous beauty.

There are still a few things in the world which belong to the dimension of the objective art. Just seeing the piece of objective art, whatsoever it is - sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry, a parable - whatsoever it is, just by seeing it, listening to it, being with it, you start disappearing into the no- mind.

For example, the Taj Mahal is an example of objective art. When the moon is full just meditate on it. Just sit silently and look at it, and something starts disappearing in you. A moment comes soon when you are not and the observer has become the observed. It is a piece of Sufi art. Tourists will never understand it because they will not give time to it. The whole day people are passing in the Taj Mahal, coming and going - the whole day. If it was in my hands I would prevent these people entering the Taj Mahal unless they are prepared to meditate for a few hours. That should be the entry fee; otherwise they should not be allowed. It is profaning something sacred. It has to be approached in a certain attitude, in a prayerful attitude, at a certain time.

When the moon is full - the full-moon night is the night for the Taj Mahal - exactly in the middle of the night when the moon is just on the top of the Taj Mahal, sit for one hour looking at it and you will disappear, and you will never be the same person again.

So are the caves of Ajanta and Ellora, and the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak and the pyramids of Egypt. They were not just mind things; they were created by people for posterity to meditate on.

Music is perfect when the listener reaches the same state of mind or no-mind as was the state of the musician when he created it. Only then is it successful; otherwise it is not successful.

Much potential is in you. Much more is to come; what you have done is just a preface. And always remember that - that whatsoever one has done is always a preface, because there is no end to our potential; it is inexhaustible. And the more you share it with the world, the more you will be given.

[To a sannyasin who had been assaulted the previous night in the main street of Koregaon Park.] I am happy with you. You remained undisturbed and thats very good. Your energy has remained absolutely undisturbed and that is very good; that's why I called you, just to check.

We have to use every opportunity - good or bad - to grow. Just always remain a witness, whatsoever happens. And never be afraid of anything. You proved your mettle beautifully!