1 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Bliss is not a result of prayer, it is not a reward: it is prayer itself. It is not that prayerful people
become blissful; just the contrary: blissful people are prayerful. There is no question of becoming;
bliss and prayer are synonymous. And once this is understood then the whole of life can be a prayer.
If this is not understood then prayer remains a ritual and never becomes your whole life, and unless
prayer becomes your whole life, your totality, it cannot transform you. It remains a duty, a formality,
a good ritual – healthy in itself, but it takes you nowhere.
My whole teaching is that if a person remains blissful in ordinary day-to-day life, doing small things
but blissfully, then prayer is spread all over his life. Then eating he is prayerfully eating because he
is blissfully eating. Then walking he is prayerfully walking because he is blissfully walking. Then
breathing, he is prayerfully breathing because he is blissfully breathing.
Prem means love, vinito means humbleness. Love brings humbleness. It is not cultivated, it comes
on its own accord. A cultivated humbleness is nothing but the ego masquerading in a beautiful form.
If one practises humbleness one misses the whole point. It is one of those few things which cannot
be practised. Something else has to be done: that is, the heart has to melt into love, and then
humbleness comes as a shadow of love, as a natural consequence. Then it has tremendous beauty
because one is not even aware that one is humble.
The true humbleness is not self conscious, because the true humbleness means that the self is no
more there to be; it is the disappearance of the ego. One cannot brag about it, one cannot even
claim. It is very silent. One feels it, one knows it, but there is no way to express it; it is ineffable.
Anand means bliss, viren means courageous, courage. It is one of the most significant things to
understand in life that to be miserable needs no courage, any coward can afford it. But to be blissful
needs courage. That’s why there are so few blissful people in the world: they don’t fulfil the first
requirement. It really needs tremendous courage, because the society is against blissful persons.
The society is against the blissful person because the blissful person cannot be reduced to a thing,
cannot be reduced to a machine. And the society is not interested in men; it is interested in machines
– efficient, skilful, but machines – not men. The society is very much afraid of real men, because
the real man means freedom, the real man means the capacity to say no, the capacity to revolt, the
capacity to be oneself. The real man means not to be just a part of the crowd; and bliss is part
of individuation. When one becomes individual, one is blissful, when one remains part of the mob
psychology one remains miserable.
The masses live on the lowest rung of the ladder. It is very dark there and very dismal, but they don’t
have the courage to rise higher. They are afraid of climbing the mountains, they are afraid of the
risks. It is secure where they are; even if they fall, it is not dangerous, they are on plain ground. But
the man who is searching for peaks of bliss – and bliss is the greatest peak, it is the Everest of life –
has to be courageous. He has to be courageous to drop misery, he has to be courageous to drop all
investment in misery, he has to be courageous to go into the unknown for the search of bliss. And
once one has learned to take a few steps into the unknown. only the first steps are hesitant. There
is a trembling. because one is moving beyond the boundaries of the known and the familiar. It is the
same fear that the small child feels the first day he goes to the school, the same fear when the boy
leaves home and goes to live in the hostel; that kind of thing is natural. It has to be accepted and
transcended and then suddenly skies of bliss open up. There is no end. One cannot contain it, so
much bliss is possible. One starts overflowing with it.
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