---
section: Library
booktitle: "Dance Til the Stars Come Down From the Rafters"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "RAFTER"
dategiven: "15 January 1980 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #15"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "8001155"
shorttitle: "RAFTER15"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "Dance Til the Stars Come Down From the Rafters: Chapter #15"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
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> [!info]
> Note
>
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]


This is a beautiful name. It can be of tremendous significance and can bring a transformation to your consciousness.
Jed means Jehovah is a friend, god is a beloved.


Religion is a love affair with existence. It is not our of fear, it is out of love that real prayer arises. It is not that god is powerful, that we have to bow down to him, but that he is pure friendliness, pure love, the fragrance of love and nothing else.


Surrendering to love is not a surrender, it is a victory. Surrendering to power is humiliating, it is ugly. But remember, god is not a person. God is another name for the totality of existence. From this very moment don't look at god as a father figure, don't look at gos as the creator, as the ruler. Drop those ideas, those are all political ideas. Think of god always as a friend. You can laugh with him, you can share a joke with him. You need not be afraid, he understands. If he cannot understand you, then nobody can understand you. Then there is no possibility of any understanding at all.


This is your name: Ma Gemma. Gemma means fullness -- and that's the goal of sannyas.


Man ordinarily is empty, hollow. That is his misery. He wants to be full, hence he goes on stuffing with food, with sex, with alcohol, with money, with things, with all kinds of gadgets that technology makes available. But still the inner emptiness remains as empty as ever. In fact one starts feeling it more when one is surrounded by all kinds of things. In contrast the inner looks very poor.


The search for money, power and prestige is basically to create a fullness of being, but it is a wrong direction. That is not the way to become full. The way to become full its love, prayer, grace. The way to become full is only one: to be pregnant with god, to be available to god and to all his glory and splendor.


That's what my teaching is in essence: Love the existence and you will be full. Love unconditionally and you will be overflowing. And the moment one starts overflowing is the moment of coming home. One has arrived. There is tremendous contentment.


This is your new name: Swami Avinasho. Avinasho means the eternal one, the indestructible one, the immortal one. That's your reality. You were never born and you will never die. You don't exist as part of time. You penetrate time, but you exist as eternity. You are reflected in time but time is only a mirror. The reality is beyond it.


Birth means the beginning of the reflection in the mirror. But the one who was reflected remains forever. Mirrors go on changing but the mirrored one is eternal, it is deathless.


To be reminded of it is the purpose of meditation. Meditation changes your consciousness from the mirror to the original face, from the reflection to the original face. And to know one's original face is to know god. Your original face is god's face too. They are not different.


This is your new name: Ma Nibbano. Nibbano means cessation of the self, of the ego, of the very idea that 'I am.' The moment that the idea of one's separation from existence disappears, god appears immediately. God is always there, it is just that the ego is functioning like an iron curtain, you cannot see through it.


Once the ego is put aside all the values of life go through a radical change. What was important before is no more important because all that was important was nothing but nourishment for the ego. Now something else is important -- that which nourishes your being. So all priorities change. You live as you were living before yet you are no more the same person. Your presence has changed. The body is the same and everything is the same, but something at the center, at the very core has become full of light, joy. It starts radiating. It starts reaching to other people too. It can trigger the process in other's lives also.


'Nibbano' is Buddha's word for ultimate enlightenment when the ego is completely dissolved into the whole, when the dewdrop disappears in the ocean and becomes the ocean itself.

This is your new name: Swami Prabhat. Prabhat means the dawn.


Sannyas is a bridge between the night and the day. It is the end of the night and the beginning of the day. It is hard to drop the old, but is has to be dropped because only then is the new possible. It is hard to accept the new because it is new and we are unfamiliar with it. It is a stranger, and deep down we are apprehensive and afraid. But one has to learn to love the now, otherwise there is no growth possible.


Growth simply means the courage to drop the old and the courage to love the new. And this has not to be done only once, it has to be done every moment, because every moment something is becoming old and something new is knocking at the door. Whenever that is happening, listen to the new and become utterly deaf to the old. The old functions as a bondage, the new brings freedom.


Truth is always new. God is always fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops in the early morning sun.


This is your new name: Swami Dasen. Dasen means the surrendered one, the humble one, one who is ready to become a slave to god. But by becoming a slave to god one becomes a master. By trying to be a master on one's own one remains a slave of a thousand and one things.


The ego wants to be as master on its own, but you are not the ego, and if you support the ego you are supporting your own enemy. Surrendering to god, becoming a slave to god simply means that you have become absolutely aware of the trap of the go and you are no longer going to help it, to co-operate with it. You have dropped all connections with it.


In that very moment something immensely beautiful happens. For the first time you become aware of your vastness, of what Jesus calls the kingdom of god. But the way to enter into it is to be humble.


Jesus is right when he says: Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of god.


This is your new name: Swami Paritosho. Paritosho means total contentment, pure contentment for no reason at all. If there is a reason for it, it is not total. It is total only when it is uncaused, when it comes out of your understanding. When you see all the gifts that the existence has bestowed upon you, a gratitude arises on its own. One feels immensely loved by existence. One is no more an alien, a stranger, an outsider. The whole existence becomes one's home. We belong to it, it belongs to us. All alienation disappears. Then each moment is so full of joy, it is so overflowing in ecstasy, that one can only be contented. There is no possibility of being otherwise.


Meditation is the key to open the door, the door of absolute contentment. Mind is always discontented., hence meditation means creating a state of no-mind. That space is always contented.


This is your new name: Ma Gangotri. Gangotri is the source of the river Ganges. It is thought to be one of the holiest places in the world. That is only symbolic.


Ordinarily river move further and further away from the source, that is the natural course. But in meditation one starts moving toward the source. Hence Gangotri became a metaphor. It simple means that we have to reach the source from where we have come. Unless we've found the source of our life energies, we will not find god anywhere.


So we have to go in more and more, to the point where no more possibility of going in is left. Then you have arrived at the source. And the source is the goal too. That's what we are tying to do here: bringing people, slowly slowly persuading them to come to the source.
The source is within you. One need not go anywhere.


This is your new name: Ma Anando. Anando means the ultimate bliss. It is not pleasure. Pleasure is of the body. It is very superficial, momentary and it always contains its opposite in it, pain.


Every pleasure brings its own kind of pain in its wake, like a shadow. You cannot avoid the pain. If you choose pleasure you have also chosen pain in the bargain. That's the problem of all pleasure-seekers: one moment they look so high, another moment so low. One moment they are on the peaks, the sunlit peaks, another moment they are in the dark valleys. One moment it is all paradise, another moment it is all hell.


Bliss is not pleasure, nor is bliss happiness. Happiness is something higher than pleasure; it is psychological. But is also contains its opposite, unhappiness.


The body and the mind cannot go beyond duality. Pleasure is more animal, gross. Happiness is a little human, a little subtle. Listening to music, reading poetry, painting, watching a sunset these are higher phenomena than sex and food, but they bring their own unhappiness. And because they are higher the fall is greater. So the ordinary pleasure-seeker is not in so much pain, because his pleasure is also not so much. But the person who can be happy can be very miserable. He moves between two diametrically opposite poles, between happiness and misery, like a pendulum. And it is a constant change from one point to the other. It makes one feel insane.


Bliss is beyond duality, bliss is spiritual. It knows no opposite, it has no opposite. It is just pure joy, without any shadow.


You may have heard a beautiful parable, it exists in almost all the cultures of the world, that in heaven angels don't make any shadows. When they walk there is no shadow. That is a metaphor, that is saying something about bliss. Heaven is nothing but the ultimate state of bliss. No shadow is cast. One becomes transparent, so transparent that no shadow is possible. A Buddha, a Jesus, a Lao Tzu, these people live in bliss. They don't know its opposite; they don't know what misery is, what pain is. Not that their bodies will not suffer. When Buddha is ill his body suffers, but he is only a watcher of the pain, he does not become identified with it. He remains aloof, cool far away; the distance is always there. Even in death he knows that it is only the body that is going to die.


Bliss has been the goal of all the religions, and bliss is the goal for my sannyas too. Forget all about god, paradise, remember only bliss. And if you can attain to bliss you will have attained god and paradise -- all without even thinking about them.

This is your new name: Swami Amito. Amito means the infinite one.


Man appears very finite, very small, just like a dewdrop, but he contains all the oceans in him, he contains all the skies in him. he contains all the skies in him. If you look from the outside he is very small, tiny, just dust, nothing much: just unto just. But if you look from his inside, from his center he is the whole universe.


That's the difference between science and religion: science looks at man from the outside and finds nothing spiritual, nothing divine, just physiology, chemistry, biology -- another kind of animal. Hence scientists go on studying animals to understand man. Animals are more simple, easily manipulatable, so they go on researching on rats, and whatsoever they conclude, they go on insisting that this is the case with humanity too. It is a little more complex of course, but basically it's the same.


Science has reduced man to rats. And man can only be understood not by studying rats or dogs... Pavlov used to study dogs to understand man and Skinner goes on studying rats to understand man. Man can be understood only by understanding Buddhas, Christs, Krishnas. Always remember that this is one of the fundamentals, you cannot understand the lower, but you can understand the lower by understanding the higher. The higher contains the lower but the lower does not contain the higher.


The only way to understand man is not from the outside, not through observation, but through meditation. One has to enter into one's interiority, into one's own subjectivity. Standing from there one comes to know the greatest wonder and the suprememost awe -- that man is nothing but god.


The mystics in India have declared: Aham Brahmasmi -- I am god. And Skinner declares; I am a rat. Now it is for you to choose! (laughter) By becoming a sannyasin one renounces all Skinners and one chooses the people who have declared that the highest is within you. That is the meaning of Amito. It means the infinite one, the eternal one, the vast one. It is another name for god.
			

> [!info]
> Copyright 1964-1990 Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
>