---
section: Library
booktitle: "Dance Til the Stars Come Down From the Rafters"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "RAFTER"
dategiven: "14 January 1980 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #14"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "8001145"
shorttitle: "RAFTER14"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "Dance Til the Stars Come Down From the Rafters: Chapter #14"
---

```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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed.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 will be your new name: Swami Juno


It is a beautiful name so there is no need to change it. And it is also of tremendous meaning. It means purity. But remember that purity has nothing to do with morality. A moral person is pure only from the outside. He has cultivated a certain character but his inside is as unclean as anybody else's. He has a beautiful facade but it is just a facade. The so-called saints and the sinners differ only in their faces.


Real purity is something totally different from morality. It cannot be cultivated. It has nothing to do with character, it has something to do with consciousness. It is a transformation of consciousness. When one becomes very alert in one's innermost core, aware and meditative, then a purity arises which is beyond morality and immorality, which is beyond sinners and saints. It is a kind of innocence. The mirror is absolutely without any dust. And when the mirror is pure it reflects god.


This is your name: Ma Aki. Aki means early morning -- and that's what sannyas is, the beginning of the day. The night is over, the sun has not yet risen. A sannyasin is just in the middle of these two. He has left the old and he is waiting for the new to arrive. The new comes inevitably, but patience is needed


This interval between the night and the day is of immense beauty, of great silence, because it is a passage where darkness becomes light, death becomes life, matter disappears and there is only god left behind.

Come here. Close your eyes... close your eyes.
Good. Ruth, come here. Just look at me. Good.


This is your name: Ma Ruth. Ruth  means compassionate. It has other meaning too: beauty, a vision of beauty, the capacity to see. But I will choose compassionate.


Sannyas is the alchemy of transforming passion into compassion. Passion is the lowest state of consciousness and compassion the highest. The lower has not to be denied but to be transforms. The lower has to be used as a stepping stone. In the past the so-called religious people have been very much against it, and because of their centuries of teachings they have created a schizophrenic humanity. They have divided man into two, the lower and the higher, and that division is the cause of misery, anguish, anxiety.


When you start thinking in terms of yourself as being two, the lower and the higher, there is constant conflict. You are trying to overcome the lower, to fight with it, to destroy it -- and it is not possible to destroy it. Transformation is possible, destruction is not possible. Nothing can be destroyed in existence. Yes, things can be changed. Water can become vapor or water can become ice, but this is just a change. You cannot make water disappear totally. You can analyze it, then it will become hydrogen and oxygen, but is remains. There is no way to annihilate it. Nothing can ever be annihilated and nothing new can ever be created. Only combinations change.


So because of this long long tradition of dividing man into two the whole humanity is suffering. My effort is to help you to drop the division, to drop this schizophrenia which as been perpetuated in the name of religion.


Religion has not proved a blessing. It has proved to be the greatest calamity. Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra -- they are blessings, but Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism -- they are not blessings.


All the great masters of the world were teaching methods to move your inner being into higher planes. They were helping people to grow wings. And all the churches have been trying to divide you, because that is the fundamental way to rule over people: divide and rule. You can divide easily, and once a person is divided he becomes powerless, his energies start fighting within him, he becomes a chaos, then you can rule him. And all the churches are interested not in transforming you but in enslaving you, in ruling you, in exploiting you.


Passion is the lowest rung and compassion is the highest rung of the ladder, but both belong to the same ladder. Remember, when passion becomes conscious it becomes compassion. When passion is unconscious it is cruel, it is ugly, it is animal.


Just bring more consciousness to your being and you start moving toward divinity; from the animal to god. Man is only a ladder stretched between these two eternities.


This is your name: Ma Anne. Anne has many meanings: prayer, mercy... but the most beautiful is grace. So remember grace. Grace is something that descends from above. You cannot create it, you can only receive it. You can be open to the beyond, available, in a state of let-go, and something starts showering on you. It is invisible but one can feel it and the freshness that it brings and the rejuvenation.


Prayer is only a method to help you to attain grace. And mercy is only an expression of the achievement of grace. These are the three meanings of the word: prayer, grace, mercy. Attain to grace, use prayer as a method and then mercy as an expression. Prayer precedes, mercy follows, but the real phenomenon is grace. And the only way to attain it is to drop the ego. That is the only barrier. We are closed to god because of it. The moment the ego is put aside we are one with god. He starts flowing in us and we start flowing in him. And that is the state of grace.


This is your name: Ma Gudrun. Gudrun means divine wisdom. It is a repetition because in fact all wisdom is divine. There is no other wisdom in the world. Knowledge is human, wisdom is divine. Knowledge is concerned with the facts, wisdom is concerned with the truth. Facts are superficial things.


It is a fact that you are a woman, but it is not a truth. Truth is that you are a pure consciousness, neither man or woman. The fact is that you are a body, the truth is that you are not the body, you are the spirit. But the fact is easily available, it is objective, and the truth is subjective.


Soren Kierkegaard says 'Truth is subjectivity.' His definition is of great significance. Fact is objective -- it can be proved, experimented with. That's why science only believes in facts and that's why science and religion cannot communicate with each other: their dimensions are different. Science talks about the facts, religion talks about the truth.


Science has no idea of truth because truth is something invisible. You can feel it, you can experience it, but you cannot show it to others, while objective facts can be shown to others, they can be proved. Wisdom is not possible through learning. Through learning only knowledge is possible. Wisdom is possible only thought a state of not-knowing, a state of innocence. By the process of unlearning one comes to wisdom and by the process of learning one comes to knowledge, hence there can be no school, no university for wisdom. For knowledge all kinds of schools are possible.


What's why wisdom has disappeared from the world slowly slowly: the world has become too burdened with knowledge.


To be a sannyasins means taking a quantum leap from knowledge to wisdom, from the objective to the subjective, from the outer to the inner, from the fast to the truth, from the visible to the invisible, from the known to the unknown. It is the greatest adventure of life, and unless one comes to know one's innermost being, the truth, the subjectivity, one has not known anything. One can accumulate much knowledge but that is all rubbish. It is only wisdom that liberates, it is only wisdom that transforms. It is only wisdom that becomes the door to the divine, hence all wisdom is divine.


Your name: Swami Alan. Alan means harmony, and harmony is the goal of all true religious enquiry.


Man live in discord. Man lives like a crowd; there are many people inside you, not one, and they are all fighting, quarrelling and they all pretend to be the master.


Gurdjieff used to say: Man is like a house whose master has gone away or has fallen asleep and all the servants are drunk. In their drunken state every servant thinks that he is the master and there is great quarrel and fighting going on.


He was right. That's generally the situation of a human being. All is fragmentary and each fragment wants to go its own way and no two fragments are in any agreement. That's why ordinary human beings cannot make a promise. If they promise they cannot keep it, because the person who promises 'Tomorrow I will meet you,' may not be in power tomorrow. The wheel goes on moving, another spoke come up.


In the evening you decide 'Tomorrow morning I am going to get up at four and meditate' and the decision seems to be total and you are determined and you are happy that you are determined. But when the alarm goes at four, you throw away the alarm, you pull the blanket over you and you say 'We will see tomorrow.' Now this is somebody else. And when you get up at eight o'clock in the morning  you are miserable, repentant, feeling guilty that you could not keep promise given to yourself -- and you really wanted it, you had meant it. Now this is another person... and so on, so forth, it goes on.


Man needs integration, an integration of all these fragments into one whole, into one harmony. And that is the whole effort of religion. The very word 'religion' means that which binds you together. That's exactly the meaning of yoga too; yoga means union. Religion and yoga are synonymous.


When you become crystallized, when you become one, when all these parts that are falling apart melt and merge into one unity a tremendous joy arises because all the conflict is gone. And when the conflict is gone celebration begins. All the meditative techniques are devised in such a way that they; can bring your quarrelling fragments closer to each other, into a friendship, into harmony, into accord.


This is your new name: Swami Narayano. Narayano means god. The whole existence is made of god: the rocks, the trees, the animals, man. God is the only stuff. There is nothing else available. We differ only in forms.


The tree is green but is is god who is green in the tree, and the red in the flowers. He is the mud, he is the water and he is the lotus. He is in the lowest and he is in the highest.


So there is no question of any inferiority or superiority; we are part of the whole. To remember it is to become holy.

This is your name: Swami Bhagwato. Bhagwato means divine.


Man has forgotten only one thing, and that is the door to the divine. He has become lost in so many things and there are millions of things that one can get lost in. And one can forget god very easily. One can forget god easily because god is already the case. There is no gap between you and god, hence it is easy to forget.


It is just like the fish in the ocean. The fish in the ocean does not know the ocean unless somebody pulls the fish out of the ocean and the distance is created. Then the fish remembers, then she longs for the ocean. Now the fish understands what has been missed.


That can be done as far as a fish is concerned but that cannot be done with man, because all is god. You cannot be pulled out of god. A distance cannot be created, so that is not the way to remind you. The only way to remind you is to make you aware that all that you are involved with is trivia, mundane, superfluous. Even if you achieve it nothing is achieved. And death will take everything away from you anyway.


Before death comes, attain something of eternity, have a taste of something which is timeless, deathless, then death cannot destroy you. Then you can die dancing, singing, laughing. And to be able to die singing, laughing, dancing, is the greatest achievement of life. That is the very culmination of life, that is the goal of sannyas. And one who can die joyously, naturally is bound to live joyously.


So live joyously, live with a deep enquiry within yourself 'Who am I?', because there is the door to the divine. You are the temple of god. Just don't go on running hither and tither, come back home. Look within! It is not far away. It is very close. In act even to say that it is close is not right, because closeness is also a kind of distance.


He exists in you as you, so you have to know who you are. The moment that you know who you are, you have known god too, simultaneously.


This is your new name: Ma Vimal. Vimal means purity, innocence. Literally it means without any dust, without any mud.


Man is a mirror -- and we go on collecting dust on the mirror. Thoughts, memories, desires -- they are all dust. Layers and layers of dust are there, and the mirror is completely lost, it mirrors nothing, it cannot, because so many layers of dust are upon it.


The whole effort here is to help you to clean the mirror. Nothing else is needed, just a little cleaning inside. And once the mirror is clean you need not be told that god is, you will know.


I don't expect you to believe in god, because all beliefs are false. My function is to help you see god, to know god. Seeing is of importance, not believing. Belief is again another layer of dust -- religious dust, holy dust, but dust is dust. And one has to clean the mind totally, completely.


When the mind is without any thoughts, memories, imagination, even for a single moment, you immediately become aware of god. That awareness fulfils you, makes your life meaningful. Your song bursts forth, a great ecstasy for which we have been searching and searching for many many lives, arises in your being.

This is your new name: Swami Nirmal. Nirmal means innocence.


Jesus is right when he says: Unless a man is born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of god. And he also says: Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of god.


One day he is standing in the marketplace, a crowd has gathered to listen to him, and a rabbi asks him: Who is entitled to enter the kingdom of god that you go on talking about? Jesus looks around, finds a small child, takes him up on his shoulders, and says, Those who are like this small child.


The rabbi was offended, obviously, because he was thinking that Jesus would point towards him; he was the most knowledgeable person in the town. And others were also offended. Somebody was the most virtuous and somebody else was the most saintly and somebody else was the most respectable. All kinds of people were there, and he has chosen just an ordinary child! But Jesus is right: man has to learn to be a child again.


The first childhood is bound to be lost. The first childhood is a natural thing. It is like something of which you are not aware and cannot be aware unless you lose it. You have to lose it, and only later on when you become aware what have you done? What have you gained by losing it?... Then you start searching for it again. A second childhood is needed.


That is the meaning of your name: a second childhood. One has to be twice-born, it is a spiritual birth. And then all is possible, even the impossible is possible.

This is your new name: Swami Satyamo.


Satyamo means the ultimate truth. Truth is not available through the intellect. Truth is available only through intuition. Truth cannot be found by logic, by thinking, by the head; it can only be found by the heart, by feeling, by love.


So the whole problem before a seeker is how to shift the energy from the head to the heart. The whole gestalt has to be changed. Our society teaches us how to take the whole energy to the head. It excludes all other centers, it denies energy to all other centers, it takes everything towards the head.


Our society is head-oriented, so it is not an accident that millions of people are crazy, mad, insane. Their heads are boiling with too much energy and their hearts are empty because no energy moves there. The heart remains undernourished, goes on shrinking -- and it is through the heart that one can be bridged with life, with god. Only through the heart is there a possibility of rejoicing, of becoming sane, of attaining to the ultimate truth.


Sannyas is only a beginning, a small beginning, of changing the gestalt, of moving the energy from the head to the heart. It can be done, energy can be moved to any center. It is only a question of understanding what our problem is. Once we know the problem the solution is not far away. In fact the problem contains the solution. Understood rightly, you will find the solution in the problem, you will find the answer in the question itself.


So now this is going to be your work: shifting your energy from the head to the heart. Feel more, sing, dance, participate in music; watch the stars, the sunset, the sunrise, the flowers, the trees, and you will feel yourself coming closer to the heart. And avoid argumentation, logic-chopping, hair-splitting. Avoid that, it leads nowhere. It takes you more and more into the desert, more and more away from you and your truth.
			

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