---
section: Library
booktitle: "Just the Tip of the Iceberg"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "ICEBRG"
dategiven: "15 September 1980 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #15"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "8009155"
shorttitle: "ICEBRG15"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "Just the Tip of the Iceberg: 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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]


Your name, Sylvia, is a mythological name, and it symbolizes the profound silence to be found amongst the trees. But that is nothing compared to the inner silence. The outer, howsoever profound it is, remains shallow, it has no depth. One can go into a forest, one can go into the mountains -- there is certainly a silence, but it is in fact a negative silence. The marketplace and its noise is not there, the traffic noise is not there. The aeroplane passing by (an aeroplane passes by), the train (a train hoots from far off), the people and the dogs barking, are not there. It is absence of noise; hence it cannot be profound.


When you go in your touch a new kind of silence -- the presence of silence itself. It is not only an absence of noise, it is something absolutely positive, almost visible, tangible -- and that is the difference. The outer silence can be disturbed any moment, but the inner silence can never be disturbed. No noise can ever penetrate it. And once you have felt it, even in the marketplace you will remain silent. It becomes an undercurrent. On the surface you may be involved in activities, in working, but deep down it is all silent. Nothing disturbs it, nothing distracts you from it; you remain rooted in it. That's why my insistence is that sannyasins should not leave the world.


For thousands of years the monks, the nuns, have been leaving the world in search of silence. Of course they find a certain silence in the jungles and forests, in the monasteries -- but that is absence of noise, it is not true silence.


True silence can only be found when you move inwards. It exists in your very interiority. Then it has infinite depth and infinite height. It is immeasurable. And to know it is to know all. To feel it is to feel God.


Love needs great courage. It is not for cowards. The coward can always ask to be loved but he cannot love. And the problem is, unless you love you cannot get love. And the world is full of cowards; everybody is asking, "Give me love." Every I is begging, "Give me love," every heart has become a begging bowl, "Give me love." But beggars are begging from other beggars -- how can they give? Nobody is ready to give.


It needs courage to share your being. And we are brought up in such a way that we become very miserly. We know only one kind of economics, worldly economics. If you give your money you will lose it. You have to cling to it. You have to snatch it away from others. You have to give less and get more, then you are in profit.


But the inner economics is totally different, just the polar opposite of the outer: the more you give, the more you have; the less you give, the less you have; the more you give, the more the whole existence goes on pouring into you. You have to be constantly giving, sharing for the sheer joy of sharing.


It needs guts, but once you have experienced it, once you have come to know the inner mathematics, then there is no problem. The first step needs courage then there is no problem at all. Once you know that the more you give, the more you get, then it is very easy.


The first step in love cannot be taken by a coward. It needs somebody bold in spirit who can risk, because in the beginning it is a risk. Who knows whether you will get any response or not? Who knows? -- you may give your love and nothing may come in return. There is no guarantee. But that first step has to be taken in trust, then the second step is very easy and you can move thousands of miles. Then there is no problem at all; then the whole journey is very simple and life becomes more and more rich at each step.


And the richer you are inwardly the more aware you become of the existence of God. When you have reached to the ultimate peak of richness God penetrates you through and through, permeates you. Then you are divine, you are godly. Then God is not somebody outside you, it is something at the very core of your being -- an eternal light. But one has to go through this risk.


I teach only how to live dangerously, how to go into the uncharted sea, how to move into the unknown. And the person who moves into the unknown and into the unknowable is the only religious person. Others are only creating a deception of being religious -- deceiving others and deceiving themselves.


(To a student from Italy he gave the name victory and immortality. They can be known via meditation only...)


Meditation is a bridge between you and god, and to know god is to be victorious and to know god is to be immortal. Victory and immortality are two sides of the same coin.


We cannot be victorious on our own. If we try to be victorious on our own we are bound to be defeated, we are doomed. The failure is absolutely certain, inevitable. It is like a small wave fighting against the whole ocean: it belongs to the ocean -- how can it fight? It is like the part fighting with the whole, the leaf fighting the tree to which it belongs. The leaf can be victorious only in the victory of the tree, not separately. The wave can be victorious only with the ocean, not against it, not without it.


Man is victorious when he lives not according to his will but according to the will of god.


Jesus prays in the last moments, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." He drops his will. Now the wave is no more separate from the ocean; now there is no possibility of any frustration, any failure. And the moment you drop your will, your ego, your private idea of achievement, life moves on a totally different plane. Then each step is of victory and each moment you come closer and closer to immortality.


The more you disappear as a separate entity, the more you are victorious, the more god starts functioning through you, flowing through you. You become just a hollow bamboo. And on the lips of god the bamboo turns into a flute and songs start pouring through you.


That's what a sannyasin has to be: just a hollow bamboo -- surrendered to god, ready to become a vehicle, a passage, allowing god to be. A sannyasin needs to disappear as an ego. The moment the miracle happens, whenever you drop the ego, suddenly god is active within you. It is only hindered by the ego. Ego functions like a curtain between you and god.


(A messenger of god can only be a bringer of truth, he told Prem Angela when outlining the meanings of her name.)


The message of god is truth. It cannot be anything else. But one can only become a bringer of truth through love, not through logic. Logic is a pretender. It pretends to find, to conclude, to theorise about truth, but that is pseudo activity.


Logic can never give you the truth. Any logical conclusion is only a hypothesis, an inference. And truth is not an inference. It is not only a hypothesis it is something absolutely certain. It is not of the mind, it is not through logic that you can arrive at it; it is only through the heart, through love.


Logic can go on and on in circles. And of course it can create the illusion of some conclusion being achieved. But nothing is ever achieved. No philosopher has ever known what truth is, although they have all been thinking and thinking about it But it is like a blind man thinking about light. He can think for his whole life, he can theorise, but without eyes you cannot see light, and light can only be known by seeing; there is no other way.


Truth can only be known through loving, there is no other way. Truth comes directly to the heart, it never comes via the head. It has a direct route, an immediate contact with the heart. And we are all living in our head, that's why we go on missing it.


Love and love more. Love without any miserlinesss love without any desire to get something out of it. Love as an end, but not as a means -- and then suddenly, when your heart is overflowing with love, truth descends. It is only through love that we become worthy of receiving truth. Then one becomes a messenger of god. Then one's whole life is a message, a divine message. One lives truth -- only then is one a messenger.


(Irene, a doctor of medicine from Germany, had been looking a little restless in her place. So he found just the right meaning for her name:)
Anand means bliss. Irene means peace.


It is easy to be blissful if you ignore peace. It is also easy to be peaceful if you ignore bliss. But a bliss without peace is feverish; it is excitement and tiring, exhausting. And a peace without bliss is dead, it is cold, it has no warmth. It cannot dance, it cannot sing, it cannot celebrate. Up to now people have tried either bliss or peace. Up to now it has been an either or question.


My effort is for my sannyasins to bring both together. Unless both are present together your life will be lopsided. One has to be in immense peace and yet capable of dance. One has to be singing and dancing and yet remaining rooted in peace. When these two polar opposites meet and merge in you, the ultimate height is achieved. And life then has a richness which could not have been possible if you chose one out of the two.


Of course it is easier to choose one -- obviously, because to be alert, to be aware, and to bring about this synthesis within you is a more complex phenomenon; it needs intelligence, tremendous intelligence. But that intelligence can be released through meditation.


So you have to remember these three things.... Meditation is the triggering, the process which can make you so intelligent that you can make the impossible happen.


It has happened within me so I know it can happen in everybody else. Your peace need not be cold, it can be full of warmth and love. And your bliss need not be just feverish, it can be ecstatic and yet very cool.


This paradox has to be achieved, only then is one worthy of God, because God contains all the contradictions and this is the greatest of contradictions. Unless one is vast enough, one cannot allow this to happen.


That vastness comes through meditation. If you can remember these three words, meditation, bliss and peace -- this is my ABC -- then the whole alphabet is complete.

(Danish Maj-Britt became a love song -- Prem Sugita.)


Love cannot grow in a state of misery. The miserable person cannot be loving, the miserable person becomes closed. And love needs openness, otherwise the sources of your energy will remain imprisoned. Without love a man is an imprisoned splendour. Love opens the doors, removes the rocks, allows the springs of your life, your laughter, your dance, your song, to flow.


Song simply represents a state in which one is open and ready to pour one's heart into existence. The song is symbolic -- that one is not miserable. The birds singing in the morning -- just like them, one has to be constantly in the mood for singing, as if it is always morning, as if it is always the time for the sun to rise. Any moment the sun can rise and you have to be welcoming to it, you have to be in a receptive mood. You have to be alert -- the guest can come any moment. The singing birds are just getting ready to welcome the sun. The flowers start opening, the trees start swaying. The whole earth becomes alive, aflame, ready to receive a new day.


The singing heart, the dancing heart, the loving heart, is ready to receive God. The miserable can go on praying but out of misery the prayer goes wrong from the very beginning. It becomes heavy and falls back down on the earth. It has no wings; it cannot go to the ultimate, it cannot reach to God.


When one is blissful, loving, when one is full of laughter, joy, when one is not serious about life but playful like a small child -- innocent, wondering about each and everything, looking at everything with awe, when the heart is singing hallelujah -- then God can come any moment. There is no need for you to go anywhere, just learn how to be receptive, open, loving, singing, cheerful -- and that's enough. There is no need to become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, there is no need to go to any church, to any temple or mosque. If your heart is overflowing with cheerfulness and love there is no need to even believe in God, he is bound to come.


Jesus says "Knock and the doors shall be opened," and I say, don't bother! Just sing and he will knock on your door. He will say, "Can I come in?"


Make yourself so blissful that even God would like to come in. Tempt him rather than knock on his door!

(Then he transformed a student from Germany into a blissful meditator.)


Meditation is not a serious phenomenon. Of course for centuries people have taken it very seriously. That's why millions have tried meditation but very few have achieved it. Seriousness kills the whole thing. Seriousness is a disease.


One should go into meditation cheerfully, joyously, blissfully, with a deep longing to enquire, a sincere longing to enquire, but no seriousness about it


The moment you start taking life seriously you become burdened; and religious people have been very much burdened. Look at the faces of your saints -- Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. They look so serious, so deadly serious, as if life is a torture, as if they are burdened with mountains, as if they are carrying the whole responsibility of the world. That is sheer foolishness.


Learn the art of being a child. Take life as fun, and meditation comes very easily. And when it is possible to enter into the world of the divine dancing, singing, laughing, why go with a sad face, with a long face? I don't think that your so-called saints have ever reached heaven. God won't allow them there. They are not worthy of being allowed in heaven. Their company would be absolutely boring. They don't know how to laugh, they have forgotten all laughter.


If god has been surrounded with all those so-called saints, he must have committed suicide. Just looking at those saints must be such a boring affair. He must have taken shelter in hell! Your so-called saints are not good company at all. I have lived with them, I have been with them, and I know: they are not good company at all. They are like rocks, dead people -- rotten, stinking.


One has to be full of laughter then life comes to its totality. And in laughter the ego can be put aside so easily. In fact in laughter it disappears. When you really laugh there is no ego.


So be cheerful and be meditative. And meditation simply means silence -- but a laughing silence, a dancing silence, a singing silence, a silence not cold but warm.


(Italian Claudio was renamed a song -- Pragito. But his song was of meditation not of love, and turned out to be no song to speak of!)


Meditation is a state of absolute silence -- no thought, no desire, no ambition. One is simply in the present, neither in the past nor in the future. One is herenow, and just being herenow is enough, and the song starts arising in you -- the song celestial, the song divine.


It is not your song -- you are no more there -- it comes from something deeper than you. It does not come from your mind, from your ego, it comes from the very source of life. It is god's song. And the moment you hear your own being whispering a song to you you hear god's voice.


All that is needed on our part is to become silent so that we can hear the still small voice within. It is pure poetry, it is pure music, and once it starts arising you cannot stop it.


Gautam the Buddha is reported to have said that misery has no beginning but an end and bliss has a beginning but no end. And I agree with him absolutely. Misery has no beginning. Your misery is beginningless for your whole past, for the whole eternity that has passed, you have been miserable. But it can come to an end and it can come to an end right now, this very moment. Bliss has a beginning but then there is no end to it It goes on and on, from perfection to perfection, from great heights to greater heights.


Meditation is simply a key to open the lock. The moment your inner lock is opened misery disappears, bliss arises, darkness is no more found. Suddenly you are full of light -- hence the word "enlightenment".
			

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