The Rainbow Bridge

CHAPTER 1
1 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Michael means one who is godlike, and anando means blissful. One is basically divine because all
is divine. To exist is to be divine, to be alive is to be divine, to breathe is to be divine. Hence trees
are divine and the rocks and the birds and the people – whatsoever is. Divinity is another name of
isness.

God is not a person. God is the feeling of the presence of this tremendous isness that surrounds
you. It is infinite, it is eternal: no beginning, no end. And it is incredible, unbelievable! Why is it
there? – there is no answer to the question; it is simply there. It is mysterious, it is miraculous.
Nobody has ever been able to fathom the depth of its abyss. There seems to be no bottom to it – no
ceiling, no bottom. This infinite isness is what is meant by the word ”god”.

But the moment we use the word ”god”, it misleads us. It gives us a feeling of a person, and that is
totally wrong. God is not a person but a presence, a pure presence. Suddenly, in the mountains you
feel it: the silence, the solidity of the mountains, almost the eternal quality, the permanence of the
mountains, and the closeness to nature. One is overwhelmed with the isness, the isness of things.
This bird chirping, the rain falling on the roof, the wind blowing through the trees... all this is included

when I say isness. Even things are included, even things are not just things, they also partake of,
and participate in, divine existence. To be overwhelmed by it is to be blissful, to be aware of it is to
be blissful.

Sannyas is initiation into this isness, into this freedom of existence, into this mysterious ”x. Because
it has no name, it is better to call it ”x” than God, because God becomes a definition. And the only
way to know it is to be utterly free in yourself – no dogma, no scripture, no religion, no ideology.
Sannyas is a declaration of freedom.

I am not here to make you a slave in any way, because I have no ideology. Even if you want to
depend on me you cannot, I am absolutely undependable! Even if you want to cling to me you
cannot, because I am not there. And I have no doctrine and no scripture and no religion. I am not
teaching you anything at all. I am simply showing you my freedom, inviting you to drink a little bit of
my freedom so that you can have the taste, and then you have to move on your own way.

My sannyasins are not my followers: my sannyasins are my friends, my lovers, my beloveds.
So this moment of initiation is not a moment of a new bond but a moment of new freedom. If you
meet me on the way, kill me. You have to be in total aloneness, because only when you are totally
alone within yourself – with nothing to cling to, nothing to hold to – does the isness impinge upon
you. It comes like a flood from all directions; because you are so empty it rushes towards you. That
rush is bliss, and when it fills you to the brim you have come home.

Prem Anita. Prem leans love; anita is Hebrew, a form of anna. It is a very pregnant word; it has
three basic meanings. The first, and the most important, is prayer. Love is prayer. There is no other
prayer, all other prayers are just pseudo, substitutes for’ love. The other prayers are invented by
people who cannot love, who are incapable of love, who are afraid of love; who have been so badly
damaged by the society that they have lost their intrinsic quality of love. Prayer is a substitute for
those people. But it is a poor substitute, and it cannot fulfill them because it will never become real.
A prayer is real only when it is not a substitute for love but a flowering of love, when it is the fragrance
of your love.

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