Turn On, Tune In and Drop the Lot

CHAPTER 1

1 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Samvad means communion. Man is living as an island, and that’s from where all misery arises.
Down the centuries man has been trying to live independently from existence. That is not possible
in the very nature of things. Man can neither be independent nor dependent. Existence is a state
of interdependence: everything depends on everything else. There is no hierarchy, nobody is lower
and nobody is higher. Existence is a communion, an eternal love affair.
But the idea that man has to be higher, more superior, special, creates trouble. Man has to be
nothing: man has to dissolve into the totality of things. And when we drop all the barriers, communion

happens, and that communion is a benediction. To be one with the whole is all. That is the very core
of religion.

Deva means divine, anando means bliss. Bliss is something which descends from the beyond.
It cannot be manufactured, man cannot make it. There is no possibility ever. No technology, no
methodology, can help man to create bliss; bliss is beyond human creativity. But still, man can
receive it; and the whole art of being blissful is the art of being receptive. One has to be in a kind of
let-go, then it comes. One has to be almost absent, then it pours in from all directions and fills you
to the full – not only that, it starts overflowing in you. Happiness is human, can be created. Bliss is
divine, cannot be created. It is always a gift from god, it is a grace; but man has forgotten how to
receive.

He has become too much of a doer and he feels that he can do everything: he can go to the moon,
he can make atom bombs and he can reach the secrets of nature. For the first time in the history
of human consciousness man has fallen deeply into the dream of being a doer. He has lost track
of something immensely valuable that can only be received. That’s why a few values are utterly
missing.

Love is disappearing, because you cannot produce it. It happens, it is not an activity. And there can
never be a science of love; there is no way to cause it to happen, it is not part of the world of cause
and effect. It is something mysterious – it happens.

But if we become too much of a doer then we are closed to that happening. Slowly slowly those
windows, those doors, become too tightly closed and slowly slowly we forget that they ever existed.
We have become focused on doing. The doing can do many things, but not all; and whatsoever can
be done by man is bound to be mundane. All that is great only descends. Great poetry is not manproduced:

man becomes a vehicle for it. Great works of art are not man-made: it is god working
through man, man becomes possessed. Love, meditation, all that is great, all that is sacred, comes
only from the beyond. Man is at the receiving end. And to learn it, to be alert about it, is to be a
sannyasin.

The sannyasin is not a doer. To be a sannyasin simply means to be in a relaxed state where the
mind no longer functions. One is just open, with no defences; one is simply vulnerable, available.
One has to become like a dry leaf in the wind: wherever the wind blows, the leaf goes with it. One
has to leave oneself to the river of life; and the river is already going to the ocean, you need not
swim. You only need to trust and let the river take you.

This is the difference between science and religion. Science is action, religion is inaction. Science
is doing, religion is non-doing. Science is male, religion is female. Science is aggressive, religion is
receptive. Science tries to conquer, religion surrenders. And the miracle is that the more you try to
conquer, the more you are at a loss, and the more you surrender, the more you are victorious.

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