Won’t You Join the Dance?

CHAPTER 1

1 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, christopher means Christ-bearer. The story is that Saint Christopher bore the
Christ child across the river. But it can become a tremendously significant metaphor for the inner
journey. The meaning that I would like to give it is that each person, man or woman, is a Christbearer
in the sense that everybody is pregnant with Christ, that we are carrying the child in our womb.
This is the whole dilemma of human existence, because if Jesus lives then Christ cannot live; if
Jesus dies, only then can Christ live. By Jesus I mean the ego; by Christ I mean the egoless
consciousness. Jesus and Christ cannot be together. When Jesus dies on the cross, then Christ
is resurrected: the death of the ego is the birth of god. The majority of people have chosen the
ego, they cling to the ego, and the Christ child remains suffocated, un-grown-up, like a seed– heavy,
ready to be born, but finding no opportunity.

Sannyas is nothing but an opportunity for Jesus to die and for Christ to be resurrected.
Prem means love, alessandra means a helper of mankind. The full name will mean: love, the helper
of mankind. And this is something very important to be remembered, that unless you love you
cannot be of any help. Help cannot be a duty. If it comes out of duty it is ugly, egoistic; it humiliates
the other. When. it comes out of love it obliges nobody; it is for the sheer joy of sharing. In fact you
feel thankful to the person who accepted your help, because he respected it, he welcomed it–he
could have rejected it.

People also become helpers without love–they become great public servants, missionaries, etcetera.
These are the most mischievous people in the world: in the name of help they dominate, in the name
of service they are on a power-trip. The service is nothing but a camouflage. They don’t love; and
without love whatsoever they do, harms – because this is the observation of all those who have
known, that only love is nectar, everything else is poison.

So let love become the centre of your existence, your very being. And if out of the pulsation of love,
service arises, it is beautiful; if you can help somebody out of love it is a tremendous joy. But it is
not service, it is not duty, and you are not earning virtue. You are simply sharing your life as god has
shared his life with you.

Anand means bliss; Jerry comes from Jeremiah, the second greatest biblical prophet. The literal
meaning of Jeremiah is: god is exalted. That is the basic flavour of prayer – that god is great,
that god is exalted, that god is supreme, that god is holy. The moment we say that god is exalted,
automatically the whole existence is exalted, because god is not a person but another name for the
totality of existence. It is all inclusive: men, women, trees, birds, rivers, mountains, stars, all are
included in it. God simply means the whole, the total, all that is.
There is an ancient tradition which says that god is a code word. ’G’ stands for ’that’, ’o’ stands for
’which’, ’d’ stands for ’is’: that-which-is. God is not a person, but all that which is, all that exists, all
that has been.

’God is exalted’ means the whole existence is sacred. Wherever you are moving you are on
holy ground, and whatsoever you are doing is as significant as any prayer. Then the small acts
of life are no more small, the ordinary is no more ordinary, everything becomes suffused with
extraordinariness. Then even the smallest contains the greatest, and the atom in itself is a universe.
To feel this, this utter exultation of existence, is to be prayerful. Jerry is a beautiful name, the very
essence of prayer. Become a blissful, prayerful yea-saying, a total yes – unguarded, unconditioned.
And feel in everything the beauty of god, the expression of the divine. Slowly slowly, one becomes
suddenly aware one day that we are like fish in the ocean of god. There is no need to go to seek
and search for him: he is here, he is now.

Prem means love, dara is Hebrew; it means the heart of wisdom. Knowledge is of the head, hence
it has nothing to do with love; in fact basically it is antilove. Love plays no part in the growth
of knowledge. Knowledge is the accumulation of dead facts, information, but those facts are not
beating, they are not alive, because love is missing.

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