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you live, the more divine you are. The intensity of your life, your liveliness is the only way to reach God.
Nothing has to be renounced. Everything has to be lived with deep awareness, with totality, with understanding, because escape is not a way of growth; hence all the so-called saints who have escaped from life remain psychologically immature.
Maturity is in life, in all its bitterness and sweetness, in all its misery and joy, in its nights and days. One has to learn through these polarities to move alert, conscious, so that one can remain balanced between the two, exactly in the middle.
That's what sannyas is. It is not renunciation. It is rejoicing in life, of course with a different quality than ordinary people live it. Ordinary people live unconsciously -- a sannyasin tries to live consciously. That's the only difference, otherwise both live the same life.
Denis has two meanings from two different languages; both are beautiful.
The first is from Assyrian. In the assyrian language it means wise, a buddha, one who is awakened, one who knows. but even better than that is the Greek meaning; in Greek it means God of wine... one who is utterly drunk, drunk with the divine. Both meanings become two aspects of the same phenomenon: the moment you become wise and awakened you also become drunk, you also become a God of wine, so drunk that there is no way to come back. Once gone into it one is gone forever. One is so drunk with the divine that there is no possibility of becoming sober again. and then life is a dance, a song, a celebration.
It is a beautiful name because it joins two aspects of spirituality together.
That's my whole effort here: to make you wise and yet drunk, to make you drunk, yet wise. I don't want to separate these two things.
Barbara literally means a stranger, an outsider. But symbolically it means coming with joy. On the surface the literal meaning and the symbolic meaning don't seem to be joined together, but deep down they are joined.
The world is in such misery that whenever somebody comes with joy he appears to be a stranger, an outsider. He does not belong to the world. He lives
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