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Silence contains the whole world of music, just like the color white; hence those who have known silence have known tremendous music. But it is a music which cannot be expressed, it is a music which cannot even be heard. It is only experienced, it is like a taste on the tongue.
Bliss also is a multi-splendored phenomenon; it also has seven notes to it. Those who have gone into the innermost world of man have discovered that man consists of seven centers. Each center gives its own kind of pleasure. Ordinarily we are acquainted with the lowest center, the sex center; hence in peoples' minds pleasure means something sexual. That is only the first dimension of bliss, the lowest. Nothing is wrong in it but one should not be confined to it. One should use it as a jumping board for something higher.
There are still six planes and the seventh is samadhi, the seventh is the ultimate of meditation. At the seventh you come to know the highest peak of bliss.
My approach is that a man should be capable of knowing all seven notes, the whole spectrum, the whole ladder from the lowest rung to the highest; only then is man whole and only then does he become holy. Hence I am not in favor of renouncing anything. Absorb everything, renounce nothing. Digest every experience, renounce nothing. Rejoice in everything, renounce nothing. And then one day that ultimate music explodes and fills you with bliss, benediction.
[Anand Utsavo means bliss and celebration.]
Religion has been dominated by ill and pathological people for centuries...
My approach to religion is totally different. It is rooted in celebration, in wholeness, in health. I am not against life, I am in absolute love with life because to me life is god. There is no god other than life. One need not bother about any god up above there, in the heavens. God is within you and god is all around you, within everything. God means existence, that which exists is divine; hence even death is divine because that too exists. It exists as much as life itself, it is the very culmination of life. Life comes to a crescendo in death.
And I teach my sannyasins to celebrate everything. Celebrate
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