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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.
Then it is not Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan. Then it has no form; then it is not a ritual at all. Then it is a way of life. When one lives lovingly, one is prayerful.
And the second meaning of anita is mercy. One who is prayerful is bound to be compassionate -- naturally; it has not to be cultivated. A cultivated compassion is not true compassion. A cultivated character is only acting, pretension. Basically, anything that you cultivate makes you a hypocrite.
Real things grow; they are not painted from the outside. You don't learn them from the society, you grow them from your innermost core. They grow in you just as leaves grow on the trees. You can paint a beautiful tree but it will be only
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