Transmission of Lamp – The mystic can pour his light within you

1. Silence is incommunicable, it cannot be communicated through language at all. Yes, there is a way of communion. That’s what sannyas is all about getting in tune with someone who has already become silent makes you silent. Just getting in harmony with a master, the disciple starts becoming the same. Just sitting by the side of the master, doing nothing, one starts imbibing the spirit. Nothing is said, nothing is heard, but a flame is transferred.
2. That is the relationship between a Master and a disciple. By and by they become one. Only when they become one can the truth be shared. Then that which has happened in the innermost core of the Master can be delivered to the disciple. But it is not a thing so it cannot be delivered if you are separate. It is a feeling. It can be delivered only when you be-come one, when there is an inner contact.
3. The only way — and I emphasize it — the only way is to live with someone who has attained to the experience. Just being in the presence of someone who has attained to the experience, something mysterious will be transferred to you… not by words — it is a jump of energy. Just as a flame can jump from a lit lamp to an unlit lamp — you bring the unlit lamp closer to the lit lamp, and the flame can jump — the same thing happens between a Master and a disciple: a transmission beyond scriptures — a transmission of energy not of message, a transmission of life not of words.
4. The mystic can pour his light within you and can make you aware of all that is hidden in you — your hidden splendor. This is the authentic relationship between the master and the disciple. The master does not teach anything. He simply pours his light into the heart of the disciple. There is no philosophy to be taught, there is no teaching that the student has to be converted to — there is only an experience that has to be transferred. For centuries it has been known as the transmission of the lamp. It is a beautiful expression: `transmission of the lamp’. The master simply allows you to have his fire, to make your dark house also light. He loses nothing, but you gain tremendously. Hence the great gratitude that has been felt by the disciples for the master, because you cannot repay him — there is no way. What he has given to you is invaluable. All that you can do is feel a heartfelt gratitude. This gratitude is the only authentic connection between the disciple and the master. And as the disciple also becomes aware, he rises to the same status as the master.
5. A master has to talk to bring you nearer. The nearer you come, the more he will drop it. Once you are in the grip of his silence there is no need to talk. Once you know what silence is, once you have become silent, a new rapport exists. Now things can be said without any saying, messages can be given without ever giving them — without him giving them you can receive them.
6. For the disciple there is no other way than communion, a merger — two consciousnesses meeting and merging, losing their boundaries, overlapping. Whatever I have experienced starts overflowing into you, waking you up, waking your deepest spiritual sleep so that the disciple one day is no more a disciple; he has come home. He has become a master himself.
7. All personalities are ungrown-up, all personalities are childish. Presence is grown-upness, maturity. And to be with a master is to be with a presence. To be with a presence is slowly slowly moving towards the presence, and one day you will also become aflame. One day when you come REALLY close to a master, something jumps from the master into you — a flame. Just as it happens when you bring an unlit candle very close to a lit candle. Just a moment before, the unlit candle was unlit and the lit candle was lit. And just a moment afterwards, at a certain distance the flame jumps and both the candles are lit. And the lit candle has not lost anything, and the unlit has gained all. The master never loses anything. That’s why millions of disciples can become lit through a single master. But there is nothing like a fully self-sufficient grown-up person; that is just a deception. There is a fully grown-up presence. A flame, a light.
8. A disciple is a womb — ready to receive the truth, ready to receive the Master, ready to receive his energy. And remember, with the Master it is always a transfer of energy. Unseen by you, untouched by you, a constant shower of energy is happening. If you are receptive you will be utterly satisfied by it. Your thirst will disappear. But if you are only listening to the words and collecting the words, and proving, disproving, agreeing, disagreeing — then you are not here, you are not present; you are almost absent. You may be physically here, but you are not psychologically here, not spiritually here at all.
9. if you can be in tune with the master, that is enough to be enlightened — just merging in his presence, just melting in his silence, just dropping the duality between you and him, just feeling oneness. And that feeling will take you to new dimensions of life. It will help you to transcend the small mind and will open up the whole sky with all the stars for you to explore.
10. The transfer between a master and a disciple is exactly like the transfer between a lover and the beloved. The lover initiates, but the beloved becomes the womb. The lover initiates, starts, and the beloved completes it. Then the child is born. The child neither belongs to the father alone nor to the mother alone: it belongs to both. The father started, the mother completed it. Between the master and the disciple something exactly like that is happening. Whatsoever I am saying here, if you just try to understand it from the outside, you will miss. It is not for outsiders, it is only for insiders. Hence my insistence for sannyas. Sannyas is just a gesture that you have become part of my family, that you are married with me, that now we can take the responsibility of a child, that we can father and mother a child — a new being is possible.
11. Master also gives a new birth, but it is the birth of consciousness, which knows only a beginning — and there is no end to it. All that is needed is an atmosphere of absolute trust — and in that trust, things start happening on their own; neither does the disciple do them nor does the master. The disciple receives them. The master is the vehicle of the universal forces — just like a hollow bamboo that can become a flute. But the song is not of the hollow bamboo; the hollow bamboo can have the credit only of not destroying the song, of allowing it. The master is a medium of the universal consciousness.