|
I am the beginning of a new kind of religiousness- I am also the end of all the old religions -
Religiousness is an individual affair
Question 2: Osho, What is Religion?
Milarepa, religion is not what people understand it to be. It is not Christianity, it is not Hinduism, it is not Mohammedanism. Religion is a dead rock.
I teach you not religion, but religiousness - a flowing river, continuously changing its course, but ultimately reaching the ocean.
A rock may be very ancient, far more experienced, far older than any RIGVEDA, but a rock is a rock, and it is dead. It does not move with the seasons, it does not move with existence; it is simply lying there. And have you seen any rock with any song, with any dance?
To me religion is a quality, not an organization.
All the religions which exist in the world - and they are not a small number, there are three hundred religions in the world - are dead rocks. They don't flow, they don't change, they don't move with the times. And anything that is dead is not going to help you - unless you want to make a grave, and then perhaps the rock may be helpful.
All the so-called religions have been making graves for you, destroying your life, your love, your joy, and filling your heads with fantasies, illusions, hallucinations about God, about heaven and hell, about reincarnation, and all kinds of crap.
I trust the flowing, changing, moving... because that is the nature of life. It knows only one thing permanent, and that is change. Only change never changes; otherwise, everything changes.
Sometimes it is fall and the trees become naked. All the leaves fall down with no complaint; silently, peacefully, they merge back into the earth from where they have come. The naked trees against the sky have a beauty of their own, and a tremendous trust must be there in their hearts, because they know that if the old leaves are gone, the new will be coming. And soon new leaves, fresh, younger, more delicate, start coming out.
A religion should not be a dead organization, but a kind of religiousness, a quality which includes truthfulness, sincerity, naturalness, a deep let-go with the cosmos, a loving heart, a friendliness towards the whole. For these no holy scriptures are needed.
In fact, there are no holy scriptures anywhere. The so-called holy scriptures do not even prove that they are good literature. It is good that nobody reads them, because they are full of ugly pornography.
One of my friends, when I said this, started working on the HOLY BIBLE, and now he has found five hundred solid pages of pornography. If any book has to be banned from the world, it is the HOLY BIBLE. But that friend does not know that the HOLY BIBLE is just nothing. If you look into the Hindu PURANAS, you will be surprised. They are the ancientmost editions of PLAYBOY. Not only the human beings but even the gods described there are such ugly, dirty old people, it is strange...
and they are still worshipped as gods.
For example, the moon is worshipped as a god by the Hindus, by the Jainas, but the story is that the moon was very much sexually interested in a beautiful woman who was the wife of a saint. In India the saints go to take a bath early in the morning before the sun rises, and that was the time when the moon would come - of course, in disguise, because gods can do anything. He would knock on the door and the wife would think her husband was back. The moon would make love to somebody else's wife and then disappear.
Almost all the so-called Hindu gods are rapists. And they are not satisfied that in heaven they have the most beautiful women - of course not covered with skin, but covered with plastic. But they had no word for plastic in those days, it seems. They say that the heavenly girls - the word is apsara, which you can translate very accurately as a call girl; they are not ordinary prostitutes, but very high class - they don't perspire.
When I came to know this - that they don't perspire - I started thinking, How is it possible for a man or woman with skin not to perspire? Plastic seems to be the only alternative. And they remain stuck at the age of sixteen; they never grow up. For centuries they are only sixteen.... And how many saints have enjoyed them? I don't think they can even remember the number over millions of years.
An authentic religiousness needs no prophets, no saviors, no holy books, no churches, no popes, no priests - because religiousness is the flowering of your heart. It is reaching to the very center of your being. And the moment you reach to the very center of your being, there is an explosion of beauty, of blissfulness, of silence, of light. You start becoming a totally different person. All that was dark in your life disappears, and all that was wrong in your life disappears too. Whatever you do is done with utter totality and absolute awareness.
I know only of one virtue, and that is awareness.
If religiousness spreads all over the world, religions will fade away. And it will be a tremendous blessing to humanity when man is simply man, neither Christian nor Mohammedan nor Hindu.
These demarcations, these divisions have been the cause of thousands of wars all through history.
If you look back at the history of man, you cannot resist the temptation to say that we have lived in the past in an insane way. In the name of God, in the name of church, in the name of ideologies which have no evidence at all, people have been killing each other.
Religion has not happened to the world yet.
Unless religiousness becomes the very climate of humanity there will be no religion at all. But I insist on calling it religiousness so that it does not become organized. You cannot organize love. Have you ever heard of churches of love, temples of love, mosques of love? Love is an individual affair with another individual. And religiousness is a greater love affair with the individual directed towards the whole cosmos.
When a man falls in love with the whole cosmos, the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the oceans, the stars, he knows what prayer is. It is wordless.... He knows a deep dance in his heart and a music which has no sounds. He experiences for the first time the eternal, the immortal, that which always remains in every change - which renews its life afresh. And anyone who becomes a religious person and drops Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism, Buddhism - for the first time he declares his individuality.
Religiousness is an individual affair. It is a message of love from you to the whole cosmos. Only then will there be a peace that passeth all misunderstanding. Otherwise these religions have been parasites exploiting people, enslaving people, forcing people to believe. And all beliefs are against intelligence, forcing people to pray words which have no meaning because they are not coming from your heart, but only from your memory.
I have often told the beautiful story of Leo Tolstoy. The story is about three villagers, uneducated, uncultured, who lived on a small island in a big lake. Millions of people were coming to them, worshipping them, and the archbishop of old Russia, before the revolution, became concerned. The churches were empty, nobody was coming to the archbishop. And the Russian church is the oldest church in the world, very orthodox, and people were going to those three persons who were not even initiated into the secrets of Christianity - how had they become saints?
In India it is easy to become a saint, but in Christianity it is not so easy. The English word 'saint' comes from a root, sanctus. It means that unless you are sanctioned, certified by the pope or the archbishop, you cannot be accepted as a saint. But people were saying those three people were so saintly....
In anger one day the archbishop took a motorboat and went to those three people who were sitting under a tree. He looked at them and he could not believe it: what kind of saints are these? In the very beginning he introduced himself and declared, "I am the archbishop." The three saints all touched his feet. Now he felt relaxed, "These are fools... and things are not yet gone so far that they cannot be controlled."
He asked them, "Are you saints?"
They looked at each other, and they said, "We have never heard the word. We are uneducated, uncultured. Don't talk Greek to us; just simply say what you mean."
"My God," said the archbishop, "you don't know what a saint means? Do you know the Christian prayer?"
Again they looked at each other, and nudged each other as if to say, "You tell him."
The archbishop now became really powerful. He said, "Tell me what your prayer is."
They said, "We are very uneducated, we don't know what Christian prayer is. We have made a prayer of our own."
The archbishop laughed. He said, "Nobody makes his own prayer. Prayer has to be authorized by the church. What is your prayer, anyway?"
They felt very embarrassed, very shy, and finally one said, "Because you are asking, we cannot refuse. But our prayer is not much of a prayer.... We have heard that God has three forms - God, the Holy Ghost, and the Son - so we thought to make a prayer of our own. Our prayer is: You are three, we are three, have mercy on us."
The archbishop said, "You idiots, do you think this is a prayer? I will teach you the prayer authorized by the church."
But the prayer was too long, and all the three spoke together: "This long a prayer we cannot remember. We will try our best, but please repeat it one time more." And they asked him to repeat it a third time, because it was too big. "If we remember the beginning, we forget the end. If we remember the end, we forget the beginning. If we remember the beginning and the end, we forget the middle."
The archbishop said, "You need education."
But they said, "We cannot write, otherwise we could have written your prayer. Just one time more and we will try our best."
The archbishop was very happy that he had converted three idiots who were being worshipped by millions of people. He said the prayer a third time, they touched his feet, and he went back into his motorboat.
Just as he was in the middle of the lake he saw a huge something coming towards him. He could not believe it, "What could it be?" He started praying. As they came close, he understood that it was those three idiots walking on the water. He said, "My God, only Jesus has ever walked on water."
And they came with folded hands saying, "We forgot the prayer, so we thought... one more time."
The archbishop, seeing them standing on the water, realized the fact. He said, "You don't need my prayer. Your prayer is perfect. I have been praying my whole life, I have reached the highest post in the Orthodox Church of Russia, but I cannot walk on water. God seems to be with you. You just go and do your old prayer."
They were very happy. They said, "We are so grateful, because that long prayer would have killed us!"
Here is a beautiful story saying that the traditional, the orthodox religion becomes dead.
Religiousness has to arise within your heart as an individual offering of love and fragrance to the cosmos.
Even God is not necessary for a religious person, because God is an unproved hypothesis, and a religious person cannot accept anything unproved. He can accept only that which he feels.
What do you feel? - the breathing, the heartbeat... The existence breathes in and out, the existence goes on giving you your life every moment.
But you have never looked at the trees, you have never looked at the flowers and their beauty, and you have never thought that they are divine. They are really the only God that exists.
This whole existence is full of godliness.
If you are full of religiousness, the whole existence simultaneously becomes full of godliness.
To me, this is what religion is.
- Osho, "Satyam Shivam Sundram, #13"
I am against all the so-called religionsbecause they are not religions at all
Question 1: Osho, Are you against all the religions? what is their most fundamental mistake?
YES, I am against all the so-called religions because they are not religions at all. I am for religion but not for the religions.
The true religion can only be one, just like science. You don't have a Mohammedan physics, a Hindu physics, a Christian physics; that would be nonsense. But that's what the religions have done - they have made the whole earth a madhouse.
If science is one, then why should the science of the inner not be one, too?
Science explores the objective world and religion explores the subjective world. Their work is the same, just their direction and dimension are different.
In a more enlightened age there will be no such thing as religion, there will be only two sciences:
objective science and subjective science. Objective science deals with things, subjective science deals with being.
That's why I say I am against the religions but not against religion. But that religion is still in its birth pangs. All the old religions will do everything in their power to kill it, to destroy it - because the birth of a science of consciousness will be the death of all these so-called religions which have been exploiting humanity for thousands of years.
What will happen to their churches, synagogues, temples? What will happen to their priesthood, their popes, their imams, their shankaracharyas, their rabbis? It is big business. And these people are not going to easily allow the true religion to be born.
But the time has come in human history when the grip of the old religions is loosening.
Man is only formally paying respect to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, but basically anybody who has any intelligence is no longer interested in all that rubbish. He may go to the synagogue and to the church and to the mosque for other reasons, but those reasons are not religious; those reasons are social. It pays to be seen in the synagogue; it is respectable, and there is no harm. It is just like joining the rotary club or the lions club. These religions are old clubs which have a religious jargon around them, but look a little deeper and you will find they are all hocus-pocus with no substance inside.
I am for religion, but that religion will not be a repetition of any religion that you are acquainted with.
This religion will be a rebellion against all these religions. It will not carry their work further; it will stop their work completely and start a new work - the real transformation of man.
You ask me: What is the most fundamental error of all these religions? There are many errors and they are all fundamental, but first I would like to talk about the most fundamental. The most fundamental error of all the religions is that none of them was courageous enough to accept that there are things which we don't know. They all pretended to know everything, they all pretended to know all, that they were all omniscient.
Why did this happen? - because if you accept that you are ignorant about something then doubt arises in the minds of your followers. If you are ignorant about something, who knows? - you may be ignorant about other things also. What is the guarantee? To make it foolproof, they have all pretended, without exception, that they are omniscient.
The most beautiful thing about science is that it does not pretend to be omniscient. Science does not pretend to be omniscient; it accepts its human limits. It knows how much it knows, and it knows that there is much more to know. And the greatest scientists know of something even deeper. The known, they know the boundaries of; the knowable they will know sooner or later - they are on the way.
But only the greatest scientists like Albert Einstein will be aware of the third category, the unknowable, which will never be known. Nothing can be done about it because the ultimate mystery cannot be reduced to knowledge.
We are part of existence - how can we know existence's ultimate mystery?
We have come very late; there was nobody present as an eyewitness. And there is no way for us to separate ourselves completely from existence and become just an observer. We live, we breathe, we exist with existence - we cannot separate ourselves from it. The moment we are separate, we are dead. And without being separate, just a watcher, with no involvement, with no attachment, you cannot know the ultimate mystery; hence it is impossible. There will remain something always unknowable. Yes, it can be felt, but it cannot be known. Perhaps it can be experienced in different ways - not like knowledge.
You fall in love - can you say you know love? It seems to be a totally different phenomenon. You feel it. If you try to know it, perhaps it will evaporate in your hands. You cannot reduce it to knowing.
You cannot make it an object of knowledge because it is not a mind phenomenon. It is something to do with your heart. Yes, your heartbeats know it, but that is a totally different kind of knowledge: the intellect is incapable of approaching the heartbeats.
But there is something more than heart in you - your being, your life source. lust as you know through the mind, which is the most superficial part of your individuality, you know something from your heart - which is deeper than the mind. The mind cannot go into it, it is too deep for it. But behind the heart, still deeper, is your being, your very life source. That life source also has a way of knowing.
When mind knows, we call it knowledge. When heart knows, we call it love. And when being knows, we call it meditation.
But all three speak different languages, which are not translatable into each other. And the deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes to translate, because at the very center of your being there is nothing but silence. Now, how to translate silence into sound? The moment you translate silence into sound you have destroyed it. Even music cannot translate it. Perhaps music comes closest, but still it is sound.
Poetry does not come quite as close as music, because words, howsoever beautiful, are still words.
They don't have life in them, they are dead. How can you translate life into something dead? Yes, perhaps between the words you may have a glimpse here and there - but it is between the words, between the lines, not in the words, not in the lines.
This is the most fundamental error of all religions: that they have deceived humanity by blatantly posing as if they know all.
But every day they have been exposed and their knowledge has been exposed; hence, they have been fighting with any progress of knowledge.
If Galileo finds that the earth moves around the sun, the pope is angry. The pope is infallible; he is only a representative of Jesus, but he is infallible. What to say about Jesus - he is the only begotten son of God, and what to say about God.... But in the Bible - which is a book descended from heaven, written by God - the sun goes around the earth.
Now, Galileo creates a problem. If Galileo is right, then God is wrong; God's only begotten son is wrong, the only begotten son's representatives for these two thousand years - all the popes who are infallible - are wrong. Just a single man, Galileo, destroys the whole pretension. The whole hypocrisy he exposes. His mouth has to be shut. He was old, dying, on his deathbed, but he was forced, almost dragged, to the court of the pope to ask for an apology.
And the pope demanded: "You change it in your book, because the holy book cannot be wrong. You are a mere human being; you can be wrong; but jesus Christ cannot be wrong, God Himself cannot be wrong, hundreds of infallible popes cannot be wrong.... You are standing against God, His son, and His representatives. You simply change it!"
Galileo must have been a man with an immense sense of humor - which I count to be one of the great qualities of a religious man. Only idiots are serious; they are bound to be serious. To be able to laugh you need a little intelligence.
It is said that an Englishman laughs twice when he hears a joke: once, just to be nice to the fellow who is telling the joke, out of etiquette, a mannerism; and second, in the middle of the night when he gets the meaning of the joke. The German laughs only once, just to show that he has understood it.
The Jew never laughs; he simply says, "In the first place you are telling it all wrong...."
You need a little intelligence, and Galileo must have been intelligent. He was one of the greatest scientists of the world, but he must be counted as one of the most religious persons also. He said, "Of course God cannot be wrong, Jesus cannot be wrong, all the infallible popes cannot be wrong, but poor Galileo can always be wrong. There is no problem about it - i will change it in my book.
But one thing you should remember: the earth will still go around the sun. About that I cannot do anything; it does not follow my orders. As far as my book is concerned I will change it, but in the note I will have to write this:'The earth does not follow my orders, it still goes around the sun.'"
Each step of science, religion was against. The earth is flat, according to the Bible, not round. When Columbus started thinking of going on a trip with the idea that the earth is round, his arithmetic was simple: "If I continue journeying directly, one day I am bound to come back to the same point from where I started... the whole circle." But everybody was against it.
The pope called Columbus and told him, "Don't be foolish! The Bible says it clearly: it is flat. Soon you will reach the edge of this flat earth and you will fall from there. And do you know where you will fall? Heaven is above, and you cannot fall upwards - or can you? You will fall downwards into hell.
So don't go on this journey and don't persuade other people to go on this journey."
Columbus insisted that he was going; he went on the journey and opened the doors of the new world.
We owe so much to Columbus that we are not aware of The world that we know was brought to light by Columbus. If he had listened to the pope, the infallible pope, who was talking just nonsense - but his nonsense was very holy, religious....
All the religions of the world are bound to pretend that whatsoever there is, they know it. And they know it exactly as it is; it cannot be otherwise.
Jainas say their tirthankara, their prophet, their messiah is omniscient. He knows everything - past, present and future, so whatsoever he says is the absolute truth. Buddha has joked about Mahavira, the Jaina messiah. They were contemporaries twenty-five centuries ago. Mahavira was getting old, but Buddha was young and was still capable of joking and laughing. He was still young and alive - he was not yet established.
Once you become an established religion, then you have your vested interests. Mahavira had an established religion thousands of years old, perhaps the oldest religion of the world - because Hindus say, and say rightly, that they have the oldest book in the world, the Rig Veda. Certainly it is now scientifically proved that the Rig Veda is the oldest scripture that has survived. But in the Rig Veda, the first Jaina messiah is mentioned; that is proof enough that the Jaina messiah has preceded the Rig Veda. And he is mentioned: his name is Rishabhadeva.
He is mentioned with a respect that it is impossible to have towards a contemporary. It is just human weakness, but it is very difficult to be respectful towards somebody who is contemporary and alive, just like you. It is easy to be respectful to somebody who has died long ago. The way the Rig Veda remembers Rishabhadeva is so respectful that it seems that he must have been dead for at least a thousand years, not less that that, so Jainism is a long-established religion.
Buddhism was just starting with Buddha. He could afford to joke and laugh, so he jokes against Mahavira and his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. He says, "I have seen Mahavira standing before a house begging" - because Mahavira lived naked and used to beg just with his hands. Buddha says, "I have seen him standing before a house which was empty. There was nobody in the house - and yet this man, Jainas say, is a knower, not only of the present, but of the past and the future."
Buddha says, "i saw Mahavira walking just ahead of me, and he stepped on a dog's tail. It was early morning and it was not yet light. Only when the dog jumped, barking, did Mahavira come to know that he had stepped on his tail. This man is omniscient, and he does not know that a dog is sleeping right in his way, and he is going to step on his tail."
But the same happened with Buddha when he became established. After three hundred years, when his sayings and statements were collected for the first time, the disciples made it absolutely clear that "everything written here is absolutely true, and it is going to remain true forever."
Now, in those statements there are so many idiotic things which may have been meaningful twenty- five centuries ago but today they are not meaningful because so much has happened in twenty-five centuries. Buddha had no idea of Karl Marx, he had no idea of Sigmund Freud... so what he has written or stated is bound to be based only on the knowledge which was available at that time.
"A man is poor, because in his past life he has committed bad actions." Now, after Marx, you cannot say that. "A man is rich because he has committed good actions in his past life." Now, after Marx, you cannot say that. And I don't think Buddha had any idea that there was going to be a Karl Marx, although his disciples say that whatsoever he said is going to remain true forever - another way of saying that he is omniscient.
This was a good consolation for the poor, that if they did good works, in their future lives they also would be rich. It was a joy for the rich too: "We are rich because we have done good works in our past life." And they know perfectly well what good works they are doing right now... and their riches are increasing every day; their past life is finished with long ago and yet their riches go on increasing.
The poor people go on becoming poorer and the rich go on becoming richer.
But in India no revolution has ever been thought about; there is no question of its happening - and India has lived in poverty such as no other country has lived. India has lived longer in slavery than any other country of the world. But slavery, poverty, suffering - everything has to be accepted because it is your doing. You cannot revolt against it. Against whom are you going to revolt? The only way is to do something to balance your bad actions with good actions. The very idea of revolution has never happened to the Indian mind. If slavery comes, you have to accept it.
The Hindus know all the answers. They say, "Without God's will nothing happens. So if you are a slave...." And for two thousand years India has been in slavery. It is a miracle that such a big country has remained in slavery for two thousand years. And the people who invaded India were small barbarian tribes; they were nothing compared to India. They could have been simply crushed by the crowd, there was no need even to take sword in hand.
But anybody - Hunas, Moguls, Turks, Mohammedans, Britishers - anybody who was ambitious and wanted to invade India was always welcome. It was ready - obliged that you came from so far away, and you took so much trouble! The simple reason was that the Hindus know the answer: it is God's will; nothing happens without God's will, so this slavery is God's will. And a man like Mahatma Gandhi - one would think that a man like Gandhi would show a little more intelligence, but no. If you are a Hindu you cannot show more intelligence than you are supposed to.
In Bihar, one of the provinces of India - the poorest province - there was a great earthquake. It was already poor; every year it suffers from floods. And then this earthquake... thousands died. And what did Gandhi say? Gandhi said, "Bihar is suffering because of its bad actions." In the twentieth century? - an earthquake? - and the whole population of Bihar?
It was understandable that you had been explaining to single individuals that they were suffering because of their bad karmas, but the whole state suffering because of its bad karmas...! As if all these people in their past life were also in this same state, and they all committed such bad karmas that the earthquake happened. And the whole of the rest of India did not suffer from the earthquake because they had done good karmas in their past life. Strange!
It is even more strange because Bihar is the birthplace of Mahavira, of Gautam Buddha, of Makhkhali Gosal, of Ajit Keshkambal - great teachers and great prophets - and Bihar is suffering because it has committed bad karmas! In India no other state has given birth to so many prophets, philosophers, thinkers. And what wrong could Bihar have done? But Hinduism knows everything.
I want you to remember that the basic mistake that all the religions have committed is that they have not been courageous enough to accept that there are limits to their knowing They have not been able to say on any point, "We don't know."
They have been so arrogant that they go on saying they know, and they go on creating new fictions of knowledge.
That's where the true religion will be different, fundamentally different.
Yes, once in a while there have been single individuals who had the quality of true religion; for example, Bodhidharma. One of the most loveable human beings, he went to China fourteen hundred years ago. He remained for nine years in China and a following gathered around him. But he was not a man belonging to the stupidity of the so-called religions.
Formally he was a Buddhist monk, and China was already converted to Buddhism. Thousands of Buddhist monks had already reached China before Bodhidharma, and when they heard Bodhidharma was coming, they rejoiced, because Bodhidharma was almost equal to Buddha. His name had reached them long before he came. Even the king of China, the great Emperor Wu, came to receive Bodhidharma on the boundary of China and India.
Wu was the medium to transform the whole of China into Buddhism, to convert it from Confucius to Gautam Buddha. He had put all his forces and all his treasures into the hands of Buddhist monks, and he was a great emperor. When he met Bodhidharma he asked, "I have been waiting to see you.
I am old, and I am fortunate that you have come after all; all these years we have been waiting. I want to ask a few questions."
The first question he asked was: "I have devoted all my treasures, my armies, my bureaucracy - everything that I have - to convert this vast land to Buddhism, and I have made thousands of temples for Buddha." He had made one temple to Buddha in which there were ten thousand statues of Buddha; the whole mountain was carved. Because ten thousand Buddhas had to be carved, the whole mountain was finished - carved into Buddhist statues, so the whole mountain became a temple. He asked, "What will be my benefit in the other world?"
That's what the other monks were telling him, "You have done so much to serve Gautam Buddha that perhaps when you reach the other world, he himself will be standing there to welcome you. And you have earned so much virtue that an eternity of pleasures is yours."
Bodhidharma said, "All that you have done is absolutely meaningless. You have not even started on the journey, you have not taken even the first step. You will fall into the seventh hell - take my word for it.
The Emperor Wu could not believe it: "I have done so much, and this man says'You will fall into the seventh hell'!"
Bodhidharma laughed and he said, "Whatsoever you have done is out of greed, and anything done out of greed cannot make you religious. You have renounced so many riches, but you have not renounced them unconditionally. You are bargaining; it is a business. You are purchasing in the other world. You are putting your bank balance from this world into the other world, transferring it. You are cunning: because this world is momentary - tomorrow you may die - and these other monks have been telling you the other world is eternal.... So what are you doing?giving momentary treasures to gain eternal treasures? Really a good deal! Whom are you trying to deceive?"
When Bodhidharma spoke to Wu in this way, before all the monks and the generals and the lesser kings who had come with Wu and his whole court, Wu was angry. Nobody had spoken in this way to him before. He said to Bodhidharma, "is this the way for a religious person to talk?"
Bodhidharma said, "Yes, this is the only way a religious person talks; all other ways are of people who want to cheat you. These monks here have been cheating you; they have been making promises to you. You don't know anything about what happens after death; nor do they, but they have been pretending that they Wu asked, "Who are you to speak with such authority?"
And do you know what Bodhidharma said? He said, "I don't know. That is one point that I don't know. I have been into myself, I have gone to the very center of my being and come out as ignorant as before. I do not know." Now this I call courage.
No religion has been courageous enough to say, "We know this much, and that much we don't know; perhaps in the future we may know. And beyond that there is a space which is going to remain unknowable forever."
If these religions had been that humble, the world would have been totally different. Humanity would not have been in such a mess; there would not have been so much anguish. All around the world everybody is full of anguish. What to say about hell - we are already living in hell here. What more suffering can there be in hell?
And the people responsible for it are your so-called religious people. They still go on pretending, playing the same game. After three hundred years of science continually demolishing their territory, continually destroying their so-called knowledge, bringing forth new facts, new realities, still the pope is infallible, still the shankaracharya is infallible!
In Jaipur there was a Hindu conference and one of the shankaracharyas.... There are four shankaracharyas in India and they are equivalent to the pope; each one ruling one direction - for the four directions, four shankaracharyas. One of the shankaracharyas belonged to Jaipur, he was born in Jaipur. He was basically an astrologer, a great scholar, so when one shankaracharya died, he was chosen to be the shankaracharya of Jaganath Puri.
I had known him before he was a shankaracharya and this conference was the first time that I had met him since he had become the shankaracharya. I asked him, "Now you must have become infallible. And I know you perfectly well - before you were not. Can you tell me on what date, at what time you became infallible?"
He said, "Don't ask inconvenient questions in front of others. Now I am a shankaracharya and I am supposed to be infallible." I said, "Supposed to be?" He said, "That is for your information. If you ask me in public, I am infallible."
Now a polack has become pope. Have you ever heard of any polack becoming infallible? But one pope, a polack, has become infallible. How far has this world to fall? Now there is nowhere to fall.
After the polack dies - because popes die very quickly, for the simple reason that by the time they become popes they are almost dead. It takes such a long time to reach the Vatican, that if they survive a few years that is enough. Now after this pope whom are you going to choose? Can you find anybody else? I think Oregon will be good. After Poland, Oregon will be the right place. You can find far superior idiots here, but they will also become infallible once they become the pope.
A true religion will have this humbleness of accepting that only a few things are known, much more is unknown, and something will always remain unknowable.
That something is the target of the whole religious search.
You cannot make it an object of knowledge, but you can experience it, you can drink of it, you can have the taste of it - it is existential.
The scientist remains separate from the object he is studying. He is always separate from the object; hence knowledge is possible, because the knower is different from the known. But the religious person is moving into his subjectivity, where the knower and the known are one.
When the knower and the known are one there is no possibility of knowledge. Yes, you can dance it, but you cannot say it.
It may be in the walk, the way you walk; it may be in your eyes, the way you see; it may be in your touch, the way you touch - but it cannot be put into words.
Words are absolutely impotent as far as religion is concerned. And all these so-called religions are full of words. I call it all crap!
This is the fundamental mistake. But there are other mistakes too, worth remembering. For example:
every religion is egoistic. Although every religion teaches the followers to drop the ego, to be egoless, to be humble, the religion itself is not humble, it is very arrogant.
Jesus says, "Be humble, be meek," but have you ever thought - Jesus himself is not humble, not meek, not at all. What more arrogance and what more egotism can there be? - he declares himself to be the only begotten son of God! You cannot declare yourself to be another son of God - not even a cousin, because God has no brothers. You cannot have any relationship with God: that one relationship is closed, Jesus has closed the door.
He is the messiah and he has come to redeem the world. Nobody seems to be redeemed, and two thousand years have passed. He himself died in suffering on the cross - whom is he going to redeem? But the idea that "I am going to redeem you, come follow me".... This has been one of the most important factors in destroying humanity - because all religions claim that they are the only right religion, and all other religions are wrong. They have been continually fighting, killing each other, destroying each other.
Just the other day I saw a panel on the TV. One rabbi, one Protestant priest and one Catholic monk were discussing me. And they came to the conclusion... the rabbi suggested, "It is time now - we should make an effort to have a dialogue with this man." I could not believe it - a rabbi talking to the Catholic priest, suggesting that a dialogue is needed. Why? There were so many rabbis in Jesus" time, why wasn't a dialogue needed with Jesus? Or was the crucifixion the dialogue?
And this idiot Catholic agrees. He does not even say, "You, being a rabbi, do you believe in dialogue?
Then what happened with Jesus? Was the crucifixion a dialogue?" No, he does not ask that. Nor does the rabbi wonder what he himself is saying. Jesus was a Jew - it would have been perfectly right for the rabbis to have a dialogue with a Jew. If he has gone astray, bring the Jew back on the right path; or perhaps he is right, then you come to his path. But was the crucifixion the dialogue? It was not even a monologue!
But now they are all established. The Catholic, the Protestant and the rabbi have no trouble because now they are part of the vested business. And they all know that they are doing the same things, they are in the same business. Jesus was a trouble; perhaps a dialogue was not possible. It is not possible with me either, but the reasons are different.
With Jesus the dialogue was not possible because he was the messiah, but who were you? A dialogue is possible only amongst equals. He is the son of God. Who are you? - son-in-law? You have to be a somebody, otherwise what dialogue? No, it was not possible because Jesus was so egoistic that the rabbis knew perfectly well a dialogue was not possible. Once or twice they had approached him.
Once a rabbi asked Jesus, "On what authority are you speaking?"
He said, "On my own authority - and remember, before Abraham was, I am." Abraham was the forefather, the ancientmost; and Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am. What more authority do you want?" Now this man is saying, "Blessed are the meek," but he himself is not meek; "Blessed are the poor, blessed are the humble.... n But what is the reason? Why are they blessed? "... because they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven."
A strange argument! Here you lose; there you gain a thousandfold. But what do you gain? - the same things. Here you are poor, there you will be rich. Here you are a beggar, there you will be a king. But what is the qualitative difference? - just here, and there - two different spaces. And these people are trying to be meek and humble and poor for one simple reason: to inherit the kingdom of God. Now this man is provoking and exploiting your greed. All the religions have been doing that.
A dialogue with me is also impossible, but for different reasons.
First: I don't know myself - about that no discussion is possible - and that is the most fundamental thing to be discussed. What dialogue is possible? Either you have been within or you haven't.
If you have been within, then just looking into your eyes is enough - that's the dialogue. If you have not been within, then too just looking in your eyes is enough. The dialogue is finished before it begins.
With me a dialogue is impossible because I am not a scholar. I cannot quote scriptures, I always misquote them. But who cares? - because I don't pay any respect to those scriptures. I don't believe them to be holy. They are just religious fictions, so misquoting from religious fictions is not a problem at all. In fact I have never read them carefully. I have gone through them, here and there just looking - and even then I have found so much garbage.
So what dialogue is possible with me, on what points? There needs to be a certain agreement, and there is no agreement possible because I say there is no God. Now what dialogue is possible? You will have to prove God; then the dialogue can begin. Or bring God to the witness box; then we can discuss whether He is truly a God or just a phony American.
I don't believe that there is any heaven or hell. What dialogue is possible? Yes, in other religions you can have dialogues because these are the points of agreement. A Mohammedan, a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew - they can discuss God. One point is certain, that God is. Now, the question is only about His form, attributes, qualities - but the basic thing is agreed. They all agree on heaven and hell. Now, it may be that somebody believes in seven hells, somebody believes in five, somebody believes in three. This is only a question of numbers, not so very important. With me what kind of dialogue is possible?
When I heard the panel, I started wondering that if a dialogue has to happen, how is it going to start?
From where? There is not a single point of agreement, because all those religions are pseudo, they are not true religions; otherwise there would have been some possibility.
With Bodhidharma I can have a dialogue. He says, "I do not know who I am." That's enough agreement. Now we can hold each other's hand and go for a morning walk. Now there is no need to say anything more: all is said.
After nine years, when Bodhidharma was returning to India, he gathered four of his chief disciples and he asked them, "Condense religion into a single statement so that I can know whether you have understood me or not."
The first one said, "Compassion is religion. That is Buddha's basic message: compassion."
Bodhidharma said, "You have my bones, but nothing else."
The second disciple said, "Meditation. To be silent, to be so utterly silent that not a single thought moves inside you: that is the essence of religion."
Bodhidharma said, "You have my flesh, but nothing more; because in what you are saying, you are only repeating my words. In your eyes I don't see the silence; on your face I don't see the depth that silence brings."
The third one said, "It cannot be said. It is inexpressible."
Bodhidharma said, "You have my marrow. But if it cannot be said, why have you used even these words? You have already said it. Even in saying'It cannot be said, it cannot be expressed,' you are saying something about it; hence I say you have only the marrow."
He turned towards the fourth. There were tears in the disciple's eyes and he fell at Bodhidharma's feet. Bodhidharma shook him and asked him again and again, "What is religion?" But only tears of joy... his hands holding his feet in gratitude. The disciple never spoke a single word, not even that it cannot be said, it is inexpressible.
Bodhidharma hugged him and said, "You have me. Now I can go in peace because I am leaving something of me behind."
Now with these rabbis, Catholic priests, Protestant priests, what dialogue is possible? Two thousand years have passed and the rabbis have not apologized yet for crucifying Jesus. He may have been an egoist, he may have been wrong, he may have been teaching something faulty, but nobody has the right to crucify the man - he had not harmed anybody. All that was needed was a gentlemanly argument, but they were not competent enough to argue with him.
Crucifixion is not an argument. You can cut off my head - that is not an argument. That does not mean that I am wrong and you are right. In fact, cutting off my head simply proves that you were incapable of arguing your point. It is always the weak who become angry. It is always the weak who want to convert you at the point of a sword. After two thousand years and still... I wonder that not a single rabbi has apologized. Why should they? They think they were right then and they are right now.
I wonder what kind of Catholic is this monk and what kind of Protestant is this priest who are sitting with the rabbi and discussing me. They should talk first about themselves, about why they are sitting together.
All these people have been egoists. Now, rabbis go on teaching people to be humble but they cannot give an apology. That is impossible. They have not even mentioned the name of Jesus in their scriptures, in their books. You will not find any mention of Jesus, his crucifixion or the birth of Christianity in Jewish sources, no: "It is not even worth mentioning." But the same is the situation of other religions. Mohammed says, "I am the only messenger of God. One God, one messenger and one holy book, the Koran - if you believe in these three things, that's enough, you are saved."
That brings me to the second point, that all these religions have been against doubt. They have been really afraid of doubt.
Only an impotent intellect can be afraid of doubt; otherwise doubt is a challenge, an opportunity to enquire.
They have all killed doubt and they have all forced on everybody's mind the idea that if you doubt you will fall into hell and you will suffer for eternity. Never doubt. Belief is the in thing; faith, total faith - not even partial faith will do, but total faith. What are you asking from human beings?something absolutely inhuman. A man - how can he believe totally? And even if he tries to believe totally, it means doubt is there; otherwise against what is he fighting? Against what is he trying to believe totally?
There is doubt, and doubt is not destroyed by believing. Doubt is destroyed by experiencing. They say, believe! I say, explore. They say, don't doubt! I say, doubt to the very end, till you arrive, and know and feel and experience.
Then there is no need to repress doubt, it evaporates by itself Then there is no need for you to believe. You don't believe in the sun, you don't believe in the moon - why do you believe in God?
You don't need to believe in ordinary facts because they are there. But they are not ultimate truth.
A rose flower is there in the morning; in the evening it is gone. Still you "believe" in it but you don't need to; you know it, there is no question of doubt. This "belief" in a rose flower is a simple belief, not against doubt. Just so that you don't get confused between a simple belief and a complicated belief, I have a different word for it: it is trust.
You trust a rose flower. It blooms, it releases its fragrance, and it is gone. By the evening you will not find it; its petals have fallen and the wind has taken them away. But it was not an eternal truth; you know it as a fact. And you know again there will be roses, again there will be fragrance. You need not believe; you simply know from experience, because yesterday also there were roses and they disappeared. Today again they appeared - and tomorrow nature is going to follow its course.
Why believe in God? Neither yesterday did you have any experience of God, nor today - and what certainty is there about tomorrow? From where can you get certainty for tomorrow? - because yesterday was empty, today is empty, and tomorrow is only an empty hope, hoping against hope.
But that's what all these religions have been teaching: destroy doubt.
The moment you destroy doubt you have destroyed something of immense value in man, because it is doubt which is going to help man to enquire and find. You have cut the very root of enquiry; now there will be no enquiry.
That's why, in the whole world, there is rarely, once in a while, a person who has the feel of the eternal, who has breathed the eternal, who has found the pulse of the eternal - but very rarely. And who is responsible? All your rabbis and all your popes and all your shankaracharyas and all your imams - they are responsible because they have cut the very root of enquiry.
In Japan they grow a strange tree. There are, in existence, three-hundred or four-hundred-year-old trees, five inches tall. Four hundred years old! If you look at the tree, it is so ancient but such a pygmy of a tree - five inches tall. And they think it is an art! What they have been doing is to go on cutting the roots. The earthen pot in which the tree is has no bottom, so once in a while they take up the pot and cut the roots. When you cut the roots the tree cannot grow up. It grows old but it never grows up. It becomes older and older, but you have destroyed it. It may have become a big tree, because mostly those trees are bo trees.
Japan is a Buddhist country, and Gautam Buddha became enlightened under a bo tree. The bo tree is called a bo tree in English too, because under it Gautam Siddartha became a Buddha, attained bodhi, enlightenment. The full name is bodhi tree, but in ordinary use it is enough to call it a bo tree.
So all those trees are bo trees. Now no Buddha can sit under these bo trees. You have stopped who knows how many Buddhas from becoming Buddhas by cutting these bo trees.
The tree under which Buddha became enlightened was so big that one thousand bullock carts could rest underneath it. It was so big. It is still alive - not the same tree of course, but a branch of the same tree. Mohammedans destroyed the tree. They could not tolerate that a tree exists underneath which somebody became far greater than their Mohammed. They burned the tree, they completely destroyed the tree.
But one of the emperors of India, Ashoka, had sent one branch of the tree as a present to Ceylon with his own daughter, Sanghamitra, who had become a sannyasin. Sanghamitra carried a branch of the bo tree to Ceylon, and from that bo tree a branch has been brought back again and put in the place where Buddha had become enlightened. It is part of the same tree, but the third generation.
But what these people in Japan are doing shows something significant: it is what religions have done with man. They have been cutting your roots so you don't grow up - you only grow old.
And the first root they cut is doubt; then enquiry stops.
The second root they cut turns you against your own nature, condemns your nature. Obviously when your nature is condemned, how can you help your nature to flow, grow and take its own course like a river? No, they don't allow you to be like a river, moving zigzag.
All the religions have turned you into railway trains, running on rails, running from one station to another - and mostly just shunting, not going anywhere but still on rails. Those rails they call discipline, control, self-control.
Religions have done so much harm that it is almost incalculable - their pot of sins is full, overflowing.
It just needs to be thrown into the Pacific, five miles deep, so deep that nobody can find it again and start again the same idiotic process.
The small number of people in the world who are intelligent should get rid of all that their religions have done to them without their knowing. They should become completely clean of Jewishness, of Hinduism, of Christianity, of Jainism, of Buddhism. They should be completely clean - just to be human is enough.
Accept yourself.
Respect yourself Allow your nature to take its own course. Don't force, don't repress.
Doubt - because doubt is not a sin, it is the sign of your intelligence. Doubt and go on enquiring until you find.
One thing I can say: whosoever enquires, finds. It is absolutely certain; it has never been otherwise.
Nobody has come empty-handed from an authentic enquiry.
- Osho, "From Ignorance to Innocence, #11"
Organized religion is another form of politics
Question : Osho, What is Religion? What is your opinion on Organized Religion?
Anand Maitreya, religion is the highest flight of human consciousness — it is the individual search for truth. The inner truth cannot be made an object of common knowledge. Each one has to go within himself; each time, it is a new discovery. It does not matter how many people have attained awakening, realization; the moment you attain it, it will be absolutely fresh — because it cannot be borrowed.
The search basically consists of knowing your interiority. You have an outside, and no outside can exist without an inside: the very existence of the outside is proof of an inner world. The inner world consists of three layers: thoughts are the most superficial; feelings are deeper — and then is the being, which is your godliness. To know one’s own godliness, to know one’s own eternity, is the basic search of religion.
All your senses lead you outside: eyes open to look outside, ears hear what is happening outside, your hands can touch what is outside. Senses are the doors to go out — and always remember, the door that takes you out, can also take you in. It is the same door from which you go out of your home and through which you come back in; just the direction changes.
To go out, you need open eyes. To come in, you need closed eyes, all your senses silent. The first encounter is with the mind — but that is not your reality. Although it is inside your skull, it is not you — it is the reflection of the outside. All your thoughts are reflections of the outside.
For example, a blind man cannot think about colors because he has not seen colors — hence the reflection is not possible. The blind man cannot even see darkness; and because he has never seen light or darkness outside, there is no possibility of any reflection. The blind man does not know whether there is darkness or there is light — both words are meaningless. And if you analyze your thoughts, you will find they are all triggered inside you by outside reality — so they are basically of the outside, reflected in your inner lake of consciousness.
But because of these thoughts… and they are a tremendous crowd in you; they go on accumulating, they create a China wall. You have to go beyond your thoughts. And religion knows only one method — there are different names, but the method is one: it is watchfulness, it is witnessing. You simply watch your thoughts, with no judgment, no condemnation, no appreciation — utterly aloof; you just see the process of thoughts passing on the screen of your mind.
As your watcher becomes stronger, thoughts become less — in the same proportion. If the watcher is ten percent of your energy, then ninety percent of your energy is wasted in thoughts; if your watcher becomes ninety percent, then only ten percent remains in thoughts. The moment you are one hundred percent a watcher, the mind becomes empty. This whole process is known as meditation.
As you pass through the thoughts, you will come to the second layer which is inside you — of feelings, of your heart, which is more subtle. But by now, your watcher is capable even of watching your moods, your sentiments, your emotions, your feelings — howsoever subtle they may be. And the same method works in the same way as it worked with the thoughts: soon there will be no sentiments, no feelings, no moods. You have gone beyond the mind, and the heart. Now there is utter silence; nothing moves. This is your being; this is you.
The taste of your being is truth. The beauty of your being is the beauty of existence. The silence of your being is the language that existence understands. And just settled in being, you have come home. The wandering is finished. The struggle is finished. At ease, you sit silently within yourself. A great hidden splendor is revealed to you: you are not separate from reality, you are one with it. The trees and the moon and the stars and the mountains are all part of one organic unity; you are also part of that organic unity — you become part of God.
Religion is man’s highest achievement. Beyond religion, there is nothing — but there is no need either. Your being is so abundant, so overflowing with bliss, silence, peace, understanding, ecstasy, that for the first time, life becomes really a song, a dance, a celebration. Those who do not know religion, don’t know celebration.
But organized religion is a totally different affair, so I have to make it clear to you that authentic religion is always individual. The moment truth is organized, it dies; it becomes a doctrine, a theology, a philosophy — but it is no longer experienced, because the crowd cannot experience.
Experience happens only to individuals — separately. It is almost like love. You cannot have organizations of love — so that you need not bother; the organization will take care, the priest will love on your behalf. But that’s what has happened to religion. Each time a man discovers the truth, immediately one of the most cunning parts of humanity, the priests, surround him. They start compiling his words; they start interpreting his words; and they start making it clear to people that if you want to know truth, you have to go via them — they are agents of God. They may call themselves prophets, they may call themselves messengers; they may choose any name, but the reality is, they are self-appointed agents of God. They don’t know God, but in the name of God, they exploit humanity.
Organized religion is another form of politics. Just as I have always condemned politics as the lowest activity of human beings, the same is my attitude about organized religions. You can see it: the priests and the politicians have always been in conspiracy against humanity. They have been supporting each other. They have divided things between themselves so that your worldly life belongs to the politician, he is the ruler there, and your inner life belongs to the priest, he is the ruler there.
One sometimes feels so amazed… it seems unbelievable, that even in the twentieth century the pope could declare, a few months ago, that to communicate with God directly is a sin. You should go through the priest, the right channel — because if people start going directly to God, confessing to God, praying to God, the millions of priests will be unemployed. They don’t do anything; their whole function is to deceive you. Because you don’t understand the language of God, and you are not so evolved, just for some fee — a donation to their church or to their temple — they will do the job for you.
All those donations go in the pockets of the priests. They don’t know anything about God, but they are very learned — they can repeat scriptures like parrots. But their inner desire is not for God, not for truth — they are not seekers, they are exploiters.
I have heard… a priest bought two parrots and he taught them, with great hardship, beautiful statements of Jesus Christ. And everybody was really amazed — the parrots were so accurate. He made small beads for them so they were constantly praying, and he also found small bibles for them…. So they were always keeping their bibles open, and moving their beads. Although they could not read, they had already crammed everything. The priest would open the page and say, “Twelfth page,” and they would start reading it — not that they were reading; they had memorized it.
The priest was very pleased and he felt it would be good to have one more parrot. Rather than learning the bible and the beads, he could be taught to give whole sermons. He found a parrot, and the pet shop owner said, “Your wish will be fulfilled; this parrot is the most intelligent I have ever seen.” But he was not aware that it was a female parrot. And as the parrot was put in the same cage as the two parrots who were moving their beads and reading the bible, they both looked at the female parrot, and one parrot said to the other, “George, now drop those beads! Our prayers have been heard.”
Your priests are no more than parrots — and their prayers are for power, for prestige, for money. They are politicians in disguise; they are doing politics in the name of God — the politics of numbers. There are now seven hundred million Catholics; naturally the pope is the most powerful religious man in the world.
Every religion has been trying to increase its population by different methods. Mohammedans are allowed to marry four women so that they can produce four children per year. And they have been successful: they are the second largest religion after Christianity.
Organized religion is only a content-less, meaningless word; hidden inside is the politics of numbers. And you know perfectly well — as the election comes near, your politicians start going to see the shankaracharya. For five years, nobody goes to visit the shankaracharya, but when the election comes near, then the prime minister goes to visit the shankaracharya. He goes for a pilgrimage to the temples, high and deep in the mountains of the Himalayan range. For what? Suddenly, a great religious urge has arisen… which subsides as the election ends.
These people need votes; they have to pay respect to the leaders of religions. And a shankaracharya feels great that the prime minister is touching his feet. And the followers of the shankaracharya, the Hindus, feel that “our prime minister is a very religious person.”
When the pope comes to India, even the president and the prime minister with his whole cabinet, stand in line at the airport to receive him. For what? The third largest religion in India is now Christianity, and to pay respect to the pope means all the votes of the Christians will be yours.
Organized religions — whether it is Christianity or Hinduism or Mohammedanism — have not been seekers of truth. In two thousand years, what truth has organized Christianity added to the statements of Jesus? So what is the need of this organization? It is not increasing religiousness in the world, it is simply repeating what Jesus has said — which is available in books for anybody to read. In twenty-five centuries, how many Buddhists have searched for the truth, or have found the truth? — just a long line of parrots repeating what Gautam Buddha has found.
And you should be reminded that Gautam Buddha was not part of any organized religion; neither was Mahavira part of any organized religion, nor was Jesus part of any organized religion — they were individual seekers.
Truth has always been found by individuals. That is the privilege of the individual, and his dignity. Organized religions have created wars — just like politicians have done. Their names may be different… politicians fight for socialism, for communism, for fascism, for nazism, and organized religions have been fighting for God, for love, for their concept of what truth is. And millions of people have been killed in the clashes between Christians and Mohammedans, between Christians and Jews, between Mohammedans and Hindus, between Hindus and Buddhists. Religion has nothing to do with war; it is a search for peace. But organized religions are not interested in peace, they are interested in becoming more and more powerful and dominant.
I condemn the organized religions in the same way I condemn the politicians — they are nothing but politics. So when I said to you that religious people should be respected, honored — the politicians should go to them for advice — I was not talking about organized religions; I was talking only about religious individuals. And a religious individual is neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan. How can he be? — God himself is not Hindu, not Mohammedan, not Christian. And the man who knows something of the divine becomes colored with his divinity, becomes fragrant with godliness.
In the ancient East these religious people were our highest flowers, and even kings and emperors used to go to them to touch their feet and to be blessed — to ask their advice on problems which they were unable to solve.
If we want the world to remain alive, we have to bring back our ancient childhood days when the religious person had no interest of his own. That’s why his eyes were clear, his heart was pure love, his being was nothing but a blessing.
Whomsoever came to him was healed, his problems were solved; he was given new insights into rotten old problems. Organized religions should disappear from the world — they should drop this mask of being religious. They are simply politicians, wolves hiding themselves in the skin of sheep. They should come into their true colors; they should be politicians — there is no harm in that. And all the time they are politicians, but they are playing the game in the name of religion.
Organized religions don’t have any future. They should drop their disguise and come truly out in front as politicians, and be part of the political world so that we can find the authentic religious individual — who will be very rare. But just a few authentic religious individuals can lead the whole world towards light, towards immortal life, towards ultimate truth.
- Osho, “The Hidden Splendor, #8, Q1’
Priests and Politicians : The Mafia of the Soul
Learn to Understand the Language of Existence
The priests who represent religion are not its friends. They are the greatest enemies of it, because religion needs no mediators: between you and existence there is an immediate relatedness. All that you have to learn is how to understand the language of existence. You know the languages of man, but they are not the languages of existence.
Existence knows only one language: And that is of silence.
If you can also be silent you will be able to understand the truth, the meaning of life, the significance of all that exists. And there is no one who can interpret it for you. Everyone has to find it for himself. Nobody can do the job on your behalf -- but that's what the priests have been doing for centuries. They are standing like a China Wall between you and existence.
-Osho, "Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance, #22"
You Have to Sow Seeds for Lotuses
The politicians, and the priests of all the religions, the governments and the bureaucracies, all are creating enough mud. Now we have to grow lotuses. You have not to be drowned in their mud; you have to sow seeds for lotuses. The lotus seed is a miracle, it transforms the mud into the most beautiful flower.
-Osho, "The Razor’s Edge, #11"
Only You Are Capable of Knowing Your Source of Life
There is no God, except your own consciousness. There is no need for any pope, or for Ayatollah Khomeini, or for any shankaracharya, to be mediators between you and God. These are the greatest criminals in the world, because they are exploiting your helplessness.
Just a few days ago, the pope declared a new sin: that one should not confess directly to God; you have to confess through the priest. Confessing directly to God, communicating directly with God, is a new sin. Strange... you can see clearly that this is not religion, this is business -- because if people start confessing directly to God, then who is going to confess to the priest and pay the fine? The priest becomes useless, the pope becomes useless.
All the priests are pretending that they are mediators between you and the ultimate source of life. They know nothing of the ultimate source of life. Only you are capable of knowing your source of life. But your source of life is also the ultimate source of life -- because we are not separate. No man is an island; we are a vast continent underneath. Perhaps on the surface you look like an island -- and there are many islands -- but deep down in the ocean, you meet. You are part of one earth, one continent. The same is true about consciousness,
But one has to be free from churches, from temples, from mosques, from synagogues. One has to be just oneself, and take the challenge of life wherever it leads. You are the only guide. You are your own master.
-Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #11, Q1"
The Politicians Don’t Want Everybody to Become Rich
All these religions are living on poverty. The poor go there because they are suffering; it is unbearable, they need some kind of consolation. The rich don't go there; they are not suffering. And if they are in a certain anguish, these priests are not capable of helping them. The rich people, feeling frustrated, have to search for somebody who can help them out of their anguish. They don't want opium.
The politicians don't want everybody to become rich, because it is more difficult to enslave rich people than poor. It is easier to purchase the votes of the poor than to convince the rich people to vote for them. The richer a person becomes, the more out of hand he is as far as politicians are concerned. A richer person, if he has any psychological problem, will go to a psychoanalyst, not to a priest. He will go the East to find some meditator to help him realize himself so that he can go beyond the mind, but he will not go to these ordinary priests who don't know anything.
-Osho, "Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, #12"
You Have to Be Aware Who the Criminals Are
I don't have any interest in the outside world, in politics, but I have immense interest in you. You are living in a world which is ugly, sick, one foot in the grave. And I don’t want you to be drowned with this sick world.
That’s why I speak against many things. My interest is in you, my sannyasins. I speak against politics because I don’t want my sannyasins to remain ignorant of who the real criminals are in this world. That’s why I speak against the priests and religions, because I don’t want any single loophole for you. You have to be aware who the criminals are. The problem is that those criminals are thought to be great leaders, sages, saints, mahatmas, and they are tremendously respected around the world; you would never think that they could be criminals. So I have to insist continuously, every day.
-Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol. 2, #23"
The Politician Cannot Become Religious
I have said that, and I repeat it: the really religious person cannot be interested in politics. And the politician, remaining a politician, cannot have any religious experience, any taste of that flight to the unknown. But I have never said that there is no hope for a better world.
This is true, that the politician cannot become religious -- for the simple reason that politics, all politics, politics as such, is power politics. It is will-to-power. One wants to dominate, one wants to possess, one wants to be the decisive factor in people's lives. These are the qualities of the ego. Obviously this type of person cannot be religious because religion is basically the experience of egolessness.
In religion there is no place for will-to-power. In fact, in religion there is no place even for will. Will-to-power is far away; even will-to-be is not there. One is in the hands of existence, in a deep let-go. This let-go is what I call religiousness. That's why I said that religion and politics are opposite dimensions.
-Osho, "From Darkness To Light, #21, Q1"
Priests and the Politicians Have to Disappear from the Earth
There is no need for poverty, there is no need for misery, there is no need for so much sickness. There is no need for man only to live seventy years. These are just because we have not tried intelligence in living. Wherever we have tried it, we have reached heights of immense dimensions.
Only as far as man is concerned, we are dependent on God.
It is only three hundred years since science came into being. It revolted against the world and all kinds of superstitions. And within three hundred years science has given man so much that in thirty thousand years, religions have not been able to provide. And this too, against the priests, against the politicians, science has contributed. If politicians and priests are not there, man can take a quantum leap.
There is no barrier between man and paradise. But the priest wants people to be poor, because only the poor need him. It is a simple business ideology. The politician wants people poor, because only the poor can be conditioned. They are illiterate, uneducated, and they are so much in suffering that any hope and they are ready to buy it. It may be God, it may be communism, it may be revolution -- something in the future, faraway. The poor are ready to buy it.
The politicians have been selling hope for thousands of years. The priests have been selling hope, and it is really strange that after such a long time they are still doing good business. And man seems to be fast asleep, without looking at the whole strategy.
The priests and the politicians have to disappear from the earth. Only then the new man -- rich, comfortable, skillful, creative -- can come into being
-Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol. 1, #29"
The Politician Is Sick Because of His Ego
The political man is a sick man, psychologically sick, spiritually sick.
Physically he may be perfectly okay. Usually politicians are physically okay, their whole burden falls on their psyche. You can see that. Once a politician loses his power he starts losing his physical health. Strange... when he was in power, so burdened with so many anxieties and tensions, he was physically perfect.
The moment power is gone, all the anxieties are also gone; now, they will be somebody else's business. His psyche is unburdened, but in that unburdening all his sickness falls on his body.
The politician suffers, as far as his physiology is concerned, only when he loses power; otherwise politicians tend to live long, physically well. Strange, but the reason is that their whole sickness is taken by their psyche, and when the psyche takes on the whole sickness, then the body can live unburdened. But if the psyche releases all its sickness, where is it going to go? Lower than the psychic is your physical existence -- all sickness falls on the body. Politicians out of power die very soon. Politicians in power live very long. It is a known fact, but the cause is not well known.
So the first thing to be understood is that the political man is psychologically sick, and psychological sickness tends to become spiritual sickness when it becomes too much, when the psyche cannot hold it any more. Now, be careful: if the politician is in power, then his psychic sickness is bound to spread to his spiritual being, because he is holding his psychic sickness, so it does not fall downwards. It is his power, he thinks it is his treasure; he won't allow it to fall down.
I am calling it sickness. To him it is his whole ego trip. He is living for it; there is no other purpose for him. So when he is in power he holds his sickness tightly, but he does not know anything about the spiritual realm, so those doors are open. He cannot close those doors; he has no idea that there is something more than his mind. When he is in power, his psychological sickness, if it is too much, after a certain point overflows his psyche and reaches to his spirituality. If he is out of power then he tends not to hold all that stupidity. Now he knows what it was, now he is aware that it was nothing worth holding. And anyway there is nothing to hold; the power is gone, he is a nobody.
Out of desperation, he relaxes -- perhaps I should say, relaxation comes to him automatically. He can sleep now, he can go for a morning walk. He can gossip, he can play chess, he can do anything. Psychically he finds himself loosening. The doors that he had kept closed between his psyche and the body start opening, and his body is bound to suffer now: he may have a heart attack, he may get any kind of sickness; everything is possible. His psychic sickness will flow to the weakest part of his body. But in power it flows upwards, towards his being, of which he is unaware.
And what is the sickness?
The sickness is the inferiority complex.
Anybody who is interested in power is suffering from an inferiority complex; deep down he feels himself worthless, inferior to others. [....]
The political mind suffers from a wound of inferiority, and the politician goes on scratching the wound. Intellectually he is not an Albert Einstein -- he compares himself with giants -- psychologically he is not a Sigmund Freud.... If you compare yourself with the giants of humanity you are bound to feel completely shrunk, worthless.
This worthlessness can be removed in two ways: one is religion, the other is politics.
Politics does not really remove it, only covers it. It is the same sick man, the same man who was feeling inferior, who sits as a president. But just sitting on a chair as the president, what difference can it make to your inner situation? [....]
The ego is so subtle and so slippery. And the politician is sick because of his ego. Now there are two ways: either he can cover the wound by becoming a president, a prime minister.... He can cover the wound, but the wound is there. You can deceive the whole world but how can you deceive yourself? You know it. It is there, you have covered it. [....]
Inferiority creates ambition, because ambition simply means an effort to prove yourself superior. There is no other meaning to ambition but an effort to prove yourself superior. But why make an effort to prove yourself superior unless you are suffering from inferiority?
-Osho, "From Ignorance to Innocence, #15, Q1"
Drop All That the Priests and the Politicians Have Put into You
On the one hand the priest has given you the desire for the other world, the ambition for the other world, for the tomorrow. The politician is giving you this world: you can become the president.... Anybody in America can become the president, all citizens are equal. What nonsense! -- no two citizens are equal. And only the most cunning is going to become the president, not all... at least not those who would have been of any help to anybody.
Only ambitious people can reach to the highest political post in any country, because it is a race, and you need to be utterly ambitious to stake everything on it. And you are not to bother what you are doing, whether it is right or wrong. The end you have to keep in mind and do whatsoever you feel right to reach the end; whether it is right or wrong, no question. If you fail, everything is wrong; if you succeed, everything is right. Success is right and failure is wrong. That's the way politicians have been training everybody.
Drop all that the priests and the politicians have put into you, and as you unburden yourself, you start having glimpses of your pure being.
That's what I call meditation.
Once tasted, it transforms forever.
-Osho, "From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, #15, Q1"
Priests and Politicians Are Working Hand In Hand
Can't you see a simple conspiracy between the priest and the politician? The masses are befooled. The priest gives the sanction from God: certifies that this is the right man to be the president, this is the right man to be the vice-president, the prime minister. Of course the politician needs it because the masses will listen to the priest: the priest is impartial, he has nothing to do with politics, he is above politics....
He is not! The priest is in the hands of the politicians. [....]
What I am telling you is that these politicians and these priests have been constantly in conspiracy, working together hand in hand. The politician has the political power; the priest has the religious power. The politician protects the priest, the priest blesses the politician -- and the masses are exploited, sucked; their blood is sucked by both.
Remove God and you remove the politicians, you remove the politics, you remove the priest, you remove the conspiracy between the priest and the politician. And with these two removed, fifty percent of your miseries will disappear.
The idea of God gives you dreams of a better life... after death, perhaps in paradise or in another incarnation. So there is not so much to be worried about -- this life, it is a small thing, what does it matter? In millions and millions of light years, what does it matter, seventy years? It does not count at all.
There are stars so far away from us that the day you were born, their rays on that day started moving towards the earth -- they have not reached here yet. You will die, perhaps sometime then those rays will reach. And rays move with a tremendous speed, one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. For that star, you never existed. Before you were born and before you died, no ray could reach here to see you, to touch you. As far as that star is concerned... and millions of stars are there, that far away. What to say about you -- there are stars whose rays have not reached the earth since the earth came into existence. And it may go out of existence and those stars will never come to know that there has been a planet like earth.
-Osho, "From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, Talk #13"
I Teach the Religion of Here and Now
"The moment the screen of the mind is empty, a miracle happens. Your consciousness, which was focused on the screen of the mind, finding nothing there, turns upon itself. The circle is complete. It went from you up to the screen, but there is nothing there to stop it, and it comes back to the original source.
Consciousness coming back to the original source is what I call enlightenment. You have become awakened, you have opened your eyes for the first time. Now for you there is no death, no misery, no pain; for you there is only blissfulness. And this blissfulness is not something that you will attain after death. This blissfulness is something that happens here and now.
I teach the religion of here and now.
All the religions have been teaching you postponement. That is a very cunning trick. They have been telling you, "After death you will get the results." Nobody comes back after death so you don't know whether any result happens or not. I teach you immediate experience. And if you are doing it, wherever you are doing it, I am going to be with you."
- Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 5, #25"
I teach you a new religion! Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Jainism, not Buddhism. I teach you a new kind of religiousness — guilt-free, tabooless, non-repressive. I teach you a religion of joy, acceptance, naturalness, spontaneity.
-Osho, “Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind”
There is only one religion, and that is the religion of love. There is only one God, and that is the God of celebration, of life, of rejoicing. This whole earth is one and the whole humanity is one. We are parts of each other.
-Osho, “Jesus Crucified, This Time in Ronald Reagan's America”
My whole effort is to create a religionless religion
My whole effort is to create a religionless religion. We have seen what happened to religions which have God as the center. We have seen what happened to Adinatha's revolutionary concept, godless religion. We have seen what happened to Buddha -- organized religion without God.
Now my effort is: just as they dissolved God, dissolve religion also. Leave only meditation so it cannot be forgotten in any way. There is nothing else to replace it. There is no God and there is no religion. By religion I mean an organized doctrine, creed, ritual, priesthood. And for the first time I want religion to be absolutely individual, because all organized religions, whether with God or without God, have misled humanity. And the sole cause has been organization, because organization has its own ways which go against meditativeness. Organization is really a political phenomenon, it is not religious. It is another way of power and will to power. [....]
My effort is to destroy the priesthood completely. It remained with God, it remained with godless religion, now the only way is that we should dispose of God and religion both so that there is no possibility of any priesthood.
Then man is absolutely free, totally responsible for his own growth. My feeling is that the more a man is responsible for his own growth, the more difficult it is for him to postpone it for long. Because it means if you are miserable, you are responsible. If you are tense, you are responsible. If you are not relaxed, you are responsible. If you are in suffering, you are the cause of it. There is no God, there is no priesthood that you can go to and ask for some ritual. You are left alone with your misery, and nobody wants to be miserable.
The priests go on giving you opium, they go on giving you hope, "Don't be worried, it is just a test of your faith, of your trust; and if you can pass through this misery and suffering silently and patiently, in the other world beyond death you will be immensely rewarded." If there is no priesthood you have to understand that whatever you are, you are responsible for it, nobody else. [....]
The real problem is the priest, and God is the invention of the priest. Unless you drop the priest, you can drop God, but the priest will always find new rituals, he will create new gods.
My effort is to leave you alone with meditation, with no mediator between you and existence. When you are not in meditation you are separated from existence and that is your suffering. It's the same as when you take a fish out of the ocean and throw it on the bank -- the misery and the suffering and the tortures he goes through, the hankering and the effort to reach back to the ocean because it is where he belongs, he is part of the ocean and he cannot remain apart.
Any suffering is simply indicative that you are not in communion with existence, that the fish is not in the ocean. Meditation is nothing but withdrawing all the barriers, thoughts, emotions, sentiments, which create a wall between you and existence. The moment they drop you suddenly find yourself in tune with the whole; not only in tune, you really find you are the whole. When a dewdrop slips from a lotus leaf into the ocean it does not find that it is part of the ocean, it finds it is the ocean. And to find it is the ultimate goal, the ultimate realization, there is nothing beyond it.
- Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 5, #16"
My own idea of religion is that there should beas many religions as there are people
Osho, Why are there so many religions in the world?
Why are there so many languages in the world? – because there are so many people, so many ways to express. And it is not bad, it is good; the world is richer because of it. So many languages make the world tremendously rich. It gives variety, like so many flowers in the garden and so many birds.
Just think: only one flower all over the world, the marigold, and the whole world will look ugly; or the rose – just one flower all over the world. And what will you do with those roses? Then nobody will write anymore poetry about roses. And if you will compare your woman’s face with a roseflower she will become angry, she will threaten you with a divorce. Roses will lose all meaning; they are beautiful because there are millions of other flowers too.
I don’t think that the world needs one religion. The world needs religious consciousness, and then that consciousness can flow into as many streams as possible. In fact, my own idea of religion is that there should be as many religions as there are people – each person having his own religion.
It is difficult to have your own language; each person cannot have his own language, otherwise nobody will understand it. [....]
All these religions should be taken as different languages, then fanaticism loses its danger. Then it is beautiful! There are churches and temples and mosques and gurdwaras – if we think these are all different languages, there is no problem. You don’t see people fighting about which language is the true language – Hindi, Marathi, English, German, French. Which language is the true language? Nobody will ask such a question, because all languages are arbitrary, made-up. They are not true or false, they are useful. [....]
There are so many religions because there are so many people, different types of people. Different people have different likings, different people have different approaches toward reality, and reality is multidimensional.
Hence, my emphasis is: we need a religious consciousness, a universal upsurge of religious consciousness. Of course it will take many forms, but forms don’t matter; as far as the spirit is alive, forms don’t matter. And each form is beautiful. There are so many people; each has a different face, a different beauty. Each person’s fingerprints are different from every other person’s in the world – but this does not create any trouble. Each person’s footprints toward the door to godliness are going to be different.
Once we understand it, a great brotherhood is possible. Otherwise this nonsense of religious fanaticism – “Only I am right” – has been very destructive. It has destroyed religion itself; it has condemned religion and religious people. That’s why there are so many irreligious people, antireligious people. It is what religion has done to humanity up to now that has created antireligious people – atheists, godless people, God-denying people. The responsibility is of the priests, rabbis, popes, pundits, shankaracharyas – they are the responsible people. They have made religion so ugly, so inhuman, so violent, so stupid, that any rational person feels a little ashamed of being part of any religious movement.
We have to destroy the ugly heritage of the past. We have to clean the space for the future. All are accepted: the Bible has its own beauty, so has the Koran, so has the Gita. And if you are religious you will enjoy the Bible as much as you will enjoy the Koran and the Gita, because you will know only languages are different. And the difference of languages creates different beauty. Sing the Koran, and you will see the difference. The Bible cannot be beautiful that way; the Koran has a singing quality to it. You can sing the Koran; even if you don’t understand the meaning, the very music of it will be a transforming force. In fact, the Koran does not have much meaning; it has great poetry but not much meaning. [....]
Each scripture has something to contribute to the world, and no scripture can do everything. But because you don’t understand different languages, the problem arises. It will be good to have a few encounters with different religions.
That’s why I go on speaking, sometimes on Buddhism, sometimes on Hinduism, sometimes on Christianity, sometimes on Judaism, on Hasids, on Zen, on Sufis – for a certain reason: to give you different visions, so your own eyes can become rich, so that you can understand different languages also a little bit.
- OSHO, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, #8"
I teach Religiousness not Religion
That’s why I say my religion is the first authentic religion; it has no idea of guilt at all.
I don’t want you to feel guilty about anything, because nature has given to you out of its bounty. It is a gift to be received with joy, whatever it is. And a gift has not to be thrown out, repressed. Enjoy it.
So the first thing is accepting yourself — which is not very great; but seeing the situation in which humanity is, still it is a great revolution: accepting yourself.
But I don’t like the word “accept,” because that means somehow “What to do? This is the way I am; I accept it.” No, with my religion just accepting yourself is not enough.
Loving yourself, that is totally different.
Then you are feeling blessed.
Whatever nature has given — and we are nature, extensions, parts of it — we have to live it with a song, with a dance, with no question of guilt. That idea of accepting yourself has arisen because of guilt. Guilt says, “Don’t accept yourself; reject, go on rejecting. The more you reject yourself, the greater a saint you are.”
-Osho, "From Misery to Enlightenment, #10"
People ask me what, in my religion, will be the place of worship, of devotion, because they think worship and devotion are impossible without a God. I want to say to you that they are impossible with a God. The whole idea of God is so ugly that I cannot be devoted to such an idiotic hypothesis. I cannot worship God, I don’t see any reason to worship Him.
To me devotion is the refined quality of love
It has nothing to do with to whom. It is not a question of to whom it is addressed: Jehovah, God, Jesus, Buddha. It is not a question of it being addressed.
Devotion is a quality in your heart You feel full of reverence for everything that is. You feel a great love for all that is.
-Osho, "From Personality to Individuality, #11"
But here something totally new is happening. I am not trying to create a religion, I cannot do it, because the very idea of creating a religion is ugly. But I am releasing a sense of humor in you, a deep laughter in you. To me laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence far more cosmic than going to a church or to a temple. Becoming utterly nobody, a pure nothingness, is far more significant than becoming a saint. Innocence, a sense of humor, a joyous participation in life… you cannot create a dead institution around such tremendously alive experiences. A dead institution needs something dead to be made out of. It is made out of the corpses of your saints. My whole approach is nonserious — sincere, but non-serious.
-Osho, "The Goose is Out, #10"
My own idea about religion is that nobody should be given a religion by birth. Birth should not be involved in it. A child should be given a chance to watch all kinds of religions possible. He should be allowed to go to the synagogue, to the church, to the temple, to the GURUDWARA. He should be helped in every way; he should be introduced to all kinds of religious varieties going around so that he can choose on his own. The parents should help him to become alert about all the varieties of religion — they should not try to impose any religion on him. Then if he finds that he would like to become a Sikh, perfectly good. With all blessings he should become a Sikh; he should start going to the GURUDWARA . If he thinks he would like to become a Buddhist, that’s perfectly good.
-Osho, "Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 1, #10"
Rami, what theory you are talking about? From where you got the idea that there is a theory here? I am a destroyer of all theories, and I don’t give you any substitute. I only decondition you and I never recondition you. There is no doctrine, no dogma, no creed, no religion. My whole approach is that of being innocent, loving, dancing, singing, enjoying the small things of life, because the small things, if enjoyed totally, become great things. The mundane loved without any conditions becomes the sacred.
-Osho, "The Wild Geese and the Water, #13"
In the past religion became very uncreative. It even became very destructive, because it became life-negative, life-denying, world-denying -- and if you are world-denying you can't be creative. Then what is the meaning of a painting? If the whole world is illusory then your painting is just a reflection of a reflection. Then what is the meaning of poetry? -- all nonsense, because the whole world is illusory! Then what is the meaning of love?
What I am doing here is bringing creativity back to religion. I would like painters and poets and musicians and all kinds of people who have some idea to do something. I would like my whole commune to be in a passionate, creative love affair with existence. Then whether they pray or not, whether they believe in God or not, doesn’t matter at all; they are religious, they are holy people.
-Osho, "Don’t Let Yourself Be Upset by the Sutra, rather Upset the Sutra Itself, #16"
This is my vision and this I call true religion. The true religion has no idea of sin at all; the true religion is so innocent that it knows nothing of sin. And the idea of sin has condemned people so much that they have forgotten all their glory, they have forgotten all their splendour. The priests have condemned man so much that he feels ugly, unworthy, worthless. This is just a strategy of the priests to exploit man. You can exploit man only if you can make him feel guilty.
My work is to undo what the priests have done, to destroy all guilt and instead to create self-love. And whenever one loves oneself, one becomes capable of loving the whole existence.
-Osho, "Darshan Diaries , Hallelujah!, #7"
In the old spiritual dimension, laughter does not exist at all; Christians say Jesus never laughed. Now this is utter nonsense! Only Jesus is capable of laughter; who else can laugh as beautifully as Jesus? But the Christian saints are depicting Jesus according to their idea of religion: a non-laughing God, utterly serious. That is not my vision of God. My God is a dancing God. He laughs, he loves, he sings, he plays… And I say to you, my God is closer to the truth; bliss to me is the most fundamental thing in religious life. To be cheerful is to be prayerful, to remain constantly blissful, rejoicing in ordinary life, in small things… because it is not a question of what you are rejoicing about, the question is that you are rejoicing. Then anything you can rejoice about becomes spiritual. Anything that makes you cheerful is spiritual. Then we can transform the whole of life into something extraordinarily beautiful and that’s what a man of enlightenment does: his walking, his sitting, his talking, each of his gestures, is full of bliss, full of great joy. His every breath is a breath of joy itself.
-Osho, "Darshan Diaries , The Rainbow Bridge, #26"
In my vision, each person should have his own religion. There should be as many religions as there are people. Only then this conflict, this continuous conflict, will stop, this fight between religions will stop: when everybody has a religion and it is something unique like your signature, like the print of your thumb — unique. Then there will be no problem, no conflict; nobody will try to convert anybody. You don’t try to convert people saying, “Make your signature just as I do.” In fact, if somebody does it you will inform the police: “This man is trying to imitate me.”
-Osho, "Ah This!, #4"
I am giving you an insight, not a religion. And you are not my followers, remember, Zareen. Nobody here is my follower — -friends, of course, but nobody is a follower. The orange color creates the illusion that people are following me. Just to avoid that, I cannot wear orange myself. I love the color, but if I start wearing orange then it will become a logical proof that you are following me. Certainly, you are not following me; I am a white person, you are orange people — what connection can there be?
You are not my followers but friends. And because I love orange, out of your love you have accepted it. It is not a uniform; it is not that by wearing orange you become part of a certain sect or church. There is no church, no sect. Because I love orange, just out of love for me you are wearing orange. That is just a gesture of love, nothing else.
Zareen, you are not my follower, nobody is. But certainly you have chosen to be with me. That is your choice. You have fallen in love with a madman, and when you fall in love with a madman a little bit of madness is bound to enter in your heart. That’s what is happening here. I am drunk, I am making you drunk. What else can I do? But this is not a religion. Hence you can love me and you can love Jesus, and there is no conflict. In fact by loving me you are bound to love Jesus. By loving me you will find for the first time the real taste of Jesus. By being with me you can love Buddha. In fact for the first time you will have an insight of what Buddha is. By being with me, in communion with me, you will be in communion with Zarathustra, with Lao Tzu, with Mahavira, with Mohammed. But this is a totally different approach I become the door, and when you enter in me you find all the Buddhas — because it is like the ocean: you can taste it from anywhere, it is salty. If you taste me, you have tasted all the Buddhas; it is the SAME taste.
-Osho, "Be Still and Know, #6"
But I have never said it before, and people have always wondered: if I don’t have a religion, don’t have a doctrine, don’t have a teaching, then why do I go on talking to people? I could not tell them; they would not understand. Only those who will experience the relaxation of superconsciousness will be able to see the point. And then certainly, as Kaveesha says, they will understand how long I have been waiting, and how long I have been patient, and how I have been condemned for things which have nothing to do with me. But I have remained silent — because it does not bother me; the only thing that I am interested in is that my people should attain to the state from where they cannot fall before I leave the body.
I cannot give you anything more precious.
-Osho, "Beyond Psychology, #42"
This is my understanding: that if religion has disappeared in the world today, it is not because of science — no. It is not because of atheists — no. It is not because of rationalists — no. It is because of pseudo-religion. There is too much pseudoreligion and it is so bogus, phoney, that only people who are phoney can be interested in religion. People who have even an iota of reality will go against it, they will rebel. Real people have always been rebellious, because reality wants to assert its being, to express its freedom. Real people are not slaves. Remember this, then we will enter into the sutras.
-Osho, "Come Follow to You, Vol 1, #7"
Don’t be too interested in ideas; they don’t exist. Remain more concrete, more realistic. Each individual has uniqueness, and I respect that uniqueness, and it is his freedom, whatsoever he chooses. And it is nobody else’s business to give you a religion. It is not even your parents’ business, or the priests’, or the society’s, or the state’s. It is nobody’s business to give you your religion. Everybody should be allowed to find his own religion. That will be the real state of fraternity. We have to respect the other with all his uniqueness. And we have to say to the other, “If it is good for you, you follow it; it is not good for me so I am going on another route. And if by chance we meet somewhere, it will be beautiful. I will share my journey with you, and you will share your journey with me, and we both will be enriched in that way.”
-Osho, "Come, Come, Yet Again Come, #10"
My effort here is to give you a total religion, which contains all the three M’s in it. It is a very ambitious adventure. It has never been tried before; hence I am going to be opposed as nobody has ever been opposed before. You are moving with a dangerous person, but the journey is going to be of tremendous beauty. Dangers, hazards don’t make a journey ugly; on the contrary, they make it tremendously beautiful. All the dangers that you will have to face with me are going to give you a thrill. The journey is not going to be dull, it is going to be very alive. We are going to move towards God in such a multidimensional way that each moment of the journey is going to be precious.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 1, #2"
I am giving you a total religion, a religion which allows both. When you are feeling tired with the other, move into meditation, swing into meditation. When you are feeling tired of aloneness, swing into love. Both are good. Both are contradictory, but through contradiction great joy arises. If you have only one you will not have that kind of richness. The one can give you silence or can give you great joy, but both can give you something infinitely precious, incomparable. Both together, they can give you a silent ecstasy, a peaceful joy. At the innermost core you remain utterly silent, and on the periphery, the dance. And when silence dances or silence sings, that is the richest, the peakest of peaks. Hence my insistence for both.
-Osho, "The Diamond Sutra, #10"
Religion is the art of dropping questions. So, good that now you don’t have any questions. I am happy, my blessings are with you. My hand is on your head. And be careful — sooner or later you will find only my hand is there, your head has disappeared! That is the whole effort. If you don’t believe me, you can ask Yatri, our cartoonist. A few days ago he made a beautiful cartoon for me. He has understood the point — that this is the whole magic.
-Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 2, #6"
I teach a religion which is beyond religions. I teach a religion which is religionless, because religions -- Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism -- have not helped. They have, on the contrary, been very great disasters to humanity. Now something is urgently needed which will not have any adjective to it, just pure religion. A kind of religiousness I teach. Prayer I teach, meditation I teach, love I teach; but no theology, no dogmas, no doctrine, no scripture.
-Osho, "The Open Door, #15"
Christianity has nothing to do with Christ
I will speak on Christ, but not on Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ. In fact, Christianity is anti-Christ — just as Buddhism is anti-Buddha and Jainism anti-Mahavir. Christ has something in him which cannot be organized: the very nature of it is rebellion and a rebel]ion cannot be organized. The moment you organize it, you kill it.
Then the dead corpse remains. You can worship it, but you cannot be transformed by it. You can carry the load for centuries and centuries, but it will only burden you, it will not liberate you. That’s why, from the beginning, let it be absolutely clear: I am all for Christ, but not even a small part of me is for Christianity. If you want Christ, you have to go beyond Christianity.
If you cling too much to Christianity, you will not be able to understand Christ. Christ is beyond all churches. Christ is the very principle of religion. In Christ all the aspirations of humanity are fulfilled. He is a rare synthesis. Ordinarily a human being lives in agony, anguish, anxiety, pain and misery. If you look at Krishna, he has moved to the other polarity: he lives in ecstasy.
There is no agony left; the anguish has disappeared. You can love him, you can dance with him for a while, but the bridge will be missing. You are in agony, he is in ecstasy — where is the bridge? A Buddha has gone even farther away. He is neither in agony, nor in ecstasy. He is absolutely quiet and calm. He is so far away that you can look at him, but you cannot believe that he is. It looks like a myth — maybe a wish fulfillment of humanity.
How can such a man walk on this earth, so transcendental to all agony and ecstasy? He is too far away. Jesus is the culmination of all aspiration. He is in agony as you are, as every human being is born — in agony on the cross. He is in the ecstasy that sometimes a Krishna achieves: he celebrates; he is a song, a dance. And he is also transcendence.
There are moments, when you come closer and closer to him, when you will see that his innermost being is neither the cross nor his celebration, but transcendence. That’s the beauty of Christ: there exists a bridge. You can move towards him by and by, and he can lead you towards the unknown — and so slowly that you will not even be aware when you cross the boundary, when you enter the unknown from the known, when the world disappears and God appears.
You can trust him, because he is so like you and yet so unlike. You can believe in him because he is part of your agony; you can understand his language. That’s why Jesus became a great milestone in the history of consciousness. It is not just coincidental that Jesus’ birth has become the most important date in history. It has to be so. Before Christ, one world; after Christ, a totally different world has existed — a demarcation in the consciousness of man.
There are so many calendars, so many ways, but the calendar that is based on Christ is the most significant. With him something has changed in man; with him something has penetrated into the consciousness of man. Buddha is beautiful, superb, but not of this world; Krishna is lovable — but still the bridge is missing. Christ is the bridge.
Hence I have chosen to talk on Christ. But remember always, I am not talking on Christianity. The Church is always anti-Christ. Once you try to organize a rebellion, the rebellion has to be subsided. You cannot organize a storm — how can you organize a rebellion? A rebellion is true and alive only when it is a chaos. With Jesus, a chaos entered into human consciousness.
Now the organization is not to be done on the outside, in the society; the order has to be brought into the innermost core of your being. Christ has brought a chaos. Now, out of that chaos, you have to be born totally new, an order coming from the innermost being — not a new Church but a new man, not a new society but a new human consciousness. That is the message.
- Osho, "Come Follow To You, Vol 1, #1"
Religion does not mean to belong to a particular church.It does not mean to believe in a particular dogma or belief system.
Religion does not mean to belong to a particular church. It does not mean to believe in a particular dogma or belief system. It does not mean to perform a particular ritual. It does not mean being a Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jew.
To be religious means to be blissful, to be cheerful: cheerful because God is, cheerful because we are in God, cheerful because we are his extensions, cheerful because to be is a great blessing. Just to be is more than one can ask for. A single moment of being is so precious that there is no way to thank God for it, but because it is given freely and we don’t have to earn it, we don’t feel grateful.
The day that Alexander was dying he wanted his physicians to let him live at least twenty-four hours more, because he had promised his mother that he would be back. The mother was very much afraid because he was going on such a long journey to strange lands and he had this mad idea to conquer the world: he may be killed, he may never be back. His mother was very worried. He had promised his mother that, ”Don’t be worried! I am a man of word – I will come back. Whatsoever happens I will be back.”
And now he was only a few miles away from the mother, he had almost arrived: just twenty-four hours more were needed and he would have reached and fulfilled his word. But the physicians said, ”It is impossible, we cannot do anything.” He was ready to give half of his kingdom, but they said, ”Even if you give the whole of your kingdom it can’t be done, it is impossible. Death has arrived, there is no more time left.”
It is said that Alexander wept and said, ”If I had known this before, that you cannot extend your life even for twenty-four hours in exchange of your whole kingdom, I would not have wasted my life in conquering the world. Rather I would have lived, loved.” But it was too late. And many people become aware when death arrives, but then it is too late. This is good, that you are becoming a sannyasin while you have enough time to live creatively, to live intensely, to live passionately.
Remember one thing: it is bliss that brings you closer to God. Misery is the distance between you and God. Bliss – and the distance disappears; you are suddenly in God. Let cheerfulness be your prayer, let blissfulness be your meditation.
- Osho, “The Rainbow Bridge”
Neither is worship going to help nor is prayer going to help.
Question 2 It seems that many of us are still plagued with guilt, even though we have been in your surgery a long time. no matter what it is, we feel guilty if we do, guilty if we don't -- a no-win situation. and the deeper it is, the more subtle and elusive it seems to be. Will we ever be freed from this insidious emotional blackmail? is this the surgery you have been doing in these discourses on god?
What do you think? By killing God I am killing your guilt.
I have no concern with God because he does not exist. But I have to be very discreet not to kill your guilt directly, because you will stand in defense. So I kill the gods -- that is my indirect way to kill your guilt. Otherwise I have no concern with God. Without God you cannot be guilty, and that is certainly my concern.
I am operating on God -- that is an indirect way of operating on you. It is a very strange kind of surgery in which God is to be cut into pieces so that your clinging to God disappears and your clinging to God's commandments disappears. When there is no God, suddenly you will drop all morality, and all so-called duties, virtues. Suddenly you will become a pagan.
I love the pagan. I want the world back in the hands of the pagans.
All the religions have destroyed the pagans because they were the people without any judgment, without any God, without any morality -- just simple, innocent, flowing with nature, in a deep let-go. So whatever was spontaneous they were doing, whatever was coming from their nature they were following. There was no question of guilt, there was no situation like a no-win situation.
The pagan was always victorious. Whatever he was doing or not doing, he had his dignity, his honor. I want you to be pagans, that is the first step to being a buddha. I have chosen Zorba as an example of a pagan, and that is the very foundation. On that foundation you can make a shrine for the buddha. But without the foundation, the buddha is hanging in the air like a balloon. You can worship it, but you cannot be nourished by it unless your roots are deep into the earth. Your branches cannot grow into the sky, you cannot touch the stars without deep roots in the earth. First you have to be very earthly, earthbound, then only will you start growing towards the stars.
Without roots in the earth you become simply a star gazer, you don't grow towards stars. You simply look at the buddha, you worship, you pray. But neither is worship going to help nor is prayer going to help. What is going to help is a real foundation, and that real foundation is to be without God, to be without scriptures, to be without discipline, to be without any commandments. Be a free man, don't be a spiritually enslaved person.
Once you have attained freedom from all these fictions, mythologies, you will feel so great, so fresh, so young, and so alive, that the dance will come by itself. So abundantly rich in your innermost being ... because your innermost being is the place from where you are joined with the cosmos. Your roots in the cosmos grow from your innermost center. Once you have accepted existence as it is, you have accepted yourself also as you are.
-Osho, "I Celebrate Myself - God Is No Where, #3"
Rituals and Rules : They are not religion
Question 3 Why are you so much against rituals and rules?
Because they are not religion, and they cannot be religion. I am against rituals, but that does not mean that a religious person cannot go into a ritual. But when a religious person goes into a ritual, it is not a ritual at all. His heart is in it; then his words have wings.
So remember it: I am against the ritual when there is no heart in it. Then it is a ritual! But if there is a heart... just remember those three mystics, those three Russian mystics, praying to God: "You are three, we are three -- have mercy on us!" This too is a ritual, a simple one, of their own invention; this too is a prayer -- but their heart was in it.
A famous story about Moses:
He was passing through a forest. He saw a man praying. But the man who was praying was saying such absurd things that he could not go further. He had to stop the man. What he was saying was profane, sacrilegious. He was saying to God: "God, you must be feeling sometimes very alone -- I can come and be always with you like a shadow. You can depend on me You need not be alone. Why suffer loneliness when I am here? And I am not a useless person either -- I can be of much use, I can be handy. I will give you a good bath. I can massage too. I am a shepherd. And I will take all the lice from your hair and your body..."
Lice? Moses could not believe his ears: "What is he talking about?"
"And I will cook food for you. And do you know what? -- everybody likes what I cook. It is delicious. And I will prepare your bed and I will wash your clothes. And I can do a thousand and one things! And when you are ill I will take care of you. I will be a mother to you, a wife to you, a servant, a slave -- I can be Al kinds of things. Just give me a hint so I can come ."
Moses stopped him and said, "Listen! What kind of prayer is this? What are you doing? To whom are you talking? Lice in God's hair? He needs a bath? And you are saying 'I will rub your body and make it absolutely clean'? Stop this nonsense. This is not prayer. God will be offended by you."
Looking at Moses, the man fell at his feet. He said, "I am sorry. I am an illiterate, ignorant man. I don't know how to pray. Please, you teach me!"
So Moses taught him the right way to pray, and he was very happy because he had put a man on the right track. Happy, puffed up in his ego, Moses went away.
And when he was alone in the forest, a very thundering voice came from the sky and said, "Moses, I have sent you into the world to bring people to me, to bridge people with me, but not to take my lovers away from me. And that's exactly what you have done. That man is one of the MOST intimate to me. Go back! Apologize. Take your prayer back! You have destroyed the whole beauty of his dialogue. He is sincere. He is loving. His love is true. Whatsoever he was saying, he was saying from his heart. It was not a ritual. Now what you have given to him is just a ritual. He will repeat it but it will be only on the lips; it will not be out of his being."
I am not against prayer, I am against the ritualistic prayer -- BECAUSE IT IS NOT PRAYER, that's why I am against it. Don't learn empty gestures. Let your gestures be alive, spontaneous. Otherwise, deep down you know that this is a ritual, deep down you know that this is just a formality you are performing. And if that is your feeling inside, what is the point of going into it?
During a race riot in Detroit, the police stopped a black man driving an automobile which had a white pillow-case flying from the radio antenna.
"What's that for?" asked a patrolman.
"It's a white pillow-case," explained the driver, "to show that I'm neutral!"
The policeman quickly frisked him and discovered a pistol in his pocket.
"Neutral, eh?" said the cop. "Then what's this gun for?"
"In case somebody don't believe it," said the driver.
But that's what your rituals are. Deep down, you know that they are rituals. You yourself don't believe in them. They have been taught to you, you have been conditioned for them. You go on repeating them mechanically, robot like. If you don't repeat them, you feel something is missed; if you repeat them nothing is gained. And there is no understanding behind them.
"No," said Clarabelle. "Ah'm not that kind of girl. Besides, the grass is wet, Mama said I shouldn't, and two bits ain't enough."
What you have been told by others is never going to become your true life. It will remain superficial. And not only that: your true life will remain absolutely against it. And all the rituals that you have learnt, you have learnt from others who had learnt them from somebody else. They don't know what they are doing. They don't know what they are teaching you.
So on the surface you learn one thing: deep down you learn quite another. Deep down, you learn falsity. Deep down you learn hypocrisy.
His grandmother watched the boy eat his soup with the wrong spoon, grasp the utensils with the wrong fingers, eat the main course with his hands, and pour tea into the saucer and blow on it.
"Hasn't watching your mother and dad at the dinner table taught you anything?"
"Yeah," said the boy. "Never to get married."
People are learning on two levels: on one level what you are teaching, on another level what you are. Small children are very perceptive; they go on seeing all the falsities. You cannot cheat a small child; he is very intuitive. He knows! And even if he allows you to cheat him, he knows that you are cheating and he knows that he is being cheated and he is allowing it, but he is just playing a game. He is enjoying it! You think you are cheating him, he thinks he is cheating you.
I am against rituals because they have killed the spirit of religion in the world. But I am not saying don't pray, but let the prayer arise. Let it be of your own. Let it be of your own feeling. Don't repeat it parrot-like.
I am not against rules, but the rules should arise out of your understanding. They should not be imposed from the outside. I am not against discipline! but discipline should not be slavery. All true discipline is self-discipline. And self-discipline is never against freedom -- in fact, it is the ladder to freedom. Only disciplined people become free, but their discipline is not obedience to others: their discipline is obedience to their own inner voice. And they are ready to risk anything for it.
Let your own awareness decide your life-style, life-pattern. Don't allow anybody else to decide it. That is a sin: to allow anybody else to decide it. Why is it a sin? -- because you will never be in it. It will remain superficial, it will be hypocrisy.
-Osho, "The Perfect Master, Vol 2, #8, Q3“
Real religion is never in the scriptures
Real religion is never in the scriptures. And a real religious seeker does not go in search of scriptures, he goes in search of a Master — a living Master. That is one of the basic tenets of Kabir’s understanding: SATGURU — the living Master. Go and search for a living Master! If you can come in contact with a living Master then dead scriptures will become alive again. They become alive only VIA the living Master — there is no other way, because the living Master is the only scripture. When the living Master touches the Bhagavad Gita it will become alive; when he touches the gospel, the gospel will become alive. When he recites the Koran, the Koran will again become alive. He will give his own life to these words, they will start throbbing. But directly you cannot find religion in the scriptures.
So religion is not in the tradition and religion is not in the scriptures and religion is not in the rituals. Rituals are formalities. Unless you are in communion with a living Master, rituals are a dead weight. They will burden you, they will dry you, they will kill you, and you will be lost in infinite formalities. With a living Master, a new ritual is born. It comes out of the contact; it has a context to it, a living reference to it. It is not learned by dead tradition being transferred from one generation to another. You live it — and through living it, you learn it.
When you come to a living Master, deep down something in you wants to bow down. It is not that you are going to do a certain formality — if you are doing, it is meaningless. But something really down in your spirit, deep in your spirit, deep in your center, wants to bow down. Then bowing to a Master is no more ritualistic. It is alive, it is meaningful, it is not an empty gesture. But you can just go on bowing down to anybody, because you have been taught to bow down — then it is useless. Try to see the difference. When something is born into you out of your spontaneity, then it is true. When you have to do something as a duty, it is untrue. `Duty’ is a dirty word. If something is born out of love, good. If something is born out of duty, avoid it, never do it — because that is dangerous. If you learn the ways of duty too much, you will forget the ways of love. Duty is against love. Duty is a false substitute for love.
Religion is not in the rituals. Of course, whenever there is religion there is ritual — but that is a totally different matter. How can you avoid when Buddha walks amongst you, how can you avoid touching his feet? Impossible. You can do only two things and both are rituals: either you have to touch his feet, or you have to throw stones at him. Both are rituals — one is that of the enemy and one is that of the friend, but both are rituals. You cannot neglect Buddha, you cannot be indifferent, that’s all. The phenomenon is such that you cannot just bypass. Either you have to become a friend or you have to become an enemy; you have to choose. You have to have an attitude — that attitude is ritual. But then it is born into your heart, not learned from somebody else. It simply arises in your being.
Religion, wherever it is, always brings rituals; but when the religion disappears, the rituals become dead. Don’t carry the corpse. Yes, you loved your mother very much and now she is dead — what are you going to do? Are you going to carry her corpse for your whole life? You have to burn it or bury it. You have to get rid of it, you cannot go on carrying it. But this same thing happens as far as religion is concerned. You loved the Buddha so much, and great passion arose in your soul, and great worship and great songs were born in his presence… now he is gone, you continue the song. By and by, it is a far away echo of the echo… goes on fading.
When the pope speaks in the Vatican, it is not Jesus’ voice at all — cannot be. When Jesus speaks, he speaks on his own authority. When the pope speaks, he speaks on the authority of Jesus. A real Master speaks on his own authority, he is his sole authority.
Religion is not in the tradition, not in the rituals, and NOT in the so-called religions — Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Religion has no adjective to it. Religion is simply religion, as love is love. Do you call love Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan? If love is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, then why should God be Christian, Hindu and Mohammedan? Has not Jesus said `God is Love’? Religion is not in the religions; religion is pure of all adjectives, pure of all definitions, and each one has to seek it.
Nobody can be born into a religion, religion has to be born into you. You have to open your soul and receive religion. It is showering all around… but you are carrying toys, substitutes, false coins, in your hands, and thinking you are having religion. In the church it is not, in the mosque it is not, in the temple it is not. Go somewhere where a living Master is: it is there. And that too exists only for a few moments — the Master is gone, and the religion disappears.
Hence Kabir’s insistence for a SATGURU — for a true Master Religion is individual, one has to seek it on one’s own. It is not a social phenomenon, it has nothing to do with the crowd and the collective. It is a private thing, as intimate as love. You come to it alone, in deep intimacy, privacy… you open your heart. Religion is spontaneous in the sense that you cannot learn it. You can be it, but you cannot learn it. It is as spontaneous as love.
Have you ever learnt what love is?And that day will be a doomsday, when man will have to learn how to love. That day seems to be coming closer every day, in the West particularly, and more particularly in America. Books are being written: How to Love, How to be Friendly — foolish books, because if man has forgotten how to love, no book can teach it. To teach humanity how to love is as if somebody goes to the fish and teaches the fish to swim — that will be foolish. And so is the case with religion. Religion cannot be taught, it can only be caught; it is a sort of infection. You can go wherever a holy person exists and you can catch it, you can imbibe it.
Religion is a rebellion. It is a rebellion against death, it is rebellion against all that is dead; it is rebellion against the outside: it is rebellion against politics, greed, society, culture, civilization. Religion is a rebellion: it says we have to listen to the innermost core of our being and follow it wherever it leads. Wherever… unafraid of the consequences, we will listen to the small still voice within and follow it. Religion is a risk. Those people who are after security too much can never become religious; it is a dangerous thing. If you pass through it, you will be passing through a crucifixion… but only after the crucifixion is resurrection.
- Osho, “The Divine Melody”
A religion is founded by slaves
Somebody was always pointing out that you are doing wrong, you are behaving wrongly, that this is not the right etiquette. Some Confucius, some Manu, some Moses, some Mohammed was telling you how to behave. Somebody was deciding for you what is right and what is wrong.
This is the only place, for the first time in the whole of history, where nobody is deciding for you what is right and what is wrong. My effort is to bring your consciousness to the highest peak, so that it can decide on its own what is right and what is wrong.
It may not be in agreement with Manu, five thousand years old, it may not be in agreement with Moses, it may not be in agreement with Mohammed. It will be only in agreement with existence and with you.
To me, religion is an individual love affair with existence. It has nothing to do with scriptures, nothing to do with knowledge, learning -- that is all nonsense.
But because you have become accustomed to being told that you are unworthy, undeserving and you have accepted it, when you come here to a total freedom, with no inhibitions, with no repressions, with nobody to tell you what to do and what not to do, you feel at a loss. It is just like a small child in a fair who loses his mother's hand and feels at a loss where to go.
You remain retarded because of these people who go on telling you what is right and what is wrong. They keep you in dependence, in slavery. And I have told you, the greatest slavery is spiritual slavery, and the whole of humanity is living under spiritual slavery.
I teach you rebellion!
Come out of the masses. Stand alone like a lion and live your life according to your own light. Find the light and it will show you the path. The path that is shown by your own light is the only path that is right. What others have been telling may be right for them; it cannot be right for you.
That's why I am not a moralist, I am not an immoralist. I am absolutely amoral. I don't consider morality or immorality at all. I am not a puritan who creates guilt in you.
Just the other day I was telling you about the German scholar who has compared me with Jesus. He has a point. He seems to be a man of very keen intelligence. He says that I am far superior to Jesus, but I will not be able to found a religion.
He is right! Why does he say that? He says, "Because you go on teaching freedom, how can you found a religion?"
A religion is founded by slaves, and to create slavery there is a psychological device.
First, create guilt. Once a person starts feeling guilty that he is doing something wrong, that he is undeserving, unworthy, then he has a wound inside which will not heal, which will go on growing. He has a spiritual cancer in the name of guilt. But all the religions have been creating that spiritual cancer.
Their purpose is that when you feel guilty, undeserving, you lose your confidence and you have to go to the priest to find confidence. You have to confess to the priest that you have been doing something wrong, that you have been having a love affair with somebody else's wife. Now you feel guilty. You cannot say it to your wife, you cannot say it to the husband of the woman you are in love with. Where to go? It becomes a constant tension in you. You are hiding like a thief from everybody.
The priest is available. You can go and confess to the priest that this is happening. He is perfectly happy. He says, "You are forgiven. I will pray for you to God. Now put ten dollars into the donation box, say five Hail Marys, and you are free of sin."
Great! First they create the guilt, then they make the arrangement for removing the guilt. And it is worth ten dollars. Now you have found a way: you can have as many love affairs with anybody's wife, and no worry. Just ten dollars.
This is a very subtle exploitation of man. [....] All the religions, all the societies, are corrupting people. So when you come here and find no corruption, no morality, no puritanism, and find absolute acceptance as you are, nobody interfering in your lifestyle, you feel good, but a little confused. You are coming from a world which has been guiding you on every step.
Do you know, Gautam Buddha's scriptures have thirty-three thousand principles for the Buddhist monk. Even to remember them is impossible. Thirty-three thousand principles, for every detail of life! The smallest detail of life is determined. You have to follow it, otherwise you are guilty.
-Osho, "Yakusan: Straight to the Point of Enlightenment, #4"
Religion - dharma - means nature, the natural order of things.
No matter how many scriptures you read, you cannot establish contact thereby with religion. No temple or mosque or church can connect you with religion. Slumbering, insensitive you go to worship; the same you who runs the shop, also goes to the house of worship. Your attitude should change, and once it is altered, everything else is transformed accordingly; otherwise you will keep on trying everything and yet remain your same old self.
Nanak went to Hardwar during the month of offerings to the dead. People were filling vessels with water, and then, facing East, were throwing them into the sky in order to reach their forefathers in heaven. Nanak picked up a bucket also, but he turned towards the West, and each bucket of water he poured, he cried out, ”Reach my fields!”
After emptying a number of buckets, the people round him remonstrated with him. ”What are you doing? You are turned in the wrong direction. You should face towards the rising sun! And why do you say, ’Reach my fields’? Where are your fields?”
Nanak replied, ”About two hundred miles from here.” The people began to laugh. ”And you expect the water you throw here to reach your fields two hundred miles away? You are really out of your mind.”
”How far away are your forefathers?” Nanak asked. ”They are infinitely far away,” they replied. ”If your water can reach your ancestors an infinite distance away, why can’t my water cover a mere two hundred miles?” asked Nanak.
What is Nanak trying to say? He is asking them to think a little, ponder: ”What is this foolishness you indulge in? Become a little aware; what do you gain by such actions?”
Unfortunately all religion is filled with such stupidities. Some send water to ancestors, some bathe in the Ganges to wash away sins, yet others sit before idols without any feeling of worship or adoration, merely to ask for worldly things. A thousand foolishnesses prevail in the name of religion. Therefore Nanak insists that religion is not attained through scriptures, nor through tradition and customs, nor through blind following. Contact with religion is established only when a person attains contemplation.
When a person awakens, awareness appears within him. When the resonance of Omkar first sounds, our relationship with religion begins. The day you are capable of hearing the resonance of 0m within yourself, without any longer saying it, you are filled with joy, you are the witness, the observer. That very day you establish your connection with religion, not with some creed or sect. It is religion that Buddha calls dharma. It is religion that Mahavir and Nanak talk about.
Religion – dharma – means nature, the natural order of things. What Lao Tzu means by Tao, so Nanak means by religion. To be removed from one’s nature is to be lost. To return to one’s own nature is to return homewards. To be established in one’s own nature is to be established in God. The name, Niranjan – God, the spotless, the flawless one – is such that only he who contemplates his heart knows.
-Osho, “The True Name, Vol 1”
The first and the last religion
Question 1: Osho, Why do you call your religion the first and the last religion?
[....] Yes, I call it the first religion because religion is the highest flowering of consciousness. Up to now man was not capable of conceiving it. Even now, only one percent of humanity is barely able to conceive it. The masses are still living in the past, burdened with the past, conditioned with the past.
Barely one percent of mankind is in a state now to conceive religion. All the old religions are based in fear. Now, a real religion destroys fear. It is not based in fear.
The concept of God in all the old religions is nothing but out of fear, a consolation; otherwise there is no validity, no evidence, no proof for the existence of God. The people who believe in God are really people who cannot trust in themselves. They need a father figure, a big daddy. They are still childish. Their mental age is just nearabout twelve years, not more than that. They need somebody to give them courage, to guide them, to protect them. They are simply afraid to be left alone. They are afraid of death which is coming closer every day. They need somebody to protect them from death. It is a projection of your fear. The moment your fear disappears you will find there is no God.
The moment you are able to trust in yourself, to be yourself, there will be no God. You will laugh at the whole concept of God.
Now, Jesus is praying to God, continually raising his hands towards the sky, as if God is there above in the heaven. And not only is he praying, he is receiving answers too - he is hearing voices! Now, these are symptoms of neurosis. To tell you the truth, Jesus is a mental case. He is a nice fellow, he is a good person, but the way he behaves proves many things. He is a fanatic. He carries the same kind of mind as Adolf Hitler. He is a fascist. He thinks that only those who follow him will be saved; anybody else who does not follow him is going to fall into eternal hell. Now, only a simpleton can say such a thing. Who is he to save anybody? But he says he is the only begotten son of God.
And he truly believes it. It is not only that he says it, he truly believes it.
Until the crucifixion, he truly believes it. It is only the crucifixion which brings a little sense to this insane man. Only at the crucifixion he cries, "Why have you forsaken me?" He was certainly waiting for a miracle to happen. He is the only son of God, and God is not coming. And if he is not coming at the crucifixion, then when? And if even Jesus is not being saved, what is the guarantee that those who are going to follow Jesus will be saved? And the fools are still believing that they will be saved if they follow Jesus. Even Jesus is not saved, and he knew it. He waited for a time for the miracle to happen - but it didn't happen.
Miracles don't happen at all. They have never happened. They are only wish fulfillments of people who are dreaming and hallucinating. They are not realities. If you believe in them, they may appear to you almost real, perhaps more than real. It is your belief that creates the hallucination; otherwise there is nothing - no miracle. But Jesus himself believed that he was doing miracles; and he was waiting for the miracle. These are all very childish qualities.
He is a little bit schizophrenic, too. He goes on saying, "Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of God." But he is not a meek person. He is very arrogant. If you are burdened with Christian conditioning you may not be able to see that he is very arrogant. But once you are clean you can see it clearly. He enters the temple, the great temple of the Jews, and throws out the moneychangers, turns over their tables, hits them, beats them... and he is talking of meekness, humbleness!
He and his followers are hungry and they have been refused food in a village. He is very angry.
They come to a fig tree; it is not the season for figs, so of course there are no figs on the tree. And he becomes so mad at the fig tree and curses it: "You are also against us; you will not provide figs for us." Now, a person cursing a fig tree out of season - what do you call such a person? And it is not only me, his own master... Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist. John the Baptist was imprisoned, and when he heard these things about Jesus, even he became doubtful about whether he was worthy to be accepted as a disciple or not. He sent a message from the jail to Jesus: "Do you think you are really the messiah for whom the Jews have been waiting?" Because he became suspicious - the things that Jesus is saying and doing are contradictory, and the way he is behaving is not the way of a religious man. He is behaving very irreligiously.
A religious man cannot take the standpoint that, "I am special, the only begotten son of God." A religious man comes to know that he is as ordinary as every ordinary thing. He is just like the blades of grass or the stars or the mountains. He is not special in any way. The idea of specialness, of being extra-ordinary, superior, is nothing but the game of the ego which creates all kinds of arrogance.
The same was the situation with other religions. I have spoken on Mahavira, but I cannot agree with the man's behavior, nor can I agree with the ideology and the guidelines that he gives to his disciples. They are absolutely against nature.
Mahavira lived naked. Now, it is not accidental that man has invented clothes. It is absolutely a natural need... because other animals grow hair all over the body and they are protected from winter and cold. Man has not that capacity. Even if he grows hair, it is not as thick as on an animal who lives in the snows. He will not survive, he will die. He has to protect his body. He is not cold blooded, like cold blooded fishes which live in the Arctic. Their blood is cold, ice cold, and it has a certain chemical that keeps it from freezing. The outside, to us, is freezing cold; for those fishes it is not. Man is a hot blooded animal. He needs protection. Now, to make him go naked is absolutely idiotic. And Mahavira prescribes that you should not use any kinds of instruments - even simple instruments like a razor blade, which is not a big machine or big technology. If you want to cut your hair you have to pull your hair out. So Jaina monks every year pull out their hair. This is so stupid, so ugly, so unnatural... and for what?
The whole reasoning is that if you do these things you earn virtue and you will be in heaven. On the one hand he says, "Don't be greedy, greed is sin." And on the other hand, he is teaching nothing but greed, greed in the other world. That seems to be far more greedy even than the ordinary greed of this world: having money or a good house seems to be nothing compared to eternal pleasures in heaven. And Jainas have seven heavens, so the more you torture yourself the higher you reach.
So it seems there is certainly an element of masochism in Mahavira. But I could not say this to the Jainas.
So I have been carrying a heavy weight on me, on my heart. My health has been destroyed for many reasons; the most important is this, that I have been speaking on people with whom I do not agree at all. I disagree - not only disagree, but I find them basically psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic, anti-life. All these religions in the past are anti-life. Nobody is for life, nobody is for living, nobody is for laughter. No religion has accepted a sense of humor as a quality of religiousness.
Hence, I say my religion is the first religion which takes man in his totality, in his naturalness, accepts man's whole, as he is. And that's what holy means to me - not something sacred, but something accepted in its wholeness. Perhaps things are a little bit upside down and you have to put them in place; just like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to put them in place. And then out of that wholeness arises religious consciousness I have spoken more on Buddha than on anybody else. But he is as much anti-life as anyone else:
"This life has to be used just to reach the real life which is after death." Now, nobody has returned after death. Not a single proof exists of anybody returning after death and telling you that there is life there. And all these religions are based on this assumption, that there is a life after death; sacrifice this for that. And I am saying, "Sacrifice that for this!" - because this is all that you have got: herenow. And if there is any life after death, you will be there and then it will be "here and now."
Once you know how to live here and now, you will be able to live there too. So I teach you how to live here and now.
This is the first religion which does not reject anything from your life. It accepts you totally, as you are, and finds methods and ways of how to make a more harmonious whole. You have all the ingredients, everything that is needed is within you - perhaps not in the right place. It has to be put in its right place. And once everything is put in its right place, that I call virtue. Then the man of character, the man whom I can call a moral man, a religious man, arises out of you.
All the old religions are based on certain belief systems. Those beliefs are not to be questioned because they are all fictions - beautiful fictions, but fictions all the same.
You cannot ask, "How do you know God created the world?" There was not a single eyewitness, cannot be by the very nature itself, because if there was an eyewitness already there, then this was not the beginning of the world. You will have to go back before that eyewitness. The world was already there; the eyewitness was there. That eyewitness is enough to prove that the world has already been in existence. So there cannot be any eyewitness for God creating the world. But all the religions accept it, and you are not allowed to ask or question because to doubt is to be on the "black list."
Then there are seven hells waiting for you, with all the tortures that any Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong can conceive. These religious people have conceived them a long time before... all kinds of tortures. And not for a few days - Christianity throws you in hell for eternity. Such an absurd assumption!
Christianity accepts only one life. In one life how many sins can you commit? If you continuously commit sins day and night for seventy years, from the first day to the last you go on like a chain- sinner, then too eternal punishment cannot be justified. Eternal punishment... forever? There will be no end to it! And I don't think you commit sins continuously every moment. A man may be committing a few sins... may go to a jail for four years, five years; it may be justified. But eternal hell? So they are exploiting your fear: fear of hell and greed for pleasure in heaven. That has been their total pattern of working on the human mind. I want to say to you that they are only so-called religions. They are not religions at all.
This is the first religion. I don't promise you any heaven, and I don't make you afraid of any hell; there is none. I don't say, "You have to follow me, then only can you be saved." That is absolutely egoistic. Jesus says, "Come, follow me." Even my book on Jesus is titled Come Follow Me. That is not my statement, it is Jesus' statement. If you ask me I will say, "Never! Don't follow me, because I am myself lost. Unless you choose to be lost forever like me... then it is okay." To me, anybody claiming any kind of superiority, and you have to follow him - it is a fascist attitude.
My sannyasins are not my followers but my fellow travelers, my friends, my lovers.
They have seen something in me the way you see something in a mirror. You are not a follower of your mirror - but in the mirror you can see your face. The master is a mirror. You are not to follow him. You have to see your face in his mirror - and that's all. And remember one thing: the mirror does not do anything at all. When you are facing the mirror, you are doing something; you are facing the mirror. The mirror is not bothered whether you are facing it or not. And the mirror does not do a single thing while you are facing the mirror; it simply mirrors you. That is its nature, that is why we call it a mirror. It simply mirrors, reflects. It is not a doing, it is its being.
The master does not do anything at all. It is his being, it is his presence that becomes a source of reflecting. Slowly slowly you start seeing yourself in a new light, in a new way, from a new aspect, in a new dimension.
The old religions are based on belief systems. My religion is absolutely scientific. It is not a belief, it is not a faith - it is pure science. The word science means knowing. Of course, it is a different science than the science that is being taught in the universities. That is objective science; this is subjective science.
Sometimes words are tremendously significant. Have you ever thought about the word object? It simply means that which obstructs you, objects to you, comes in your way, hinders you. Science is trying to observe the objects that surround you. They should not hinder you, they should not come in your way. On the contrary, they should become your way; they should become steppingstones, they should be used. They should not remain enemies surrounding you. So the whole effort of science is to transform the objects into friends, so they no more object to you but allow you, give a welcome sign.
And when I say religion, my religion, is a science, that means the way science observes objects, religion observes subjectivity. Subjectivity is just the opposite of objectivity: the very diametrically opposite. The object obstructs you; subjectivity is just an abysmal depth. There is nothing to object to you. Once you let go, you start falling into a fathomless abyss; you never come to the end. But you don't want to come to the end either. Just that eternal falling is so tremendously ecstatic that to think that it will end is not possible; it is unending.
Objects begin and end; subjectivity begins but never ends. Science uses observation as its method; religion also uses observation as its method, but it calls it meditation. It is observation, pure observation, of your own subjectivity. Science calls its work experiment; religion calls its work experience. They both start from the same point but they move in the opposite directions. Science goes outwards; religion goes inwards. Hence I have not given you any belief; I have only given you methods. I have only explained to you my experience, and I have told you the way I experienced it.
Once I experienced it I tried all the ways, whether they all reach to it or not. And I found there are one hundred and twelve ways which can reach to the same point. And once you reach by one method, the one hundred and eleven are very simple because you know the point, you have reached it already. Now you can reach from anywhere. So I have been teaching one hundred and twelve methods of meditation - but no belief system. Hence I call it science.
And I have said perhaps it may be the last religion too, for the simple reason that I have not given you anything which can be argued against. I can argue against Jesus. I can argue against Mahavira.
I can argue against Lao Tzu. I can argue against Buddha. Nobody can argue against me, because in the first place I have not given you any dogma which can be argued against. I have given you only methods. Methods you can try or you may not try, but you cannot argue against a method. If you try, I know it is going to succeed. I know by my own experience that it is going to succeed - there is no question. If you don't try it, you have no right to say anything about it.
And because I have taken the whole personality of man into it, nothing has been left out. All the religions have been leaving things out, so there was the possibility of another religion taking something in. For example, Buddhism will not allow alcohol; Christianity allows it.
I have not given you anything that is not rooted in reason, in logic, in experiment, in experience, so a person can be against me only if he does not know me. If he knows me, there is no way to be against me. I don't give you any point to be against me.
And I can say it is the last religion because I have not claimed infallibility like the foolish popes of the Vatican go on doing. Only an idiot can say that he is infallible - and for two thousand years these popes have been claiming they are infallible.
And it is such a beautiful and strange story: that one pope has to correct another pope, who was also infallible! One infallible pope burned Joan of Arc alive because she was rebellious and she was a heretic, and she was not following orders from the pope. After three hundred years, as people became more and more aware of Joan of Arc, her life, her story... the pope who had butchered her became more and more condemned in people's eyes. After three hundred years it became necessary for another pope to declare Joan of Arc a saint. Now she is Saint Joan of Arc! And her bones were dragged out from the grave and worshipped. Someday some other pope may find that it is not right, she was a witch - they drag her bones out from the grave again and curse them, and spit on them, and drag them into the filth - and do whatsoever he can do. What kind of stupidity is this? These infallible people! And strange that even in this century....
That's why I say only one percent at the most has barely touched the point that an authentic religion can become possible. The ninety-nine percent are still under 'infallible' popes. They may be Hindus, then the shankaracharya is infallible.
You may be surprised. I used to know one shankaracharya - I used to know many, but one I was very much interested in because he belonged to the same place to which I belonged, and I knew him and he knew me from childhood. And I was interested in the man because before the public he would not accept anything from me, but in private he was absolutely in agreement with me. And he said, "You can call me a hypocrite - I am. But I am holding such a position that in public I cannot say you are right. You are right; as far as I am concerned I follow you and I try your methods and I read your books." This was an infallible shankaracharya. Before the public he has not even the guts to say that what he is doing is wrong. And what he is doing in private is totally different and against what he is doing in public.
The man died. He wrote two wills. Perhaps one he wrote at one time, for somebody he thought was very much capable of being a shankaracharya... and forgot about the will. And when he was dying he wrote another will, for another man. Now those two are fighting in the courts about who is the real shankaracharya. These are infallible people! Now the court has locked the temple and it will not be opened till the court decides who is the real shankaracharya. And it is very difficult to decide because both the wills are written by the same man, signed by the same man, so for almost twenty years the case has been pending. Many judges have changed, but nobody can decide. How to decide it? They are simply waiting for one of the two to die so that a decision will happen; otherwise, legally there is no possibility. Both have equally valid grounds.
These infallible shankaracharyas, infallible popes, imams, caliphs... they can be proved very easily wrong in a thousand and one ways. I am not infallible. So what I am giving to you is an open religion.
They have given you a closed system. A closed system is always afraid of any new truth, because the new truth will disturb the whole system. You will have to arrange it again.
You know the story.... When Galileo found that it is not the sun that goes around the earth, but the earth that goes around the sun, the infallible pope immediately called him to his court and said, "You have to change it, because The Bible says that the sun goes around the earth, and The Bible cannot be wrong because it is written by God." And if one statement is wrong, then all other statements become doubtful.
Galileo was a very intelligent man; I love that man. Very few people have praised that man - even a man like Bertrand Russell has condemned him as a coward. I don't think Russell understood Galileo's point, because Galileo went to the court and kneeled down before the pope - he was old, seventy-five, dying; from his death bed he had been forced and dragged to the court - and he asked, "What do you want from me?"
The pope said, "You simply state in your book that the sun goes around the earth, and the previous statement you cancel."
He said, "Perfectly right. I will write in my book that the sun goes round the earth. But, dear sir, one thing you should remember: neither the sun nor the earth listen to me. Still the earth will continue to go around the sun. I cannot do anything about it. I will change it in my book - the book is mine and I have every right to change it - but the universe... I cannot do anything about it."
I think he was a man of immense humor and not a coward at all. And he did the right thing - why unnecessarily quarrel with these idiots? He said, "Okay. But remember, don't think that this is going to change the fact. The fact remains in its place."
Now, The Bible is a closed system. What I have given to you is not a closed system, it is an open experiment. Any truth that may come later on can be absorbed by this system without any conflict, because I have told you again and again that there are no contradictions in life; all contradictions are complementaries. So even something contradicting any statement of mine can be absorbed in the religion without any fear, because this is my position: every contradiction is a complementary.
Just as day and night are complementary, life and death are complementary, all contradictions are complementary, so you can absorb even the most contradictory truth that ever comes in the future and it will be part of my system.
Hence I say this is the first and the last religion. There will be no need for any other religion.
- Osho, “From Unconciousness to Consciousness, #1”
One Religiousness- A World of Individuals -
AFTER NATIONS, the second great disease is religions, because they have been fighting, they have been killing, and for reasons in which nobody is interested.
Christianity was the first religion to create in people's minds the idea that a war too can be religious.
I say, war as such is irreligious. There cannot be anything like a crusade, a jihad, a holy war! If you call war "holy" then what is left to be called unholy?
Who is interested in God except the priests?
I have never come across a man who is really interested in God. If you offer him five dollars in one hand and God in another, he will take the five dollars and he will say: "God is eternal, we will see later on. For the moment five dollars will be helpful."
But the priests are interested, because God is their business, and they want their business to spread.
The religions have destroyed man's integrity.
They have broken him – not only in parts but into opposing parts, and these parts are continuously fighting with each other. In this way they have made humanity schizophrenic; they have given everybody a split personality. It has been done in a very clever and cunning way by condemning your body, your sex – by turning you against your own nature.
All the religions are against everything that man can enjoy. It is their vested interest to keep man miserable, to destroy every possibility of his finding peace, joy and fulfillment – to find paradise here, now.
Your misery is absolutely needed for the "other world" to exist. For example, if your sex is really fulfilled, you don't need God, because your life is fulfilled. But if your sex is condemned, repressed, destroyed, if you are made to feel guilty about it – then God can go on living forever. God derives his energy from your suicide!
The religions have taught you that you are not part of this world; you are here to be punished, to repent your "original sin." They had to do it in order to create God, who is a poetic fiction; and to create heaven, which is an extension of human greed; and to make people afraid of hell, which is to create a great fear in the very center of the human soul. Of course those fictions are very profitable to the priests.
No religion accepts the simple, natural and factual phenomenon that man is a unity – body and consciousness together – and this world is not separate from man. Man is rooted in this world just as trees are rooted. And the roots are as essential a part of the tree as the flowers. In fact, without roots there wouldn't be any tree!
This planet, this earth, is our mother and we are all part of one life force – part of one oceanic existence. And because we are one deep inside at our center, the possibility of love exists.
I am against all organized religions, without any exception, for the simple reason that truth cannot be organized, love cannot be organized – it is not politics.
All these religions have made you parts of crowds, dependent on the crowds. They have taken away your individuality, your freedom, your intelligence. In its place they have given you bogus beliefs, which mean nothing.
Belief is just a strategy to deceive yourself.
You don't want to go on the path of seeking, searching, discovering. It is arduous, because you will have to drop many superstitions, and you will have to deprogram yourself from many conditionings from the past which are preventing you from knowing the truth, from knowing yourself. No belief can help, and all religions are based on belief – that's why they are called "faiths."
Truth is a search, not a faith. It is an inquiry, not a belief. It is a question, a quest. To avoid this search you easily become gullible, you easily become victims of anybody who is ready to exploit you.
And naturally it feels cozy in a crowd. There are six hundred million Catholics. It feels cozy. And it feels like six hundred million people cannot be wrong. You may be wrong, but six hundred million people cannot be wrong – but that's what every one of them is thinking.
Four hundred million Hindus feel that they are right, and the same is true about Mohammedans, Buddhists and other religions.
A religion should be not a dead organization, but a kind of religiousness, a loving heart, a friendliness towards the whole. For these, no holy scriptures are needed.
An authentic religiousness needs no prophets, no saviors, no churches, no popes, no priests – because religiousness is the flowering of your heart.
If religiousness spreads all over the world the religions will fade away. It will be a tremendous blessing to humanity when man is simply man, neither Christian, nor Mohammedan, nor Hindu.
Religiousness is an individual affair. It is a message of love from you to the whole cosmos. Only then will there be a peace that passeth all misunderstanding...otherwise these religions have been parasites, exploiting people, enslaving people, forcing people to believe – and all beliefs are against intelligence.
I would love the whole world to be religious – as an independent search out of each individual's freedom.
So first, the nations should go if the world is to survive. There is no need of India and England and Germany.
Second, the religions should go.
One humanity is enough. And one religiousness is enough. Meditation, truth, love, authenticity, sincerity – which do not need any name...Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Just one religiousness – a quality, not something organized.
The moment organization comes in there is going to be violence, because there will be other organizations in conflict. We need a world of individuals without any organizations. Yes, there can be gatherings of people who have similar feelings, similar joys, rejoicings, but there should not be any organizations, hierarchies, bureaucracies.
First nations, second religions; and third, a science completely devoted to a better life, to more life, to better intelligence, to more creativity – not to create more war, not to be destructive. If these three things are possible, the whole humanity can be saved from being destroyed by its own leaders – religious, political, social.
-Osho, "The Greatest Challenge: the Golden Future"
All the Buddhas have been saying the same thing
Question : Osho, Why do all buddhas say the same thing?
Truth is one. Even if it is said differently, it is the same truth. Languages may differ, metaphors may differ parables may differ, but if you really look a little deep, then all parables, all languages, all metaphors, culminate in one truth. TRUTH is one — what can Buddhas do? Although each Buddha speaks in his own way, and his expression has HIS signature on it. His expression is just his and nobody else’s. But still those who can see will always find that it is the same diamond — maybe we have been shown only one aspect of it by Krishna, another aspect by Christ, still another by Mohammed, but those are aspects of the same diamond.
The diamond is one, this universe is one — and all the Buddhas have been saying the same thing, in different languages, in different ways. Those differences come from their individualities, not from their experience. The moment of experience is wordless, the moment of experience is thoughtless. So when Buddha experienced it, it was the same purity of consciousness as when Jesus experienced it.
Two purities cannot be different; two impurities can be different. Two healths cannot be different; two diseases can be different. Two silences cannot be different; two noises can be different. The truth is known in silence, but you cannot utter It in silence — you have to use words, language, noise. And immediately… when Buddha speaks, he speaks in Pali; that is the language that he knows, that is his mother tongue. And Jesus speaks in Aramaic; that is his mother tongue. If Jesus and Buddha had met, they would not have understood each other’s language at all, but they would have looked into each other’s eyes and would have understood each other TOTALLY!
A Sufi story: Mulla Nasruddin is sitting in the village square one evening plucking the strings of a sitar. Little by little, an expectant circle of villagers gathers around him. He keeps on playing just one note. Finally, one villager enquires, “That’s a very nice note you are playing, Mulla, but most musicians use all the notes. Why don’t you?” “Those donkeys,” retorts the Mulla, “they are searching for the note, but I have found it!”
Truth is one — when you have found it you can go on repeating it, you can find different ways to repeat it, unique ways to express it, you can devise your own methods. And there are many methods devised — because of the compassion of the enlightened ones. Strange methods, very contradictory to each other.
If you go to a Sufi saint, he will be very polite to you, he may even touch your feet — because the Sufis respect God in all forms. That is their device. When a Sufi Master touches your feet… just think of that moment, contemplate over the moment — a Bahauddin, or a Jalaluddin, or a Farid — great Masters! diamonds of the purest water. A Bahauddin touching your feet, it is a device. In that moment when Bahauddin touches your feet, you are BOUND to fall silent, howsoever noisy your mind. Bahauddin touching your feet!? A great silence will descend on you. Bahauddin is giving you a taste of his meditation in this way; this is his device.
And a Zen Master is just the opposite: you go to him, you have to bow down seven times. And you ask some innocent question… and he jumps on you, hits you on the head — so unexpectedly. A very different device, but just think: a Bodhidharma, a Rinzai, a Bokoju, jumping on you, hitting on your head! For a moment all thinking stops… so unexpected. And you had asked a simple question: “Is there a God?” and he became furious. And you cannot figure it out — why? And he gives you no time to figure it out; he gives you no time to escape either.
It happened once that when Bokoju met his Master and asked something about Buddha, the Master took him physically and threw him out of the window… from a three-storey building. The poor fellow fell down on a rock, smashed, and the Master was looking from the window and he asked, “Do you understand now?” And the whole ridiculousness of it!
And the silence of the garden. And the silence of the accident. The shock. And the Master’s smiling face, and those compassionate eyes, and his asking, “Now do you understand?” And in that moment, Bokoju became enlightened. He said, “Yes, yes, Master. Can I come in and touch your feet in gratitude?”
“You are welcome,” the Master said, “to have a cup of tea with me.” And they are sipping tea together.
Something immensely valuable has happened. In that moment, in that dangerous moment, when you are falling, it is almost as if you are going to die — you are finished. How can you think? In dangerous moments thinking stops. When you come across a snake, suddenly thinking stops. You don’t decide to jump out of the way, remember — you jump FIRST and then you decide, then you think it over, then you can afford to think it over. But you jump first!
Gurdjieff used to say that mind is very slow in action, and he is right. The body is far quicker. Mind is very lethargic; it goes on round and round in circles. So whenever there is some urgency, then your existence does not allow your mind to go round and round through logical processes to come to a conclusion, because then it will be too late.
By the time you have decided…. For example, if a snake is passing by and you give it to the mind, then there is trouble. First the mind will say, “Ninety-seven percent of snakes are non-poisonous, so there are only three chances out of a hundred that this snake is poisonous. A hundred persons who are bitten by snakes, they don’t all die; only five percent die, ninety-five percent are saved. And those five persons who die, maybe they were going to die anyway. So what is the hurry? Why bother? And one has to die one day.”
And great philosophical ideas about death and the immortality of the soul…. And snakes don’t care about these things! They are absolutely non-philosophical; they won’t give you that much time. The snake may strike you before you have come to any conclusion. Gurdjieff is right: he says whenever there is any urgency, the body immediately takes over from the mind; it does not give mind any chance to do — it does it on its own. The body has its own wisdom: it jumps out of the way. It is almost an in-built response, so no thinking is needed. That’s what Zen people have been doing with their disciples.
One Zen Master had this habit that whenever he would talk of God, of Buddha, of the higher dimensions of life, he would raise one of his fingers towards the sky. It became so characteristic of him that one of his small sannyasins, a young boy — must have been of the age of Siddhartha — became very much interested in this one finger pointing upwards. And he was always in attendance just to do something for the Master — if he needs some tea, to run and bring the tea, or just to be by his side and to help him to get rid of the mosquitoes.
He learnt the trick, and playfully, whenever the Master was not looking at him, he would show one finger to the audience. The Master knew — people would laugh, or smile and he would know who was doing the whole trick.
One day — and this can be done only by a Zen Master — he simply caught hold of the child when he was making the gesture of one finger pointing to heaven, and cut the finger with a sharp knife. Now, just think of doing such a thing to poor Siddhartha….
The child cried, screamed, and the Master said, “Stop! And put the finger up!” And his shout was such, it was such a thunderlike shout, that the child forgot all about his finger, that it had been cut and blood was oozing, and he showed the finger which was NO more there, because the Master had ordered.
And in that moment when he was showing a finger which was no more there, he became aware of the invisible; the Master was not pointing to something visible, but something invisible. And the child started laughing, and the Master took him into his embrace and said, “You have understood.” And it is said that small child had his first satori. Later on became a famous enlightened Master.
Different approaches… but the truth is one. The truth is silence — the single note of silence. Be silent and know, and you will also know the same thing that Buddhas have always known and will always know: truth is eternal. It has nothing to do with time, it never changes.
- Osho, “The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty”
Religion: The last luxury
Question1 : Why is it that western societies are becoming so interested in indian religion now?
I consider religion to be the last luxury. Only when a society becomes affluent does religion become meaningful. And now, for the first time, a greater part of the world is not poor. America in particular is the first society in human history to reach such affluence. To be religious, or to be interested in the ultimate questions of life, one needs to have really fulfilled all the lower wants and needs. So to me, a poor society cannot be religious. India was religious only when it was at a peak of affluence. For example, in Buddha's time India was just like America is today. In those days India was the richest land. The religion that we have in India today is just a leftover from those days.
There is a basic difference between a poor man's religion and a rich man's religion. If a poor man becomes interested in religion it will be just as a substitute. Even if he prays to God he will be praying for economic goods; the basic problem of man will not yet have arisen for him. So Marx is right in a way when he says that religion is the opium of the people. He is exactly right about poor people: they cannot get the basic needs of life fulfilled, so they substitute prayer and meditation and Yoga and religion. But for a rich man there is a basic change of dimension. Now he is not asking for economic goods, he is asking for the meaning of life.
Krishna, Mahavira, Buddha, the twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas, and the twenty-four avatars of the Hindus were all rich people: royally born, sons of kings. India has not had one avatar who was a poor man. Only Jesus was poor: that is why he was crucified. A poor man's son can be crucified very easily.
-Osho, "The Great Challenge, #6, Q1"
on Osho's Religiousness
The fool lives around the idea of “my” and “mine”: my nation, my religion, my race, my family, my wealth, my children, my parents…he lives around “my” and “mine.” And he has come alone and he will go alone; nobody brings anything into the world and nobody takes anything from the world. Alone, empty-handed we come; alone, empty-handed we go. The wise knows it; hence the wise claims nothing as “mine.” He uses things, but he does not possess them. Using is perfectly good — use all the things of the world, they ARE for you. The world is a gift from God — use it, but don’t possess it. The moment you become a possessor, you cannot use things — the things start using you. The moment you become a possessor, in fact you are possessed by your things, you become a slave. And the very idea of possessing is stupid. How can you possess anything? You don’t even possess your own being. What else can you possess? You are not even a master of yourself.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha"
I have not stopped the sannyas movement; I have stopped it becoming a religion. A movement is a flux; that’s the meaning of movement — it is moving, it is growing. But a religion is dead — it has stopped moving, it has stopped growing. It is dead. The only place for it is in the crematorium. That’s where we had to take it. And we have celebrated the death of the religion — a religion which was not my idea.
I trust in sannyasins remaining individuals, I trust in their growth and movement; but I don’t like the idea of them becoming like Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists. That’s what was done while I was in isolation. In my absence, Sheela gathered around herself a fascist group and managed to cripple the sannyas movement, to make it dead, to make it a religion.
We have burned the religion — that does not mean we have burned our religiousness. That is a totally different thing.
Religiousness is like love — invisible, yet so tangible. You cannot explain it, but you can experience it.
Religiousness has been freed from a dead structure, a bondage that Sheela and her criminal group have put around it. Now you are not Rajneeshees. And I would like the press, the media to be kind enough not to refer to my people as Rajneeshees. They need some kind of reference — they can call them friends of Rajneesh, and that will be absolutely right and appropriate.
Sheela wanted a dead religion. Every priest or priestess wants a dead religion, because it is predictable. Everything is just a catechism. There is no opinion, no evolution, no growth. Just look at Christianity: two thousand years have passed — have they gone even an inch farther than Jesus Christ? Twenty-five centuries have passed since Buddha — have Buddhists gone a single step ahead? This is destroying growth, destroying evolution.
Now I want my people to remain open, alive, growing, always fresh and new. It remains a new kind of phenomenon, religiousness: no label attached to it, because every label is a full stop. And I don’t like full stops, I don’t like even semi-colons: Life is always ongoing….
One journalist was very much worried; he said, “You have destroyed Rajneeshism, the religion. Now you will be in great trouble on two counts: first, Rajneesh Foundation International will lose its tax-exempt status.”
I told the man, “Don’t you worry about it. We have burned religion but not religiousness; and we will fight so that a man can have a growing experience of religiousness without being part of a mob psychology, without being a member of a collectivity. That is perfectly good for the sheep, but not for lions. And I want my sannyasins to be lions, not sheep.
“Nobody can take away the tax-exempt status. We are more religious than any Christian, any Hindu, any Mohammedan. We have just buried the dead structure and freed the soul of religion. That freedom is religiousness.”
He was also worried that it would be difficult now for me in reference to my immigration, on the same grounds. It is not going to be difficult for me at all. If you don’t have a category for religiousness, that is your fault. Make a category for religiousness.
Even in my interview with the INS I had made it clear that this is no ordinary religion; it is simply a way of life, a quality of religiousness.
The INS officer said, “But it is difficult, because we don’t have any category for that. We have a category for religion.”
“Then,” I said, “you can write that it is a religionless religion.” And that is on record.
What does “religionless religion” mean? It simply means a religiousness.
-Osho, "From Bondage to Freedom"
That’s why I say my religion is the first authentic religion; it has no idea of guilt at all.
I don’t want you to feel guilty about anything, because nature has given to you out of its bounty. It is a gift to be received with joy, whatever it is. And a gift has not to be thrown out, repressed. Enjoy it.
So the first thing is accepting yourself — which is not very great; but seeing the situation in which humanity is, still it is a great revolution: accepting yourself.
But I don’t like the word “accept,” because that means somehow “What to do? This is the way I am; I accept it.” No, with my religion just accepting yourself is not enough.
Loving yourself, that is totally different.
Then you are feeling blessed.
Whatever nature has given — and we are nature, extensions, parts of it — we have to live it with a song, with a dance, with no question of guilt. That idea of accepting yourself has arisen because of guilt. Guilt says, “Don’t accept yourself; reject, go on rejecting. The more you reject yourself, the greater a saint you are.”
-Osho, "From Misery to Enlightenment"
People ask me what, in my religion, will be the place of worship, of devotion, because they think worship and devotion are impossible without a God.I want to say to you that they are impossible with a God. The whole idea of God is so ugly that I cannot be devoted to such an idiotic hypothesis. I cannot worship God, I don’t see any reason to worship Him.
To me devotion is the refined quality of love
It has nothing to do with to whom. It is not a question of to whom it is addressed: Jehovah, God, Jesus, Buddha. It is not a question of it being addressed.
Devotion is a quality in your heart
You feel full of reverence for everything that is.
You feel a great love for all that is.
-Osho, "From Personality to Individuality"
But here something totally new is happening. I am not trying to create a religion, I cannot do it, because the very idea of creating a religion is ugly. But I am releasing a sense of humor in you, a deep laughter in you. To me laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence far more cosmic than going to a church or to a temple. Becoming utterly nobody, a pure nothingness, is far more significant than becoming a saint. Innocence, a sense of humor, a joyous participation in life… you cannot create a dead institution around such tremendously alive experiences. A dead institution needs something dead to be made out of. It is made out of the corpses of your saints. My whole approach is nonserious — sincere, but non-serious.
-Osho, "The Goose is Out"
My own idea about religion is that nobody should be given a religion by birth. Birth should not be involved in it. A child should be given a chance to watch all kinds of religions possible. He should be allowed to go to the synagogue, to the church, to the temple, to the GURUDWARA. He should be helped in every way; he should be introduced to all kinds of religious varieties going around so that he can choose on his own. The parents should help him to become alert about all the varieties of religion — they should not try to impose any religion on him. Then if he finds that he would like to become a Sikh, perfectly good. With all blessings he should become a Sikh; he should start going to the GURUDWARA . If he thinks he would like to become a Buddhist, that’s perfectly good.
-Osho, "Sufis: The People of the Path"
Rami, what theory you are talking about? From where you got the idea that there is a theory here? I am a destroyer of all theories, and I don’t give you any substitute. I only decondition you and I never recondition you. There is no doctrine, no dogma, no creed, no religion. My whole approach is that of being innocent, loving, dancing, singing, enjoying the small things of life, because the small things, if enjoyed totally, become great things. The mundane loved without any conditions becomes the sacred.
-Osho, "The Wild Geese and the Water"
What I am doing here is bringing creativity back to religion. I would like painters and poets and musicians and all kinds of people who have some idea to do something. I would like my whole commune to be in a passionate, creative love affair with existence. Then whether they pray or not, whether they believe in God or not, doesn’t matter at all; they are religious, they are holy people.
-Osho, "Don’t Let Yourself Be Upset by the Sutra, rather Upset the Sutra Itself"
This is my vision and this I call true religion. The true religion has no idea of sin at all; the true religion is so innocent that it knows nothing of sin. And the idea of sin has condemned people so much that they have forgotten all their glory, they have forgotten all their splendour. The priests have condemned man so much that he feels ugly, unworthy, worthless. This is just a strategy of the priests to exploit man. You can exploit man only if you can make him feel guilty.
My work is to undo what the priests have done, to destroy all guilt and instead to create self-love. And whenever one loves oneself, one becomes capable of loving the whole existence.
-Osho, "Darshan Diaries , Hallelujah!"
In the old spiritual dimension, laughter does not exist at all; Christians say Jesus never laughed. Now this is utter nonsense! Only Jesus is capable of laughter; who else can laugh as beautifully as Jesus? But the Christian saints are depicting Jesus according to their idea of religion: a non-laughing God, utterly serious. That is not my vision of God. My God is a dancing God. He laughs, he loves, he sings, he plays… And I say to you, my God is closer to the truth; bliss to me is the most fundamental thing in religious life. To be cheerful is to be prayerful, to remain constantly blissful, rejoicing in ordinary life, in small things… because it is not a question of what you are rejoicing about, the question is that you are rejoicing. Then anything you can rejoice about becomes spiritual. Anything that makes you cheerful is spiritual. Then we can transform the whole of life into something extraordinarily beautiful and that’s what a man of enlightenment does: his walking, his sitting, his talking, each of his gestures, is full of bliss, full of great joy. His every breath is a breath of joy itself.
-Osho, "Darshan Diaries , The Rainbow Bridge"
I am giving you an insight, not a religion. And you are not my followers, remember, Zareen. Nobody here is my follower — -friends, of course, but nobody is a follower. The orange color creates the illusion that people are following me. Just to avoid that, I cannot wear orange myself. I love the color, but if I start wearing orange then it will become a logical proof that you are following me. Certainly, you are not following me; I am a white person, you are orange people — what connection can there be?
You are not my followers but friends. And because I love orange, out of your love you have accepted it. It is not a uniform; it is not that by wearing orange you become part of a certain sect or church. There is no church, no sect. Because I love orange, just out of love for me you are wearing orange. That is just a gesture of love, nothing else.
Zareen, you are not my follower, nobody is. But certainly you have chosen to be with me. That is your choice. You have fallen in love with a madman, and when you fall in love with a madman a little bit of madness is bound to enter in your heart. That’s what is happening here. I am drunk, I am making you drunk. What else can I do? But this is not a religion. Hence you can love me and you can love Jesus, and there is no conflict. In fact by loving me you are bound to love Jesus. By loving me you will find for the first time the real taste of Jesus. By being with me you can love Buddha. In fact for the first time you will have an insight of what Buddha is. By being with me, in communion with me, you will be in communion with Zarathustra, with Lao Tzu, with Mahavira, with Mohammed. But this is a totally different approach I become the door, and when you enter in me you find all the Buddhas — because it is like the ocean: you can taste it from anywhere, it is salty. If you taste me, you have tasted all the Buddhas; it is the SAME taste.
-Osho, "Be Still and Know"
But I have never said it before, and people have always wondered: if I don’t have a religion, don’t have a doctrine, don’t have a teaching, then why do I go on talking to people? I could not tell them; they would not understand. Only those who will experience the relaxation of superconsciousness will be able to see the point. And then certainly, as Kaveesha says, they will understand how long I have been waiting, and how long I have been patient, and how I have been condemned for things which have nothing to do with me. But I have remained silent — because it does not bother me; the only thing that I am interested in is that my people should attain to the state from where they cannot fall before I leave the body.
I cannot give you anything more precious.
-Osho, "Beyond Psychology"
This is my understanding: that if religion has disappeared in the world today, it is not because of science — no. It is not because of atheists — no. It is not because of rationalists — no. It is because of pseudo-religion. There is too much pseudoreligion and it is so bogus, phoney, that only people who are phoney can be interested in religion. People who have even an iota of reality will go against it, they will rebel. Real people have always been rebellious, because reality wants to assert its being, to express its freedom. Real people are not slaves. Remember this, then we will enter into the sutras.
-Osho, "Come Follow to You"
Don’t be too interested in ideas; they don’t exist. Remain more concrete, more realistic. Each individual has uniqueness, and I respect that uniqueness, and it is his freedom, whatsoever he chooses. And it is nobody else’s business to give you a religion. It is not even your parents’ business, or the priests’, or the society’s, or the state’s. It is nobody’s business to give you your religion. Everybody should be allowed to find his own religion. That will be the real state of fraternity. We have to respect the other with all his uniqueness. And we have to say to the other, “If it is good for you, you follow it; it is not good for me so I am going on another route. And if by chance we meet somewhere, it will be beautiful. I will share my journey with you, and you will share your journey with me, and we both will be enriched in that way.”
-Osho, "Come, Come, Yet Again Come"
My effort here is to give you a total religion, which contains all the three M’s in it. It is a very ambitious adventure. It has never been tried before; hence I am going to be opposed as nobody has ever been opposed before. You are moving with a dangerous person, but the journey is going to be of tremendous beauty. Dangers, hazards don’t make a journey ugly; on the contrary, they make it tremendously beautiful. All the dangers that you will have to face with me are going to give you a thrill. The journey is not going to be dull, it is going to be very alive. We are going to move towards God in such a multidimensional way that each moment of the journey is going to be precious.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha"
I am giving you a total religion, a religion which allows both. When you are feeling tired with the other, move into meditation, swing into meditation. When you are feeling tired of aloneness, swing into love. Both are good. Both are contradictory, but through contradiction great joy arises. If you have only one you will not have that kind of richness. The one can give you silence or can give you great joy, but both can give you something infinitely precious, incomparable. Both together, they can give you a silent ecstasy, a peaceful joy. At the innermost core you remain utterly silent, and on the periphery, the dance. And when silence dances or silence sings, that is the richest, the peakest of peaks. Hence my insistence for both.
-Osho, "The Diamond Sutra"
Religion is the art of dropping questions. So, good that now you don’t have any questions. I am happy, my blessings are with you. My hand is on your head. And be careful — sooner or later you will find only my hand is there, your head has disappeared! That is the whole effort. If you don’t believe me, you can ask Yatri, our cartoonist. A few days ago he made a beautiful cartoon for me. He has understood the point — that this is the whole magic.
-Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence"
Osho Quotes on Religion
Life exists without rules; games cannot exist without rules. So real religion is always without rules; only false religion has rules, because false religion is a game.
-Osho, "A Bird on the Wing"
Religion is not based on belief or faith: religion is based on awe, religion is based on wonder. Religion is based on the mysterious that is your surround. To feel it, to be aware of it, to see it, open your eyes and drop the dust of the ages. Clean your mirror! and see what beauty surrounds you, what tremendous grandeur goes on knocking at your doors. Why are you sitting with closed eyes? Why are you sitting with such long faces? Why can't you dance? and why can't you laugh?
-Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder"
Religion is not knowledge. Religion is love. The word 'religion' comes from a root which means binding together -- falling into love, becoming one.
-Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder"
So many religions are there because so many people are unhappy. A happy person needs no religion; a happy person needs no temple, no church -- because for a happy person the whole universe is a temple, the whole existence is a church. The happy person has nothing like religious activity because his whole life is religious.
-Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder"
Religion in the West has a very wrong connotation. It has almost reached to a point where the very word 'religion' creates a repulsion, where the very word 'religion' reminds one of dead churches and dead priests. It reminds one of serious looking people, long faces. It has lost the capacity to dance, to sing, to celebrate. And when a religion has lost the capacity to dance, to celebrate, to sing, to love, just to be, then it is no more religion -- it is a corpse, it is theology. Theology is dead religion.
-Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder"
Be happy! and meditation will follow. Be happy, and religion will follow. Happiness is a basic condition. People become religious only when they are unhappy -- then their religion is pseudo. Try to understand why you are unhappy.
-Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder"
If you become too sceptical, you become scientists. If you become too childlike, you become religious. Science exists with doubt. Religion exists with wonder. If you want to be religious then create more wonder, discover more wonder. Allow your eyes to be more filled with wonder than anything else. Be surprised by everything that is happening. Everything is so tremendously wonderful that it is simply unbelievable how you go on living without dancing, how you go on living without becoming ecstatic. You must not be seeing what is happening all around.
-Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder"
LAUGHTER is the very essence of religion. Seriousness is never religious, cannot be religious. Seriousness is of the ego, part of the very disease. Laughter is egolessness. Yes, there is a difference between when you laugh and when a religious man laughs. The difference is that you laugh always about others -- the religious man laughs at himself, or at the whole ridiculousness of man's being. Religion cannot be anything other than a celebration of life.
-Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder"
Be light-hearted, light-footed. Be of light step. Don't carry religion like a burden. And don't expect religion to be a teaching; it is not. It is certainly a discipline, but not a teaching at all. Teaching has to be imposed upon you from the outside and teaching can only reach to your mind, never to your heart, and never, never to the very center of your being. Teaching remains intellectual. It is an answer to human curiosity, and curiosity is not a true search.
-Osho, "Ah, This!"
Religion is a valid inquiry; whether society accepts it or rejects it, it doesn't matter. Man is a religious animal and is going to remain that way. Religion is something natural. To ask from where you come is relevant; to ask, 'Who am l?' is going to remain relevant always. But the modern mind has created a climate of atheism so you cannot ask such questions. If you ask, people laugh. If you talk about such things, people feel bored If you start inquiring in these ways, people think you are slipping out of your sanity. Religion is no longer a welcome inquiry.
-Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines"
Science is concerned about quantity; religion is concerned about quality. Religion is concerned with the art of how to live life and how to die life.
-Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines"
On the surface, Christian theology seems to be saying that God is opposed to evil, but if you look deeper you see that it is not actually opposed to evil, It is opposed to the natural.
All religions are against nature, it is not only Christianity. Why are they against nature? There is a great psychological strategy. The strategy is that if you are programmed to be against nature, you will live a miserable life, you will live in anxiety, anguish, perversion, guilt.
This whole phenomenon can be created only if you are programmed to be against nature. If you are natural, then you will be just as happy as all the birds, and all the trees, and all the animals. They don't worship God, they don't go to any church, they don't have any theology. They don't have any feeling of guilt, they are simply natural.
The priests found out very early in human history that man can be forced to be God-oriented only if he is forced to be against nature. Once you are against nature you are schizophrenic. Your whole being is part of nature; just your mind is against nature, because only the mind can be programmed, not your body.
So you may take the vow of celibacy, but that does not change your biology, that does not change your physiology. It is just a mind concept, just words. Your blood will go on creating sexual energy, your body will go on creating sexual hormones.
-Osho, “God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth, #6, Q1”
The Aim of Religion
Question : What is the aim of religion?
It is to awaken the slumbering superman in the ordinary man.
This and this alone is religion's goal.
YOU ASK FOR PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD? Isn't the existence of consciousness sufficient proof? Doesn't a drop of water prove there is an ocean?
AT DAWN I watched the sparkling drops of dew gently and lovingly settling on the petals of the flowers. They made not a sound. When one's heart is ready God also descends like the tiny drops of dew. You have no inkling of his coming until he manifests himself before you.
IF YOU WISH TO KNOW GOD the path is silence. Whatsoever is said about God becomes untrue because it has been said in the first place.
TO WHICH RELIGION DO I BELONG? To none. Only in the sense of virtue, piety, justice, fairness, simplicity and the like qualities has religion any real existence, but in so-called religious cults and sects it does not exist at all. And it is the very existence of these cults and sects that have obstructed the manifestation of real religion in the world. To give birth to a true religious spirit all cults must disappear. That is why I do not belong to any particular religion, to any sect or cult.
The man who aspires to real virtue need not belong to any religion. The organized religions really only exist to encourage the evil that lives and flourishes in the wake of religion. Evil may have some cause for anxiety when it encounters virtue, but the existence of today's religions must make it positively jubilant. I do not belong to any religion because I have no wish to join Satan's party.
I have heard that Satan and his disciples had for some time been keeping their eyes on a man who was engaged in the quest for truth. They were understandably anxious and had been watching him closely. One morning, however, the disciples rushed to Satan to inform him that the man had attained truth. They were quite upset.
Satan consoled them, saying, "Don't worry. Just wait until this news spreads from city to city; People will flock to this man; they will take the truth he has attained and frame it in codes and creeds, and then they will organize themselves into a sect; You have nothing to worry about at all."
RELIGION IS A PATH. No path can be traveled just by knowing about it. You can only travel a path by walking it.
THE GREATEST RESPECT a man can show religion is to live it, to use it. The man who only talks about it but does not live it betrays his non-belief in his own words and thoughts.
A RELIGIOUS LIFE IS NOT AN IMPRACTICAL ONE. Nor is a virtuous life.
The truth of religion can only be known to the degree it is lived. Unless it is lived it cannot be known.
Living it is knowing it. To those who imagine they can know religion without living it, a religious life may appear impractical, but unless they live it they will never be able to understand it.
When a man is walking in the darkness the lamp be carries only lights a few feet in front of him.
Only as he walks along is the path ahead of him illumined. The path of religion is the same. But if the man with the lamp stops and says to himself, "This is such a tiny limp. Its light is so weak, the way is so long and the night is so dark," is it any wonder it seems impractical to him to continue on his way by the light of his lamp?
IT IS VERY EASY TO DIE FOR RELIGION but very difficult to live for it. Actually, it is always easy to die for some cause. All that is needed is a kind of madness. Dying happens in a moment, so even a single moment of insanity is quite enough. But to live, awareness and wakefulness are essential.
Only those who live for religion know religion. Those who martyr themselves for religion do not know it at all.
WHATEVER DRIVE THERE IS IN A MAN'S LIFE, whatever evolution there is, whatever touch of glory there is, only comes as a result of daredevil courage. What I mean by daredevil courage is accepting life's invitation to insecurity, possessing a love for the new and the unknown, finding joy in risking one's all. The man who is not prepared to take risks may exist but he is not alive.
And what is the greatest way to apply one's daredevil courage? It is to seek God, to seek the universal soul. Nothing is more insecure that the path to God. There is nothing stranger, nothing more unfamiliar, nothing more unknowable. What bigger stake, what riskier gamble, what more perilous adventure can there be than seeking the universal soul? I say unequivocably that daredevil courage is the greatest of qualities, the greatest of virtues. The man who lacks it is not meant for religion and religion is not meant for him.
YOU HAVE TO FORSAKE BOTH GOOD AND BAD TO REALIZE GOD. Only then will your consciousness rise above differences and establish itself in oneness.
THERE IS ONE MAN I have known for many years. He used to chase money; now he pursues religion. But the race is the same. The only difference is that before he was a businessman and now he is an ascetic who has renounced everything. Whenever I hear of things like this I am surprised.
In the depths, is not his desire to reach God the same as his former desire to amass riches?
The ways of greed are very subtle, and is not the desire to realize God the ultimate development of greed? Man's greed is boundless; he is even greedy for salvation. But the fact remains that a man can never become liberated as long as his mind desire to acquire anything at all. The desire to acquire is the fundamental obstacle that stands in the way of liberation. And how can someone who is not free know God? What a man knows when he is liberated is God!
WHAT CONNECTION DO "I" AND "MINE" HAVE WITH TRUTH? Or with religion? How can truth be MY truth? How can religion be MY religion? Truth cannot be MY truth; MY truth cannot be truth.
ARE YOU SO POOR THAT YOU HAVE NO RELIGION? Worldly poverty is not such a big thing, but having no religion is real poverty. In spite of his gold and riches a man can be poor, but if he has the treasure of religion he can never be a pauper. The greatest thing that can happen to a man is not his worldly success, not his building of empires - it is nothing of this sort - it is his setting out in search of the wealth that lies hidden within him. That riches is religion. Outer wealth is nothing but soiled banknotes; inner wealth is the only real virtue. Those who seek worldly wealth are really seeking poverty but those who are seeking virtue are searching for real riches.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF RELIGION? Religion is moving from the mud to the lotus. Wherever there is mud, the lotus is there as well. But what a difference there is between them!
RELIGION IS NOT A FORMLESS CONCEPT. Religion is a concrete activity. It is not a thought, it is an experience. Living your life so that whatever causes you misery should not befall others is religion.
I DREAMED THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT HAD COME. Everyone rose from his grave to be questioned. The inquiry was conducted by God himself. Standing next to me was a pundit, a scholar I knew quite well. He had a very carefree attitude. He knew the Gita, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the whole lot. He felt he could pass any examination in religion. But as God moved down the line be became less and less sure of himself and more and more anxious. He turned to me and cried, "This is too unjust! Nothing whatsoever is being asked about the scriptures! God is only asking about life!
But I know what I'll do. You know what I'll say? I shall say I know nothing but the scriptures, that I have spent my whole life trying to know them."
Scriptures and dogmas are like dry leaves. There is no sap in them. Nor can there ever be. Only the tree of the self produces green leaves and blossoms that are full of life.
ON MY SEARCH I FOUND NO GREATER SCRIPTURE THAN SILENCE. When I had dug through all the scriptures I realized how futile they all were and that silence was the only thing that had any point to it whatsoever.
IF THE TRUTH IS NOT KNOWN to you the knowledge of the scriptures is useless. If the truth is known to you the knowledge of the scriptures is also useless.
IT IS COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS TO DELVE INTO THE SCRIPTURES in the hope of realizing truth. The scriptures may well have grown out of truth, but they have never been known to generate the experience of truth in anyone. People are so silly - they shelter the blackest ignorance in a living heart and dig among dead words trying to unearth the truth!
WORDS, SCRIPTURES, CREEDS AND CULTS conspire to keep the soul tied to the shore of slavery. And the man who is moored by the rope of slavery is denied the freedom of the limitless ocean. To sail the open sea you have to untie yourself from the shore. To attain freedom you have to break your chains. To catch a fish, anglers put a lump of dough on a hook and the fish is tempted by the dough and caught. The hook of mental slavery is baited with the dough of promised security.
It is always on the hook of security that people lose their freedom. This is one of the oldest conspiracies. And people who are not vigilant, who are not alert to this web of intrigue will never attain to that life and that bliss that go hand in hand with freedom of consciousness. Life and bliss are both hidden in that freedom.
Nothing is of greater value than freedom. No other experience or acquisition can compare. This is because it is only through freedom that truth can be realized. Whoever is opposed to the freedom of man's soul is an enemy of mankind.
The temptation of security is freedom's principal foe. An excessive desire for security becomes a prison for one's soul. This mad craving for security feeds the blindly-accepted superstitions and traditions that can so easily fetter the mind. And even when a man is able to drop these things a vague kind of fear seizes him. The familiar ground shifts and quakes under him and he has no choice but to walk on strange paths.
This is why all vampires, be they political leaders or the priests of the religions, never want to see a man's heart free of fear. Fear and fear alone is the mainstay of their extortion activities. It is out of fear that people cling to what is well known, to the most popular beliefs, even if they are untrue.
A man with an eye on his own safety does not dare stray a single inch from the accepted traditions and recognized values of the masses, even though these things may be founded on ignorance and blind belief. This fear ultimately dulls and deadens his capacity to think. It is safer; thinking will lead him to rebellion.
As long as this web of extortion envelops man and this well planned and carefully executed conspiracy to destroy his individuality goes on, the only important thought a man can have must be how to achieve his freedom. Political and economic slavery is nothing in comparison to the slavery that chains an individual's consciousness to words and scriptures in the name of truth. This slavery is subtle; it cannot be seen or felt. It goes so deep that the individual accepts it in his very marrow.
I oppose this slavery. Because of it, millions and millions of souls have been deprived of the dazzling brilliance of truth. Their hearts have not known freedom. And without that freedom a man is deprived of the bliss and harmony that is his own birthright. A subservient mind can never encounter God.
God is brilliance itself; the servile mind is the blackest night.
If you wish to hear the sweet voice of God then turn a deaf ear to the verbiage of the world. Those who are deaf to the external world hear him clearly, those who are blind to mundane things see him distinctly and those who are lame and crippled in the earthly sense keep pace with him easily.
DO NOT KEEP RELIGION IN YOUR MOUTH. Let it go to your belly; let it be absorbed into your blood. You will never fill your belly if you keep a piece of bread in your mouth.
PEOPLE WORSHIP WORDS AND THINK THEY ARE TRUTH. They mistake a milestone for their destination and settle down beside it. Isn't man's great lethargy at the root of this self-deception?
Only a lazy and insensitive man could accept empty words as truth and think of a stone idol as God.
I WATCH YOU REPEATING MANTRAS and incantations, muttering words you have memorized from the scriptures, and my heart is filled with sympathy for you. What are you doing? Do you take this drugging, this self-forgetfulness, this soul-destroying slumber for some kind of religious practice?
This chanting of mantras and the repetition of words will drown the mind in a pleasant kind of sleepiness but please do not confuse this drowsiness with meditation. There is a very wide gulf between sleep and meditation. In this sleep of self-forgetfulness you may have some sort of experiences, but these experiences are nothing but dreams. Your mind is a master at creating dreams. The may be highly pleasing to you, very satisfying to you, but they are not real just because they make you feel good.
But most people are not looking for truth at all, they are only seeking satisfaction. And so it is very easy to get caught up is any kind of illusion. The mind that is seeking satisfaction is likely to be satisfied with any sort of intoxication, with any kind of self-forgetfulness. This self-forgetfulness can easily be attained through so-called mantras, through recitation of the scriptures, through concentration. Repeating anything over and over again can subdue your consciousness.
Religion is not concerned with self-forgetfulness or with stupefaction. Not at all. Religion is the state of total sensitivity, of remembering the soul completely, of absolute wakefulness.
SALVATION IS NEITHER ACHIEVED BY PRAYER NOR BY WORSHIP. It is not even achieved by faith in religious teachings. Salvation is attained by leading a peaceful life. To remain peaceful in thoughts and deed is prayer and worship. It is also the only spiritual discipline that is necessary.
IF I STEP INTO A RIVER to bathe I leave my clothes on the bank. And the man who wants to wash himself clean in God must leave all of his clothes on the bank as well - all of the apparel that masks his individuality, all of the garments that hide his personality. Only those who are stark naked have access to that great ocean - only those who have nothing left at all. But blessed are they who can leave everything behind them. By doing so they receive much more than the sum-total of all.
HOW CAN YOU DESIRE NIRVANA OR MOKSHA? Nothing is more impossible that the desire for nirvana, than the desire for emancipation, because nirvana is the state where there is not desire at all. And if desire is the absence of liberation, if it is your unliberated state itself, then how can you desire moksha? But there are people who desire moksha. So it is only natural that their so-called spiritual renunciation becomes a form of bondage and chains them even more securely to the world.
Moksha is attained naturally, without asking, without desiring, when the futility of desire is known, when desire is recognized as misery, when the bondage of desire is understood in the subtlest of its subtle forms. When the pointlessness of the race is understood, the race finishes. An understanding of what the pursuit of desire is all about is enough to be liberated from it. And then what remains is moksha.
AREN'T WE ALL JUST LIKE FLOUNDERING, FLAILING FISH that have been caught in a fishermans's net? It seems to me. And yet this is no reason to feel desperate, because I also see something else - not only are we the fish, we are the net and the fisherman as well. And there is the door to freedom. We ourselves are the creators of all our bondages, of all our miseries.
They are the creations of our own minds. And now, from this truth, don't you see the possibilities of salvation WHAT IS RELIGION? If you wish to know religion you will have to forget about religions. Unless you can ignore religions you will never know religion.
AM I TO PROCLAIM GOD TO YOU? Is he not proclaimed all around you? Isn't nature itself God's clearest and loudest proclamation?
LOOK AT THE GANGES. It rushes to the ocean from the mountain peaks. It is the symbol of a righteous life because it has only one aim throughout its whole journey, and that is to unite with the ocean. It wants to lose itself, to lose its individuality in the universal sea. Its bliss lies in its merger with the ocean. And there, there is no difference, no loneliness; there, there are no petty boundaries.
There it is complete. There it has attained its fullness. As long as it still exists as the Ganges it is incomplete.
Become like the Ganges. Seek an ocean. Let there be a single aim in life: the vast ocean; let there be one passion, one zeal: the limitless ocean; let there be a single song in your heart: the boundless ocean. And then just keep flowing.
If the currents of your being are impatient for the ocean your feet will find the path. The river's search for the ocean is its search to lose itself, because this is the only way it will truly find itself. In this single precept all spirituality, all religion and all yoga are united. This is the only bliss, the only truth that man can attain.
I AM THE POOREST OF THE POOR. There is nothing I can call mine. Even I myself am not mine.
Whatever there is belongs to God. God himself is all. But the moment I realized my utter poverty it vanished completely. I am now God too, for "I" am no longer there God alone exists. What is this search for God? It is the search for one's lost home. In this world man is but a homeless wanderer, a stranger in a foreign land.
WHEN I LOOK INTO YOUR EYES MY HEART WEEPS at the agony and disillusionment I see in them. What have you done to yourselves? Man is born with such possibilities, and see how he dies!
He perishes with nothing! His consciousness has the potential of scaling the peaks of divinity and he simply wanders about aimlessly in the valley of the animals. You never experience that perfect happiness that is your birthright; your lives are heavy with the weight of darkness.
Man is in agony because he has not developed his potential, because he has not achieved that which is in his nature to achieve. Education can be the means, the medium for allowing that which is contained in the soul of man to manifest itself.
Socrates once said, "I am like a midwife. I will bring out what is hidden in you." This is a tremendously apt definition of education. Fortune and misfortune are both hidden in man; nectar and poison exist in him; God and the animal both dwell in him. And this gives man the glorious freedom to choose whatever it is he wishes to become. The right kind of education will be the one that shows his the path to godliness.
But it must be remembered that when a man does not strive towards the achievement of a better life he automatically sinks to a level even lower than that of the animal. The fact that a man has been born is enough to achieve this kind of fall. It is always easy to slide down; it requires work and constant application of oneself to rise. It takes effort, courage, determination. Rising upwards is an art, the greatest art in life.
The aim of an authentic education must be to teach this art, to teach the art of becoming one with God. The goal of education must be life itself, not merely providing instruction in how to earn a livelihood. In itself this means nothing. It is often mistaken as the aim of education, but this is tantamount to saying that man does not eat to live but lives to eat. Yet, considering the status of modern eduction this kind of conclusion is unavoidable.
Is this the only failing of the present form of education? If I were to say so, it would be the same as saying that everything is just fine in the body of a dead man except that life is absent. Today's system of education is just such a body. It is totally without life. The means of a man's livelihood is only the existence of his body, and education will only be alive when it teaches life itself.
To teach life is to teach knowledge of the self. A man may know everything else, but if he is unaware of the existence of his self then all of his knowledge is negated. Of what use is knowledge that does not have the self as its center? The illumination of the whole world is useless if the self is in darkness.
To begin this ascent to consciousness, the first step must be in the direction of self-knowledge. The extent to which a man begins to know himself is the extent to which his animality declines. The perfection of self-knowledge a man in God. Only in that attainment is there fulfillment.
Each man carries the seed of that supreme development, of that ultimate perfection within him. And unless those seeds are fertilized he will remain barren. His situation is not unlike that of seeds sown in the earth. Only when they are watered and cultivated do they sprout; only then do they poke through the soil and reach the light of the sun. And the sense of anxiousness, the feeling of restlessness that exists between the sowing and the harvest is an excellent sign, because only after restlessness can there be peace. And education can intensify, can sharpen this wonderful time of restlessness in young people.
When education moves towards real knowledge and real peace, a new man and a new humanity will be born. Our future depends on this. The fate of mankind is in the hands of education. If man is to be saved from himself it is essential he be reshaped, re-created. If this does not happen the animal in man will destroy him. The only escape from this nightmare is for mankind to establish itself in God.
I AM AGAINST THAT KIND OF EDUCATION THAT TRIES TO SHAPE AN INDIVIDUAL IN A PREDETERMINED MOLD. That kind of education does not sharpen one's individuality, it blunts it. I do not favor an education that is based on temptations or on the fear of punishment either. What is more poisonous than fear! I also condemn outer disciplines. What are they except preparations for slavery?
DO NOT TIE YOURSELF TO DISCIPLINES. Real discipline happens when discrimination awakens in you. Then you are liberated. It can never happen if you tie yourself to anything.
HOW CAN I FIND THE WORDS to tell you how much our present so-called educational system distresses me! Knowledge that is taught destroys one's ability to think. The power to think is crushed under the burden of acquired thoughts. The memory may be trained but the springs of real knowledge are never set free. And then the trained memory gives the illusion of knowledge.
The individual who has been educated under this so-called system must learn to think from a whole new standpoint. He has to unlearn everything he has learned thus far. I had to do this. But it had to be done. It was the only way I could look at life through my own eyes.
I had to forget everything I had learned, everything I had been taught. To attain my own vision, I had to get rid of all those second-hand points of view. To think my own thoughts I had to free myself from all the borrowed ideas that had been pumped into me.
If you want to learn to walk you have to stop leaning on someone else's shoulder. And only when you stop looking through someone else's eyes will your own eyes open. Remember, the man who sees life through the eyes of another is even more blind than the man who is born without sight at all.
THE AIM OF EDUCATION IS TO BRING OUT WHAT LIES HIDDEN IN THE INDIVIDUAL. Education is not some external ideal, not some outer imposition, it is a revelation of one's inner being.
I WOULD LIKE TO TELL YOU about something that happened to a fakir I know. He was a very lonely man. One night he met God in a dream. Much to his surprise has saw that God's loneliness was even greater than his. He said to God, "Are you alone too? But so many people believe in you!
Where are they all?"
God replied with serenity, "I am always alone. This is why only a man who is also alone can see me.
And as far as those who believe in me are concerned, as far as those so-called religious people are concerned, when have they ever been with me? A few are with Ram; a few are with Krishna. Some are with Mohammed; some are with Mahavira. But none of them is with me. I am always alone. And only a man who is not with anyone else, who is with himself, is with me."
The fakir awoke in great bewilderment and rushed to see me. He woke me up, told me of his dream, and asked, "What does it mean?"
I said, "If it had only been a dream I would interpret it for you, but it is a fact. Since when does a fact require interpretation? Be aware; just look at it. Those who are attached to any ism, be they Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian or Buddhist, are not religious. Religion is one; only where there is oneness there is religion. To a real religious mind, all these human divisions are false. In the state where one experiences God there are no cults.
"What are the scriptures? What are all the religious organizations? How can you put such boundaries on the boundless? Where are ideologies to be found in that state of inner silence?
In that void, where are the temples? Where are the mosques in that emptiness? Rid yourself of all of these things - and what remains is God."
Before I say anything on the topic of "religion and education" I wish to clarify one point. When I use the word "religion" I do not mean the organized religions. To be religious is different from being Hindu or Mohammedan. Being traditional is being non-religious. It is, in fact, a great barrier to being religious. As long as a man is Hindu or Moslem it is impossible for him to be religious. Those who talk about religion and education and wish to unite them are speaking of Hindu, Mohammedan or Christian when they use the word "religion". This kind of religious education will never result in authentic religion. It will simply make man more irreligious. Mankind has been given this kind of education for the last four or five thousand years but it has neither improved mankind nor brought about any radical change in our society.
More violence, injustice and bloodshed have been perpetuated in the names of Hindu, Mohammedan and Christian than in any other. You may find it hard to understand that the heretics, the non-believers in these religions are not responsible for very great sins at all. It is the theists, those who follow these religions who have committed the truly great sins. Heretics never burn temples or murder for religion, but those who belong to these religions are responsible for incredible massacres. It is those who claim to be religious who have divided humanity.
Words, ideologies, creeds and codes of conduct have set man against man. Ism and organizations have brought chaos and misery to the world. Humanity has been divided, and man's mind has become exceedingly narrow. Continuing to impart such an education in the name of religion is a very dangerous practice and will be even more so in the future. Such an education is not religious at all. Nor can it ever be. Those who have been educated in this manner prove my point. This ideological instruction has given birth to violence, anger and hatred. It has stunted the hearts and minds of men.
So in the first place, I wish to say that by "religious education" I do not mean instruction by any religious organization - not in its likes and dislikes, not in its dogmas, not in its so-called spiritual know-how. If we want to marry religion and education we have to divorce ourselves from the concepts of Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian. Only then can religion and education become a unit, a single entity. Organizations should have no relation with education whatsoever especially those who do so under the guise of religion.
In this context it is preferable to remain non-religious. For the non-religious man there is at least a chance of his becoming religious, but the heart and mind of the so-called religious man are always closed. A man whose mind is closed can never be religious. To discover truth you need a mind that is always kept open, a mind that is completely free.
If you want to find a civilization in the true sense of that word, that civilization can neither be Hindu nor Mohammedan, neither eastern nor western. Such a civilization will have to be total. It will have to be of every individual, of the whole of humanity. Such a civilization cannot be aligned to any particular sect, because so long as there is any division in humanity, any categorization at all, mankind will never be free of frustration or war.
It is very difficult to create such a civilization as long as there is a wall between me and you. As long as there are walls between individuals how can we create a society that can live in love and joy?
The society we have created thus far can certainly not be called a society of love. Fifteen thousand wars have been waged on the earth in three thousand years. In three thousand years, fifteen thousand wars! How hard this is even to imagine! And fifteen thousand wars cannot have been fought in three thousand years without some cause.
What is the meaning of this ratio, five wars a year? It means that in the last three thousand years there has only been a small span of three hundred years in which there have been no wars. But that period of three hundred years was not continuous. Between wars we have only had short lapses - one day here, two days there, a week, ten days. And these brief intervals add up to three hundred years. Three thousand years of war and three hundred years of peace! And it isn't even correct to call those three hundred years peace. At the most they have been a truce. And whatever peace we have today is as unreal. What we call peace is nothing more than the preparation for the next war.
I divide the history of man's evolution into two stages - war, and the preparation for war. We have never had peace. And it is this kind of human behavior that is responsible for the disintegration of mankind.
Who has divided mankind? Who, I ask? Have not the religions done it? Haven't ideologies, codes of conduct and organizations split man asunder? Hasn't the whole petty concept of nations and nationalities separated man from man? But religion is the worst culprit.
All controversy has some identifications with a particular sect inherent in it. And these sects may be religious or political. No matter which, their existence causes controversy and controversy ultimately results in war. Today, Russian communism and American democracy are the new religions.
But I ask if it is not possible to stop this discrimination, to end this division in humanity. Can it not all be traced to our personal ideologies and to our private dreams? Do you think it is right that there should be "my ideas" and "your ideas" when all they do is corrupt the hearts and minds of us both?
Up to now this is what has happened.
No organization based on religious and national preferences can ever be any organization of brotherly love. They are, in fact, organizations of brotherly hate. You must be aware that anyone can be made to join an organization if the poison of hatred sufficiently pollutes the general atmosphere.
Adolf Hitler said somewhere that to unite a community it was necessary to create hatred for another community. Not only did he say this, he put it into action and found the formula to be very effective indeed. And any revolutionary who has ever wanted to create chaos on earth has found it as true and as applicable as Hitler did.
You can unite Mohammedans by shouting "Islam is in danger" and Hindus will really if they hear the same cry about Hinduism. Danger produces fear, and whatever makes a man afraid becomes the object of his hatred. It is his way of reacting to the fear. All organizations and alliances are based on some aspect of his fear and hatred.
All religions say they want to foster love in the world, but since they want individual organizational unity they must ultimately take shelter in hatred. And so they only pay lip service to love. Their hatred of each other is the backbone of each and every one of them.
The religion I am talking about is not an organization at all. It is meditation. It is a sadhana; it is the journey to self-realization itself. It is an experience, an individual experience. It has nothing whatsoever to do with amassing large groups of followers. The experience of religion is a totally individual one.
All these organizations we call religions are based on hatred. But what possible relation can there ever be between hatred and religion? Whatever makes me hate you cannot be called religion. Only something that allows love to flow between you and me can be called religion. How can anything that divides man from man ever unite man with God? But what we call religion does just this - it separates us from each other.
Although the religions all talk about love and say they stand for unity and brotherhood, it is all just hot air. No matter what they have said to date, it has simply resulted in hatred and hostility. Christianity preaches the gospel of love, but no other cult can possibly compete with Christianity in numbers of lives destroyed. Islam is supposed to be a religion of peace and tranquility, but do you know of any other sect that has created more unrest in the world? Perhaps they believe fine sentiments are a good way to cancel out evil deeds!
If a man would like to kill people, then it becomes quite easy to do so in the name of love. And if one wants to indulge in violence it is a simple matter to strike out in defense of nonviolence. If I wished to take your life I could easily convince myself that it would be for your own good because you are going to die anyway. You are going to die one day so why should I feel like a criminal? You would never complain about it to anyone. Man is a very logical animal and can always find a rational excuse for anything he does or wants to do.
Perhaps Satan has led man to believe, from the beginning, that if there is any bad work to be done all he need do is find a good banner under which to do it. The worse the deed, the better the slogan he requires.
Those organizations that exist under the banner of religion have no relation whatsoever with God, with love, with prayer or, indeed, with religion. Mutual hatred and envy hold them together. Otherwise how could there possibly be so much desecration of mosques, burning of temples, smashing of idols and killing of people? How can all this happen? But it has happened, it is happening and it will continue to happen. If this is religion, then it is beyond me to imagine what irreligion is!
A traditional attitude is not religious. If the truth be known, it is the shadow of irreligiousness. That is why the first requirement for a religious education must be total freedom from all organized religions.
So-called religious people say they want their children to learn to live together in harmony, but they insist this be learned under the mantle of their own particular religion. Why is this so? Is it because they are so very interested in religion? No, they are definitely not interested in religion at all. Their concern is only for their own religion. And this kind of self-interest is completely irreligious because anything that has to be identified as "mine" or "yours" is not religion. Religion is only present when there is no "mine' or "yours'. And that is the beginning of the wisdom that leads to God.
Whenever religion is taught by so-called religious people there is always a selfish motive underneath.
This selfishness has very deep and ancient roots. And these very roots themselves are responsible for may different kinds of exploitation.
The younger generation, however, is capable of effecting a radical change in society if it is able to free itself from the vicious circle of its conditioning. This revolution must be one of total deconditioning.
Such a revolution will have far-reaching and adverse effects on those who thrive on the promotion of conflict between men. And those whose livelihood depends on perpetuating this vicious circle of the organized religions will find themselves unemployed. Then the selfishness and exploitation that are based on the differences between men and carried on under the fatherly eye of religion will be greatly undermined.
Under the pretext of religious education the older generation endeavors to pass along all its blind faiths and its ignorance, all its illnesses and its enmity to young people. And that very transmission itself brings great satisfaction to the ego. It is this very ego that does not allow a man to break through the barriers of his conditioning. In the process of human evolution there is no greater obstacle than the ego.
There is only evolution where there is revolution. But the older generation cannot accept the fact that evolution comes through revolution. It prefers the status quo; it wants to keep its old faiths, its old disciplines, its comfortable submissiveness. It wants to hold the younger generation down so that all of its creative energy is destroyed, so that the energy that is capable of discarding the old, and creating the new has no chance to grow. This is cold-blooded murder. But it is done invisibly, in secret. Perhaps they are not even aware of what they are doing; perhaps their actions are completely unconscious. Their fathers and their fathers' fathers have done the same thing; they have behaved as unconsciously towards their children. This vicious circle is a very ancient one indeed. But it must be brought to a Halt! This is the very thing that prevents the union of truth and religion.
What is the basis of this vicious circle? Parents plant the seeds of their own beliefs in their children before the young people have a chance to mature. And for a preconditioned mind to think for itself, to think new thoughts, is an almost impossible task. Faith and creativity exist in opposite dimensions.
Faith is blindness; creativity is self-understanding. And children are deprived of any possibility of understanding themselves by this parental imposition of ready-made answers. And it is in support of something this sinister that so-called religious people are anxious to impart "religious education"
to their children. This is a great misfortune. There is no greater sin than the destruction of creativity.
But parents are always committing this crime and it is one of the basic reasons why real religion does not exist in the world today.
Children have to be taught how to think, not how to believe; they need to be helped to understand themselves, not to have blind faith in someone else's ideas. And only when religion is based on self-knowledge and not of blind faith can it be united with education. And the result will be sheer bliss! When tested with right-thinking and self-understanding, and not simply accepted blindly, even scientific facts can also bring a man bliss!
Did you know that a man who just believes what he is told eventually becomes incapable of any kind of creativity whatsoever, and that all he sees around him then wherever he looks, is frustration? And these are the people who want to educate their children with ready-made formulas so they do not appear stupid! It is so easy for these people to believe they are right. And if someone awakens and realizes the significance and magnitude of this vast network of deceptions, then what do they do to him? They do the same thing to him they did to Socrates and to Christ.
When you consider the question of religious education, it is essential you ask yourselves whether you are not, in fact, bringing darkness to these young minds under the illusion you are bringing them light. Cut and dried concepts have corrupted the vision of many in the name of sight. Any kind of belief is ignorance; any kind of belief is darkness.
Children must be saved from these blind beliefs, but they can only be saved if they are given clarity of mind. They must be helped to think clearly; they must be helped to think creatively. Do not give them thoughts, give them the ability to think. Giving them thoughts means you are giving them your thoughts, but giving them a chance to be creative is giving them something that is their own. That energy is what must be generated. That energy, that energy of creativity, is enough to bring your children lives that are new, fresh and real.
Thinking is the way. Beliefs bring nothing but frustration. That is why I say that a man who is conditioned by beliefs cannot think freely. One who is a Hindu cannot be really creative; one who is a Jain cannot be creative; one who is a communist cannot be creative. His belief itself is his conditioning.
Because thinking can destroy his beliefs, a believer chooses not to think. And this becomes his security. But all this security is, is a denial of himself. Do you not see that belief is an obstacle to creative thinking?
This murder of your minds is being carried out both consciously and unconsciously. A Hindu father wants his son to be a Hindu and a Mohammedan father wants his son to be a Mohammedan, yet this is all decided when the child is an infant and incapable of thinking for himself. But this kind of corruption is only possible during that period; to accomplish this in later years is very difficult indeed.
When the ability to think exists, deception is impossible.
A man's capacity for rational understanding becomes his self-awareness. It is no wonder that so- called religious people are opposed to such reasoning, to such understanding. If the truth be known, they are not even in favor of intelligence. Wherever there is intelligence, creativity and reason, there is revolution. And revolution means the quest for a new way of life. Revolution means leaving the known in search of the unknown. Revolution means breaking through the barriers that separate every older generation from every younger one.
As I see it, revolution is the nucleus of a religious mind. There is no greater revolution than religion.
Religion is a life-transforming process. It is the most radical transformation there is. So, religious education cannot be an education in dullness, in ignorance - it must be an education in profound and creative thinking. A religious education must spark deep reasoning abilities; it must foster creative intelligence.
An innocent child should not be burdened with pat answers or conditioned in ways that go against his basic intelligence, he should be encouraged along paths that will allow his intrinsic intelligence to function freely, actively and with constant awareness. He should be helped to reach a point where it is impossible for him to be conditioned by anything or anyone at all. Only such a mind can be capable of joy, of love. This is what truth is.
Freedom is the path to truth. So allow children to be free. Awaken a sense of freedom in them. Help them to be alert to all possible enslavement of their hearts and minds. This and this alone is what real religious eduction is.
The various religions, however, do not impart this type of education. What they do is exactly the opposite. They provide an education in slavery. This is not an education in creativity, it is an attempt to promote the worship of belief. It is not an education in intelligence, it is an education in ignorance.
It is founded on blindness and not on self-understanding.
Why are all the religions so afraid of creativity? Their fear is definitely not without foundation.There are many fundamental reasons, but the most important one is that if there is too much creative thought many religious organizations will not be able to survive for very long. Religion will endure of course, but religious organizations would be in certain danger.
Any move towards effortless creative thinking is a move in the direction of truth. Just as the rivers flow naturally towards the sea, creativity moves towards the totality. And there in the totality, only truth remains unidentified with anything and unattached to anything.
There cannot be any paths to truth - the truth is one. There is no separate truth for Hindus and Christians, but when their so-called truths are based on blind faith there is no possibility of their having any common denominator whatsoever. Beliefs are obstructions to creativity. Beliefs are imprisoned within their own narrow limitations and because they are static and do not move towards the totality they can never attain oneness. It is because they are confined within such rigid and private structures that there are so many different beliefs in the world.
Thinking is creativity; belief is conditioning. Thinking is self-revolution; belief is self-programming.
A thought may start out from any point but it ultimately leads to deeper realms, towards the center, towards the truth; a belief simply blocks the way to God.
I have heard that there is even a Jain geography! And this type of foolishness exists in other religions as well. Can there even be a separate geography? If it is based on a belief, yes - then it is possible.
Where there is no creative thinking there is fantasy, blind faith and gullibility - and these things all differ from individual to individual.
The truth is one, but each man's imagination is different. No two person's desires are the same; no two people dream the same dream. The truth that exists within the self is universal. It is not someone's dream, not someone's projection, not someone's interpretation.
To perceive truth one needs enormous capacity; one needs a wide-open mind that is constantly alert. The creative totality can only be perceived by a man with great clarity of mind. That is why I say over and over again that if you want your children to know the truth you must give them the chance to think creatively. Stop conditioning them with beliefs; allow them to understand things for themselves. Creativity will become their capacity for life; creativity will become their wisdom. That capacity and that wisdom will lead them to the uncharted sea of truth.
Did you know that Aristotles, that a man of his stature has written that women have less teeth than men! How could he write such a thing? Was there no woman around so he could count her teeth?
Although there was no scarcity of women, he simply accepted the traditional belief and saw no reason to check things out for himself. And he even had two wives of his own! All he had to do was ask either the first Mrs. Aristotle or the second Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth so he could count her teeth! But he never bothered. He never doubted tradition. He simply accepted the belief that women have less teeth than men. If the truth be known, the male ego is not prepared to accept that women can be equal to men in any respect, not even in the number of teeth! And when a man like Aristotle did not doubt a popular belief then who else would.
Doubt is the beginning of discovery. Real doubt is the first step on the path to the discovery of truth.
And that is the beginning of an authentic religious education. Doubt, not faith, is the real foundation of religion. Doubt is the beginning; faith is the end. Doubt is the search; faith is the fulfillment.
The man who sets out in doubt ultimately reaches God, but the man who starts out in faith reaches nowhere at all. He has put the cart before the horse. You can only begin at the beginning. How can you begin at the end? Where there is no doubt there is no thinking, where there is no thinking there is no understanding, and where there is no understanding there is no truth.
Religious organizations teach belief, not doubt. They teach how to follow not who to explore. But an authentic religion will teach how to doubt, how to think, how to discover.
Real perception only comes through self-discovery, and that very discovery itself brings about that radical transformation we know as truth. Truth is discovery, constant discovery. It is a continuing revolution in creative inventiveness. Truth cannot be passed from one hand to another; it can only come from one's own direct experience. Truth cannot be borrowed; it is the result of one's own effort.
Any activity directed towards the discovery of truth is part of a religious education. But as long as religion is hung up on belief, there is virtually no hope for religious education at all. You can call it religious education if you wish, but all it will really be will be Hindu education, Christian education, Mohammedan education. This kind of education is not a religious education at all. This is an education in narrow-mindedness; it is definitely not the way to become broad-minded.
Anyone who has been given this kind of education cannot help but be prejudiced. His intelligence has not been freed; it has become stale, stagnant. He has grown old in heart and mind. To make any kind of discovery a mind that is young and fresh is needed. And a man who is free of prejudices is always young. A man who is free form ideologies and preconceived ideas is forever fresh. A biased mind ages quickly, and a man is conditioned to the same extent he is prejudiced. This kind of mind is not religious but the man who is free from all these ready-made theories and structures lives in religion, in a flow of natural creativity, in self-understanding.
A man's ideologies grow out of his identification with his environment, but these are simply outward expressions. Like dust covers a mirror, ideologies veil one's consciousness. The mirror of consciousness must not be coated with the dust of stock answers, blind beliefs and preconceived ideas, it must be clear.
An authentic education in religion and in meditation gives birth to an aspiration for freedom. Religion is the way to free the intelligence from all of its complexes. But the religion that is offered in the marketplace is not real religion at all, and before religion can enter the domain of education it must free itself from virtually all other involvements. Only then it can bring a new creativity and intelligence to the younger generation.
Young people have to learn to live in religion. It has to become part of their daily lives, and until this comes to pass their lives will remain crippled, twisted and out of harmony.
If we think only in terms of our outer environment, our inner being will remain unknown, undiscovered. As long as our attention is towards material things alone we are deprived of God. This a costly affair, this forsaking of diamonds for pebbles. Of what value are outer comforts when you compare them with the inner experience? Can you compare worldly pleasure with the unfathomable joy of God, with the bliss of the unknown? You have to come to know the heart, the core of your being. The heart and soul of all your activities must become the discovery of your inner being. As long as this urge towards inner discovery is missing in you, your life will never be total.
I do not want to see religion and education joined together in name only; I want to see the core of life become the focal point of education as well. And the unknown is the foundation. Unless a man is in communion with the unknown, with God, there is neither meaning nor significance to his life.
And how can there be any joy in a life that is empty of all meaning? There is joy in life only when there is meaning to life.
Science is the discovery of things useful to life; religion is the discovery of the significance of life itself. Science is incomplete on its own, and religion is as incomplete. There can only be perfection and joy in the union, in the combined virtues of the two. The same it true of religion and education.
One universe exists outside man. But that is not all. A universe exists within him too. One is the goal of objective research; the other, of inward discovery. But subjective discovery must not be ignored at the expense of objective research. If this happens we will have power but we will have no peace, we will have outer comforts but no inner serenity. And what is the point of possessing worldly riches at the cost of inner peace? This kind of success is tantamount to defeat and failure.
There was once a holy woman named Rabiya. One morning someone called to her from outside her hut, "Rabiya, come out! The sunrise is so beautiful. The morning is exquisite. Come out!"
Rabiya replied, "My friend, I invite you to come in. In here I am looking at the creator of that very sun, of that very morning you are admiring outside. Shouldn't you be inside too? I have seen the outer beauty. Have you never seen the beauty that is inside?"
One world is the objective one. It is very beautiful indeed, and anyone who wants to pit mankind against the outer world has no intelligence whatsoever. This outer world is tremendously beautiful, and those who reject its splendors without understanding are against the welfare of humanity. The beauty of the outer world is beyond question, but there is a world inside that is infused with a beauty that has no limit. The man who stops at the outer world has stopped halfway.
Such a man has been in a hurry to settle down; he has confused the means with the end. He has mistaken the door for the palace and is standing on the staircase. He must be shaken up; he must be awakened. He has to be directed towards the goal so he can continue on his way.
Children must be given a sense of the same goal so they won't stop somewhere en route. It must be the aim of a religious education to help children understand the goal so their lives don't grind to a halt at the half-way mark.
It is absolutely essential to understand that learning is only concerned with the exploration and discovery of the outer world. On its own, objective research is incomplete. The concentration of education must be on subjectivity, on inner discovery. But the search of religion as we know it is not subjective at all. The religions may talk a lot about the inner, but their talk is empty, unless.
Their temples are outside, their mosques are outside, their idols are outside, their scriptures are outside, their ideologies are outside, and every day we see them fighting over external things. Their whole insistence is on the outer. These so-called religions do not lead mankind towards any sort of subjective exploration whatsoever.
One morning a Negro approached a clergyman standing at the door of his church and asked permission to enter. Now how can a man with black skin enter a church that belongs to men with white skin? The very people who talk about subjectivity all the time never fail to notice whether a mans skin is black or white! And those who go on and on about God in this country are also very aware of whether a man is a Brahmin or an untouchable!
The priest said, "My friend, what would you do in church? So long as your mind is impure or restless, what good will it do you to go in?"
Times have changed and along with them, the priest has changed his way of putting things. In the past he simply would have obstructed the man, saying, "Begone. Your sort is not allowed here." But times have changed and he has had to change his tone. But his heart has not changed. He stills manages to keep those he considers undesirable out. He did not say "You are untouchable and unchaste, so go away" but he did say, "My friend, what good will it do you? So long as your mind is impure and not at rest, how will you understand God? Go and purify your mind first." This is what he said to the Negro. But if a man with white skin had come to the church he would have said nothing at all. As if having white skin guaranteed peace of mind!
That innocent black man withdrew. The clergyman must have rejoiced. He must have thought the man would never attain peace of mind in a million years, and so would never come back again. The Negro never did come again in fact - but he did attain tranquility.
A year rolled by and one day the priest saw the Negro walking down the street in front of the church.
He looked totally different. He radiated a divine glory and was surrounded by a celestial glow. The priest thought he was going to try to come into the church again, and the idea upset him greatly. But his fears were groundless. The Negro continued down the street without so much as a glance in the direction of the church. The priest could not contain himself. He ran after him and asked, "Where have you been? I have not seen you around here in quite some time."
The Negro laughed and said, "My friend, thank you. I followed your advice. For the past year I have been trying to attain peace of mind so that I might come to church. But last night God himself appeared to me in a dream and said, "Why do you want to go to church? To see me? Let me tell you, I have been trying to get in myself for the past ten years. If the priest won"t let me in, he'll never allow you to enter!"
I would like to say that not only has God been unable to get into that particular church. He has never been allowed into any! Any church or temple built by man cannot be greater than man. And those man-made churches and temples are so small and insignificant there isn't enough room for God! A temple built by someone whose mind is not a temple itself is of no use whatsoever.
One who has never experienced God within will never find him somewhere outside. God makes his first appearance to a man within the man himself. And that first appearance is total. There is no outer way to reach the totality; the inner is the only route.
One's self is the closest thing to God; instead of searching for him far and wide one has to discover him within. If a man cannot find something so close, how can he expect to find anything that is far away? God is not experienced in the temples; God is experienced within. Because of this, the religions of the temples and mosques can never be united with education. Nor should they.
Their influence is just more insistence on the outer, and any insistence on the objective world is an obstacle blocking the way to inner discovery.
I feel like laughing when I hear them talking in the universities about the education imparted by religious organizations in the temples. Doesn't man learn anything at all from history? Haven't we already seen what the religions of the temples and mosques can accomplish and cannot accomplish?
There is no need for any kind of outward religious formalities or rites whatsoever. If they were only useless there would be no problem, but they are really very harmful. Religion is not to be found in any kind of externalization, and so any type of outward ritual is a non-religious act. This should be as easy to understand as two plus two equals four.
There is also a real temple of God, but it cannot be built from bricks and mortar. A temple built of stone can be Hindu, Christian, Jain or Buddhist, but it cannot belong to God. Something that is the private property of some organization cannot belong to God as well. There cannot by any structure to God's temple because he is whole, total. God's temple can only be the temple of consciousness.
That temple is not in the sky or on the earth, it is in the soul itself. And it does not have to be built.
God's temple is already there. It need only be unveiled.
So for an education to be integrated with religion, it cannot have anything to do with the religions of the temples and mosques. It must only be associated with that religion that can unveil the temple hidden within the self.
What exists within is what has to be understood, because to understand that can bring about a revolution in one' life. To understand truth means to effect a radical transformation in one's life.
An education which does not uncover the inner truth, which does not discover God, is not only incomplete but also very dangerous. And it is this incompleteness itself that is the root cause of the failure of today's educational system.
The education of the young man who has just completed his university training these days is thoroughly incomplete. He is absolutely unaware of what throbs at the core of his being, at the heart of life itself. He has no understanding of truth or of beauty; he is totally unacquainted with love.
He enters the world with certain trivial facts he has learned and these are all he has to live with, all he has to live by. This kind of a life never brings him peace, and his consciousness gradually becomes suffocated by a sense of purposelessness, of superficiality, of futility. The living creativity that is life is lost in a desert of pointlessness - and his reaction to this is anger and frustration towards the world in general. This is what happens to a non-religious mind.
A religious mind, on the other hand, is filled with bliss and with a sense of benediction. A religious mind is grateful to all. But this only happens when a man is total, when his whole being pulsates with joy. This joy and this feeling of totality are only available to the man who has understood his self, who has come to know his inner being. Until it merges with religion there can never be such a thing as real education, because the consciousness of one's inner being is the foundation of life itself. To understand this, to be open to this is indispensable if a man is to live his life to the full.
Religion is the education of the inner man.
So what should we teach? Should we teach what is contained in the scriptures? Should we teach codes of moral conduct? Should we tell our children our ideas about God, about the soul, about heaven, about hell, about salvation? No, absolutely not. Such an education will not be a religious education at all. Such an education can never lead a man inside. Such an education is first passing along one's own prejudices; such an education is simply memorizing words and trite phrases. All this does is give birth to misconceptions which in themselves are even more dangerous than ignorance.
Wisdom only comes from self-understanding. Knowledge that is acquired from others is not wisdom.
Knowledge acquired from others is simply the illusion of wisdom. This illusion only acts as a veil over one's own ignorance and shuts the door on creative discovery forever. To understand one's ignorance is a truly beautiful thing, because it leads a man to the discovery of his own creativity. But to accept acquired knowledge as gospel is very dangerous indeed. The contentment that borrowed knowledge brings is a barrier that can stop a man from making any further attempts at discovery.
I once visited an orphanage where some hundred children lived. The administrator informed me they also gave the children a religious education, and so to show me he began putting questions to the youngsters.
"Is there a God?" he asked.
The children answered, "Yes, there is a God."
"And where is he?" the administrator inquired.
The children pointed their fingers towards the sky.
"And where is the soul?"
The children said, "Here" and put their hands on their chests.
I watched the whole thing. The administrator and the teachers were very pleased with themselves.
They said to me "You may also ask something."
I asked one small child, "Where is your heart?"
He looked around, a bit confused, and then said, "They haven't taught us that yet."
Can you call this religious education: Is the repetition of memorized answers what education is?
Wouldn't the world have become religious long ago if it were that easy? I informed the administrator and the teachers that the education they were giving those children was not a religious education at all, that all they were doing was training the children to become parrots. If an individual learns to memorize certain things and to repeat them mechanically his intelligence suffers greatly. And then when life faces him with a challenge, the type of challenge that could be a doorway to the discovery of truth, he will repeat what he has memorized and be quite satisfied with it.
"Your teaching techniques are murdering their sense of inquiry," I said. "They know neither the soul nor God and this putting their hands on their chests and pointing to the sky to show where they are, is a complete sham. And you say you are giving them a religious education!
"But isn't your own understanding the same as that of a child's?" I asked. "Aren't you just repeating what someone has told you?"
And they began looking around in confusion, just like that child.
From generation to generation we continue to pass the same empty words along - and we call them knowledge. Can truth be taught? Can truth be memorized? Is truth something to be repeated by rote?
In the material world, these techniques can be of some use, just as symbols are effective in indicating knowledge man has acquired about the objective world. But as far as God is concerned, symbols are meaningless, valueless, God's dimension is not one of symbols; it is the realm of understanding alone. It is the dimension of direct perception. One can be there, can live there - but this cannot be taught. When one is there, both teaching and learning become play, just like being on a stage.
Can anyone learn love? If a man thinks he has learned love somewhere then it is not love at all, it is just an act. This is the reason that all acquired knowledge about God and dogmas is so phony; this is the reason worship and prayer have become so false. If love cannot be learned, how can one learn how to pray? Prayer is a deeper aspect of love. And if a man cannot learn about love, then how is there the remotest possibility he can be taught to understand God? The fulfillment of love itself is God.
The truth is unknown, and with what is known - with rules, codes of conduct, words - one cannot reach the truth. To enter into the unknown a man must leave all he knows behind him. Freeing oneself from the known is the beginning of facing the unknown. Unlearning all one knows is better than receiving a so-called religious education. In this case, forgetting is better than remembering.
Nothing more should be imprinted on one's consciousness; what has to happen is that everything already written there must be erased.
When the consciousness is freed of words it becomes the mirror to truth. One's consciousness must not be allowed to become a storehouse of ideologies, it must be made the very mirror of truth itself.
Only then will religious education become less education, in the ordinary sense of the word, and more an active sadhana, more a direct journey to truth itself. Preparing a man for this sadhana is what a religious education is.
An education in religion is not like an academic education, and so no examination is possible. The test of religious education is life itself; life is its examination.
After completing their university educations three young men were preparing to return to their homes. They were examined in all their subjects, but not in religion. They had been surprised at not being examined in religion; they had simply been given passing grades.
When they left the school, night was beginning to fall. As they walked along they came across a thorny branch that had fallen onto the road from a nearby tree. The first youth jumped over the branch, the second skirted it, then the third picked it up and placed it safely out of the way.
The others asked, "What are you bothering with that for? It's getting dark and we should hurry if we want to be out of the forest before it's pitch black."
"That is exactly why I'm removing the branch." he said. "If anyone else comes along in the darkness he won't be able to see it and might step on the thorns."
At this point their teacher stepped out from behind the tree. To the third youth he said, "My son, you may go. You have passed your religious examination." He led the other two back to school to complete their educations.
Can there be any other examination for life except life itself? Religion is life itself. Those who think they are educated, simply because they have passed some exam are living in illusion. Where examinations end one's real education begins, because the end of schooling is the beginning of life.
Then what is to be done about religious education? The seed of religion exists in everyone. Truth exists in each of us; life exists in each of us. An environment that allows the evolution of that seed must be created and barriers that stand in the way of its development must be removed. If this can be accomplished, then with its own spontaneous and inherent capacity for life the seed will find its true course. For its natural evolution no effort is required at all. And that instinctive activity itself is what life is all about. When a man evolves naturally his life will be full of joy, full of beauty, full of love.
All we must do is to create the correct environment and let life take its natural course. This will be a real religious education. Educational institutions are quite capable of providing the kind of atmosphere necessary to allow religion to find its own natural and spontaneous route. And as well, circumstances can be created to remove all the barriers that stand in the way of this natural evolution of religion.
To create this opportunity there are three fundamental requirements. The first element is courage.
An individual needs tremendous courage. The first requirement on the road to the discovery of truth, in the search for God, is courage. To discover God a man needs more courage than he does to climb the Himalayas or to plumb the depths of the ocean. There is no loftier deed, no effort more profound than the discovery of God.
But so-called religious people are usually not courageous at all. In fact, their religiousness is generally an escape from their cowardice. Both religion and God are masks to hide their fear.
A mind that is afraid can never be religious.
To be religious fearlessness is essential. Courage grows out of fearlessness, so the first thing is not to teach fear, not to teach children any kind of fear at all! And the second thing is to instill a sense of fearlessness in them. Fearlessness is such a glorious thing. It is so radiant, so tremendous! Real religion can only be built on a foundation of fearlessness.
The so-called religions exploit men through fear, and it is because of this and this alone that religion is in the state it is in today. It has not been able to transcend the material world at all. Can there ever be any kind of transcendence when fear is so deep? Whenever I go to a temple, to a mosque or to a church, I see people huddled together in fear. Their prayers are nothing more than reactions to their fear, and the God before whom they kneel is nothing more than a personification of that fear.
A man runs to God in times of crisis because that is when he is most afraid. And at the end of his life a man rushes headlong to God because death terrifies him even more than anything else.
Go to a temple and look. Visit a church. You will only see people there who are either approaching death or who are already dead. Such fear should not be taught. We should teach fearlessness instead. Only then will religion become the religion of the living.
Why are you so afraid to teach fearlessness? One of your fears is that young people will deny God.
But this only frightens you because your God is based in fear.
What is wrong with denying God? I say it is wrong just to accept him, I am so keen on fearlessness that I say it is fine to deny God - if we do not know him ourselves. Where there is no denial there is no fearlessness. And unless a man denies what is false for him how can he ever discover what is true?
As I see it, an atheism that has arisen out of a man's fearlessness is just the other side of theism; it is a fundamental factor in the growth of theism. How can a man who has not been an atheist ever become a theist? It is much more difficult to be a theist than to be an atheist. But if a man is afraid of atheism then his theism is totally false; then he is a theist simply because he is afraid of being an theist. And of what value is his theism?
I prefer an atheism based on fearlessness to a theism based on fear because there can never be real religion where fear exists. A religion is only creative when fearlessness exists. Passing through atheism is a joy; it makes one's being more vital, more energetic. If a man becomes a theist without first having gone through a period of atheism his theism is empty. The atheist will always be there, hidden in the deeper regions of his mind. But if one passes through atheism completely he is free of it forever.
Atheism is denial. If a society is against God and against religion, then in that society it will be atheism to believe in God. The denial of what is generally accepted and believed is atheism.
This period of denial is very useful, a very valuable stage in the maturing process of an individual.
One who has not passed through this period of denial will always remain immature. And maturity only comes through one's own personal experience, though one's own fearlessness, through one's courage to experience life.
What is the greatest courage? The greatest courage is to deny what is false for you. If you are not convinced that God exists then do not accept his existence. Though someone may try his utmost to convince you, may tempt you with heaven or threaten you will hell, do not let yourself be convinced if you are not sure. It is better to lose heaven and prepare for hell than to be afraid. It is ruinous to be afraid. Only a man who possesses great courage is capable of discovering the truth.
What does a man who is afraid do? Such a man is ready to accept anything and everything because of his fear. In a theist society he becomes a theist; in Soviet Russia he becomes an atheist. He is dead, a shadow of the society. He cannot be called alive. Only fearlessness can bring an individual's creativity to the fore.
A few people came to see me yesterday. They said, "We believe in the eternity of the soul," but their faces betrayed their fear of death.
I said, "Don't you just believe this because you are afraid of death? Those who are afraid of death always feel consoled when they are told the soul is eternal."
What I said to them makes no difference whatsoever. And it makes no difference whether the soul is eternal or not. The question is whether one who is afraid of death can ever discover or understand life! Fearlessness is the most essential factor on the path to the discovery of truth.
And I want to say to you as well that those who are the most afraid of death are those who have the greatest faith in the eternity of the soul. Their faith is equal to their fear. Are such people ready to open their eyes and face the facts? The truth can never be experienced unless one is fearless.
Yes, the soul is eternal, but this is not the belief of a frightened mind, it is an experience of consciousness. A frightened mind does not want the truth, it wants to escape into whatever makes it feel secure. A mind full of fear does not really want to know truth, it wants consolation. And such a man will grab onto any belief which gives him the security and consolation he is looking for.
But how can beliefs, persuasions or past experiences give any security or consolation? There is no security except in truth. Only in truth is there contentment and peace. To discover the truth one needs a mind that is free from this desire for false security and well-being. This is why I say infinite courage is the greatest religious virtue.
A priest was giving a sermon on courage to a group of children and the youngsters asked for an example. He said, "Suppose twelve children are staying in a hill-station. It is a very chilly night. All the children are tired from their journey and ready to go to bed. Eleven of the twelve children jump into bed and snuggle down into the blankets immediately, but despite the cold one child kneels down to say his prayers. To me, this is courage. Don't you find this courageous?
One child spoke up. "Suppose there were twelve priests in the inn," he said, "and eleven kneeled down in prayer. And suppose the twelfth priest covered himself with a blanket and jumped into bed.
Wouldn't this be courage too?"
I have no idea how that priest handled that young boy's question, but I do know that just too be oneself takes great courage. To stand on one's own, free of the crowd, is courage. To help a child to be as he is, is to give him courage. Courage is confidence in oneself, in one's self. Courage is self-confidence.
Along with courage, give children understanding, give them self-awareness. This is the second fundamental requirement of education. If there is no understanding, then courage can be dangerous on its own. Then, instead of helping a child to become self-confident, courage can pervert him, make him egoistic. Courage is an energy; understanding is vision. Courage is a force; understanding is sight.
Have you heard the story of the lame man and the blind man? Once the forest they were in caught fire and they were both trapped. Naturally each of them wanted to escape the flames. The blind man could run but he could not see. And since the forest was on fire what chance would he have anyway? The lame man could see but he could not run. So of what use was his sight? There was no way he could run from the fire! But they found the solution and they both escaped death. The blind man carried the lame man on his shoulders.
This is not only a tale of the blind and the halt, it is also a story of courage and understanding. If a man wants to rescue himself from the fire of ignorance, from the burning forest of this environment, he needs courage that is guided by understanding.
Most people live their lives in ignorance. Man is asleep, in a deep hypnotic sleep. He is in the deep sleep of self-forgetfulness. Becoming conscious, becoming aware of one's self, rouses one from this sleep - and self-understanding is born. Children must be educated in awareness. They must become aware of their whole beings. And they must be helped to develop self-understanding.
Generally, all of our conscious activities are outer ones. We are only aware of what goes on outside.
But that very energy can be directed inside, towards the self, towards an awareness of one's self.
This understanding results in an awareness that awakens a man from the sleep of ignorance to the reality of his own being.
Nothing that is perpetuated in the name of religion, be it hymns or prayers, brings any kind of self- understanding of awareness whatsoever. These things bring nothing but self-forgetfulness. The contentedness a man feels through this kind of religious activity is akin to the enjoyment he gets from a good night's sleep, like the happiness he feels when he's had a few drinks.
Educational institutions are the perfect places to begin instilling awareness in young people. And the awareness must be all-encompassing, on all levels - on the physical level, on the mental level and at the level of the child's inner being, at the level of his soul. If everything is done in awareness, done with understanding, life can be filled with consciousness. Alertness to each and every aspect of a child's mental creativity will bring total awareness and understanding to his life. Constant awareness of one's inner being results in self-awareness and self-knowledge.
The third fundamental requirement in a religious education is stillness, silence, tranquility. Words are the most offenders. Words disturb the mind; they make it tense. The mind is always thinking. It thinks and thinks and thinks. It is never at peace.
By stillness I mean peace of mind. Being in a state of stillness and watchfulness generates freshness, youthfulness. In a state of stillness, of total silence, the mind becomes crystal clear.
It becomes a mirror in which truth is reflected.
Tell me, what can a disturbed mind understand? What can such a mind ever discover? Such a mind becomes so caught up in its own machinations it has no interest in exploring any new avenues whatsoever.
The discovery of truth requires a mind that is totally still, completely calm, empty of thoughts. This mental state is meditation. And children can be easily directed towards this calm and quiet state of mind, towards meditation. The mind has a natural tendency towards tranquility, and intrinsic attraction towards silence.
The mind must be totally calm. It must be as peaceful as a man is when he is simply floating on the waves - not swimming, simply floating on the waves. Just floating. No movement at all. And this action of complete inactivity will lead a man to a silence he has never known before. And in that peace, in that silence, the mystery and the joy of life appear before him. It is then he perceives the truth.
In fact, truth has always been there. Because of his frustrations it was invisible to him. In silence, in total peace, his self is revealed.
Religious education then is an education in courage, understanding and peace. Religious education is an eduction in fearlessness, in awareness, in stillness, in thoughtlessness. And without a doubt, such an education can be the foundation of a new generation, the foundation of a new humanity.
I hope you will meditate upon what have said to you today. I do not want you just to believe what I have said, I would like you to meditate on my words, to experience them for yourselves. You only require an attitude that is free of prejudice; you only need to test what I have said by your own experimentation.
When tested in the fire of self-experience, the truth becomes pure gold.
I HAVE FORGOTTEN WHAT I HAVE LEARNED, I have realized the only thing worth learning but it is something that cannot be taught. In order to realize the truth are your ready to forget everything you have ever learned about it? If your answer is "yes" then come, the door of truth is open for you.
- Osho, "The Long the Short and the All, #3"
|
Oshofriends Links
"Just sitting silently doing nothing, Witnessing whatsoever is happening, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself."
All Osho Talks on this site © OSHO International Foundation .
2007 ~ 2024. Oshofriends.com by Flowerrain - The New Man