Not Religion But Religiousness

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.

Spirituality & Science

The East has lived religiously -- that is one pole -- and because IT has lived religiously it has not been able to produce science. The West has lived scientifically, and because of its science it has lost track of religion. Now for the first time, the East is no more East and the West is no more West. The earth is becoming one: the earth is becoming one. global village. This is the time when the reconciliation can be seen, can be understood. Man is entering into a new phase; a new consciousness is to dawn. For at least ten thousand years, as far as consciousness is concerned, nothing new has happened. There have been Buddhas and there have been Albert Einsteins, but we are still waiting for a Buddha who is also an Albert Einstein or an Albert Einstein who is also a Buddha. The day is coming closer and closer. Albert Einstein in his last days was very much interested in meditation, in religion. His last days were full of wonder. He said in his old age, "I used to think when I was young that sooner or later all the mysteries of existence would be solved, and I worked hard. But now I can say that the more we know, the more existence turns out to be mysterious. The more we know, the less we know and the more we become aware of the vastness...." Science has not been able to demystify existence. Now this is recognized not by ordinary technicians but by geniuses, because they are the pioneers; they can see the dawn very close by, they are the prophets. Albert Einstein says that science has failed in demystifying existence, that on the contrary it has mystified things even more. For example, it was so easy in the old days, just a hundred years ago, for the scientist to say that all is matter. Now matter has disappeared; in neo-physics there is no entity called matter. The deeper the physicist went into the world of matter, the more matter was not to be found at all: it is pure energy. How to define energy now? Is it material? Energy cannot be material; energy is something totally different from matter. Matter is static, energy is dynamic; matter is a noun, energy is a verb. Matter is measurable. That is exactly the meaning of the word 'matter': it comes from 'measure', the root means 'measurable'. Matter can be measured, that's why it is called matter. Energy is immeasurable, it cannot be called matter. And as the physicist has entered into the world of energy, he has become more and more puzzled; never before has he been so puzzled. Mystics have always been in awe before existence. The physicist is for the first time in awe, because he has for the first time touched something very vital otherwise he was just looking from the outside. A stone is just a stone from the outside. The physicist now knows that the stone is not just a stone: it contains universes. A single small pebble that you can hold in your hand contains so much atomic energy that the whole universe can grow out of it, contains so much atomic energy that the whole universe can be destroyed by it. It is not just a pebble any more and it is not solid any more. You are holding it in your hand and you know it is solid, but your knowing is no longer scientific. It only appears solid; it is liquid. And it looks so available, manipulatable; you can do things with it. But you don't know its mysteries which are not manipulatable, and the mysteries are really immense -- almost as immense as the mystery of God itself. The modern physicist is using the language of the mystics for the first time. Eddington said, "The universe no longer looks like a thing but like a thought." This, from the mouth of a scientist, a Nobel prize-winner -- the universe looks like a thought and not like a thing? That means the universe is more consciousness than matter. And matter has been analyzed, our penetration has become deeper; we have come across atoms, electrons, neutrons -- and we are utterly mystified, at a loss even to express what we have come across. We don't have the language, the right language for it, because we have never known it. Now the right language has to be found in the words of the mystics: a Buddha will be helpful, a Lao Tzu will be helpful And scientists ARE looking into the words of the Buddhas to find the right language, because these are the people who have been talking about paradox, mystery. And now science is coming across paradoxes. The greatest paradox is that the electron behaves in such a mysterious way that the scientist has no language to express it. It behaves simultaneously as a particle and as a wave. This is impossible, inconceivable for the mind. Either something is a particle or it is a wave; the same thing cannot be both at the same time. You know Euclidean geometry: either something is a point or something is a line; one thing cannot be a point and a line together at the same time. A line means many points following each other in sequence; a single point cannot function like a line. But that's now electrons are functioning -- simultaneously as a point and as a line, as a particle and as a wave. What to make of it? How to say it? The scientist is dumb. Now he knows that the mystics, who have always been talking in paradoxes, who have been saying God is far away and very close by, must be saying something through their experience. The mystics who used to say that life and death are one, not two, for the first time are becoming relevant to the scientist's mind. A new science is arising which says it is a science of uncertainty. NO more certainty! Certainty seems to be too gross. Mahavira, twenty-five centuries ago, used to make each of his statements with a 'perhaps'. If you asked him, "Is there a God?" he would say, "Perhaps." In those days it was not understood at all -- because how can you say, "Perhaps"? Either God is or is not. It seems so simple and so logical: "If God is, God is; if he is not, he is not. What do you mean by 'perhaps'?" Now it can be understood. Mahavira was using the same language in religion that is being used by Albert Einstein in physics. Albert Einstein calls it the theory of relativity. Mahavira has called his philosophy exactly the same: SAPEKSHAWAD -- the theory of relativity. Nothing is certain, everything is flexible, fluid. The moment you have said something, it is no longer the same. Things don't exist, Mahavira says, but only events. That's what modern science is saying, that there are no things in the world, but only events. And we cannot say anything absolutely, we cannot say, "This is so." Whenever somebody says absolutely, "This is so," he is behaving foolishly. In the past he was thought to be a man of knowledge; the more certain he was, the more it was thought that he knew. The uncertain person, the hesitating person, was thought to be ignorant. That's why Mahavira could not influence the world very much; he came too early, he arrived before his time. Now is the time for him -- now he will be understood by the scientist, by the highest intelligence in the world. But he was talking to people, the ordinary masses, who could not understand his SYADAWAD -- his perhaps-ism. People wanted certain knowledge: "Is there a God?" And Mahavira would say, "Perhaps. Yes -- in one way it can be said yes, and in another it can be said no. And both are right together, simultaneously." Now the time has come. Don't try to reconcile things -- that will be a false phenomenon. Just watch, just look deep into things as they are. They are already reconciled; there is no conflict in existence. All contraries are complementaries.