An Oceanic Experience…
To be religious is an experience, just like love. It is an encounter with the totality of existence.
It is an oceanic experience, the dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. You can say either the dewdrop has become the ocean, or you can say the ocean has become the dewdrop.
It is the greatest experience there is.
But to belong to a religion is not an experience, it is just a belief system in which you have been brought up. It is all borrowed.
And remember that truth cannot be borrowed. Either it is yours, or it is not there.
Religion, is not in the holy scriptures but in the holiness of existence.
It is a prayer without words. It is a song without sound. It is pure silence. And in that silence, existence speaks to you.
In that silence, you speak to existence, there is a dialogue, there is a transfer of energy.
But to be a part of an organized religion is to be not really alive, not really in search of truth, not in love with existence. It is a kind of death – although you go on breathing, you go on eating. But all your breathing and all your eating drive you only towards the graveyard. You don’t grow up, you only grow old.
The organized religions are all dead; the churches, the temples, the mosques, the synagogues… they are all graveyards of the past. And the sooner we convert them into museums the better, otherwise they are going to kill the whole of humanity, they have already killed too much in every man. They have crippled everybody, poisoned everybody; their destruction is uncountable.
The rebellious man cannot accept any of this idiocy. His religion is his intelligence.
His religion is his consciousness.
His religion is his awareness.
And out of his awareness, he starts living for the first time, and he knows that life is the only God there is – there is no other God.
The true religion has no name, it cannot have any name. Buddha lived it, Jesus lived it – but remember, Jesus was not a Christian and Buddha was not a Buddhist, he had never heard of the word.
The truly religious people have been simply religious, they have not been dogmatic…
It is strange – so strange that it is almost unbelievable – that there are three hundred religions in the world and there is no peace, no joy, no celebration, no holiness, no divineness anywhere – this is such an absurdity!
If truth is one, how can there be three hundred religions? If science, which is concerned with the objective truth is one, then religion is also one, because it is concerned with the subjective truth, the other side of the truth…
Osho: The Rebel
GateLessGate Magazine 