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Main Index
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lives for a while and then dies. But followers go on clinging to the dead body. Then the dead body kills the followers also: it becomes a source of illness, neurosis: it becomes an abnormality, a cancerous growth. When religion becomes ill or dead, it kills you; it is poisonous. This has to be understood from many directions.
Firstly, people are more willing to be in a dead religion than to be in an alive one, because you have been taught to be afraid of life, of love, of happiness. Every child is brought up in the world with a conditioning: with a feeling that there is something wrong in being happy. A very vague feeling, but it is there. It influences your whole life, you think that there is something wrong in being happy. So whenever you feel happy, you feel guilty -- as if you have been committing some wrong, as if you have been sinning.
Only sinners seem to be happy, saints seem to be very sad. So whenever you are sad, everything is okay. You never feel guilty if you are sad -- have you observed it? But if you are very happy, suddenly you try to hide it; nobody should know it. Why has this happened to the human mind?
Every child is taught to be serious, somber, to be long faced. Every child is taught not to jump, not to run, not to shriek, not to be too delighted, not to laugh loudly. "Sit quietly" -- as if there is something wrong in energy expressing itself. Whenever the child is happy the family, the people around, all start teaching him, as if something has gone wrong. And when the child is not happy, when he is unhappy, everybody sympathizes with him.
When the child is ill, everybody takes care of him; when he is healthy, everybody goes on stopping him: "Don't do this, don't do that." When the child is Lying on the bed ill, the father comes, the mother comes, the relatives come. They are all very careful about him. By and by he starts learning that there is something basically wrong in energy, in happiness, in joy. In dancing, running around, shrieking with delight, there is something basically wrong. He gets the hint.
And there is something basically good in being sad, ill. Whenever he is sad, he is appreciated, sympathized
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