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religious but you want to pretend. And you want to pretend in such a way that not even you yourself can catch yourself pretending. You want to pretend in such a way that you don't ever come across your pretensions, so a great structure is created. And that great structure is the church. Avoid that structure if you really want to become religious. And unless you are religious you are not!
Now let me tell you this paradox; You are only when you are not, because you are only when the ego has disappeared and you are God. That is the first principle. I am not telling it to you, and you are not hearing it from me.
It happened:
The car suddenly broke down in the middle of nowhere. He crawled underneath to see what the trouble was. She crawled underneath to hold the torch for him. It was quite cozy under there and, after a while, they forgot about car repairs. Suddenly a voice said, "And just what do you two think you are doing?"
Looking up they saw the local village constable.
"Why we are -- er -- repairing the back axle," the young man stammered.
"Well, while you are down there, you had better look at the brakes as well," replied the law. "Your car has been at the bottom of the hill for the past half hour."
That's what has happened to churches. Jesus is not there, the Buddha is not there. People are doing something else in the name of Jesus, in the name of Buddha, and they are thinking Buddha is there. Church is the last place where you can meet Jesus, and the temple, the Buddhist temple, is the last place where you can meet a Buddha. But you go to the church, you go to the temple... and you think you are going to Buddha and to Jesus.
You are great pretenders. You want to pretend. You want to be respectable. You want to show to everybody that "We are religious people." So we have created a Sunday religion; every Sunday you go. Six days for the world; one day -- not the whole day -- one or two hours -- for God. Just in case something goes wrong or maybe really God is or maybe one survives death. These are all perhapses. And a perhaps never changes anybody's life; only a certainty changes somebody's life.
Hence
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