| |
cowards, and because of these cowards, religion has become a pseudo phenomenon. These cowards gather in temples, churches, mosques. They worship out of fear, their God is nothing but their projection of fear. They are seeking security in God, safety in God. They believe because they are afraid. Not that they know: they don't make any effort to know, they avoid all possibilities of knowing. They simply believe because belief is cheap, and cowards cannot risk knowing.
Knowing needs guts of knowing. The first requirement is that you drop all your beliefs. A knower has to be without belief; only then will he not have any prejudice, only then he will not have any concepts. God has to be perceived, not conceived. God has to be known, not believed in. God has to be experienced, not imagined.
And the coward finds it easy to imagine, to believe, because it takes nothing to believe -- only fear is needed. Imagination we have more than enough of, we can dream every kind of thing. And the coward can dream about spiritual experiences very easily, he can hallucinate.
The world is not religious because religion has fallen into the hands of the cowards. My observation is that you will find more religious people in the section, the very minor section of humanity, which does not believe in religion. You will find more religious people in that section. The people who don't believe in religion are more religious. In fact, their not believing in religion is a basic and fundamental step towards religion: they are dropping the belief. And you can drop the belief only if you are ready to drop your fears, because your belief is covering your fears.
Only the adventurous person who is ready to risk all his comforts, consolations, can be truly religious. Religion is an exploration, an exploration into truth. You cannot borrow it from somebody else, it has to be authentically your own. And the risk is great: dropping all consolations is almost moving into an abyss, falling into an abyss. Dropping all kinds of beliefs means that you are becoming ignorant. Forgetting all that you have learned from others means that you are becoming a child again. Nobody wants to drop
|
|
|