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religion is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. First it means an egoless state -- first and foremost it means a deep acceptance of one's nobodiness. Religion is not a ladder that leads you higher than others. It is not trying to achieve some superiority but, on the contrary, it is relaxing into your ordinariness. A religious person neither feels inferior nor superior; in fact, he never compares himself with anybody else. He cannot compare -- his understanding makes it clear to him that comparison is not possible because there are no two persons similar. How can you compare people who are so dissimilar' You cannot compare Buddha to Krishna, Krishna to Christ, Christ to Mohammed, Mohammed to Kabir, Kabir to Nanak -- no, that is not possible. You cannot compare anybody with anybody else; everybody is unique.
But when I say everybody is unique, remember the word "everybody." I am not using the word "unique" in a comparative sense -- more unique than others, more unique than somebody else. EVERYBODY is unique! Uniqueness is an ordinary quality, the MOST ordinary quality. A religious person is utterly ordinary.
In India there is a tremendously beautiful treatise which contains only the names of God and nothing else: VISHNU SAHASRANAM, THE ONE THOUSAND NAMES OF GOD -- just names and nothing else. But those names are something unbelievably beautiful, showing different aspects of God. In those one thousand names there are two names: one is "God is the most ordinary" and the other is "God is the most extraordinary." Ordinary and extraordinary, both -- two names of God.
The religious person is ordinary, very ordinary. He lives a very simple, unpretentious life with no claim to extra-ordinariness. But that's what makes him extraordinary, so there is no contradiction in those two names.
To be extraordinary is a very ordinary desire. To be ordinary is not an ordinary desire; it is extraordinary. And to relax into one's ordinariness is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the world. The moment you relax into your ordinariness and you start enjoying the ordinary small things of life... in the early morning a cup of tea, a walk in the woods, a swim in the
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