Carve your own religion
One of the radical contentions of Osho is that man cannot be born in a religion, a religion has to be born in man. Certainly Osho is not talking about the established religions because everyone is born in some religion or the other but religions that are reduced to cults have harmed the humanity so much, it’s time to drop them and graduate to a more refined quality of consciousness, which is “religiousness”. This religiousness doesn’t have a label, it is individual, intensely intimate; in fact it is like a love affair. Your own religion is born in you when your inner being goes through the agony, the fire of finding its own unique individuality.
People who are born in a particular belief system follow it unconsciously; it is a childhood conditioning. But when somebody carves his own path going against the prejudices imposed on him, battling with his own darkness, the wisdom born through this search illumines his body, his intelligence.
Up until now I understood the Osho insight only intellectually but its implication dawned on me when I came across an Australian priest called Rami. This guy was born of a Jewish mother and a Christian father in South Africa. He got attracted to Hinduism in his teens and the attraction was strong enough to motivate him to come to India and learn from the noted Hindu priests. He was ordained as Acharya Ramanujachari. And now he is the most popular Hindu priest in Australia! Those who choose their own religion bring freshness and originality in their approach. They interpret the age-old concepts in a unique, scientific way, adding their own flavour to them. Their authenticity is so powerful that those who have discarded their own religion as stale and dead, wake up to the wisdom of the enlightened ones.
If we want to stop atrocities committed in the name of religion, we have to pay attention to this Osho insight: “Religion is not in the tradition, not in the rituals, not Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Religion has no adjective to it. Religion is simply religion, as love is love. Do you call love Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan? If love is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, why should God be Christian, Hindu and Mohammedan? Nobody can be born into a religion, religion has to be born into you. You have to open your soul and receive religion. It is showering all around... but you are carrying toys, substitutes, false coins in your hands, and thinking you are having religion. In the church it is not, in the mosque it is not, in the temple it is not.”
Then where is it? It is in the heart of the seeker.
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