What is your definition of religion and belief?
Belief is corrupted ( why do we believe in anything ), because behind belief and idealistic morality lurks the `me', the self - the self which is constantly growing bigger, more powerful. We think that belief in God is religion. We consider that to believe is to be religious. If you do not believe, you will be regarded as an atheist and condemned by society. One society condemns those who do not believe in God, and another society condemns those who do. They are both the same.
So religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free. But it is only in freedom that you can find out what is true, what is God, not through any belief; because your belief projects what you think God ought to be, what you think ought to be true. If you believe God is love, God is good, God is this or that, your very belief prevents you from understanding what is God, what is true. But, you see, you want to forget yourself in a belief; you want to sacrifice yourself; you want to emulate another, to abandon this constant struggle that is going on within you and pursue virtue.
Your life is a constant struggle in which there is sorrow, suffering, ambition, transient pleasure, happiness that comes and goes, so the mind wants something enormous to cling to, something beyond itself with which it can become identified. That something the mind calls God, truth, and it identifies itself with it through belief, through conviction, through rationalization, through various forms of discipline and idealistic morality. But that vast something, which creates speculation, is still part of the `me', it is projected by the mind in its desire to escape from the turmoils of life.
We identify ourselves with a particular country - Canada , Poland ,China , India, Russia, America. You think of yourself as an American .
Why? Why do you identify yourself with America? Have you ever looked at it, gone behind the words that have captured your mind? Living in a city or a small town, leading a miserable life with your struggles and family quarrels, being dissatisfied, discontented, unhappy, you identify yourself with a country called America. This gives you a sense of vastness, of importance, a psychological satisfaction, so you say, "I am an American; and for this you are willing to kill, to die or be maimed.
In the same way, because you are very petty, in constant battle with yourself and others, because you are confused, miserable, uncertain, because you know there is death, you identify yourself with something beyond, something vast, significant, full of meaning, which you call God. This identification with what you call God, gives you a sense of enormous importance, and you feel happy. So the identifying of yourself with something vast is a self-expansive process; it is still the struggling of the `me', the self.
Religion as we generally know it, is a series of beliefs, dogmas, rituals, superstitions; it is the worship of idols, of charms and gurus, and we think all this will lead us to some ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is our own projection; it is what we want, what we think will make us happy, a guarantee of the deathless state. Caught in this desire for certainty, the mind creates a religion of dogmas, of priestcraft, of superstitions and idol worship; and there it stagnates. Is that religion? Is religion a matter of belief, a matter of accepting or having knowledge of other people's experiences and assertions? Is religion merely the practice of morality? You know, it is comparatively easy to be moral - to do this and not to do that. You can just imitate a moral system. But behind such morality lurks the aggressive self, growing, expanding, dominating. And is that religion?
You have to find out what truth is, because that is what really matters - not whether you are rich or poor, or whether you are happily married and have children, for all these things come to an end; and there is always death. So, without any form of belief, you must have the vigour, the self-reliance, the initiative to find out for yourself what truth is, what God is. Belief will not free your mind; belief only corrupts, binds, darkens. The mind can be free only through its own
vigour and
self-reliance.
Surely it is one of the functions of education to create individuals who are not bound by any form of belief, by any pattern of morality or respectability. It is the `me' that merely seeks to become moral, respectable. The truly religious individual is he who discovers, who directly experiences what God is, what truth is. That direct experiencing is never possible through any form of belief, through any ritual, through any following or worshipping of another. The truly religious mind is free of all gurus. Us as an individuals,we can discover the truth from moment to moment, and therefore we are capable of being free. Most people think that to be free from the material things of the world is the first step towards religion
.Bull ,it is not. That is one of the easiest things to do. The first step is to be free to think fully, completely and independently, which means not being bound by any belief or crushed by circumstances, by environment, so that you are an integrated human being,
capable, vigorous and self-reliant. Only then can your mind, being free, unbiased, unconditioned, find out what God is. Surely, that is the basic purpose of religion and for which any educational centre should exist: to help each individual who comes there to be free to discover reality. This means not following any system, not clinging to any belief or ritual, and not worshipping any guru. The individual has to awaken his intelligence, not through any form of discipline, resistance, compulsion, coercion, but through freedom. It is only through the intelligence born of freedom that the individual can discover that which is beyond the mind. That immensity - the unnameable, the limitless, that which is not measurable by words and in which there is the love that is not of the mind - must be directly experienced.
