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Chapter 26 - Life's aim is life itself
God. But life is so real that thousands of years of all the religions have not been able even to make a dent in it, although they have all been anti-life. Their God was not the innermost center of life, their God was to be found only in renouncing life. It has been a very great calamity humanity has passed through: the very idea of renouncing life means respecting death.
All your religions are worshipers of death. It is not a coincidence that you worship only the dead saints. When they are alive, you crucify them. When they are alive, you stone them to death. When they are alive, you poison them and when they are dead, you worship them -- a sudden change happens. Your whole attitude changes.
Nobody has gone deep into the psychology of this change. It is worth contemplating: Why are the dead saints worshiped and the living ones condemned? Because the dead saints fulfill all the conditions of being religious: they don't laugh, they don't enjoy, they don't love, they don't dance, they don't have any kind of relationship with existence. They have really renounced life in its totality: they don't breathe, their hearts no longer beat. Now they are perfectly religious! They cannot commit a sin. One thing is certain -- you can depend on them, you can rely on them.
A living saint is not so reliable. Tomorrow he may change his mind. Saints have become sinners, sinners have become saints -- so until they are dead, nothing can be said about them with absolute certainty. That is one of the basic reasons that in your temples, in your churches, in your mosques, in your gurudwaras, in your synagogues... whom are you worshipping? And you don't see the stupidity of it all, that the living are worshiping the dead. The present is worshiping the past.
Life is being forced to worship death. It is because of these anti-life religions that the question has arisen again and again down the ages: what is the aim of life?
According to your religions, the aim of life is to renounce it, to destroy it, to torture yourself in the name of some mythological, some hypothetical God.
Animals don't have any religion, except life; trees don't have any religion except
life; stars don't have any religion except life. Except man, the whole existence trusts only in life; there is no other God and there is no other temple. There is no holy scripture.
Life is all in all.
It is the god and it is the temple and it is the holy scripture -- and to live it totally, wholeheartedly, is the only religion.
I teach you that there is no other aim than to live with such totality that each moment becomes a celebration. The very idea of "aim" brings future into the mind, because any aim, any end, any goal, needs future. All your goals deprive you of your present, which is the only reality you have. The future is only your imagination, and the past is just footprints left in the sands of your memory. Neither is the past real anymore, nor is the future real yet.
This moment is the only reality.
And to live this moment without any inhibition, without any repression, without any greed for the future, without any fear -- without repeating the past again and again, but being absolutely fresh in every moment, fresh and young, unhampered by memories, unhindered by imaginations -- you have such purity, such innocence, that only this innocence I call godliness.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 258
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