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Chapter 26 - Life's aim is life itself
To me, God is not someone who created the world. God is someone that you create when you live totally, intensely -- with all your heart, not holding anything back. When your life becomes simply a moment-to-moment joy, a moment-to- moment dance, when your life is nothing but a festival of lights... every moment is so precious because once it is gone, it is gone forever.
Living for any aim simply means you are not living in the present. Living for any heaven is simply greed. And you are missing the present, you are sacrificing the real that is in your hands, at the feet of some imaginary heaven, for which no proof exists at all.
Or being afraid of hell... There are thousands of monks -- Christians, Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina. They are all living out of fear and greed. It is strange that nobody sees a simple fact --
that they are living for greed to enter heaven and to enjoy the heavenly pleasures, and they are living out of fear that they should not commit anything wrong; otherwise they will have to suffer hellfire for eternity. And these monks, to whatever religion they belong, are worshiped by you.
These are sick people, they need psychiatric treatment. They are so full of greed that this life is not enough for them, they need some heaven. And they are so much afraid, so much fear-oriented, that out of their fear they have created all kinds of hell. Of course, heaven is for those who will follow the path that they think is the path of virtue. And hell is for those who will not follow the path of virtue according to them.
And just a little look around, and you will be very much surprised: the Hindu gods are not celibate, and according to Jainism or Buddhism, or Catholic theology, celibacy is the foundation of all virtue. What about Hindu gods? According to Jainism and Buddhism, drinking any alcoholic beverage is a sin, but according to Christians, even on their holy days they drink alcohol. Even Jesus was drinking alcohol.
Not only that, Christians brag that Jesus did many miracles. One of them was turning water into wine. Turning water into wine is a miracle -- or, is it a crime?
According to Jainism and Buddhism, Jesus is a meat eater, a drinker of wine; he is not following the path of virtue.
Even Hindu gods, according to Jainism and Buddhism, are living the ordinary life of a householder. They are not celibate and they have not renounced life; they cannot be accepted as holy.
Just in the last part of the past century, Ramakrishna was worshiped by Hindus almost as a god, but being a Bengali, his food consisted mainly of rice and fish. According to the vegetarians, a man who is eating fish, destroying life for his food, is not even human, what to say about divine?
Looking from the other side, Christians cannot accept Gautam Buddha as a religious person because he never served the poor, he never opened institutions for the orphans like Mother Teresa does. He never opened hospitals for the sick. He was not concerned at all with human misery, poverty, sickness, disease. He was not in the service of God's creation. He was a selfish man, just meditating, just enjoying his own being, just reaching to the higher peaks of consciousness. But his ecstasy is selfish -- it is not in the service of those who are suffering.
Mahavira cannot be accepted as a religious man according to Christianity for the same reasons. These are all very selfish people. All meditators are selfish because they are more concerned about their own growth than they are concerned about the blind and the deaf and the dumb.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 259
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