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Chapter 13 - Truth is not divisible
Spontaneity was like a child; commitment is maturity, crystallization. Just as nobody can start from the middle of life, or from the end of life -- everybody has to start from the childhood. Although every childhood will reach old age, and every birth will reach death... but nobody can begin with death. And a life that has been lived with joy and dance and love -- its crescendo, the death, will not be dark. It will not be an end of something but a new beginning, a new beginning of a higher spontaneity on another plane.
But religions have deceived humanity in such cunning ways. And unless you are very alert, it is difficult to understand in what ways they have deceived you. Spontaneity and commitment are two poles of the same energy, but there is one commitment -- which is imposed from outside, which has not come as a flowering of your own spontaneity -- that is a false commitment: your being a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Jew is a false commitment. It has not grown within you, you have not lived up to it. It is not a maturity of your own consciousness, not a crystallization of your being, but something imposed from above by others.
It has no roots within you. That's why the whole world is full of religious people but there seems to be no religiousness anywhere. No religious values blossom, but just the opposite --
humanity lives on an almost subhuman level.
Prem Nirmala, start from spontaneity. But no tradition, no culture, no civilization, will allow it, because they can control only dead people. And they can control through commitment.
The spontaneous person is beyond anybody's enslavement. And if the spontaneous person grows, he will come to a commitment -- but that will be his own commitment to existence, between himself and existence. No other mediator, no priest, no pope, no imam, no shankaracharya is going to stand between him and this immensely beautiful existence, this great life, this divineness that is spread all over the world.
His spontaneity will bring him to a commitment, but that commitment will be
out of his own freedom. It will have roots deep in his own being. He will not be a Christian -- he can be a Jesus Christ. He will not be a Buddhist -- he can be a Gautam Buddha. He will not be a Hindu, but he can be a Krishna; he will not be a Jaina, but he can be a Mahavira.
It is because of this that I emphasize that religion is a private, personal and individual affair. It cannot be organized. The moment you organize it, you destroy it. And if we want humanity to be religious, then all the religions have to disappear. They are the barriers.
There are three hundred religions on the earth. They are dividing human beings, giving them different commitments, and those commitments have nothing to do with the time, with the space in which we find ourselves.
When a commitment comes out of spontaneity, it is always timely, it is never dead -- it is always growing with the changes that are happening every moment. It is just a riverlike flow, it is not frozen ice.
But it is very easy to deceive people because both the phenomena are so deeply interrelated. And people are living in such a deep sleep -- without any alertness at all, that they cannot make the discrimination between such closely connected experiences.
But just a little turn makes all the difference. If you start from commitment, then you will never reach to spontaneity; you have started from death. But if you start from spontaneity, you Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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