Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Unlike science, religion is not a tradition

During a service at an old synagogue in Eastern Europe, when the prayer was being said, half the congregants stood up while the other half remained seated. Those who were seated started yelling at those standing to sit down, and the ones standing yelled at the ones sitting to stand up. The rabbi, learned as he was in law and commentaries didn't know what to do.

His congregation suggested that he consult a 98-year-old man, who was one of the original founders of the temple. The rabbi hoped the elderly man would be able to tell him what the actual temple tradition was. So he went to the nursing home with a representative of each faction of the congregation. The one whose followers stood during the prayer said to the old man, "Is it the tradition to stand during this prayer?" The old man answered, "No, that is not the tradition". The one whose followers sat asked, "Is it the tradition to sit during the prayer?"

The old man answered, "No, that is not the tradition". Then the rabbi said to the old man, "The congregants fight all the time, yelling at each other about whether they should sit or stand!" The old man interrupted, exclaiming, "THAT is our tradition!"

Religion is not in the tradition, nor in rituals. Religion has no adjective to describe it. Religion is simply religion, as love is love. Can we call love Christian, Hindu, Muslim? If love is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Islamic, then why should God be Christian, Hindu or Jewish? Has not Jesus said "God is Love"? The enlightened ones have reminded: No one can be born into a religion; rather, religion has to be born into you. One has to open one's soul and receive religion. In the church it is not, in the mosque or synagogue it is not, in the temple it is not. Osho points out, "Science depends on tradition. Without a Newton, without an Edison, there is no possibility for Albert Einstein to have existed at all.

He needs a certain tradition; only on that tradition, on the shoulders of the past giants in the world of science, he can stand. Of course, when you stand on the shoulders of somebody you can look a little farther than the person on whose shoulders you are standing, but that person is needed there. "Science is a tradition, but religion is not a tradition: it is an individual experience, utterly individual. Once something is known in the world of science it need not be discovered again, it will be foolish to discover it again.Youneed not discover the theory of gravitation, Newton has done it. You need not go and sit in a garden and watch an apple fall and then conclude that there must be some force in the earth that pulls it downwards; it will be simply foolish. Newton has done it; now it is part of human tradition... But in religion you have to discover again and again. No discovery becomes a heritage in religion".

A master, such as Osho, teaches us that God's way of being present in the world is His absence. He is not present by being present. God is present by being absent. That is His way of being present in the world. You cannot pinpoint: here is God. If you pinpoint, it will be something else, not God, a statue, a scripture, a radition, a morality, but not religion, not God. God is everywhere! His way of presence is to be absent, and this is hat a master teaches you.