Product Description

Life expands, death is a shrinkage. When you are young, you are flowing in all
directions. When you are old, you are frozen. You no longer flow. You only
grumble: you become hard, the flexibility is lost.
When religion is young, alive, it is ordinary. It has nothing in it to fulfill the ego –
– it is very ordinary. In fact, in its very ordinariness, it is extraordinary. It is
superb in being just ordinary. Life is enough when religion is young; no other
God is needed. Then life is God, life is divine.
When religion becomes old and ill…. Everything becomes old and ill, whatsoever
is born has to die. Even a religion is born one day, lives for a while and then dies.
But followers go on clinging to the dead body. Then the dead body kills the
followers also: it becomes a source of illness, neurosis: it becomes an
abnormality, a cancerous growth. When religion becomes ill or dead, it kills you;
it is poisonous. This has to be understood from many directions.
Firstly, people are more willing to be in a dead religion than to be in an alive one,
because you have been taught to be afraid of life, of love, of happiness. Every
child is brought up in the world with a conditioning: with a feeling that there is
something wrong in being happy. A very vague feeling, but it is there. It
influences your whole life, you think that there is something wrong in being
happy. So whenever you feel happy, you feel guilty — as if you have been
committing some wrong, as if you have been sinning.