Organised Religions are a calamity

Organized religion is the very death of religiousness.

A living religion is always in the individual. It can never be organized, just as love cannot be organized. It can never be of the masses, of the crowd, of the collective. Religiousness absolutely is an individual experience.

Truth is so essentially individual that it cannot even be expressed in words; hence, there is no possibility for expression of the inexpressible experience. This will make clear that there are no holy books. If truth cannot be expressed, no book can be holy by its very nature.

Every religion claims that its book is written by God himself, and all these holy books are so contradictory to each other, it leads to a simple conclusion that God is absolutely insane.

Organized religions enslave the individual, for political and economic purposes. The religious heritage is phony, based on childish myths. Religions are responsible for all the miseries of the world – poverty and violence, perversion and the suffering of women. They are organizations of brotherly hate, not brotherly love. Neither atheism nor agnosticism is the answer. The answer is in discovering one’s own individuality.

But it is easier and cheaper to find consolation in the crowd, and the crowd psychology, because one feels that everybody else cannot be wrong – and that’s what others are also feeling. So rather than declaring one’s individuality, one declares his membership to an organization, to a political party, to a religious church. This turns human beings into sheep.

It is not coincidence that people accept, without any shame, that Jesus says he is the shepherd. For two thousand years nobody has said this is humiliating, a degradation of human beings into sheep. On the contrary, people have really liked the idea of being sheep. It feels very cosy. And it feels as if one is no longer responsible – the whole responsibility is on the shoulders of the saviour, the messiah, the incarnation of god, the prophet, the messenger.

But the moment you give your responsibility to someone, without your knowing you have also given your freedom. Responsibility and freedom are two sides of the same coin. Either you have to accept both or you can deny both. Up to now man has denied both, and this is the foundation of his slavery.

My approach is not to condemn human beings into sheep, but to help them discover their beauty of aloneness, their glamour of being a lion.

If I can help a man to find his lion’s roar I have given him a new birth. I have created an individual. I don’t compose poetry. And I don’t compose music. I am not a sculptor or a painter, but still I declare that I am a creator. But my creation is very subtle. I destroy the false in man and I help him to discover the authentic and the true. This is the greatest creation according to me.

If the world consists only of individuals, only then there will be peace and love and silences of the heart.

Only in a world of individuals can man attain to his ultimate potential. He can blossom, and rejoice in his blossoming. To me, this is authentic religiousness: the manifesto of the individual against all slavery, whether the slavery is religious, spiritual, political, social.