Philosophical Questions

Potential To Exist

When you are born you are born only with the potential to exist, to survive, not with the art of making life a joy, a bliss, a celebration. That art has to be learned. Religion is that very art, the supreme art: the art of transforming the lower into the higher. Religion is alchemy. It is the process of transforming the potential into the actual. Man has lived at the minimum; hence he looks so dull. Man can live at the maximum and then there will be great brilliance and great radiance and then there will be great flowering.

Laughter is as precious as prayer – or even more precious than prayer because the man who cannot laugh cannot pray either. A prayer that does not come out of a joyous heart is already dead. It cannot reach God, it cannot leave the earth, it has no wings. It is like a rock: it will fall back to the earth, it cannot fly into the sky.

Religion has lived without laughter, that’s why religion has been a corpse, and you are worshipping corpses in your churches and in your temples and in your mosques. You have become worshippers of death. Rather than worshipping life you have been worshipping death.

Religion is against laughter, is against love, is against rejoicing, is against celebration. The religious person, the so-called religious person, condemns everything of this world; he lives surrounded by a thousand and one condemnations. He lives in fear, in trembling. He does not live, he only vegetates.

So-called saints and mahatmas are not real people, they don’t have the guts to be real, they are phony. But you have worshipped them for so long, you still go on worshipping them. The reason you worship them is because they are so dead, because they are so serious, because they are so ugly, because their whole approach toward life is so negative. They are anti-life, anti-love, anti-laughter – how can they be for God? It is only through love and laughter and a tremendous joy in life that you start feeling the presence of something that is beyond.

When life becomes an adventure, a dance of ecstasy, only then do you move beyond the confinement of the body and the mind and soar high toward the infinite.

When, you can laugh. You can dance, sing and laugh. In that moment you are in deep love. You dropping the garbage of centuries, the rotten, stupid superstitions of centuries. You getting out of the old, being born anew.

All the religions were born thousands of years ago; everything has changed. Those religions don’t fit anymore, they have no relevance, their context has disappeared. But they go on sitting on your head, heavy mountains, and they don’t allow you to move. In fact, the older the religion, the more precious you think it is. It is not so: the older the religion, the more irrelevant it is.