Philosophical Questions

Living Without Conflict

Religion is – living without conflict, that is without ideas and without ideals, because whenever one lives with ideals there is conflict.

What is religion? Religion is falling in tune with the whole, falling in love with the whole, falling in a togetherness with the whole.

A religious person is one who is not against the whole, and the irreligious is one who is fighting the whole, is in conflict with the whole. The religious person is life-affirmative. The irreligious person is life-negative. To the religious person all is good, his affirmation is absolute and total. Nothing is wrong. Even if it appears at times that it is wrong, it cannot be wrong. It must be a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation. It must be based somewhere in our ignorance because we don’t know the whole story.

So maybe some part looks as if it does not fit with the whole. We have not heard the whole song, so some note appears to fall out of line. But everything has to be good if there is God. God is the guarantee of goodness. Evil, as such, cannot exist. If it appears, it must be a nightmare of our own minds, we must have created it.

The religious mind denies not. His affirmation is absolute, unconditional. He says yes to existence. And his yes has no conditions, remember. When he says yes he means it. If you find a person who says no to existence, to life, to this and that, then remember he is just an egoist, not religious at all. He is fighting the whole, trying to prove himself a conqueror, trying to prove that he is something special. He is doomed to fail. He is going to be frustrated sooner or later; it cannot be avoided for long, it is predestined. It is predestined by his own attitude of conflict. Religion is cooperation, cooperation with all that is.

Try to understand it as deeply as possible, because only then will you be able to understand this mystic singer Kabir. He is a lover of life. He does not deny, he does not negate, he does not condemn; he never sees anything bad anywhere. Once you have had a vision of the whole, all becomes sublime. Then there is nothing secular, everything is sacred, and the whole of existence is the temple of God, and the whole of life is a prayer. Walking, you walk in God. Dancing, you dance in God. Sleeping, you sleep in God, because nothing else exists than him.

God is the guarantee of goodness. God means the good. The good is the substratum of existence, so evil is not possible. Evil is impossible. We must have misrepresented. We must have brought our own ideas, concepts, doctrines. We must have created our own stupid private notions of how things should be. Things simply are. There is no should in existence. The idea of should is brought by man, and once you bring the idea of should, existence is divided into two: good and bad. Once you say, “Things should be like this,” you have moved away from reality, you have moved away from that which is. And only that which is, is; nothing else. Reality is here as it is, don’t bring in the should, otherwise the condemnation comes.