The Bhagavad Gita’s Approach to Innovation

Religionless Religion

Krishna’s whole effort is existential, not intellectual at all. And the true religion is existential. It has always happened to only a few people and then it disappears from the earth because the intellectuals immediately grab it and they start making beautiful ideologies out of it – neat and clean, logical. In that very effort they destroy its beauty. They create philosophies, and religion disappears. The pundit, the scholar, the theologian, is the enemy of religion.

So remember it: you are not getting initiated into a certain religion; you are getting initiated into just religiousness. It is vast, immense, unbounded – it is like the whole sky.

Even the sky is not the limit, so open your wings without any fear. This whole existence belongs to us; this is our temple, this is our scripture. Less than that is manmade, manufactured by man. Where it is manufactured does not matter much – beware of manufactured religions so that you can know the truth, which is not man made. And it is available in the trees, in the mountains, in the rivers, in the stars – in you, in people that surround you – it is available everywhere.

The Search for Truth in Both Science and Religion: Science is the search for truth in the objective world and religion is the search for the truth in the subjective world. In fact, they are two wings of one bird, of one inquiry – two sides. Ultimately there is no need to have two names. My own suggestion is that “science” is a perfectly beautiful name, because it means “knowing.” So science has two sides, just like every coin has two sides. Knowing in the dimension of matter you can call objective science, and knowing in the dimension of your interiority – of your inner being, of your consciousness – you can call subjective science. There is no need for the word religion.

Revolutionary Changes

Unless man is changed nothing is changed; you can only pretend. You can believe, you can hope, you can imagine, and you can go on living in your misery. You can dream. Those dreams are soothing, comfortable; they keep you asleep. In fact, modern research about dreams says it is so, exactly so – that’s the function of the dreams: they keep you asleep.

Religion is the only revolution because it changes man. It changes man’s consciousness, it changes man’s heart. It depends on the individual, because the individual is real and concrete. It does not bother about the society. If the individual is different you will have a different society and a different world automatically. And you cannot change the inner by changing the outer, because the outer is on the periphery. But you can change the outer by changing the center, the inner, because the inner is at the very core of it.

By changing the symptoms you will not change the disease. You will have to go deep into man. From where comes this violence? From where comes this exploitation? From where come all these ego-trips? From where? They all come from unconsciousness. Man lives asleep, man lives mechanically. That mechanism has to be broken, man has to be re-done. That is the religious revolution that has not been tried.