True Religiousness – Osho

It is true that listening to you I often feel surrounded by softness, peacefulness, silence, but within all that is such a deep longing. It happens also sometimes when I am overwhelmed and delighted by a sunset, a full moon, a beautiful piece of music. There is always a longing, almost like a sweet pain. Osho, what is it that I long for?

Anything of beauty, anything reminding you of the beyond, will create a longing in you, a longing that you cannot figure out what it is for. You don’t know the name of the object because in fact it is not for any object.

Listening to beautiful music, looking at a sunset or just a bird on the wing or beautiful roses, or sitting here in silence, a sweet pain can be felt.

The longing is how to become one with this state of feeling. It should not be a fleeting thing that comes and goes but something that remains with you, that becomes you, because the same music which was sweet today may not be sweet tomorrow, may be boring the day after tomorrow.

So it is not the music. It is something else that is triggered in you: the longing to be peaceful, to be musical, to have all the beauty of existence and to have it forever. It is a spiritual longing, a longing for the beyond, beyond all fleeting experiences; a longing to stop time and to be here now, in this moment eternally. This is true religiousness.

The true religiousness has nothing to do with churches, mosques, priests – they are all technicians exploiting you. Their ideologies, theologies, are simply supplies to fill this longing within you. They cannot fulfill it. So people are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, but still in some corner of their heart there is a search, an ongoing quest. And if they can understand that that is the true direction of religion, then they will drop Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and they will follow the longing. It is a longing to make your life more creative, so that it becomes a music, so that life itself becomes a sunset. It is a longing to make it so meditative that life itself becomes the presence of the unknown surrounding you, releasing a fragrance that is not of this world.

-Osho

From Path of the Mystic, Discourse #8, Q4

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