The greatest enemy of religion is not materialism but morality. Why? Because morality tries to impose spirituality it is a conditioning and religion can flower only from the within, it cannot be imposed from the without. Hence morality creates an illusion of false religion.

Morality is a pretender; morality is a pseudo-religion. It gives you respectability, but it does not give you understanding. It gives you a great ego trip, but it cannot give you humility. It makes you feel superior, but it doesn”t help inner growth. And the man who feels superior cannot grow. He is stuck with the ego.

Morality is a sort of decoration of the ego. Yes, through morality you can cultivate great virtues, but you will never be virtuous. Through morality you can become very talented in certain directions, but those talents will remain unconscious. Morality cannot bring awareness because morality is not based on enlightenment.

The essential has to come from the inner, the essential has to grow like a tree, the essential is alive. The non-essential is imposed from the outside.

Before we enter this beautiful parable four things have to be very clearly understood. First, there are two kinds of unity in life. One unity is mechanical – for example, a car. A car has a certain unity, a functional unity, but it is assembled, it comes out of an assembly line. You cannot assemble a tree; you cannot assemble a baby. They also have a sort of unity – but it is totally different. Their unity is organic. A car is mechanical; a baby is organic. A machine is mechanical; a tree is organic. You cannot put a tree together, it grows. It grows out of its own inner center. At the most you can help – or hinder – but you cannot put a tree together.

You can put a car together, you can assemble a car – hence a car has no soul, no self, no center. It is a superficial unity. And the car cannot grow; it cannot give birth to new baby cars.

The tree grows and can give birth to millions of trees. And the tree has a center; it is run by its innermost center. When fall comes and the old leaves drop, who brings the new leaves? From where do they come? They evolve from the innermost core of the tree.

If a mechanical part of the car is missing, you will have to replace it. The car cannot evolve it itself. It depends on you; it has no soul; it has no inner discipline of its own. If you cut off a branch of a tree another branch is supplied by the center, but if you destroy a machine nothing will come from the center . . . there is none, there is no center.

Morality is mechanical, religion is organic. This is the first basic thing to be understood. Morality is put together from the outside; religion grows from the innermost core of your being. Morality comes out of conditioning; religion comes out of meditation. Morality is enforced by others, religion you have to seek and search for yourself. Morality is a social device; religion is an adventure. Morality is dominated by the politician and the priest; religion is a rebellion. Very rarely is a person religious – and whenever there is a religious person there is a great revolution around him.

Moral people are ordinary people, as ordinary as the immoral – sometimes even more ordinary than the immoral. The immoral may sometimes have courage but the moral has no courage. The immoral may sometimes have intelligence but the moral has no intelligence. The immoral may sometimes be original but the moral is always repetitive.

Morality is the greatest enemy of religion because it is a pseudo-coin. It pretends and it can deceive people. It has deceived down the ages; millions and millions of people are and have been deceived by morality. And they think that when they have morality, they have religion.

The second thing: morality is always relative. You can have more intelligence than somebody else or somebody else can have more virtue than you. Somebody can be more courageous than you or more cowardly than you. Somebody can be more sharing, more loving, or you can be more loving than somebody else. Morality is comparative.

Nobody can be more religious than you or less religious than you – religion is non-comparative. when religion is there, it is simply there. Can you say Buddha was more religious than Jesus? Can you say Mahavira was more religious than Mohammed? Can you say Lao Tzu was more religious than Krishna? It would be absurd, the very statement would be absurd – because religion is not quantity, it is quality of being. You cannot have more or less. There are no degrees. You can be more honest than somebody else, you can be more of a thief than somebody else – there are possibilities – but how can you be more religious or less religious than somebody else? Religion means awakening. Religion means you have come home. How can you be less at home or more at home than somebody else?

When a man has become aware, his awareness is always total and complete, utterly complete. It does not come in parts; it comes as a whole – hence it is holy. Religion comes as a whole, morality comes in all shapes and sizes. You can have a family size or a medium size morality – like toothpaste. Morality comes in all shapes and sizes; religion is just complete. Either it is or it is not.

Sometimes people come to me and they ask, “Who is more enlightened – Buddha or Mahavira?” The question is absurd. Who is more enlightened? Enlightenment means that you have gone beyond relativity; more and less cannot exist now. Who is more enlightened? Enlightenment means that you have disappeared – and so have all relative concepts. You are simply there a pure isness. Whenever anybody becomes a pure isness, a pure existence, a primordial innocence. there is no comparison. To go beyond comparison is to become enlightened – so you cannot ask the question, “Who is more enlightened?” The very question is meaningless.

Religion either is or is not. This is the second thing to be remembered.

The third thing: when religion comes you are naturally moral but the vice versa is not the case – you may be moral, but you may not be religious. When you are religious you are naturally moral; morality comes like a shadow.

A disciple came to Lieh Tzu and asked Lieh Tzu, “What should I do, Master, to become enlightened?” And Lieh Tzu said, “You stand in the sun, walk, and watch your shadow.”

The man went out, stood in the sun, walked and watched his shadow, came back, bowed down, thanked the Master and said, “You have shown me the way.”

The other disciples were very much puzzled. What had transpired between the Master and this new man? They asked Lieh Tzu and he laughed. He said, “It is so simple. I told him to go into the sun and walk and watch his shadow. And he understood the point. If the body walks the shadow follows. The shadow cannot walk on its own. And even if you can arrange for the shadow to walk on its own, the body will not follow, there is no necessity.”

Morality is like the shadow; religion is the real figure. When religion is there, morality comes on its own – it has to come, there is no other possibility. But if morality is there, there is no necessity for religion to be there. You can become a moral person without becoming religious at all. You can have good qualities. You can be honest, sincere, true, non-violent, but that doesn’t make you religious. If you are religious all moral qualities simply follow you.

When you are moral you have to manage those good qualities continuously, they have to be maintained otherwise they will disappear. A moral man has to manage his honesty continuously because every moment there is a fear that he may function dishonestly. The dishonesty has not disappeared; it has been repressed. It is there, it is waiting in the basement of his being for its opportunity, and once the opportunity is there it will assert itself with vengeance. It is there and the moral person knows it well. He may be trying to be loving but he knows that the hatred is there boiling within him. He may be smiling but he knows that his eyes are full of tears. He may not be showing his anger, but he knows that his heart is burning, and he wants to kill. He may be praying but really, he wants to curse. He knows it. There is no way not to know.

You can deceive others but how can you deceive yourself? Even if you try to deceive yourself, reality will assert itself again and again and you will have to encounter it again and again. And you know that although you can pretend that you are a very good man, deep down you know how bad you are. That hangs like a stone around your neck, like a rock and keeps you pulled down.

The moral person is dual: he is one thing on the outside and just the contrary on the inside. There is a continuous struggle in his being. He is split. The moral person is a schizophrenic. The whole earth has become schizophrenic because of moral teachings. Teach a person to be moral and sooner or later you will send him to the psychiatrist’s couch. You have created madness in him. The person is feeling angry and you say, “Don’t be angry, anger is bad – because Moses says so, or Mohammed says so, or Mahavira says so. Anger is bad. Don’t be angry.” Anger is coming up naturally, but you teach against it – because great is the stake. If he becomes angry, he will lose his respect. He can be respected only if he is not angry, so he has to pretend in order to get respectability.

Look at people. They have lost their original faces. They are carrying masks; they are hiding behind masks. You can never be certain who is hiding behind the masks. You love a person but by and by you will find it is not the same person you fell in love with. Have you not observed it again and again? When you fall in love with a person, after a few months – or even after a few days if you are a great observer, you will find that the person is something else. The woman is not the same woman; the man is not the same man that you fell in love with. You fell in love with the mask and now, by and by, the reality becomes clear. When you live with a person he cannot wear the mask for twenty-four hours. It is heavy and he wants to rest. And sometimes he is on a holi-day even saints have their holidays.

I have heard.

In a circus there was a man whom the circus manager used to claim was the tallest man in the world – he was somewhere near nine feet tall.

A press reporter went to interview him because he was the tallest man in the world. He naturally chose Sunday because Sunday morning was free for him. He went to the circus and found the man lying down in front of his tent, sunbathing. He was very much surprised to find that although the face was the same the body wasn’t nine feet tall at all.

He asked, “What is the matter? You don’t look more than five-foot-five to me. But your face seems to be the right one.”

The man laughed. He said, “Yes, you are right. I am the right person – I am the tallest man in the world.”

“But,” replied the reporter, “what is the matter? You don’t look more than five-foot-five.” And the man said, “This is my Sunday. This is my holiday. If you want to see me nine feet tall then you have to see me on duty.”

It is a managed thing.

When you see a leader delivering a lecture to the masses it is a different face. When you see a priest in the temple worshipping it is a different face. When you fall in love with a woman it is a different face. She is trying to be as good as possible – but that is not the reality, that is a managed reality. She cannot manage it forever – that’s why wives are not very beautiful, that’s why husbands are ugly. You know them. You have seen them on their holidays.

Morality creates a division – the inner, the real, becomes hidden and the outer, the false, becomes manifested. This is one of the greatest calamities that has happened to humanity. Religion makes you one. It spreads the inner to the outer.

Religion makes you healthy – then you taste the same always and you are never on a holiday because you are always on a holiday. It is your natural quality.

The fourth thing: a tree is alive, a machine only exists, it is not alive. A man of morality only exists; he is not really alive. You will not find vitality, you will not find radiance, you will not find a surging energy, you will not find a flood of life coming from him. He has to curb his being and cut his energies continuously. He has to live at the minimum; he is never aflame. He is always afraid. If he becomes too much alive then that which is repressed will start asserting itself. So he is always afraid. He keeps himself pulled down. He goes on holding onto himself. He never allows himself a total let-go because a total let-go will naturally mean that that which is repressed will suddenly erupt on the surface. It will be like a volcano erupting. So he has to keep himself at the mini-mum, he has to allow only minimum energy – only then can he control himself. With the maximum energy flowing he will be out of control; he will be off-balance.

A man of morality just appears to be living; it is an appearance. Only a man of religion is alive. A man of religion lives at the optimum and the man of morality lives at the minimum. Naturally, at the minimum you live like an impotent person. You cannot be angry so you cannot love either because there is always the fear that if you love too much sometimes anger may come. When one energy is allowed total expression, other energies also get freedom. When you open your door for one thing, other things will also escape. You cannot open your door; you have to be always on guard. Just think of the misery of a man who is always on guard, who cannot relax. A man who is always on guard is a tense man.

A moral man is never happy. He may not be sad – at the most but he is never happy, he is never ecstatic. For millions of years man has existed on the Earth, but a single exception has never been seen. Never has a moral man been found who is ecstatic. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot rejoice. Joy is freedom – and he does not know what freedom is. Ecstasy is going beyond oneself and that is possible only when you move through your optimum, when you are aflame with a great passion to live, when you love totally, when you are flooded with God. Only then is ecstasy possible.

Ecstasy is not yours; ecstasy is God dancing in you. You cannot allow God to dance in you because you cannot allow nature to dance in you. You have not even been natural; how can you be spiritual? Remember, spirituality is a higher stage of being natural; spirituality is the ultimate flowering of being spontaneous.

A moral person is never spontaneous. A moral person lives through the past. He has a character and he has to follow the character. He has a blueprint, he has a map, and he always looks at the map and functions through it. He never functions in the present, he is a dead man, he carries his character around with him. His response is never a real response; it is only a reaction. A man of religion is responsive not reactive.

And because he has a character, a man of morality is predictable. You can depend on him; you know that he will be honest tomorrow because he has been always honest. He will be honest even in circumstances where honesty is going to harm the other person. Where honesty is going to be destructive, even then he is going to be honest – you can depend on that. He has no freedom, he has no eyes to look into things, he does not respond to reality. He responds to principles. When you respond to principles you are simply reacting, you have a program in your mind, you are like a computer. You go according to the program – right or wrong is not the question.

And the circumstances of life change every moment – but your principles are rigid, your principles remain the same. Naturally a man of morality never fits anywhere; he is a misfit. It is very difficult to live with a moral man because he is always a misfit. He does not look at the reality, at what reality is. He simply lives through his principles; principles are more important than the reality.

A religious man has no principles. Let it sink deep into your heart. A religious man has no principles whatsoever; he has only an awareness. He looks into reality and whatsoever is required he responds accordingly. His response is spontaneous, not dominated by the past – hence a religious person is not predictable. You don’t know what he will do. Not even he can say what he will do because it will depend on the circumstances. If there is a slight difference in the circumstances the response will be different.

A religious man has no character – it will be difficult for you to get that. A religious man has no character, because character comes from the past. A religious man has consciousness instead. Or, to say the same thing in other words, a religious man has no conscience. He has consciousness and the moral man has a conscience – no consciousness. He functions through dead codes. He carries the commandments, and he always looks into his commandments to try to find a way to behave. He is always a misfit; he is never true anywhere. A moral man cannot be true because he has a character. How can you be true when you have a character? If the circumstances are different, what will you do? You cannot change so easily.

A moral man is very rigid; he has no dynamism; he is not flowing and fluid. He has a fixed identity: things should be done only this way. He cannot do things in any other way, whatsoever the situation. The situation may have completely changed but the things have to be done in only one way.

A Zen Master, Bokuju, asked a disciple, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

And the disciple remained silent. He closed his eyes and fell into deep silence. Bokuju was happy and said, “Good, good, I agree.”

But another Master was sitting there while this happened. When the disciple had gone the other Master said, “You agreed too early. I don’t see it. Call the disciple back.”

The disciple was called back and the other Master asked, “Tell me, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” And he again closed his eyes and remained silent. And the Master laughed and he said, “Wrong, absolutely wrong.” And Bokuju said, “Yes, I agree with this other Master.”

The disciple was puzzled. He said, “But why? Just a moment before, I answered the same way – through my silence – and you said, ‘Right.’” Bokuju said, “That was true in that moment but now you are repeating. It cannot be true in this moment because everything has changed. That was a response, this is a reaction. Now you have become fixed. When you responded for the first time there was no idea in what you were doing. It came naturally. It came just simply, innocently. Your mind was not manipulating. Now it is not a response of a meditative consciousness, it is of a mind manipulating. Now the mind knows the answer. Now the mind says, ‘Good.’ The same question again, so again the same answer.”

The Master says that although the question may be the same the answer cannot be the same the next moment. It will depend on a thousand and one things.

It used to happen to Buddha every day. Somebody would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would say, “No.” Somebody else would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would say, “Yes.” And somebody else would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would keep silent. And again, somebody else would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would say, “Don’t ask nonsense questions.” In one day, he gave a thousand and one answers to one question.

His chief disciple, Ananda, became very worried. He said, “Master, the question is the same, but you answer so differently, you answer so contradictorily, that we have become puzzled, confused.”

Buddha said, “I was not answering you, so you need not listen. Somebody asked a question and the answer was given to him, not to you. And the questioners were different, the time was different, the situation was different – how can the question be the same? One man who had asked, ‘Is there a God?’ was an atheist. He didn’t believe in God. I had to say yes to him, I had to shake him, shock him. I had to bring him out of his ideology, so I had to say yes. But it is not that God exists – it was a response to that man’s reality. Then somebody said, ‘Is there a God?’ and because he was a believer and believed in God, I had to say no. I had to shake him and shock him too and bring him out of his sleep. If I had said yes to him, he would have gone home thinking that I agreed with him, that I also believed in the same way that he believed. Then his ideology would have been strengthened, and any strengthened ideology is a danger. All ideologies have to be shattered, utterly shattered, so the mind becomes completely free from ideologies.

“I had to remain silent to another person because he was neither a theist nor an atheist. His question was very simple and innocent. He had no ideology, so I did not need to shock him. He was a really silent man, so I kept silent. And he understood me. He understood the idea that about questions about God one should be silent. They are meaningless questions; there is nothing to be said about them.”

Whether you believe in God or not makes no difference, you don’t change. Go and look . . . Look into the lives of the person who believes in God and the person who does not believe in God. Their lives are the same. There is no difference at all. Somebody goes to the church, somebody else goes to the temple, somebody else goes to the mosque, but look into their lives – there is no difference at all. So what is the point of believing?

You will find a different quality of being in a person who believes in nothing, who has dropped all beliefs, whose consciousness is freed, freed from all ideology. Every ideology becomes a fixation. A moralist is a man of fixation; a religious man is flowing and fluid. The moralist has an idea about how to live his life; the religious person has no idea about how to live his life. He leaves it to Tao, to God, to the whole. He surrenders to the whole and the whole lives through him. He has no ideas about how to live his life.

Remember, if you have an idea about how to live your life, you will live wrongly. When somebody asks me, “What is the right way to live my life?” I say, “The right way to live your life is not to have any ideas about how to live your life.” Live without ideas and you live rightly. Live without mind and you live rightly. Live moment to moment and you live rightly. Don’t live out of the past and don’t live out of the future – just live herenow and you will live rightly.

-Osho

-Osho

From Tao: The Pathless Path, V.2, Discourse #7

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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