Religion's Expiration Date (Move From Blind Belief to The Science of Your Inner Experience)

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The world today is pulled apart by religious strife: people massacre one another, societies fight bitterly over dissenting belief systems and nations are at war.

Yet in direct contrast to this, people have for centuries believed that religious faith is the moral guiding light by which they can strive to live their lives.

How can man reconcile these two? Or is it simply that religion - and its purpose in our lives - has reached its expiration date?

In this collection of talks, Osho outlines a crucially dif¬ferent approach:

Osho's unique contribution to the understanding of who we are defies categorization. Mystic and scientist, a rebel¬lious spirit whose sole interest is to alert humanity to the urgent need to discover a new way of living. To continue as before is to invite threats to our very survival on this unique and beautiful planet.

His essential point is that only by changing ourselves, one individual at a time, can the outcome of all our "selves" — our societies, our cultures, our beliefs, our world — also change. The doorway to that change is meditation. Osho the scientist has experimented and scrutinized all the approaches of the past and examined their effects on the modern human being and responded to their shortcomings by creating a new starting point for the hyperactive 21st Century mind: OSHO Active Meditations.

Once the agitation of a modern lifetime has started to settle, "activity" can melt into "passivity," a key starting point of real meditation. To support this next step, Osho has transformed the ancient "art of listening" into a subtle contemporary methodology: the OSHO Talks. Here words become music, the listener discovers who is listening, and the awareness moves from what is being heard to the indi¬vidual doing the listening. Magically, as silence arises, what needs to be heard is understood directly, free from the dis¬traction of a mind that can only interrupt and interfere with this delicate process.

Man since Jesus Christ." Sunday Mid-Day (India) has selected Osho as one of ten people — along with Gandhi, Nehru and Buddha — who have changed the des¬tiny of India.

These thousands of talks cover everything from the indi¬vidual quest for meaning to the most urgent social and political issues facing society today. Osho's books are not written but are transcribed from audio and video recordings of these extemporaneous talks to international audiences. As he puts it, "So remember: whatever I am saying is not just for you...I am talking also for the future generations."

Osho has been described by The Sunday Times in London as one of the "1000 Makers of the 20th Century" and by American author Tom Robbins as "the most dan¬gerous

About his own work Osho has said that he is helping to create the conditions for the birth of a new kind of human being. He often characterizes this new human being as "Zorba the Buddha" — capable both of enjoying the earthy pleasures of a Zorba the Greek and the silent serenity of a Gautama the Buddha.

Running like a thread through all aspects of Osho's talks and meditations is a vision that encompasses both the timeless wisdom of all ages past and the highest potential of todays (and tomorrow's) science and technology. Osho is known for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, with an approach to meditation that acknowledges the accelerated pace of con-temporary life. His unique OSHO Active Meditations'" are designed to first release the accumulated stresses of body and mind, so that it is then easier to take an experi¬ence of stillness and thought-free relaxation into daily life.

The world needs a great revolution where each individual finds his religion within himself. The moment religions become organized, they become dangerous; they become really politics with a false face of religion. That's why all the religions of the world go on trying to convert more and more people to their religion. It is the politics of numbers; whoever has the greater number will be more powerful.

But nobody seems to be interested in bringing millions of individ¬uals to their own selves. My work here consists of taking you out of any kind of organized effort - because truth can never be organized. You have to go alone on the pilgrimage, because the pilgrimage is going to be inside. You cannot take anybody with you. You have to drop everything that you have learned from others because all those prejudices will distort your vision - you will not be able to see the naked reality of your being. The naked reality of your being is the only hope of finding God. God is your naked reality, undecorated, without any adjective.

It is not confined by your body, not confined by your birth, not confined by your color, not confined by your sex, not confined by your country. It is simply not confined by anything. And it is available, so close: just one step inside and you have arrived. You have been told for thousands of years that the journey to God is very long. The journey is not long, God is not far away. God is in your breath, God is in your heartbeat; God is in your blood, in your bones, in your marrow - just a single step of closing your eyes and entering within yourself.