Beliefs are to distract people from discovering the beauty, the grandeur, the splendor, the divinity of existence. And this is what all the priests of all the religions are doing all over the world: programming people to believe certain things – God, heaven, hell, right, wrong, what virtue is, what sin is.
I would like you to know exactly the meaning of the word sin. It does not mean what the Christians say; it means forgetfulness. At its root, it means forgetfulness of your being. So there is only one sin: forgetfulness of your being. And there is only one virtue: that is remembering yourself. And the moment you remember yourself, this whole existence becomes a totally different place. A great love arises, a great compassion arises. It is not that you cultivated it; you simply found it just like a flower opening in the morning sun: the flower discovers its own fragrance for the first time. Amazed – a mystery was hidden inside him, a splendor – he dances in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, just with the sheer blissfulness of having such a beautiful fragrance.
Remembering yourself, you don’t have to be part of any organized religion. You have direct communication with existence. No argument is needed to prove it; you know it. Argument is needed only when you don’t know it. Do you need any argument for the sun, for the moon, for the starry night? Do you need any argument for things that you know? You need arguments for hell; you need arguments and great theological systems to prove heaven.
It is strange that all religions are concerned with hell, with heaven, with God. No religion seems to be concerned with you. They are all concerned with the past; they are all concerned with the future. No religion seems to be concerned with the present.
All religions are life-negative; they deny life – and to deny life is to deny God. That is the only denial. Whoever denies life and teaches renouncing life is an atheist; he is against the divinity of existence. Whoever teaches you to live life in its totality, with great affirmation, rejoicing, singing, and dancing – then this very moment, the whole existence becomes divine. In your dance it becomes divine, in your joy it becomes divine, in your blissfulness it becomes divine, in your ecstasy you reach the highest peak of divineness. Unless you know your own divineness, you cannot know the divinity of existence. That is just the beginning: to know your divineness is the first step in knowing the divineness of the whole existence.
This existence has never been created. The whole argument is absolutely wrong. All religions think everything has to be created; otherwise from where will it come? But they don’t think, “Where does God come from?” If God created the world, where is he coming from? Who created him? And if God can be uncreated, then what is the point of bringing in an unnecessary hypothesis?
This is a basic principle of all scientific research: don’t bring in unnecessary hypotheses. Work it out with the minimum of hypotheses. If God is to be created by another bigger God, you will end in an absurdity – what logicians call regressus ad infinitum. You will regress into infinity, and you will not find the answer. The question will remain standing exactly where it was: Who created the last God?
Existence is enough. Hence I teach you godliness, but not God.