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Religion always deteriorates into morality. Morality
is dead religion.
Religion is alive morality. They never meet, they cannot meet. Because
life and death never meet
light and darkness never meet. But the
problem is that they look very alike -- the corpse looks very like the
living
man. Everything is just like when the man was alive: the same
face, the same eyes, the same nose, the hair, the body.
Just one thing
is missing, and that one thing is invisible.
Life is missing, but life is not tangible and
not visible. So when a man is
dead, he looks as if he is still alive. And with the problem of morality, it
becomes
more complex.
Morality looks exactly like religion, but it
is not. It is a corpse: it stinks of
death. Religion is youth, religion is freshness -- the freshness of the
flowers
and the freshness of the morning dew. Religion is splendor -- the
splendor of the stars, of life, of existence itself.
When religion is there,
there is no morality at all and the person is moral. But there is no
morality; there is no
idea of what morality is. It is just natural; it follows
you as your shadow follows you. You need not carry your shadow,
you
need not think about your shadow. You need not look back again and
again and see whether the shadow is following
you still or not. It follows.
Just like that, morality follows a religious
person. He never considers it,
he never deliberately thinks about it; it is his natural flavor. But when
religion
is dead, when life has disappeared, then one starts thinking
about morality continuously. Consciousness has disappeared,
and
conscience becomes the only shelter.
Conscience is a pseudo phenomenon. Consciousness
is yours,
conscience is borrowed. Conscience is of the society of the collective
mind; it does not arise in your own
being. When you are conscious you
act rightly because your act is conscious, and the conscious act can
never go wrong.
When your eyes are fully open and there is light, you
dont try to get through the wall, you go through the door. When
there
is no light and your eyes are also not functioning well, naturally you
grope in the dark. You have to think
a thousand and one times where
the door is -- "To the left, to the right? Am I moving in the right
direction?" And
you stumble upon the furniture, and you try to get out
through the wall.
A religious person is one who has eyes to see,
who has awareness. In
that awareness actions are naturally good. Let me repeat: naturally
good. Not that you manage
them to be good. Managed goodness is not
goodness at all. It is pseudo, it is pretension, it is hypocrisy. When
goodness
is natural, spontaneous, just as trees are green and the sky is
blue, so is the religious man moral -- completely unaware
of his morality.
Aware of himself but unaware of his morality, he has no idea that he is
moral, that he is good, that
what he is doing is right. Out of his
awareness comes innocence, out of his awareness comes the right act
-- of its
own accord. It has not to be brought, it has not to be
cultivated, it has not to be practised. Then morality has a beauty,
but it
is no more morality; it is simply moral. In fact, it is just a religious way of
living.
Thank you 4 your visit
John
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