They have made you Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans; they have made you communists, fascists – they have made you this or that. They have not allowed you an open growth. Why? Why were they so afraid? Why were they in such a hurry to send you to the church? Why were they in such a hurry to baptize you? They were in a hurry because they thought they loved you, and they would like to protect you – to protect you from the problem, the crisis that one day you might feel, you might encounter. So they were giving you answers before the question had arisen. They were preparing you. They were providing you with answers so when the question arose you would be able to deal with it, you would know the answers.

But those answers are false. They did it out of love for you, but all that is done out of love is not necessarily right. Unless love is aware, it can do harm. The world suffers much harm from love which is not aware. They wanted to protect you, they wanted you to be ready to face any crisis in your life, so they supplied you answers – and answers cannot be supplied, answers have to be found.

One has to pay for answers. They are not cheap. Knowledgeability is not knowledge.

Politics provides you with one kind of distraction, philosophy another kind of distraction.

Art is simply a consolation. It simply decorates your prison cell, it makes it worth living in, it makes it beautiful, it paints it. It keeps you in the prison cell because the prison cell becomes so beautiful – as if the cage has been made of gold and the bird forgets about the sky, and it becomes difficult to leave the cage; it is golden.

Philosophy distracts. Theology cheats. Art simply decorates, consoles. Art is a kind of ointment when what is needed is surgery, not ointment. It is consoling but it is not transforming. And education simply functions as a conspiracy. Education is in the service of the past. Education is not creative. And these are the things one gets involved in sooner or later.

Only religion can take you beyond your stagnancy. But when I say religion, I don’t mean Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. I simply mean religiousness. And religiousness is very simple. It is so simple that you will not believe in it. Theologies are complex, religion is simple. Truth is very simple, philosophies are very complex. The philosophies have to be complex, otherwise you would see the lie in them. They have to be so complex that you cannot find the lie. They have to create so much jargon, clouds, subtleties, complexities; they have to make the whole thing so zigzag, like a riddle, a puzzle, so that you can never come out of it. Philosophies, theologies are all labyrinthine: you can enter into them, getting out is very difficult because one thing leads to another. And the complexities become more and more complex the more you enter into them.

Truth is simple. Religion is simple. Religion has no theology, religion is pure experience – the experience that happens when you die to the past and you are being born into the future. Between the two is what religion is, the insight into reality.

And remember, the theologians of the world point out that things are but transitory: “All the brightness of one rose is only for a while. The mayfly comes in the morning, and in the evening is dead, is gone. God does not come and go, therefore seek only God.” This is simply greed, nothing else – the same old greed in a new form, the same old wine in a new bottle.