Have you ever thought if your being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu is your choice? Has it been your discovery? Have you ever looked at why you are a Christian? Just because of the accident that you were born to two persons who were Christians. They were also accidentally Christians, just as you are. One accident goes on giving birth to another accident. Neither was Christianity their discovery, nor is Christianity your discovery. And a religion that has not been discovered by you, how can it be real? How can it become a song in your heart? How can it transform you?

That’s why the whole world is religious, but still there is no religiousness anywhere. Somebody is Mohammedan, somebody is Jaina, somebody is Buddhist – except my people, who are searching for who they are. And the miracle is, when you search you never find that you are a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan.

If you search, you find that you are part of God. You are divine – and who bothers about being Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan? You have reached to the very source of religiousness. You will not belong to any organized religion. And then whatever religiousness you have found will be authentic, true. It will show in your actions, it will show in your eyes, it will show in your relationships, in your responses to situations.

You will not go to a church or a temple or a mosque or a synagogue, because you have found the real temple of God within yourself. So whenever you want to go to the temple, you will close your eyes and be silent. In that silence you will start falling deeper and deeper…finally to your very center. And your center is also the center of the whole universe. Only on the periphery we are different; at the center all differences are lost, just a blissfulness remains.

Remember this as something very basic, that you cannot be something of the false and something of the true. Just as in this Chuang Tzu Auditorium, if there is light it is not possible that half of the auditorium will remain dark and half will become full of light – either the whole will remain in darkness, or the whole will become full of light. There is no coexistence between light and darkness, and there is no coexistence between reality and the false.

An Irishman was condemned to receive forty lashes, but the more they whipped him, the more he laughed. “Why are you laughing?” they asked him. “You don’t understand,” he told them, helpless with laughter, “you are whipping the wrong man.”

You are also living the wrong man. Even when you are in love, which is your most precious moment, there are four persons, not two. The real two are hiding, and the false two are making love. And the false two are absolutely incapable of love – how can love arise out of falseness? Hence love gives you so much hope and frustrates you almost a thousand times more. But the problem is so deep that you never become aware of why you go on condemning the other person. You go on changing lovers, but with each lover the same thing is going to happen.

Even a man like Jean-Paul Sartre lives in the same fallacy; he calls the other the hell. The other is not hell, but there is some meaning when he calls the other the hell. You never come in contact with the real other; you always come in contact with the real other. The false has a quality of giving you great promises, but it never delivers any goods.