Those millions who are not thirsty, they also want to pretend that they are thirsty. It is these millions who are not thirsty and yet want to pretend that they are religious, seekers of truth… They become the victims of the cunning and the clever people, of the priests.

The priests succeed in exploiting because there are people who want to be exploited. It is a perfect arrangement. The priest cannot make a business out of religion if there are real seekers; they will see through it, they cannot be deceived. But, in fact, there are millions of people who don’t want to know the truth and yet are not ready to accept that they don’t want to know the truth – that hurts. For these people plastic truths are needed. For these people plastic flowers are needed. And plastic flowers have one thing about them: they never wither away.

This is something to be understood: the false has a longer life than truth, because the false adjusts to the process of time, it is part of it. The true comes from the beyond, it is not part of time; it is part of eternity. It does not belong to time. It enters into time, but it is a foreigner. Time cannot absorb it, and it cannot adjust itself to time, so it is only for a moment that you see the light of a buddha, and then it disappears. It is only for a rare moment that eternity gives a glimpse into the world of time.

That’s how a real flower dies. But the plastic flower remains. In fact, scientists now, particularly those who are interested in not polluting nature, those who are ecology-oriented, are very much worried about plastic, because plastic is something that never dies. It cannot be absorbed back into the earth; it will remain forever and ever. You throw away a plastic bag or anything that is made of plastic; it will remain. The earth cannot reabsorb it; the sea cannot reabsorb it. It is so unreal that it will persist.

Lies persist for thousands of years; lies have their own ways of remaining, because they adjust to time, they are part of time. But truth is something strange in the world of time. It is timelessness. It is a miracle that once in a while it expresses itself in the dimension of time; it is a miracle. The Buddha, the Christ, these are miracles, something that should not be, something that is going against the law of necessity, something that follows the law of power, of grace, and comes from the beyond. That ray comes and goes.

Millions of people want to pretend to be religious. These are the people who go to the churches and to the mosques and to the temples and the gurudwaras. These are the people who want religion cheap. They want only a formal kind of religion, a Sunday religion. They don’t really want to become committed; they are playing a game. And in their mundane life the game seems to pay – the churchgoer is respected, and the person who is respected can cheat better than anybody else. The churchgoer is thought to be religious; nobody thinks that he will deceive, hence he can deceive more easily. The church fits in with the market place perfectly well; it is part of the market place.