Truth has its own fragrance.
Love has its own power.
Silence has its own impact. But there is no question of converting anybody. Sannyas is not a conversion. You are not moving from one ideology to another ideology – from Hinduism to Christianity, from Christianity to Buddhism. That is simply changing prisons. Perhaps the other prison may be a little better, but a prison is a prison after all, and a better prison may be more imprisoning.
Sannyas is getting rid of all ideologies, of all prisons. It is not a new ideology that you have chosen – you have chosen freedom from all ideologies. I don’t have any ideology to preach to you. I have no doctrine to give to you, no catechism, no religion.
I can simply tell you that I was imprisoned in the same way you are. And there are ways – just as I have come out of prisons, you can also. Nobody can prevent you, because your prison exists only through your agreement.
If you are a Christian it is your agreement; if you are a Buddhist it is your agreement – unconsciously. In your very childhood they have forced the agreement on you and destroyed your innocence, your freedom, your search for truth.
My trip around the world is to make people free who are suffering under unnecessary slavery, suffering through belief systems – in churches, in synagogues, in temples, but it is the same story in different names; there is no basic difference. All the religions are preventing people from knowing the truth.
And unless you know the truth of your being, you will never feel the great benediction of life. You will never be able to overflow with joy just for the sheer fact of existence.
If you cannot experience truth, you will not be able to connect yourself with this vast cosmos which is your home, which has given birth to you, and which has the tremendous expectation of you that you will grow to the ultimate peak of consciousness…because through you, existence can become conscious; there is no other way.
Man is existence’s most precious treasure – which is being wasted by Christians, by Jews, by Hindus, by Buddhists, by Mohammedans. He is existence’s greatest experiment. In this vast, infinite universe, only on this small earth has existence been able to produce this humanity, which has the potential to become totally conscious.
Existence expects much from you.
Just think: if humanity disappears from the earth, the whole existence will be dead. Not only this earth, all those millions of solar systems and millions of planets and stars will be simply dead. It is through thousands of years of tremendous effort that nature has brought matter to a point where it becomes conscious, alive.