Monday, August 24, 2009

Because God is both summer and winter

BIGOTRY (prejudice, racism, intolerance, bias, narrow-mindedness, chauvinism)

Life is not an effort to attain, it is a celebration. Heraclitus says, “Bigotry is the sacred disease.”

Whenever a person becomes religious, this disease is possible. Whenever one becomes religious, one becomes vulnerable to this disease, bigotry. It is very difficult to find a religious man and not bigoted.

It happened: I saw Mulla Nasaruddin drinking in a bar and asked, “Nasaruddin, what are you doing? Just yesterday you told me that you have left drinking and you have become an absolute teetotaler, so what are you doing?”

Nasaruddin said, “ Yes I am an absolute teetotaler – but not a bigoted one.”

Whatsoever you are, remain flexible. Don’t create a fixed frame around you, remain moving and flowing. Sometimes one has to go out of the discipline also. Life is bigger than your discipline and sometimes one has to go completely against one’s own rules – because God is both summer and winter.

Don’t be a victim of bigotry. Be religious but don’t be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian. Let the whole earth be your church, let the whole existence be your temple. And when the whole God is available, why be satisfied with a fragment? Why say Christian, why say Hindu? When you can be a human being, why choose labels? Drop all labels and drop all beliefs.

From the book: Meeting with People, Chapter on Heraclitus by Osho

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