We need both religion and science in our lives
Religion provides you the centre, it gives you the soul. Without religion, science is a corpse, a beautiful corpse, maybe. Similarly, religion alone is not enough. Religion alone makes you a ghost - a soul without a body
SCIENCE AND Religion, both have a role to play in equal measure in the lives of humankind. One cannot exist without the other. Science can give you a better body, better health, longevity; it can give you more comforts, all the luxuries of life possible to be bought with money. One can buy a beautiful bed but not sleep; the bed is the outer; sleep is the essence - in fact, science can give you all that lies in the circumference but not the centre. Science is like a body without the soul.
Religion provides you the centre; it gives you the soul. Without religion, science is a corpse, a beautiful corpse, maybe. Similarly, religion alone is not enough. Religion alone makes you a ghost - a soul without a body.
Have you ever seen a body without a soul or a soul without a body? Never! Why? Because, neither can stand on its own. For a material thing, eg, a stool requires a minimum of three legs to stand and non-material-man, two. In like manner, if either science or religion attempted to stand only on one leg, it can at best frogmarch for a while before it falls flat. But this is what the East and the West have been trying to do all through history. In the West, there has been too much of science and in the East, too much of religion.
Forgetting the existent reality around us, in the East, we talked too much about the spirit, so much so that we turned into inveterate introverts. We forgot the beauties of nature that surrounded us. "Do not be attached. Renounce everything that you see as real, because they are unreal," taught our religion, and thus we started to be looked upon as fakirs, or the land of naked sadhus with loincloths, roaming the forests. Such was our picture presented to the world. Humanity in the East became ugly. It did have a centre all right but with no circumference.
The very opposite happened in the West. People were gregarious, action-oriented, had only one life to acquire everything attainable possible and so were in a great hurry. Thus it did achieve a commendable lot in materialistic terms but in the process lost its contentment. It became a circumference without a centre. People have everything, yet something is missing.
'Something missing', reminds me of great scientists like Max Plank, Eddington, Einstein, Newton, - all of whom later turned almost mystical. No matter how many mysteries they did unfold, tenfold more were in the waiting that they never thought of. Newton said, "to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Eddington has written in his biography, "When I started my career as a scientist, I used to think that the world consisted of things but as I grow old, I am becoming more and more aware that the world does not consist of things but of thoughts."
Reality is far closer to thoughts than to things. Reality is far more mysterious than what can be weighed or measured. Reality is not only objective, it is subjective too. Reality is not only content, it is also consciousness. Therefore, the need of the hour is that we must have a science that is religious and a religion, which is scientific.
Nikos Kazantzakis's famous novel Zorba the Greek has been described as "a living heart, a large voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet severed from Mother Earth." There has been an attempt to inject a sort of vaccine against anything spiritual. Gautama Buddha, on the other hand, is spiritualism personified. We need a new Buddha - a synthesis of Zorba the Greek and Gautama, the Buddha. He cannot be just Zorba, and he cannot be just Buddha. In his well-known book of the 1970s, Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra says it beautifully: Physicists do not need mysticism nor do the mystics need Physics, but humanity needs both.
Osho, the great master's whole endeavour has been to create a bridge between Zorba and Buddha, between the earth, this shore and the farther shore, the beyond.
Have you ever seen a body without a soul or a soul without a body? Never! Why? Because, neither can stand on its own. For a material thing, eg, a stool requires a minimum of three legs to stand and non-material-man, two. In like manner, if either science or religion attempted to stand only on one leg, it can at best frogmarch for a while before it falls flat. But this is what the East and the West have been trying to do all through history. In the West, there has been too much of science and in the East, too much of religion.
Forgetting the existent reality around us, in the East, we talked too much about the spirit, so much so that we turned into inveterate introverts. We forgot the beauties of nature that surrounded us. "Do not be attached. Renounce everything that you see as real, because they are unreal," taught our religion, and thus we started to be looked upon as fakirs, or the land of naked sadhus with loincloths, roaming the forests. Such was our picture presented to the world. Humanity in the East became ugly. It did have a centre all right but with no circumference.
The very opposite happened in the West. People were gregarious, action-oriented, had only one life to acquire everything attainable possible and so were in a great hurry. Thus it did achieve a commendable lot in materialistic terms but in the process lost its contentment. It became a circumference without a centre. People have everything, yet something is missing.
'Something missing', reminds me of great scientists like Max Plank, Eddington, Einstein, Newton, - all of whom later turned almost mystical. No matter how many mysteries they did unfold, tenfold more were in the waiting that they never thought of. Newton said, "to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Eddington has written in his biography, "When I started my career as a scientist, I used to think that the world consisted of things but as I grow old, I am becoming more and more aware that the world does not consist of things but of thoughts."
Reality is far closer to thoughts than to things. Reality is far more mysterious than what can be weighed or measured. Reality is not only objective, it is subjective too. Reality is not only content, it is also consciousness. Therefore, the need of the hour is that we must have a science that is religious and a religion, which is scientific.
Nikos Kazantzakis's famous novel Zorba the Greek has been described as "a living heart, a large voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet severed from Mother Earth." There has been an attempt to inject a sort of vaccine against anything spiritual. Gautama Buddha, on the other hand, is spiritualism personified. We need a new Buddha - a synthesis of Zorba the Greek and Gautama, the Buddha. He cannot be just Zorba, and he cannot be just Buddha. In his well-known book of the 1970s, Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra says it beautifully: Physicists do not need mysticism nor do the mystics need Physics, but humanity needs both.
Osho, the great master's whole endeavour has been to create a bridge between Zorba and Buddha, between the earth, this shore and the farther shore, the beyond.
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