All Things But None

This simple word contains all the religions of the world. It contains trust, it contains love, it contains surrender. It contains all the prayers that have ever been said, are being said and will ever be said. If you can say 'yes' with all your heart, you have said all that can be said. To say 'yes' to existence is to be religious, to say 'no' is to be irreligious.

That's my definition of the atheist and the theist. The atheist is not one who denies God and the theist is not one who believes in God – not necessarily so, because we have seen great theists who never believed in God and tremendously enlightened people who never talked about God. But they talked about yes; they had to talk about yes.

God can be dropped as an unnecessary hypothesis, but yes cannot be dropped. Yes is the very spirit of godliness. And yes can exist without God, but God cannot exist without yes. God is only the body, yes is the soul.

There are people who believe in God and yet I will call them atheists, because their belief has no yes behind it. Their belief is bogus, their belief is formal, their belief is given by others, it is borrowed. Their parents, priests and teachers have taught them that God exists; they have made them so afraid that they cannot even question the existence of God. And they have given them promises of great things if they believe in God. There will be great rewards in heaven if you believe and great punishments in hell if you don't believe. Fear and greed have been exploited. The priest has behaved with the congregation almost like the psychologist behaves with the rats upon which he experiments. The rats are controlled by punishment and reward. Reward them, and they start learning the thing for which they are rewarded; punish them, and they start unlearning the thing for which they are punished...

Theists, atheists, both are victims. The really religious person has nothing to do with the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. The really religious person has a deep communion with existence. He can say yes to a rose flower, he can say yes to the stars, he can say yes to people, he can say yes to his own being, to his own desires. He can say yes to whatever life brings him; he is a yea-sayer.

And in this yea-saying is contained the essential prayer.

Text by Osho

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And of course, also knowing exactly when to say Yes [and No] is crucial to our well being. I guess this is what they called a poor man's entry – something borrowed. Well, I like sharing, even if it's not my own. I was going to post a song and a photo and write about my weekend, but I'll do that tomorrow or the following day rather.

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Happy Monday. Yes? Yes.