BENGALURU: Life is mostly a constant repetition of habit. Taken as a whole, it is painful and tiresome, wearisome and sorrowful, and that is the lot of most of us. To escape from that, we turn to beliefs, to rituals, to knowledge, to amusements, to politics, to activity: we welcome any form of escape from our daily, tiresome, boring routine. These escapes, whether political or religious, must, by their very nature, likewise become tiresome, routine, habitual. We move from sensation to sensation; and ultimately, all sensation must become boring, tiresome. As our life is mostly a response from our physical centres, and as it causes disturbance, pain, we try to escape into what we call religion, into spiritual realms.
Now, as long as we are seeking sensation in any form, it must eventually lead to boredom; because one is surfeited, one gets tired of it - which is, again, an obvious fact. The more sensations you have, the more tiresome they become at the end, the more boring, the more habitual. And is religion a matter of sensation? – religion being the search for reality, and the discovery, the understanding, or the experiencing of the highest. Is that a matter of sensation, a matter of sentiment, a matter of appeal? To most of us, religion is a set of beliefs, dogmas, rituals, a constant repetition of organized formulae, and so on. If you examine these things you will see that they also are the outcome of the desire for sensation. You go to churches, temples, or to mosques, and you repeat certain phrases, you indulge in certain ceremonies. They are all stimulations, they give you a certain kind of sensation; and you are satisfied with that sensation, giving it a high-sounding name, but it is essentially sensation. You are caught in sensation, you like the impressions, the feeling of being good, the repetition of certain prayers, and so on. But, if one goes into it deeply and intelligently, one finds that basically they are only sensation; and although they may vary in expression and give you a feeling of newness, they are essentially sensation, and therefore ultimately boring, tiresome, habit-forming.
So, obviously, religion is not ceremony. Religion is not dogma. Religion is not the continuation of certain tenets or beliefs, inculcated from childhood. Whether you believe in God, or don’t believe in God, does not make you a religious person. Belief does not make you a religious person, surely. The man who drops an atomic bomb and destroys in a few minutes thousands upon thousands of people, may believe in God; and the person who leads a dull life and also believes in God or the person who does not believe in God, surely, they are not religious. Belief or non-belief has nothing to do with the search for reality, or with the discovery and the experiencing of that reality, which is religion. It is the experiencing of reality that is religion; and it does not lie through any organized belief, through any church, through any knowledge, either eastern or western.