Osho on Religion - I teach a Religionless Religiousness

Osho - God is not a person but an experience: the experience of bliss, of joy, of benediction. The idea of god as a person has been a calamity, a curse. The very idea has created the temples, the mosques, the churches and it has led man astray from true religion.

True religion can only be one -- and there are three hundred religions on the earth. True religion cannot
have any adjective to it -- Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. Science is neither Christian nor Hindu nor
Mohammedan, how can religion be Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan? Science investigates the objective
reality, religion investigates the subjective reality. Both are searching for the real, one in the external world, the other in the internal. If science cannot be Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian, then how can religion be? Religion is nothing but a quality -- religiousness.

I teach a religionless religiousness. And the whole thing depends on your dropping the idea of god as a
person. Otherwise if god is a person then you start worshipping, praying; then you start persuading him to do some favours for you and you go in an absolutely wrong direction. No worship is meaningful, no prayer is meaningful because there is nobody as a person to answer you.

God is an inner experience. When you have reached your innermost core, to the very roots of your
being, a great explosion of bliss happens. It is like an atomic explosion. Your consciousness explodes and you are showered, bathed in a totally new kind of splendour of which you have never dreamt before. That experience is god. It is not that you encounter somebody who is a god, you experience something inside you which is divine, godly.

Remember this, then the whole approach changes. Then instead of worship, prayer, meditation becomes
important -- because prayer means god is somewhere outside you. You have to talk to him and of course
you have to be very nice, otherwise he may get angry, he may throw you into hell; you can't be nasty to him. You have to be nice and nagging -- both things have to be done. That's what prayer is, nice and nagging. Be nice so he cannot punish you and continue to nag: 'Do this, do this, do this,' so he gets tired, and one day thinking that enough is enough, he says 'Let me do it and be finished with this man.'

But there is nobody -- whether you are nice or nasty does not matter. What you are doing is a
monologue, it is not a dialogue because there is nobody at all. It is a kind of insanity.

True religion begins with meditation, not with prayer. Of course it ends in prayer but never begins in
prayer. And when it ends in prayer the prayer has a totally different meaning. When the light has exploded in you, when bliss has exploded in you, when you have arrived home -- then of course a deep gratitude to existence arises in you. That is prayer: just gratitude. Nothing has to be said, you just feel gratitude -- that is prayer. You feel prayerful, you feel a kind of tremendous thankfulness to the whole universe for all that it has done to you because suddenly you can see that what has happened is so infinite, so profound, that you don't deserve it at all.

Out of that experience that you don't deserve it, you have not earned it and yet it has happened; what
else can you do other then feel grateful? That gratitude is prayer. It is a silent bowing down to existence.

Source - Osho Book "I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am"