Realisation of Religion

• Religion can be realised. Are you ready? Do you want it? You will get the realisation if you do, and then you will be truly religious. Until you have attained realisation, there is no difference between you and athiests. The atheists are sincere, but the man who says that he believes in religion and never attempts to realise it is not sincere.

• The chief thing is to want God. We want everything except God, because our ordinary wants are supplied by the external world; it is only when our necessities have gone beyond the external world that we want a supply from the internal, from God. So long as our needs are confined within this narrow limits of this physical universe, we cannot have any need for God, it is only when we become satiated with everything here, that we look beyond for a supply. It is only when the need is there that the demand will come. Have done with the child's play of the world as soon as you can, and then you will feel the necessity of something beyond the world, and the first step in religion will come.

• We are all of us babies here; we may be old and have studied all the books in the universe, but we are all spiritual babies. We have learnt the doctrines and dogmas, but realised nothing in our lives.

• Religion begins with a tremendous dissatisfaction with the present state of things, with our lives, and a hatred, an intense hatred, for this patching of life. an unbounded disgust for fraud and lies.

• "Death is better than a vegetating ignorant life; it is better to die on the battle-field than to live a life of defeat." This is the basis of religion. When a man takes this stand he is on the way to find the truth, he is on the way to God.

• This determination must be the first impulse towards becoming religious. I will hew out a way for myself. I will know the truth, or give up my life in the attempt. For on this side it is nothing, it is gone, it is vanishing every day.....on the other, there are the great charms of conquest, victories over all the ills of life, victory over life itself, the conquest of the universe. On that side men can stand.

• My Master used to say, the vulture rises higher and higher until he becomes a speck, but his eye is always on the piece of rotton carrion on the earth. After all what is the result of your ideas of religion? To cleanse the streets and have more bread and clothes? Who cares for bread and clothes? Millions come and go every minute. Who cares? Why care for the joys and vicissitudes of this little world? Go beyond that if you dare; go beyond law, let the universe vanish, and stand alone. "I am Existence-Absolute, Knowledge-Absolute, Bliss-Absolute; I am He, I am He."

• As my Master used to say, what would you think of men who went into a mango orchard, and busied themselves in counting the leaves, and examining the colour of the leaves, the size of the twigs, the number of branches, and so forth, while only one of them had the sense to begin to eat the mangoes? So leave this counting of leaves and twigs, and this note-taking to others. That work has its own value in its proper place, but not here, in the spiritual realm. Men never become spiritual through such work; you have never seen a strong spiritual man among these "leaf-counters". Religion is the highest aim of man, the highest glory, but it does not require "leaf-counting". If you want to be a Christian, it is not necessary to know whether Christ was born in Jerusalem or Bethlehem or just the exact date on which He pronounced the Sermon on the Mount; you only require to feel the Sermon on the Mount. It is not necessary to read two thousand words on when it was delivered. All this is for the enjoyment of the learned. Let them have it; say amen to that. Let us eat the mangoes.

• Religions of the world have become lifeless mockeries. What the world wants is character. The world is in need for those whose life is one burning love, selfless. That love will make every word tell like thunderbolt.

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