Religion

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called Insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion.”

- Robert M. Pirsig.

I don’t get it. Why do we have to conform to boundaries, rules and regulations? Yes, okay, there are a basic set of morals – don’t kill, don’t steal which make life easier to live. But religions?

My request to all the “gurus” out there – if you have certain rules, beliefs you would like to stick to, keep it to yourselves, don’t impose it on others.

And my request to all those listening to the gurus – these gurus are very good. They have a lot of knowledge and experience and you should always try to take the most of it. But don’t blindly follow everything they say. Think. Let your brain follow your own religion. Don’t let them tame your brain and decide the boundaries for you. You decide the boundaries for yourself. Or better, don’t have any boundaries. Nature will decide them for you, just like water on the floor.

Let’s make things clearer with a simple experiment. Take a glass of water. Pour it on the floor. See the water spread. Enjoy the beauty of it. If it doesn’t annoy the people around you, do it again. If it does annoy them, don’t give a damn, still do it. Every time, the water spreads in a different pattern in different directions. That’s the beauty of nature - the abstraction. And that is how one should live one’s life – without any boundaries. Stretching one’s water in every direction – more in the direction one wants to go, less in the direction one doesn’t want to go. The water on the floor stops spreading after sometime. That’s when it has reached its maximum point. Similarly, the human brain should be allowed to expand to its maximum potential. Not confined by pouring the water into a well-defined container. That’s when the water is tame, not wild and carefree as on the floor – much to the happiness of the people around you.

And why are people happy being tamed in such a manner? They are not. There is always an underlying frustration, an underlying current of unhappiness in every tamed human brain. That’s when the “gurus” come up with meditation, self-discovery and what-not. Create problems and then solve them. But that’s another subject altogether. Let’s concentrate on the history of the taming of the human brain. It is said that man evolved from apes. Let’s assume that it is true. Apes were wild. Man is civilised. Better word – gives u a nice feeling. The problem is as the brain developed gradually as man evolved, so did the need for boundaries. Humans have an inborn feeling that they should stick to a set of rules and regulations. In other words, lock themselves in a space with boundaries so they don’t go wild again. And thus, religion was born.

Let me tell you why I don’t like the concept of religion. What is religion? It is a set of beliefs. This set will vary from person to person. Everyone has different beliefs, different perspectives. But people have all these well-defined packaged deals (religions) to choose from. Most of us simply follow the religion of the family we are born into. Why? The question arises again. Why define boundaries? Or why follow boundaries set by other people?

This very question had troubled great minds like the Prophet, Jesus, Buddha etc. And so they had come up with their own religions. People of the world, you don’t have to follow their religions, all of you have a brain too, you come up with your own religion. All of you can be Prophets, Jesuses and Buddhas – the only difference is you won’t be famous because there won’t be a group of people following you, they will be busy following their own religions.

What a lovely floor it will be! Liquids of different colours and tastes allowed to spread on the floor all mixing together abstractly – no bottled up containers containing similar liquids. No thinking whether a person is a Christian, Hindu or a Muslim, no wars in the name of religion. In fact, no religion having a name and a group of people following it. Everyone having their own religion and giving it their own names. I am John, and I follow John. End of story.