Spirituality vs Religion

Religion and Belief Systems 

Sadhguru: The moment man became religious, it should have been the end of all conflict. Unfortunately, religion has become the main source of conflict everywhere in the world. It has taken the maximum number of lives and caused the maximum amount of pain on the planet for thousands of years. This is because a religion is essentially coming from a set of belief systems. 

Where does belief come from? Belief means you do not know. If you know something, you do not have to believe it, you simply know it. For example, do you believe that you have two hands or do you know that you have two hands? Even if you have no eyes to see these hands, you still know you have hands. With hands you know, but with God you believe – why? 

Belief arises because you are not sincere enough to admit that you do not know. You believe something which is culturally or generally convenient for you. Whether you believe there is God or believe there is no God, there is no difference – you are in the same boat. You are believing something that you do not know. 

The moment you believe something, you can go about with a certain level of confidence. Confidence without clarity is a disaster. This is exactly what you see in the world today. Belief systems fire people up with a great sense of confidence and this confidence without the necessary clarity is a huge disaster on this planet. The conflict in the world has always been between one man’s belief versus another man’s belief. The moment you believe that your way is right, and someone else believes his way is right, you are bound to fight. 

Belief systems arise because there is a certain convenience to them. It is a solace. Only those who are lost and disturbed need solace. Unfortunately a large part of humanity has been kept in this state for a long time, and now it has become necessary to peddle solace. All you need to tell them is, “Do not worry, God is with you.” That is all they need. Whether God is with you or not with you is not the issue. You feel someone is with you. This is keeping a lot of people sane. Otherwise they would break up. 

Religion has filled the gap between that absolutely blissful state that one can achieve in his own nature, and one’s present level of instability. If you are looking for solace, it is definitely needed. Most people are looking for solace, not liberation. Solace is like a tranquilizer – it puts you to sleep. We have to choose whether we want to go to sleep or come alive with a new possibility in our lives. 

The Difference Between Spirituality and Religion 

Somewhere, at some point, all religions started as a spiritual process. But in their eagerness to organize, they lost the fundamentals. Religion is just spirituality gone bad. Let us understand the distinction between religion and a spiritual process. The moment you say you belong to a religion, you call yourself a believer. The moment you say, “I am on a spiritual path,” you call yourself a seeker. What is the difference between believing and seeking? You can seek only that which you do not know. Or in other words, the fundamentals of seeking are that you have realized that you do not know the essential nature of your own life. You do not know the source of this creation. You do not know who you are, what you are, where you came from and where you will go. You are seeking to know. When you are in a state of “I do not know,” you cannot fight anyone. 

The first and foremost thing in the spiritual process is to be absolutely sincere with yourself and be willing to see, “What I know, I know; what I do not know, I do not know.” It does not matter who said what – whether Krishna, Jesus, Buddha or anyone else said it – maybe they are telling the truth, but with all due respect to them, you do not know – you have not experienced or seen it. Why not be sincere that you really do not know? 

“I do not know” is a tremendous possibility. It is the basis of knowing. Only when you see that you do not know, the possibility of knowing opens up. The moment you kill it with some kind of belief that is convenient for you, you destroy all possibilities of knowing. 

The spiritual process does not happen to you because you look up, down or around, it happens because you look inward. Inward is neither north, south, east or west. What is inward is dimensionless. That which is dimensionless can be approached only by someone who is straight within himself. I am not asking you to be straight with others – there may be many problems. I am talking about you being straight with yourself. Do you not deserve this one thing? 

From Religion to Responsibility 

This is the first time in the history of humanity that so many human beings can think for themselves. In the past, it was your priest, pundit, guru or scripture that thought for you. You were not allowed to think for yourself. Now you can think for yourself. Thinking for yourself means that unless something is logically correct, you cannot swallow it. The moment you start thinking logically, questions will arise in your mind. If you ask three penetrating questions, all the scriptures, religions and heavens will collapse. 

For too long, if something is going right, we think it is because of us, but if something is going wrong, we think it is because of God. It is time to change this. We need to understand that the source of all our problems is within us and if we want solutions, they are nowhere else but within us. 

What this essentially means is that humanity is beginning to move from religion to responsibility. Human potential will be fully explored only by moving the world from religion to responsibility. Otherwise, everybody has an excuse and divine sanction for all the rubbish they do. 

The nature of human intelligence is that if you do something stupid today, your intelligence will bother you tonight – “Why did I do this?” But if it is God-endorsed or scripture-endorsed, you can do idiotic things with great confidence. This needs to go. We need to move humanity from religion to a more responsible function.