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According to Osho, the true spirit of religiousness is a living, individual, wordless experience of truth—an open, risky freedom beyond beliefs, scriptures, and organizations. It is verb, not noun: loving, awareness, presence. It trusts only direct experience, stands alone without crowds or cages, and flowers as authenticity, silence, and limitless sky-like openness.
Religiousness means feeling truth directly in your own heart—free, alive, and open—without needing a group, book, or rules.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, according to my dictionary, a cult is "a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious" -- "spurious" meaning "of illegitimate birth, bastard." is it not true to say that the real spirit of religiousness can never be anything but unorthodox; and will always be inspired by a love union, rather than born out of a legalized contract?
Maneesha, I am not a man of language, not a linguist, not a man of words. My experience is of the wordless. Although I use words, I am not confined by them. To me there is only one dictionary and that is of existence, of experience. All other dictionaries are for mundane, ordinary affairs -- not for this extraordinary love affair. In the first place there is no such thing as religion. Just as there is no such thing as love, no such thing as beauty -- these are not things. There is a certain phenomenon you can describe as religiousness, but you cannot confine it to the word `religion'. Religion is a limitation; it has a boundary line, it is an imprisonment. Religiousness is open to the whole sky. It can contain the all. It has no doors, no windows, no walls. The moment the experience of religiousness is…
Beloved Osho, what is religion?
In anger one day the archbishop took a motorboat and went to those three people who were sitting under a tree. He looked at them and he could not believe it: what kind of saints are these? In the very beginning he introduced himself and declared, "I am the archbishop." The three saints all touched his feet. Now he felt relaxed, "These are fools... and things are not yet gone so far that they cannot be controlled." He asked them, "Are you saints?" They looked at each other, and they said, "We have never heard the word. We are uneducated, uncultured. Don't talk Greek to us; just simply say what you mean." "My God," said the archbishop, "you don't know what a saint means? Do you know the Christian prayer?" Again they looked at each other, and nudged each other as if to say, "You tell him." The archbishop now…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.] Sannyas is to be true to your original face. Then all your fragments start melting into each other and they create a centre, they create integrity, they create individuality. And that's what religion is all about. Religion has nothing to do with god or heaven and hell and all kinds of theories and philosophies. The basic concern of religion is truth. And one has to live it, only then can one know it. Truth is god. Truth does not mean a conclusion arrived at by thinking. It means experience arrived at through living. Truth is not a hypothesis; hence philosophy has no truth in it. Philosophy goes round and round, it moves in circles, but it never reaches the target.
A friend has asked, Osho, why should we be religious when neither the beginning nor the end is known, and there is no trace of God or soul? The enlightened ones speak of truth—if that truth is real, why can’t they make everyone experience it?
No one is telling you to be religious—at least Lao Tzu would not. The so-called religious people have created so much disturbance that it is better you do not become one of them. Lao Tzu does not say, “Be religious.” He simply says: be what you are. You may ask, why should I be what I am? Because that is the only thing you can be. There is no way to be anything else. Yes, you can try to be something else—and in that trying your life can be wasted. You may then say, why not waste life? No one can stop you. And precisely for this reason even the enlightened ones are defeated and cannot give you the knowledge of truth—because you say, why should we know the truth? What can the enlightened do? They can speak. They can try to awaken in you the thirst for the joy…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed on to the computer. It is for reference purposes only.] By going beyond all religions One becomes religious. The true religion Is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan. The true religion is a transcendence Of all creeds, dogmas, scriptures. The true religion is not a religion in fact But a kind of religiousness. It is not a noun but a verb. It has nothing to do with organisation. It has something to do with the individual. It is something inner. Not that you go to a particular church And you become a Catholic or you go to the temple And you become a Hindu -- no. You go into your own being And you become religious. And to be religious is enough. There is no need for any adjective.