Temple

Beloved Osho, when a person enters a temple, one feels a sense of sensory appeasement -- music, chanting, incense, prasad, the visual beauty of the architecture, etc. Can corporate houses, the temples of the modern age, have anything to learn from this?

Sameer, not only the corporate houses but every place where man dwells has much to learn from the temples. First, you are always moving on holy ground. Not only in the temple are you in a holy place, but even in the marketplace you are moving on the same holy ground. You are not to be just prayerful in the temple, in the mosque, in the church. Your prayerfulness has to become just your breathing. You have not to create only in your temple a beautiful world of incense, of flowers, of music, of chanting, of beautiful architecture, of sculptures -- the temple should simply be the model for every house. Not only corporate houses, every house should be a temple, because every body is a temple. God dwells in you, and wherever you are, you should create the aroma, the fragrance of godliness. The authentically religious person is neither…

Further, one may also ask: why do you go to the temple?

Certainly one can ask—and one should tell. And one should tell what is true: that you have come out of fear of your wife; or out of fear of the neighbors; or out of fear of society; or that it has become a bad habit that won’t leave you; if you don’t come, it feels as if some special task has been left undone. Just as with smoking, so it has become with coming to the temple. Whatever is true, that is what should be said.

Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the relationship between the method of meditation and jati-smaran (recollection of past lives)?

But the one who becomes skilled in this—who can fully awaken any day’s memory up to the age of five—will find that the memories begin to awaken completely. And you should test it. As today passes, note down some events and lock them up. After two years, try to recall today. Most of it will have been forgotten. Then remember—and after remembering, break the lock and compare whether what you recalled matches what you had written. You will be amazed—astonished—that besides what you wrote, many more details have come back which you did not even note at the time. They will all be there in memory. Buddha called this alaya-vijnana. There is a corner of the human mind he called the storehouse of consciousness. Like a junk room in the house where we keep all the odds and ends, there is a storehouse that collects memories—where everything from birth after…

Another friend has asked: if meditation leads to samadhi and samadhi leads to god, then what need is there to go to the temples? Shouldn't we do away with them?

Those who see God in temples and those who destroy temples -- both are wrong. One who only sees God in the temple is mistaken. His mistake is: who else does he see outside the temple? Obviously, his mistake is that he does not see God except in the temple. Your temple is very puny; God is very vast -- you cannot confine God to your puny little temples. The other person's error is: he wants to get into doing away with temples, into destroying them -- only then, he thinks, can he see God. Your temples are too small to serve as dwelling places of God or to prevent anyone from seeing God. Remember, your temples are so ridiculously small they cannot become God's residence, nor can they become his prison, which, when destroyed, would supposedly make him free. You need to understand exactly what I am saying. What…