Book of Understanding Creating Your Own Path to Freedom

WORLDLY VS. OTHERWORLDLY Understanding the Great Divide I propose a new religiousness. It will not be Christianity and it will not be Judaism and it will not be Hinduism; this religiousness will not have any adjective to it. It will be purely a quality of being whole. Religion has failed. Science has failed. The East has failed, and the West has failed. Something of a higher synthesis is needed in which East and West can have a meeting, in which religion and science can have a meeting. The human being is like a tree, with its roots in the earth and the potential to flower. Religion has failed because it was talking only of the flowers--and those flowers remain philosophical, abstract; they never materialize. They could not materialize because they were not supported by the earth. And science has failed because it has cared only about the roots. The roots are ugly, and there seems to be no flowering. Religion has failed because it was otherworldly and it neglected this world. And you cannot neglect this world--to neglect this world is to neglect your own roots. Science has failed because it neglected the other world, the inner, and you cannot neglect the flowers. Once you neglect the flowers, the innermost core of being, life loses all meaning. Just as the tree needs roots, so does the human being need roots--and the roots can only be in the earth. The tree needs an open sky to grow into, to come to great foliage and to have thousands of flowers. Then only is the tree fulfilled; then only does the tree feel significance and meaning, and life becomes relevant. The West is suffering from too much science, and the East has suffered from too much religion. Now we need a new humanity in which religion and science become two aspects of one humanity. And once we have brought this new humanity into existence, the earth can become for the first time what it is meant to become. It can become a paradise: this very body the Buddha, this very earth the paradise. Zorba the Buddha: A meeting of earth and sky My concept of a new human being is one that will be Zorba the Greek and will also be Gautam the Buddha: the new human being will be "Zorba the Buddha"--sensuous and spiritual. Physical, utterly physical--in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible--and still a great consciousness, a great witnessing will be there. Zorba the Buddha--it has never happened before. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about a meeting of the East and the West, the meeting of materialism and spirituality. That's my idea of Zorba the Buddha: heaven and earth are united. I want there to be no schizophrenia, no split between matter and spirit, between the mundane and the sacred, between this-worldly and that-worldly. I don't want any split, because every split is a split in you. And any person, any humanity that is divided against itself is going to be crazy and insane. We are living in a crazy and insane world. It can be sane only if this split can be bridged. Mankind has lived believing either in the reality of the soul and the illusoriness of matter, or in the reality of matter and the illusoriness of the soul. You can divide the humanity of the past into those who are spiritual and those who are materialists. But nobody has bothered to look at the reality of the human being. We are both together. We are neither just spirituality--not just consciousness--nor are we just matter. We are a tremendous harmony between matter and consciousness. Or perhaps matter and consciousness are not two things but only two aspects of one reality: Matter is the outside of consciousness, and consciousness is the interiority of matter. But there has not been a single philosopher, sage, or religious mystic in the past who has declared this uOshos, Osho is the author of 'Book of Understanding Creating Your Own Path to Freedom', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307336941 and ISBN 0307336948.