A living saint is not so reliable. Tomorrow he may change his mind. Saints have become sinners, sinners have become saints-so until they are dead, nothing can be said about them with absolute certainty. That is one of the basic reasons that in your temples, in your churches, in your mosques, in your gurudwaras, it your synagogues . . . whom are you worshipping? And you don’t see the stupidity of it all, that the living are worshipping the dead, the present is worshipping the
past. Life is being forced to worship death. It is because of these anti-life religious that the question has arisen again and again down the ages: what is the aim of life?
According to your religions, the aim of life is to renounce it, to destroy it, to torture yourself in the name of some mythological, hypothetical God.
Animals don’t have any religion except life; trees don’t have any religion except life; stars don’t have any religion except life. Except man, the whole existence trusts only in life; there is no other God and there is no other temple. There is no holy scripture. Life is all in all. It is the god and it is the temple and it is the holy scripture-and to live it totally, wholeheartedly, is the only religion.
I teach you that there is no other aim than to live with such totality that each moment becomes a celebration. The very idea of aim brings future into the mind, because any aim, any end, any goal, needs future. All your goals deprive you of your present, which is the only reality you have. The future is only your imagination, and the past is just footprints left in the sands of your memory. Neither is the past real anymore, nor is the future real yet.
This moment is the only reality. And to live this moment without any inhibition, without any repression, without any greed for the future, without any fear – without repeating the past again and again, but being absolutely fresh in every moment, fresh and young, unhampered by memories, unhindered by imaginations – you have such purity, such innocence, that only this innocence I call godliness. To me, God is not someone who created the world. God is someone that you create when you live totally, intensely – with all your heart, not holding anything back. When your life becomes simply a moment-to-moment joy, a moment-to-moment dance, when your is nothing but a festival of lights. . .
every moment is so precious because once it is gone, it is gone forever. Living for any aim simply means you are not living in the present.