Osho – Religion has been dominated by ill and pathological people for centuries… My approach to religion is totally different. It is rooted in celebration, in wholeness, in health. I am not against life, I am in absolute love with life because to me life is god. There is no god other than life. One need not bother about any god up above there, in the heavens. God is within you and god is all around you, within everything. God means existence, that which exists is divine; hence even death is divine because that too exists. It exists as much as life itself, it is the very culmination of life. Life comes to a crescendo in death.
And I teach my sannyasins to celebrate everything. Celebrate birth, celebrate life, celebrate death. Celebration has to be the most fundamental thing in my sannyasin’s life. Accept everything with totality because nothing wrong can ever happen. And if anything happens it cannot be wrong because only god can happen, because only god is.
So I am against all those so-called saints who live a sad kind of life with long faces, very serious looking, as if they are doing something great. They are simply stupid and nothing else! To me, children are more saintly because they can dance so light-heartedly, they can sing and they can rejoice in small things. Just watch them running on the seashore, on the beach, collecting colored stones, seashells, as if they have found a mine of diamonds. Their joy is radiant, overflowing. And that is my vision of a real saint. A real saint becomes a child again.
Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of god,” and I absolutely agree with him. Love and laughter are far more precious to me than these so-called prayers and the worship and rituals of religion. You will have to learn a totally new dimension of life with me. You will have to unburden yourself, because I say if you can dance god is yours, if you can sing he sings within you. If you can love he is always present. Whenever there is love happening, god is happening. If you can cry joyously and laugh joyously, if you can laugh so deeply that you start crying, then know well that god is around you. God is always there whenever you are passionately, intensely into something.
A sannyasin has to learn to live life moment to moment with total intensity, as if there is going to be no other moment, as if this is the last moment — the first and the last both, because he never bothers about the past — that which is gone is gone — and he never bothers about the future — that which has not come yet has not come yet. He lives in the moment. And because there is only this moment to live all his energy is poured into this moment. His life starts having a flavor of totality. And that flavor is religion, that flavor is prayer.
Source – Osho Book “The Miracle”