Question – Bhagwan, how can we get rid of the programming of organized religions?
Osho – The process of deprogramming is one of the most simple. Just you have to watch the ideologies, philosophies, religions, that you are carrying in your mind — are not your own experiences. That’s the distinction to be made: what is not your own experience, you have been programmed. Otherwise how you got it?
You are a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. How you got to be a Christian? You have never explored. You don’t have any personal experience. Your heart will immediately say to you, that “I am absolutely innocent of all these things.” Your mind has been programmed.
And to understand what is programmed, is to understand what is false in you, what is borrowed in you, what has been forced upon you. This very awareness is enough. The ideas are not clinging to you. You are clinging to those ideas.
So it is not a question how to get rid of them. It is a question how not to go on holding them. And the moment you see the falsity, you will drop them. To know something as false and borrowed, is enough to drop it.
And once you have dropped all that is borrowed in you, you are again innocent, a tabula rasa, a clean sheet on which nothing is written. And I don’t want to write anything on it. I want you to experience and write yourself. You are the only person who has the right to ink in (?anything) on your being.
This is the most essential freedom. All other freedoms are just so-so. And this essential freedom is not given to man. Political freedom is given and social freedom is given, but they are not real freedoms. To programmed people, there is no freedom, because they will be using the freedom according to the program which is their bondage.
So the first and the most important thing is to get unburdened of the bondage. And the simple distinction about everything — you have to go all over your mental luggage and ask, “Do you know god? Have you experienced anything of god?” If not, then whether god exists or not does not matter. It is not your experience. It has no relevance to you. And once you are a clean slate, you can go on an adventurous journey of discovering what is the truth. But before one knows what is the truth, one has to know what is false. Because you are so much surrounded with the false, that you will not be able to know the truth.
That is the purpose of deprogramming: to help you clean yourself of all borrowed knowledge enforced on you in your childhood, in your innocent moments of life when you were not capable to doubt and question — but now you are capable to question and doubt. So whatever your parents, your teachers, your churches, your priests have done — you have to undo it.
And it is such a simple process to undo it: just like a snake slipping out of his old skin. He never looks back. You just go on watching each idea, and you will find they are all false because none of them is yours — so there is no fear, no problem that you can get confused. What is yours and what is not yours is such a simple process, that everybody is capable of.
Source – Osho Book “Last Testament, Vol 6”