Osho – No matter how many scriptures you read, you cannot establish contact thereby with religion. No temple or mosque or church can connect you with religion. Slumbering, insensitive you go to worship; the same you who runs the shop, also goes to the house of worship. Your attitude should change, and once it is altered, everything else is transformed accordingly; otherwise you will keep on trying everything and yet remain your same old self.
Nanak went to Hardwar during the month of offerings to the dead. People were filling vessels with water, and then, facing East, were throwing them into the sky in order to reach their forefathers in heaven. Nanak picked up a bucket also, but he turned towards the West, and each bucket of water he poured, he cried out, ”Reach my fields!”
After emptying a number of buckets, the people round him remonstrated with him. ”What are you doing? You are turned in the wrong direction. You should face towards the rising sun! And why do you say, ’Reach my fields’? Where are your fields?”
Nanak replied, ”About two hundred miles from here.” The people began to laugh. ”And you expect the water you throw here to reach your fields two hundred miles away? You are really out of your mind.”
”How far away are your forefathers?” Nanak asked.
”They are infinitely far away,” they replied.
”If your water can reach your ancestors an infinite distance away, why can’t my water cover a mere two hundred miles?” asked Nanak.
What is Nanak trying to say? He is asking them to think a little, ponder: ”What is this foolishness you indulge in? Become a little aware; what do you gain by such actions?”
Unfortunately all religion is filled with such stupidities. Some send water to ancestors, some bathe in the Ganges to wash away sins, yet others sit before idols without any feeling of worship or adoration, merely to ask for worldly things. A thousand foolishnesses prevail in the name of religion. Therefore Nanak insists that religion is not attained through scriptures, nor through tradition and customs, nor through blind following. Contact with religion is established only when a person attains contemplation.
When a person awakens, awareness appears within him. When the resonance of Omkar first sounds, our relationship with religion begins. The day you are capable of hearing the resonance of 0m within yourself, without any longer saying it, you are filled with joy, you are the witness, the observer. That very day you establish your connection with religion, not with some creed or sect. It is religion that Buddha calls dharma. It is religion that Mahavir and Nanak talk about.
Religion – dharma – means nature, the natural order of things. What Lao Tzu means by Tao, so Nanak means by religion. To be removed from one’s nature is to be lost. To return to one’s own nature is to return homewards. To be established in one’s own nature is to be established in God. The name, Niranjan – God, the spotless, the flawless one – is such that only he who contemplates his heart knows.
Source – Osho Book “The True Name, Vol 1”