Earnestness, sincerity, authenticity

Earnestness, sincerity, authenticity — these are the foundations. They are not different things but different aspects of the same phenomenon. One has to be utterly truthful about oneself. One need not hide, only cowards hide. The courageous person remains as he is, naked. He is ready to accept whatsoever the consequences, but he is not ready to compromise his truth. This is the only way to become an individual; this is the only way to have integrity.

The world teaches people to be pseudo, to be compromising. The world makes people deceptive, false. All your so-called morality, character, respectability, is nothing but an effort to create a facade so you can hide your reality, you can hide and you can go on showing a false face to the world. Whatsoever is expected from you, you can show it to the world. But a man who hides his reality and shows his falseness to the world becomes split, he becomes two. In fact he becomes many, because in each situation he has to use a different face.

You can’t use the same face with your wife that you use with your girlfriend. You can’t use the same face with the boss that you use with your servant. You have to carry many faces so that whatsoever the requirement of the situation, you wear a mask. Slowly slowly it becomes automatic. You need not change; they change of their own accord. To be in such a state means to be miserable, mad, divided in thousands of pieces. Life will be a chaos and a misery and a hell.

But one can drop the facade; one can drop all the masks. That’s what my approach is: to be true, to be your original face. And then suddenly you start feeling a kind of strength which was never there before, because you start becoming one. All your fragments start melting into each other and they create a centre, they create integrity, they create individuality. Then one is earnest, sincere and authentic.

And that’s what religion is all about. Religion has nothing to do with God or heaven or hell and all kinds of theories and philosophies. The basic concern of religion is truth. And one has to live it, only then can one know it, there is no other way. It is not a belief, it has to be your own existential experience. You have to experience it in the innermost core of your very being. And that liberates. That brings freedom to you, bliss to you, benediction to you.