Truth is something to be discovered entirely on one's own initiative. There is no beaten path to it. One has to painstakingly cut his own path with the aid of the suffering that he undergoes in life. His life is his path, and the path is straight and narrow as Jesus said. lt. is narrow in the sense that not more than one can go through it at a time.
The companions on the way come along with you only to a particular point, and thereafter the journey is all alone. Deeper and deeper into yourself, all alone, where all is only one.
That is religion in the true sense of the word, the precious diamond that you discover while moving on the path.But once you chance upon it, the other man seizes the opportunity and suggests that he will organize it, to make profit out of it. That is how the human mind works. As soon as it finds any talent anywhere, anything which will attract the crowds, it says it will organize it, to turn it into money.
Religions get organized around the original discoverers, who come upon it only at their individual level. But there is politics and profit behind this organizing activity. There is strength in numbers, and the larger the number of followers the better, for they are the source of donations and votes in which the organizer and the politician are interested. Obviously, this cannot be religion.
In order to discover real religion, one has to step out of organized religion. But merely stepping out of an organized religion has no meaning, unless one launches on the discovery of the really religious life, the truly religious mind. If this discovery is not made, one leads a life of utter ignorance, however much of scholastic knowledge he might gather.
The mechanical mind, which according to its earlier inclinations, its 'bent', its likes and dislikes, which now chooses to step out of one religion to embrace another, or remains outside the pale of all religions, is still choosing and so long as it chooses, it is trapped by the same old mechanicalness and conditioning.
A change effected by this 'trapped' mind, merely results in a change in its patterns of thinking. There is no flash of intelligence in it, whereas 'Insight' sees everything in the twinkling of an eye and there is instantaneous revolution, a total conversion, a complete turning round. One suddenly looks at the whole, and the mind is incapable of 'dividing' thereafter. One's vision is totally altered.
Love is discovered by loving, and life has to be perceived by living intensely.
So long as the dark clouds of knowledge, scholarship, jealousy, competition,
in fact, the entire field of the known obscure the sky, one can never have
a glimpse of it. One must step out of 'all the known' and
must see the empty sky, become the sky and then there is the dawning of true religion
in one's life.