idolism--the naked truth!

One fine day I went to a temple (to accompany a friend who insisted me on coming along) and after reaching there I can see the crowd of worshipers engaged in worshiping the deity. The devotees were bowing down before the idols. An elderly man came to me said, "Nowadays people do not have faith in religion. very few people visit the temples."

I asked in a surprising tone, "Where is the religion in a temple? What a self- deceiver man is! He deceives himself by taking the idols as gods and surprisingly created by his own hands. He satisfies himself by taking the scriptures -- the product of his own mind -- as truth."

Whatsoever is the creation of man's own hands and mind is not religion and definitely not GOD. The idols sitting in the temples are not images of gods but of man himself. And what is written in the scriptures is but a reflection of man's own desires and thinking, not the truth seen within. It is not possible to express the truth in words. However, I would like to stress and express great respect of the religious scriptures, they contains great deal of truth and wisdom. I consider God as the truth, the innocence and the service. Being truthful to yourself and to other fellow humans, the innocence way of living life and of course helping other fellow human beings.

It is not possible to have an idol of truth, because truth is boundless, infinite and formless. It has no form, no name, no attribute. The moment it is given a form it disappears because it becomes a lie. 

In order to attain it, all idols and all physical conceptions have to be dropped; the whole cobweb of self-fabricated fallacies has to be swept away. That uncreated truth reveals itself only when man's consciousness is liberated from the prison which his own mind has created .

In fact, rather than building temples in order to find truth and God, we should demolish them; instead of sculpting idols, we should destroy them. We should drop our obsession with the form so that the formless may enter. The moment the manifest leaves our minds, the un-manifest appears.

It was there already, but it was hidden beneath the idols and the tangible. Just as we cannot see the empty space in a room stuffed with things -- remove those things and the empty space is revealed; it has always been there.

Truth too is like this. Empty the mind and it is there.