There is so much conflict over temples and other places of worship. So many restrictions on who should enter and who should not. People are ready to kill each other over creating a structure of their fancy for their own worship forgetting all about the real purpose of this creation. If a place of peace and love creates enmity, where can one find solace for the soul? The solace can truly be found in the enlightened word of mystics. They have a broad vision of life and cannot divide it into small ideologies. One of my favorite mystic poets, Kahlil Gibran's lines, touched my heart and made me ponder the state of affairs we have today. Let these beautiful lines of Gibran sink deep within your heart too:
"Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all. Take the plow and the forge and the hammer and the lute, the things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight. And if you would know God, be not a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching his arms in the lightning and descending in the rain. You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving his hands in trees. "
It's a relevant question: why do humans need so many temples and places of worship when the whole universe is the temple? This colorful, stupendous, vast temple called life is already created around us, for us. Who is the creator? Do we need any official figure to be named who has created it? No, because no one has created it, and therefore no one can dictate any rules and regulations of entering it. But how do we enter this temple? By living totally; by treating each person and species that is alive with equal respect. By opening our hearts to the songs of the winds and the waves, by watching in amazement the huge happening of life and death without any doer. Do we really need any man-made temple?
Osho says, " The temples are not the places where God lives, those are the places which we have created to deceive ourselves. Godliness is all over the space, everywhere, but to be so overwhelmed, so possessed and enchanted by it that every single moment becomes flooded with Him needs courage, needs guts, needs a heart uncluttered — open, available, receptive. To avoid this, we have created small temples. These temples are not to find God, but to avoid God... If you ask me, I will say religion is reverence for life. And if you don't have reverence for life, you cannot conceive the whole of existence — the trees and the birds and the animals — as different expressions of the same energy. In the source we are brothers and sisters with the animals and the birds and the trees; and if you start feeling this brotherhood, this sisterhood, you will find the first taste of what religion is."
