Religion -Sin

Sin is a technique of the pseudo-religions.
A true religion has no need of the concept at all.

The pseudo-religion cannot live without the concept of sin, because sin is the technique of creating guilt in people.

You will have to understand the whole strategy of sin and guilt.

Unless you make a person feel guilty, you cannot enslave him psychologically. It is impossible to imprison him in a certain ideology,a certain belief system.

But once you have created guilt in his mind, you have taken all that is courageous in him. You have destroyed all that is adventurous in him. You have repressed all possibility of his ever being an individual in his own right.

With the idea of guilt, you have almost murdered the human potential in him.

He can never be independent.

The guilt will force him to be dependent on a messiah, on a religious teaching, on God, on the concepts of heaven and hell, and the whole lot.

To create guilt, all that you need is a very simple thing: start calling mistakes, errors – Sins.

They are simply mistakes, human. Now, if somebody commits a mistake in mathematics – two plus two, and he concludes it makes five – you don’t say he has committed a sin.

He is unalert, he is not paying
attention to what he is doing. He is unprepared, he has not done his homework.

He is certainly committing a mistake, but a mistake is not a sin. It can be corrected. A mistake does not make him feel guilty.

At the most it makes him feel foolish.

What the pseudo-religions have done – and all the religions of the world have been pseudo-religions up to now – is to have exploited mistakes, errors, which are absolutely human, and condemned them as sin.

Sin means it is not a simple mistake: you have gone against God; that’s the meaning of the word sin.

People think that they are miserable because they have committed sins in the past; that is not true.

By being miserable they are
committing the sin right now, and if you cannot start being happy you become virtuous because a happy person cannot harm.

Only a sad person can harm, only a sad person becomes a sadist: only a miserable person starts looking for other’s misery.

And a miserable person wants everybody to be miserable; only then does he feel good, comparatively.

If he sees that everybody is miserable, then he can relax; then he can say ’So I’m not wrong in some way; this is how things are’.

A happy person creates a happy world around him because happiness can exist only when there are many people happy.

It cannot exist alone like an island.

If you want to be happy you would have to make your husband happy, your children happy, your mother, your father happy, your
neighbourhood,otherwise it will be impossible because we are related with everybody.

A happy person learns one basic thing: that you can remain happy if you create a happy world around you... and that’s what virtue is

OshO 

From Unconciousness to Consciousness