Science and religion have a part to play in equal measure in the life of mankind. One can not exist without the other. Science can give you a better body, better health, longevity; it can give you more comforts, all the luxuries of life that money can buy. One can buy a beautiful bed, but not sleep; the bed is the exterior; sleep is the essence; in fact, all of that is on the circumference, but not in the center. Science is like a body without a soul.
Religion gives you the center; gives you the soul Without religion, science is a corpse, a beautiful corpse, perhaps. Similarly, religion alone is not enough. Religion alone makes you a ghost, a soul without a body.
Have you ever seen a body without a soul, or a soul without a body? Never! Because? Because neither of them can fend for themselves. For a material thing, for example, a stool requires a minimum of three legs for standing, and not material – man, two. In the same way, if science or religion were to try to stand on one leg, at best they can march like a frog for a while before they collapse. But this is what East and West have tried to do throughout history. In the West there has been too much science, and in the East, too much religion.
Forgetting the existing reality around us, in the East, we talk too much about the Spirit, so much so that we become introverts. We forgot about the beauties of nature that surrounded us. “Don’t be attached. Renounce everything you see as real, because it is unreal,” our religion taught, and so we began to be seen as fakirs, or the land of loincloth-clad, naked sadhus, wandering the forests. Such was our image presented to the world. Humanity in the East became ugly. It had a center, yes, but no circumference.
Quite the opposite happened in the West. People were sociable, action-oriented, they had only one life to finish everything possible, and therefore they were in a hurry. Thus he achieved a commendable lot in materialistic terms, but in the process he lost his satisfaction. It became a circle without a center. People have it all, but something is missing.
‘Something’s Missing’ reminds me of great scientists like Max Plank, Eddington, Einstein, Newton, all of whom later became almost mystical. No matter how many mysteries they have revealed, ten times as many were on hold that they never thought of. Newton said: “To me I seem to have been just like a child playing on the seashore, and amusing myself now and then by finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than usual, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.” .
Eddington has written in his biography: “When I began my career as a scientist, I used to think that the world consisted of things, but as I get older, I realize more and more that the world does not consist of things, but of thought.”
Reality is much closer to thoughts than to things. Reality is much more mysterious than what can be weighed or measured. Reality is not only objective, it is also subjective. Reality is not only content, it is also consciousness. Therefore, the current need is that we must have a science that is religious and a religion that is scientific.
The famous novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis has been described as “a living heart, a great voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet separated from mother earth.” There has been an attempt to inject a kind of vaccine against everything spiritual. Gautama Buddha, on the other hand, is spiritualism personified. We need a new Buddha, a synthesis of Zorba the Greek and Gautama the Buddha. It cannot be just Zorba, and it cannot be just Buddha. In his bestselling book Tao of Physics from the 1970s, Fritjof Capra puts it beautifully: “Physicists don’t need mysticism, nor do mystics need Physics, but humanity needs both.”
Osho, the whole effort of the great teacher has been to create a bridge between Zorba and Buddha, between the earth, this shore, and the farthest shore, the beyond.
