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This simple word yes contains all the religions of the world. It contains trust, it contains love, it contains surrender. It contains all the prayers that have ever been done, are being done, and will ever be done. If you can say yes with the totality of your heart, you have said all that can be said.

To say yes to existence is to be religious, to say no is to be irreligious. That’s my definition of the atheist and the theist. The atheist is not one who denies God, and the theist is not one who believes in God – not necessarily so, because we have seen great theists who never believed in any God. We have known Buddha, Mahavira, Adinatha: we have known tremendously enlightened people who never talked about God. But they also talked about yes; they had to talk about yes.

God can be dropped as an unnecessary hypothesis, but yes cannot be dropped. Yes is the very spirit of God. And yes can exist without God, but God cannot exist without yes. God is only the body, yes is the soul.

There are people who believe in God and yet I will call them atheists, because their belief has no yes behind it. Their belief is bogus, their belief is formal; their belief is given by others, it is borrowed. Their parents, priests and teachers have taught them that God is; they have made them so much afraid that they cannot even question the existence of God. And they have given them promises of great things if they believe in God. There will be great rewards in heaven if you believe, and great punishments in hell if you don’t believe.

Fear and greed have been exploited. The priest has behaved with you almost as the psychologist behaves with the rats upon which he goes on experimenting. The rats in psychological experiments are controlled by punishment and reward. Reward them, and they start learning the thing for which they are rewarded; punish them, and they start unlearning the thing for which they are punished.

The priests have behaved with men as if men are rats. Psychologists are not the first to dehumanize humanity; priests were the pioneers. First the priests behaved with men as if they were rats, now the psychologists are behaving with rats as if they are men. But the process is the same, the technique exactly the same.

There are people who are theists – believers in God, churchgoers, worshippers – and yet in their hearts there is no yes; in their hearts there is doubt. On the surface they behave religiously, deep down they are suspicious. It is the depth that determines you. It is not what you do that is decisive, it is what you feel at the deepest core of your being that determines you, that creates you. And there are atheists who go on saying there is no God, but they are not in any way different from the believers. Their disbelief has as much doubt in it as the belief of the believers.

In Soviet Russia, in China, and in other red countries, disbelief is the belief; not to believe is to be a conformist, to believe is to be a revolutionary. The state goes on teaching that there is no God. If people are taught continuously, conditioned continuously, they become whatsoever they are conditioned for. It is a kind of mass hypnosis.

Theists, atheists, both are victims. The really religious person has nothing to do with the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavadgita. The really religious person has a deep communion with existence. He can say yes to a roseflower, he can say yes to the stars, he can say yes to people, he can say yes to his own being, to his own desires. He can say yes to whatsoever life brings to him; he is a yea-sayer. And in this yea saying is contained the essential prayerfulness.

The last words of Jesus on earth were: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Amen.” Do you know this word amen, what it means? It simply means “Yes, Lord, yes. Let thy will be done. Don’t listen to what I say, I am ignorant. Don’t listen to what I desire; my desires are stupid – bound to be so. Go on doing whatsoever you feel right – go on doing it in spite of me.” That is the meaning of the word amen. Mohammedans also end their prayer with amin – it is the same word.

Your question is tremendously significant. First, it is not a question, hence it is significant. It is a declaration, it is a dedication, it is surrender, it is trust.

You say, [“Beloved Bhagwan, yes!”]

This is the beginning of real sannyas. If you can say yes with totality, with no strings attached to it, with no conditions, with no desire for any reward, if you can simply enjoy saying yes, if it is your dance, your song, then it is prayer. And all prayers reach God – whether God is mentioned or not, whether you believe in God or not. All prayers reach God. To reach him, a prayer has only to be an authentic prayerfulness.

But I would like to tell you that your yes should not only be a prayer. It should become your very lifestyle, it should become your flavor, your fragrance. Down the ages, religions have been teaching people life-negation, life-condemnation. Down the ages, religions have been telling you that you are sinners, that your bodies are the houses of sin, that you have to destroy your life in order to praise the Lord, that you have to renounce the world to be able to be accepted by the Lord. This is all holy cow dung, utter nonsense.

Life-affirmation, not life-negation, is religion – because God is life, and there is no other God. God is the green of the trees and the red of the trees and the gold of the trees. God is all over the place. Only God is. To deny life means to deny God, to condemn life means to condemn God, to renounce life means you are thinking yourself wiser than God.

God has given you this life, this tremendously valuable gift, and you cannot even appreciate it. You cannot welcome it, you cannot feel any gratitude for it. On the contrary, you are complaining and complaining and complaining. Your heart is full of grudges, not gratitude. But this is what you have been taught by the priests down the ages. Priests have lived on it; this has been their basic strategy to exploit people.

If life is lived in its totality, the priest is not needed at all. If you are already okay as you are, if life is beautiful as it is, what is the need for a priest? What is the need of a mediator between you and God? You are directly in contact with God: you are living in God, breathing in God, God is pulsating in you. The priest and all his mumbo jumbo, his religion and scriptures, will be utterly useless. He can be significant only if he can create a rift between you and God.

First the rift has to be created, then he can come and can tell you, “Now I am here, I can bridge the rift.” But first the rift has to be there, only then can it be bridged. And of course, you have to pay for it. When the priest does such great work bridging the rift, you have to pay for it. And in fact deep down, he is not interested in bridging it. He will only pretend that he is bridging it; the rift will remain. In fact he will make it more and more unbridgeable; the more unbridgeable it is, the more important he is. His importance consists in denying life, destroying life, making you renounce it.

I teach you a tremendous total yes to life. I teach you not renunciation but rejoicing. Rejoice! Rejoice! Again and again, I say rejoice! – because in your rejoicing you will come closest to God.

When the dancer disappears in his dance, he is divine. When the singer disappears in his song, he is divine. Rejoice so deeply, so totally, that you disappear in your rejoicing: there is rejoicing, but there is nobody who is rejoicing. When it comes to such an optimum, there is a transformation, a revolution. You are no longer the old dark ugly self. You are showered with blessings. For the first time you come to know your grandeur, the splendor of your being.

Say yes to life, say a total yes to life. That’s what sannyas is all about. I don’t give you concepts, dogmas, creeds. I only give you a certain life-affirmative lifestyle, a philosophy of life reverence.