All Religious Education Is A Mis-Education, Because Religion Cannot Be Taught.

Love is the only true prayer. Prayer is not something formal, it can never be formal; if it is formal it is not prayer. Prayer cannot be taught. and if you learn a prayer you will miss the whole dimension of prayer for your whole life. That’s how people have been mis-educated.

All religious education is a mis-education, because religion cannot be taught. It is something to be caught, it is something to be imbibed. Nobody can teach it to you, although you can learn it; but when it is learned on your own it has a beauty, it has some authentic truth in it. The Hindu prayer, the Mohammedan prayer, the Christian prayer, are not prayers; they are conditioning. Children have been taught, forced, bribed, made afraid. They have learnt, and they will go on repeating whatsoever they have learnt, but it will be just like a gramophone, a tape, in their heads; their hearts will not be with it. And only when your heart is with your prayer does it communicate, does it commune, does it become a bridge between you and the whole.

There is no need to call the whole ‘god’, because that word has become very ugly, it has fallen into wrong hands. It is a beautiful word in itself but it has been very wrongly associated — with the church, with t
he temple, with the mosque, and with all the murders and the butcheries that have happened in the name of it. Religion has not proved a blessing, it has proved a curse.

So say that prayer is a communion between the part and the whole, between the wave and the ocean. But that communion can only be that of the heart, it cannot be of the head.

Learn love, be more loving to all that is: the people, the animals, the birds, the trees, the mountains, the stars. And if you can go on connecting with existence through love, it is prayer, it is namaz. Namaz is a Sufi word for prayer.