truth is not a dogma
The moment you destroy doubt you have destroyed something of immense value in man, because it is doubt which is going to help man to enquire and find. You have cut the very root of enquiry; now there will be no enquiry.
That's why, in the whole world, there is rarely, once in a while, a person who has the feel of the eternal, who has breathed the eternal, who has found the pulse of the eternal -- but very rarely. And who is responsible? All your rabbis and all your popes and all your shankaracharyas and all your imams -- they are responsible because they have cut the very root of enquiry.
In Japan they grow a strange tree. There are, in existence, three-hundred or four-hundred-year-old trees, five inches tall. Four hundred years old! If you look at the tree, it is so ancient but such a pygmy of a tree -- five inches tall. And they think it is an art! What they have been doing is to go on cutting the roots. The earthen pot in which the tree is has no bottom, so once in a while they take up the pot and cut the roots. When you cut the roots the tree cannot grow up. It grows old but it never grows up. It becomes older and older, but you have destroyed it. It may have become a big tree, because mostly those trees are bo trees.
Japan is a Buddhist country, and Gautam Buddha became enlightened under a bo tree. The bo tree is called a bo tree in English too, because under it Gautam Siddartha became a Buddha, attained bodhi, enlightenment. The full name is bodhi tree, but in ordinary use it is enough to call it a bo tree. So all those trees are bo trees. Now no Buddha can sit under these bo trees. You have stopped who knows how many Buddhas from becoming Buddhas by cutting these bo trees.
The tree under which Buddha became enlightened was so big that one thousand bullock carts could rest underneath it. It was so big. It is still alive -- not the same tree of course, but a branch of the same tree. Mohammedans destroyed the tree. They could not tolerate that a tree exists underneath which somebody became far greater than their Mohammed. They burned the tree, they completely destroyed the tree.
But one of the emperors of India, Ashoka, had sent one branch of the tree as a present to Ceylon with his own daughter, Sanghamitra, who had become a sannyasin. Sanghamitra carried a branch of the bo tree to Ceylon, and from that bo tree a branch has been brought back again and put in the place where Buddha had become enlightened. It is part of the same tree, but the third generation.
But what these people in Japan are doing shows something significant: it is what religions have done with man. They have been cutting your roots so you don't grow up -- you only grow old.
And the first root they cut is doubt; then enquiry stops.
The second root they cut turns you against your own nature, condemns your nature. Obviously when your nature is condemned, how can you help your nature to flow, grow and take its own course like a river? No, they don't allow you to be like a river, moving zigzag.
All the religions have turned you into railway trains, running on rails, running from one station to another -- and mostly just shunting, not going anywhere but still on rails. Those rails they call discipline, control, self-control.
Religions have done so much harm that it is almost incalculable -- their pot of sins is full, overflowing. It just needs to be thrown into the Pacific, five miles deep, so deep that nobody can find it again and start again the same idiotic process.
The small number of people in the world who are intelligent should get rid of all that their religions have done to them without their knowing. They should become completely clean of Jewishness, of Hinduism, of Christianity, of Jainism, of Buddhism. They should be completely clean -- just to be human is enough.
Accept yourself.
Respect yourself Allow your nature to take its own course. Don't force, don't repress.
Doubt -- because doubt is not a sin, it is the sign of your intelligence. Doubt and go on enquiring until you find.
One thing I can say: whosoever enquires, finds. It is absolutely certain; it has never been otherwise.
Nobody has come empty-handed from an authentic enquiry.