What happens, then, when we get to the state where you abandon completely all belief? You abandon every sort of way of hanging on to life. You accept your complete impermanence, the prospect of your death, vanishing into nothing whatsoever, you see, and of not being able to control anything, of being at the mercy of what is completely other than you. And you let go to that, you see. This means that you even get rid of any God whatsoever to do this fully. You don’t have a thing left to cling to. So this complete let go flips, and you discover, having made it, a new way of experiencing altogether in which you don’t need any God, because you’re it. But also, you don’t cling to the idea that you’re it.
All belief in God is lack of faith. Has that ever struck you? You’re still clinging. And so long as you’re still clinging, you don’t have faith—because faith is the state of total let go. So when, through some marvelous desperation, we get to the state of total let go, and then, you see, fantastically, religion—anything like religion—simply disappears. There’s no need for it any longer. It’s like: you’ve crossed to the other shore, you don’t need the raft. Get off. Leave the raft behind.
I have been years seeking the ideal place, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can possibly find it is to be it.
People who have the mystical vision—whether through practicing yoga, or Zen Buddhism, or Hesychast Christian prayers, or by taking LSD—become a serious menace to society, and society gets really worried about them because they are not taking the world and its concerns seriously any longer. They know it’s an illusion. And if you really know it’s an illusion, if you really know I’m an illusion, I don’t know what you’re going to do with me. I don’t know whether I trust you. I don’t know whether you’re going to keep the rules. I just don’t know about you. You’ve seen through it, and goodness only knows—you may do anything! And if you’re not sure of yourself, and you suddenly see that all this is an illusion, there’s nothing you can cling to, it’s all relative, you may get bugged and you may go nuts. That’s the great danger in all of this.