The Mystic has no religion, his religion is Truth || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Questioner (Q): There is a nice story on a Master, who said that everything has some value, is good for something. Then someone asked him, “What is the good in atheism?” He said, “Everyone must be atheists. If you are in deep prayer and somebody comes to you for help, you forget your prayer, forget the god, and help him.”

Acharya Prashant (AP): In fact, this is not only a smart answer, it is actually the only answer that there must be. What he is saying is that God for you is a concept. Whereas the fellow who is coming to seek help is a fact, and the fact must always be placed higher than the concept.

So, being an atheist often can mean not believing in the concept of god, and being religious often just means believing in the concept of god. So then, being an atheist is just only as bad as being religious, no worse. In fact, in that sense, all mystics are atheists. They don’t believe in the concept of god, because they don’t believe in any concepts.

You see, to say that 'God is unknowable' is actually getting very close to atheism. At least, now you are being agnostic, now you are saying, “We cannot say anything about God.” So the Upanishads are all works in atheism. Do you understand this? Are the Upanishads saying, “Yes! Yes! God is there”? Instead of that, they are saying, “Neither do we know nor can we know.” So how can you say that these are religious texts?

You remember when we had said, “Glory to the God that atheists worship!” When an atheist has a Godly experience, then it is Real. When the religious man, the so-called religious man has that experience, it is a very fake thing, because it is a learned experience, it is a cultivated experience. The religious man already knows what to experience.