your body is a temple

Man is a temple, but from the outside you can only see the walls. It is very strange that not only do others see you from the outside, you also see yourself from the outside. You look in the mirror to find your face, you look into people’s eyes to find your image, you listen to people’s opinions to know who you are – good, bad, moral, immoral, saint, sinner. This is really strange because we know ourselves from within; there is no need for any mirror. There is no need to depend on others’ opinions because their opinions only tell us about the walls, the outer walls of our temples. They cannot tell us anything about the deity within.

Sannyas is nothing but the change, the shift, the radical shift, from looking at oneself from the outside to looking at oneself from the inside. It is sitting inside and looking, not depending on others’ opinions, scriptures, et cetera, but just watching yourself from your innermost core and asking, “Who am I?” And not depending on anybody else’s answer. One has to find one’s own answer, only that can be fulfilling.
The moment you sit at the center of your „being and watch, you are amazed: your body is just a temple, God is inside you. And there is no way to find it from outside; there is no need to find it from the outside.
Once you have discovered your God within yourself, then you will be able to see it in other people too, just the same. You will know they are also temples and that God is bound to be there because they are alive, and life is God. To me, life and God are synonymous, interchangeable. And if I have to choose between the two words, I would choose the word life instead of God because God has been exploited by the priests for so long that they have made the word almost dirty, obscene. It is better to use the word life and not even with a „capital L, but with a lower case l. Just the simple life, the ordinary life, is divine.

The moment you can see your God within, your life within, your truth within, you will find it everywhere else too. Then you will see it in the trees, in the animals. You will see it everywhere. Wherever life is, God is. Then the whole existence becomes a temple.

Osho