And now the question is, how can one attain to Truth by what is called Religion? And I say, all aspects of religion help one to attain to Truth if they are understood rightly.

The first aspect is God; God is like a steppingstone, God is like a key to Truth, and if a person keeps the ideal of God away and wishes to come to the realization of Truth, he misses a great deal in life. He may come to a certain conception of Truth, but he has taken the wrong way just the same; he has wandered about; he could have come by the right way.
And the second thing is the thought of the Teacher whom one idealizes. Why must we not have a high conception of the Divine in man? It is the most beautiful thing one can have, and the one who has not the high conception of a human being born in any age, in the past or in the present, that one is missing a great deal in life. It is a need of the soul to have a high ideal, an ideal which one can conceive of as a human being.

I will tell you a little experience I had in this matter. A girl was working in a factory and she was so religious that she always had the Bible with her, and the name of Christ would make tears come from her eyes. And the scientific director of that factory came to this girl, simple and devotional and knowing no science or philosophy. He said to her: "You seem to be very religious." "No," she said, "for me Christ is everything. That is all I know." And he said: "But there never was a man born as Christ; look here, this is the book of a great clergyman." He showed her. He said: "You are what they call a religious fanatic. You will get a religious mania."

And this poor girl did not know where she was and she did not know what to believe and what not to believe; she was, so to speak, lost in the mist. The idea of a religious mania! A material man who has no religion, but believes only in science, he also has a mania. Is there not a material mania? For many money is all that is. They have lost their religion, and their brain and thought is for money. All their life they only know of making money. And that is a mania, a material mania, which is worse than the religious mania. Religious mania ends after death, but the material mania cannot be cured by it. What the material people cannot understand is that they themselves suffer from a mania, and if you ask them if they know about themselves, you will find that they have a great mania which they do not know. They know about everybody, but they do not know about themselves.

This girl from that day gave up food; she could not eat, she could not go to sleep. She said: "I do not know where I am. This one thing in my life I believed in and looked forward to, has been taken away. Now I do not know what to believe and not to believe." This girl was brought to me and when I told her that the one who said, "This is a mania," he has a material mania, she understood. I said: "No doubt your devotion has a greater reality than all the realities that are outside," and she understood. Thought and feeling are more real than what is outside. Therefore an object of devotion in religion is always a most comforting thing.
And then coming to the form of worship. We have a body and since we ourselves have a form, we cannot condemn the idea of form. Besides, the life we live, it is all form, although it is illusion. But at the same time we cannot live without it. Since we have form for all material things, why may we not have a form for our prayer? There is nothing wrong about it.
And the fourth thing is the moral principle. It is natural that we must have a principle in our life whether this principle or that principle. We must have some principle for which we shall sacrifice our benefit in life.
And the fifth thing is the realization of Truth. And that realization comes by itself once we give ourselves to the seeking after Truth, because Truth is our very Self. And it is the realization of Self which is the realization of Truth.