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OSHO International Foundation presents
There Is No God, but I Have Found Something Far More Significant
From Unconsciousness to Consciousness #3
These discourses are the foundations of your meditation.
Sitting with me in these discourses is nothing but creating more and more meditativeness in you.
I don't speak to teach something; I speak to create something.
These are not lectures; these are simply a device for you to become silent. Osho
If there is no God, are you an atheist?
There is no God,
but that does not mean
that I'm an atheist.
Certainly I am not a theist,
I am saying there is no God;
but that does not mean
that you jump to the opposite,
the atheist.
The atheist also says
there is no God,
but when I say there is no God,
and the atheists like Charvaka,
Karl Marx, Lenin,
Epicurus...
when these people say there is no God,
there is a tremendous difference
between my statement
and their statement.
The statements are absolutely dissimilar,
because I
say at the same moment
that there is godliness.
Charvaka would not agree
on that point;
Epicurus, Marx,
other atheists
will not agree on that point.
To them,
denying God
means denying consciousness.
To them, denying God
means the world is simply matter
and nothing more,
and whatever you see as consciousness
is only a by-product of
certain matters put together,
just a by-product.
Take those things apart
and the by-product disappears.
It is just like
a bullock cart:
you take the
wheels
away,
you take other parts away,
and each time you can ask,
"Is this the bullock cart?" ...
when you take the wheels apart.
Certainly the answer will be, "It is not."
No part is the whole.
You can take, by and by,
each part
and remove the whole,
and no single part was the bullock cart.
And in the end you can be asked,
"Now where is the bullock cart? ...
because we have not removed it;
you have never said at any point
that the bullock cart is being removed."
"Bullock cart" was only a combination.
It had no existence of its own,
it was a by-product.
That's what
Marx means when he says
consciousness is an epiphenomenon:
remove
the body,
remove
the brain,
remove
all that constitutes
a man's being;
you will not find
anything like consciousness.
And when you have removed everything,
it is not that consciousness will be left behind;
it was only a combination.
You have taken the combination apart.
So when I say there is no God,
I am not agreeing with Marx
or Epicurus.
I am certainly not agreeing with Jesus,
Krishna,
Moses, Mohammed,
when they say there is God,
because they use "God" as a person.
Now, to think of God as a person
is just
your imagination.
The God of the Chinese
has a Chinese face,
and the God of the Negroes
has a Negro face,
and certainly the God of the Jews
must have a Jewish nose;
it can't be otherwise.
And if horses think about God,
their God will be a horse.
So this is just projection;
giving personality to God
is your projection.
When I say there is no God,
I am denying personality to God.
I am saying,
God is not
but there is tremendous godliness.
That is an impersonal energy,
pure energy.
To impose any form on it
is ugly.
You are imposing yourself on it.
Jesus is calling God "father."
Jesus must have a certain idea
of what "father" means.
He is imposing on God the same idea.
Now, there are
in India
religions
which believe
not in a father god
but in a mother goddess.
The statue of their God is of a woman,
the most beautiful woman that
they can conceive,
but it is a Hindu woman.
Centuries
have been
going on,
passing;
religions have been born,
died,
disappeared.
Their gods have disappeared,
naturally.
There is
a place in India, Mohenjo Daro.
It has been
found to be
the most ancient city in the world.
There are seven
layers in Mohenjo Daro.
It seems that civilization
had to
face some calamity
seven times.
When the first layer was found,
it was thought that this is all:
we have found Mohenjo Daro.
That was determined to be
seven thousand years old.
But a little more digging
and another city
was found underneath
the first city,
which must have been
ten thousand years old.
Then the work continued.
The people who were working
on the excavation
went on digging,
and city after city...
seven cities have been found
in Mohenjo Daro.
The seventh
seems to be at least
twenty thousand years old.
They have temples,
they have statues of God.
Those civilizations have disappeared;
those people have disappeared,
their religions have disappeared,
their gods have disappeared.
The Christian god will disappear
the moment Christianity disappears.
The Hindu gods will disappear
the moment Hinduism disappears.
Do you see what I mean to say?
It is your projection.
If you go on projecting it,
it is there.
If you are not there to project it,
if the projector is not there,
the god disappears.
I am not
in favor of such gods,
which have been projected by
the tiny mind of man.
And of course the tiny mind of man
is bound to give qualities to God
which are its qualities.
The Jewish god in the Talmud says,
"I am an angry God.
I am not nice;
I am not your uncle."
Now, this is perfectly
meaningful in a Jewish context,
but
to a Hindu
God saying that, "I am an angry God,"
is a sheer
impossibility.
Anger and God? ...
they cannot meet.
The Jewish god is perfectly angry;
it is very Jewish, very human.
And if you don't worship him, if you
go against him,
he will destroy you.
He destroyed two cities
because the people of those two cities
were behaving in a sexually perverted way,
and he was very much against it.
Sodom and Gomorrah,
these two cities
he completely destroyed.
This will not
appeal
to a Hindu,
it is impossible.
It will not appeal
to the Mohammedan,
because the Mohammedan
prays every day, "God,
the compassionate one."
Compassion is the very
innermost quality
projected by him towards God.
Now God can only be compassion,
nothing else.
The Mohammedans pray that just
accepting your sin
will be enough
because God is compassionate,
you will be forgiven.
Omar Khayam,
one of the great poets
of Persian literature,
says, "Don't prevent me from
drinking wine,
enjoying women,
because God is compassionate.
Don't tell me
that I am committing sin,
let me commit as many sins as possible.
His compassion is far greater
than all my sins combined together.
To stop a certain
activity
in the fear
that you will be punished by God,
is to disbelieve in his compassion."
Now, this is a
different attitude,
but these are all human attitudes.
So when I say there is no God,
I am saying:
there is no person like God,
all personality
is human projection.
I want you to take
away the personality
and let God be free,
free from the bondage of personality
that you have imposed upon him.
I am not an atheist.
To me,
the whole universe is full of
the energy of God
and nothing else.
You have to understand one thing
which is very fundamental:
the world consists of verbs,
not of nouns.
Nouns are a human invention;
necessary,
but after all, a human invention.
But existence consists of verbs,
only of verbs,
not nouns and pronouns.
Look at this.
You are seeing
a flower,
a rose.
To call it a flower
is not right,
because it has not stopped flowering,
it is still flowering;
it is a verb,
it is a flow.
Calling it a flower
you have made it a noun.
You see the river.
You call it a river,
you have made it
a noun.
It is rivering.
It would be more accurate
to the existential
to say that it is rivering,
flowing.
And everything is changing,
flowing.
The child is becoming a young man,
the young man is becoming old,
life is turning into death,
death is turning into life.
Everything is in
continuity,
continuous change;
it is a continuum.
There never comes a stop,
a full stop.
It comes only in language.
In existence there is no full stop.
Do you remember
when you stopped being
a child?
When, at what point, came the stop
and you became a young man?
There is no
place, no demarcation, no full stop.
The child is still flowing in you.
If you just close your eyes
and look within, you will find everything
that has been is still there, flowing.
You have been
absorbing more and more,
but all that has been
is still there.
The river is becoming big,
new rivulets
are joining it,
but the original
is still there.
If you have seen the Ganges in India,
one of the most beautiful rivers,
you can understand it.
At the point where it arises
it is so tiny
that a
face of a cow --
of course of stone,
the face of a cow carved into stone --
is enough.
Through that cow's face
the Ganges falls, starts its journey...
so small.
And when you see it
near
the ocean, when it is reaching
to meet the ocean,
it looks almost like the ocean itself...
so vast.
But
that small current
falling in Gangotri,
far away,
thousands of miles away in the Himalayas,
from the
stone mouth of a cow...
that current is still there.
So many rivers have come
and fallen into it
and have made it oceanic.
It is still alive.
Even while it is falling in the ocean
it will remain alive, it will go on moving.
Perhaps it will become a cloud;
perhaps it will rain again.
It will go on and on.
Existence goes on and on and on;
it never stops.
There is no rest
period.
There is no
place
where you can
demarcate that something has come to its
end.
Nothing comes to its end.
You cannot find the beginning,
you cannot find the end.
It is an ever flowing process.
When you say "God"
you are using
a noun,
something
static, dead.
When I say "godliness"
I am using a verb
for something alive, flowing,
moving.
So these points have to be clear to you.
I am not a theist like Jesus
or Mohammed
or Krishna,
because I cannot
agree
with a dead god.
I am reminded of
one of my professors.
He is a very beautiful man:
Professor S.S.Roy.
Now he is retired as
head of the department of philosophy
from Allahabad University.
The first day
I joined his class
he was explaining
the concept of "The Absolute."
He was an authority on Bradley
and Shankara.
Both believe
in "The Absolute,"
that is their name for God.
I asked him one thing
which made me very intimate to him,
and he opened his whole heart to me
in every possible way.
I just asked, "Is your 'Absolute'
perfect?
Has it come
to a full stop
or is it still growing?
If it is still growing,
then it is not absolute,
it is imperfect...
only then can it grow.
Something more is possible,
some more branches,
some more flowers;
then it is alive.
If it is complete,
entirely complete...
that's the meaning of the word 'absolute':
now there is no
possibility for growth...
then it is dead."
So I asked him,
"Be clear, because 'Absolute'
represents God to Bradley and Shankara;
that is their philosophical name for God.
Is your God alive or dead?
You have to answer me this question."
He was really an honest man.
He said,
"Please give me time to think."
He had a doctorate on Bradley
from Oxford,
another doctorate on Shankara
from Benares,
and he was thought to be
the greatest authority
on these two philosophers
because he had tried to prove
that Bradley,
from the West,
and Shankara, from the East,
have come to the same conclusion.
He said, "Please give me time to think."
I said, "Your whole life
you have been writing about
Bradley and Shankara
and 'The Absolute'.
I have read your books,
I have read your unpublished thesis.
And you have been teaching here
your whole life.
Has nobody ever asked you
such a simple question?"
He said, "Nobody ever asked me;
not only that,
even I have never thought about it
that,
certainly, if something is perfect
then it has to be dead.
Anything alive
has to be imperfect.
This idea
has never occurred to me.
So please give me time."
I said, "You can
take as much time as you want.
I will come every day
and ask the same question."
And it continued
for five, six days.
Every day I would enter the class
and he would come,
shaky,
and I would stand up and state
my question.
And he said, "Please forgive me,
I cannot decide.
Both ways
there is difficulty.
I cannot say God is imperfect;
I cannot say God is dead.
But you have conquered my heart."
He removed my things
from the hostel
to his house.
He said, "No more.
You cannot live in the hostel.
You have to come and live
with my family, with me.
I have much to learn from you,
because such a simple question
had not occurred to me.
All my degrees
you have canceled."
I lived with him for almost six months
before he
moved to another university.
He wanted me to move
with him to another university,
but my vice-chancellor was reluctant.
He said,
"Professor Roy, you can go.
Professors will come and go,
but we may not find
such a student again.
So I am not going to give him
his certificates
and I am not going to allow him
to leave the university.
And I will write to the university
where you are going,
that my student should not
be taken in there either."
But he remained
loving to me.
It was a rare
phenomenon:
he used to come almost
every month to see me
from his university,
almost two hundred miles
away from my university.
But he would come
at least once every month
just to see me, just to sit with me.
And he said,
"Now I am getting a better salary
and
everything is more comfortable there,
but I miss you.
The class seems to be dead.
Nobody asks questions like you,
which cannot be answered."
And I
had told him,
"This is an agreement between me and you:
I only call a question, a 'question'
which cannot be answered.
If it can be answered,
what kind of a question is it?"
God:
perfect, absolute,
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent --
these are the words used for God
by all the religions --
is dead,
cannot be alive,
cannot breathe.
No, I reject such a god,
because with such a dead god,
this whole universe will be dead.
Godliness
is a totally different dimension.
Then the greenness in the tree,
then the flowering of the rose,
then the bird in flight,
all are part of it.
Then God is not separate from the universe.
Then he is the very soul of the universe.
Then the universe is vibrating,
pulsating,
breathing
godliness.
So I am not an atheist,
but I am not a theist either.
And there is a third term also,
which
is "agnostic."
Socrates,
Bertrand Russell,
people like these are agnostics.
Agnostic means someone who says,
"I don't know
whether God is,
or God is not."
These agnostics are at least
more honest than your so-called
theists
in the churches, in the synagogues,
in the temples, in the mosques:
all phony and hypocrites,
not knowing
what God is
and still bowing down.
Their hearts are empty,
their prayers are phony,
they don't mean
what they are saying and doing.
They are just imitating
their forefathers;
they are just puppets
in the hands of tradition.
They are hypnotized by their society,
culture, civilization;
they are conditioned by the teachers,
by the priests,
by their parents.
What they are saying is not their own,
it is borrowed.
I am reminded of one of my friends.
He was an average human being...
I mean just an idiot.
All the
students were
continuously talking
of falling in love with girls,
and this and that,
and they were asking him.
And he was
very
cowardly,
nervous.
You cannot conceive
of the conditions in India.
Even in the university
the girls and the boys sit separately,
they cannot
talk openly,
they cannot meet openly...
but
his heart was
beating,
he was
coming of age.
One day he came to me
because he thought I was the only person
who had never laughed at him,
who has never joked about
his nervousness, that seeing
a girl he would start trembling...
actually trembling, you could see his
pajamas
shaking;
and perspiring.
Even if it was
winter and cold,
he would start perspiring.
He came to me,
closed the door,
and said, "Only you can help me.
What can I do?
I would like to love a girl
but I cannot even
say a single word to a girl.
Suddenly
I lose
my voice
and I start trembling
and perspiring."
So I had to train him.
I knew a girl
who was
in my class, and I told her,
"You have to be a little helpful
to this poor man.
So just be a little kind
and compassionate,
and when he perspires
don't mention it.
Rather you should say,
"People say that you start
perspiring seeing girls,
but you are not perspiring,
and I am a girl...
have you forgotten?
And you are not shaking!"
And he will be shaking,
but you have to say,
"You are not shaking."
And I had to write love letters for him,
and he would
send those letters.
And the girl was prepared by me,
and just because I had told her,
she would answer him.
She would answer the letters,
and he would come running
to show me the letter.
And he was so happy
just with the letters.
And again
I said, "Now you start on your own.
How long am I to be
writing letters for you?
And do you know
I have also written the other letter,
because the girl says,
"I don't love him, how can I write?
So you please do this one too!"
And she shows your letter to me
and you show her letter to me,
and I am the one
who is writing both letters!"
And this phony business,
this love affair...
But this is what is happening
in all the synagogues,
temples, churches.
Your prayers are written by somebody else,
perhaps thousands of years ago.
They are not
part of your being;
they have not arisen from you.
They don't carry any love from you,
they don't have your heartbeat.
You don't know whom you are addressing,
whether anybody exists
on the other side or not.
That too is written in the same book
from which you have taken the prayer:
that he exists.
It is a very circular thing.
The same book says God exists,
the same book gives you the prayer,
the same book says that
if you do this prayer
you will receive this answer.
And if you are really hypnotized...
and millions, almost all,
are hypnotized...
they start receiving the answer,
the same answer.
No Hindu receives the answer
which a Christian receives.
Strange,
even once in a while
no mistake, no error happens?
The Christian receives the Christian answer.
The question
is borrowed, the answer is borrowed;
the prayer is somebody else's,
the answer is somebody else's...
and you are carrying on a phony love affair.
How can it satisfy you?
What fulfillment is possible out of it?
The agnostic is at least
far more honest
than your so-called theists;
and also more honest
than your so-called atheists,
because these atheists also
have not taken any trouble
to search and seek
and then say, "There is no God."
They have read it in Epicurus,
they have read it in Karl Marx.
Nor has Karl Marx taken any trouble
to find out
whether God really exists or not,
whether there is something in it
or it is all
fiction.
No, he has borrowed from
other atheists,
from Epicurus, from Diderot.
Now,
the whole communist
world, which is now almost
half of the world...
Soviet Russia,
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia,
half of Germany, Poland, China,
Vietnam, Korea...
almost half of the world is now atheist.
Do you think
these people
have searched for God?
They were all theists
just as
other people are theists.
Russia was one of the strongholds
of the Christians,
the most orthodox Christians
of the world.
The Russian church was far more orthodox
than the Vatican.
What happened
to all those Christians?
They simply disappeared.
They disappeared just like dewdrops
in the early morning sun,
not even leaving a trace behind.
They were phony.
And what they have now accepted
is again phony.
First it was
the church and the czar,
the government,
the powerful people
who were imposing;
and they were believing them.
Now it is
the communist party,
the communist presidium,
which is imposing the idea
that there is no God.
Each
small child is being taught
that there is no God.
One of my friends,
Rahul Sankrityayana,
went to Russia to teach
Sanskrit.
He fell in love there
and married a Russian woman.
But when his term was over
they did not allow his wife
and his two children
to come back with him to India.
He was very broken
when he came back.
He said, "They have spoiled my whole life."
I said, "Why have they not allowed it?"
He said, "For a simple reason.
My child learns in school
that there is no God,
that religion is the opium of the people...
and I am a religious man."
He was a Buddhist monk,
and
his wife
was an atheist.
And his wife and children
and the whole society,
and other professors of the university,
they were all trying to turn him into
an atheist.
And the government refused
his wife and children
to come with him,
"Because in India they will be spoiled;
their minds
will be filled again with the opium:
that there is God.
We cannot allow it."
And he told me a very strange thing,
which was confirmed
by other friends later on
who came from Soviet Russia:
that they have
many kinds of societies for
small children,
kindergarten schoolchildren.
They have a
youth communist league,
which spies on their parents
and informs the communist party
what they are doing;
because they are suspicious
of these people coming from the outside...
they must be theists,
they must be praying.
So these small children function as
detectives.
They informed
the communist party office,
"Our father is praying.
He has a Buddha statue
hidden behind his bookshelf."
And the communist party people came
and they
found the Buddhist
monk's
only treasure,
a small statue
that his master had
presented to him...
exactly where the children had
informed them.
Otherwise there was no way for them
to know it was hidden behind the books.
The wives are spying on the husbands,
the wives have their own communist league.
The husbands are spying on the wives;
everybody is spying on everybody else.
Now, within a few years the whole of
Russia, China,
Korea, all became
atheist;
they had to.
Theism became a laughingstock.
Rahul Sankrityayana
told me that he asked
a schoolboy,
when he first reached Russia,
"Do you
believe in God?"
The boy laughed.
He said, "What are you saying?
It is a primitive idea.
When people were absolutely
primitive,
when even fire was not discovered,
there was so much fear
that out of fear
they started believing in God.
We don't see any need for it.
Do you believe in God?"
And Rahul said to me,
"I could not
look eye to eye with that small child."
I said, "The reason is
that your religion is also
borrowed,
just as his religion is borrowed.
Your parents have forced it upon you;
his government has forced it upon him.
Neither of you have looked into it
on your own,
throwing all that others have given to you,
cleaning your mind completely
of all rubbish and crap...
and just going directly, without anybody
interfering with you,
whoever he is -- Jesus or Marx,
Krishna or Confucius,
Mohammed or Mahavira,
whoever he is --
not bothering about him,
but just going directly
into reality. Watching it,
seeing it, and finding it."
If you don't find God
you say, "There is no God."
If you are still searching, you can say,
"I am still searching, seeking,
hence I cannot answer the question
with yes or no."
Then you are an agnostic.
But
I don't think Bertrand Russell is
a right
or an honest agnostic.
He has just argued
against all the proofs of God,
and it is very simple to argue.
And he has argued against
all the arguments against God;
that too is very simple.
Seeing that both the arguments are invalid,
that the theist and the atheist
both are talking nonsense,
he declares himself to be an agnostic:
"I will not take any position."
But
I am not an agnostic.
I am very strange in a way
because you cannot categorize me.
These are three categories;
there is no fourth category,
and I belong to the fourth,
the unnamed category.
I have looked, searched.
I have not found God,
true,
but I have found something far more significant:
godliness.
I am not an atheist,
I am not a theist,
I am not an agnostic.
My position is absolutely clear.
Source: From Unconsciousness to Consciousness #3 Copyright © OSHO International Foundation, Switzerland. OSHO is a ® registered TM.
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