Osho talks about the death of God

Question:
My deepest pain is that of being an outsider, that I don’t belong here in this life, that I am essentially wrong, and death is just waiting to claim me unmercifully. That sense of belonging here, valuing myself and being valued by existence, and thus letting myself live and celebrate fully eludes me. Is this feeling the result of god-oriented religions?

The God-oriented religions are bound to create such a feeling. It is absolutely necessary, because they are giving you lies as consolation. As man has gone beyond his primitive states of consciousness, he has become more intelligent and today he can see the myth of God. He has lived with the lie as if it were the truth, and he was content. But now that he is intelligent, he can see the falsity of the whole religious lie, and a great problem arises for him.

God is dead. Man’s consolation is destroyed. He feels utterly empty, in no relationship with existence. God used to be the fulfillment of one’s life, somebody who was caring, somebody who was forgiving, somebody who was compassionate. There being no God, suddenly you feel yourself an outsider to existence. But this is a good beginning, don’t take it wrongly.

Every lie taken away will for some time leave a space empty. You can use this empty space to become miserable; misery will fill it. You can make this space anguish, anxiety, suffering, pain, but it is up to you. You can make this empty space a new beginning, a new door. God is dead, now you have to search for truth on your own; nobody can give it to you. This emptiness should become a door going inwards.

The moment you enter to the center of your being, you are no more an outsider. For the first time you are the insider. God was keeping you outside the truth, outside existence. God was keeping you simply consoled, but consolations are of no help. You need a transformation of being, you need to use your emptiness joyfully, because it opens a door onto the eternal space. It opens a door into your very roots, which are in existence. It suddenly makes you feel at home with the trees, with the birds, with human beings, with stars — with everything around you. The whole cosmos is your very home.

So it all depends how you use your emptiness. The so-called western existentialists are using it wrongly. They are filling it with misery, anxiety, tension, dread, anguish, angst.

First you were full of lies, fictions; at least they were consoling, at least they were giving you some hope, some connectedness with existence. But existentialism is using your emptiness in an even worse way than the religions have used it.

Religions have used it to exploit you. They were giving you consolation, and there is a price to everything. So they were exploiting you, but you were feeling perfectly happy for centuries, because God was in heaven and everything was all right — he will take care of you.

This consolation was false; it was not going to change you, it was not going to make you a buddha, it was not going to make you awakened, enlightened. It was not in favor of your spiritual growth, but at least it was keeping you without anxiety, without anguish, without meaninglessness. You were feeling at home, though that feeling was a dream. Now that the dream is destroyed, you suddenly feel you are alone. There is no God and you don’t know any other way of relating with existence.

Your old programming has failed. You need a new insight. You need, instead of prayer, meditation; instead of God, your own consciousness. A pillar of consciousness is going to fill your being, and this will not be a consolation. It will be authentic contentment; it will relate you with existence, you will not feel at all the outsider.

Do you think I feel at all an outsider? I am as deeply involved with existence as one can be. The whole existence has become my very being, my heart is dancing with the heartbeat of the universe.

God was preventing this happening, this tremendous phenomenon of transformation. God was not a friend to you; God was the greatest enemy. And the priests have been exploiting you.

Now that intelligence understands there is no God, there is bound to be a small gap in which you either have to choose western existentialism — which is not authentic, it is accidentalism — or you have to look inwards the same way as every awakened being has looked, and you have to stop looking towards the sky. You have to close your eyes and look towards the inner space from where you are connected with the existence. Immediately the emptiness will disappear. Not only emptiness, you will disappear. And then remains only a dance, a celebration of this whole universe. And you are absolutely one with it, there is no question of even being an insider.

There arises a great oneness. You suddenly see yourself in various manifestations: in the trees, in the flowers, in the clouds, in the stars, you are everywhere. The moment you disappear you are the whole existence, blossoming, flying; all the greenness, all the mountains, all the snow, all the rivers, all the oceans — everywhere you are spread. And this state is the state of a buddha. This is true liberation.

So you are feeling yourself an outsider. This is good. This is the transitory period. Now you have to be alert not to fill yourself with pain and misery. Now that God is no longer there, who is going to console you? You don’t need any consolation. Humanity has come of age. Be a man, be a woman, and stand on your own feet.

You have been for millennia crippled because of God, because of the whole priesthood. They never wanted you to be healthy and whole. Their whole profession was dependent on your misery, pain. They were the people who were covering your misery and pain and giving you hope, and hope is an empty word.

Karl Marx is right when he says religion is the hope of the hopeless. But the hope was just like a carrot hanging in front of you. You never reach it, but it is so close it feels you are going to reach — if not today then tomorrow, if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow. The carrot is always hanging in front of you.

A Sufi story says:

A man has purchased a cow, and he was not accustomed to dealing with cows. So he was trying to drag the cow along holding the cow’s horns, and the cow was very resistant — obviously, this man was new. She wanted to go to her home, she wanted to go to her old owner.

A Sufi mystic was watching. He said to the man, “It seems you are very new; you don’t know how to deal with cows. This is not the right way.” The man said, “What should I do, because I am not that strong. The cow is stronger; she is dragging me with her.”

The mystic gave him some beautiful green grass, and told him, “Leave her horns. You take this grass and just move ahead of her. Keep the grass very close, but don’t allow her to eat it. As she moves towards the grass, you go on moving towards your home.” And it worked.

The cow came because the grass was so close and so green and so fresh. She forgot all about the owner; the immediate problem was how to get this grass. And it is so close, just hanging in front of your eyes. But the man went on moving slowly, the distance between the cow and the grass remained the same. And she entered into the house of the new owner, and he closed the door.

Religions have been hanging carrots in front of you. Those hopes are never fulfilled, they are hopeless, those promises are empty.

When I destroy your hopes and your expectations and your ideas of God and your relationship with the world, naturally there is bound to be a small gap before you choose the right path. And the right path is not the existentialism of the West. The right path is the meditation that the East has been using for centuries and has worked out completely into a science. You move inwards.

God was preventing you because he was outside. Your prayer was towards the God who was not there. You are here, there is no need of any evidence that you are here. There is no need for any argument to prove that you are here. So why not explore this “hereness”, this presence that you are, this consciousness that you are. Why not explore it?

Those who have explored it have never come back saying they are outsiders. They have not even said that they are insiders, because even an insider is separate. They have come out and declared, “Aham brahmasmi!” — I am the whole, “Ana’l haq!” — I am the truth, I am existence itself. There is no question of outsider or insider. Those are two sides of the same coin. The whole coin is dropped, suddenly you find yourself one with the cosmic dance, a tremendous rhythm in which you disappear as a separate personality, and you become one with the whole.

Every wave in the ocean for a moment thinks it is an outsider, it does not belong to the ocean. But the next moment it disappears into the ocean. You will disappear in the ocean of consciousness the same way; you are just a wave. It does not matter that you exist for seventy years. Perhaps you have become frozen and all that is needed is melting. Every day I am saying, “Melt, melt, melt like ice melting and become one with the ocean that surrounds you. You are living in the very ocean.”

I have told you about a young, very revolutionary fish. She started asking every other fish, “Where is the ocean? I have been hearing so much about it.”

No fish could answer. They said, “You will have to find some wise fish, some enlightened fish maybe, but we don’t know where this ocean is. We have also heard about it, and we believe it must be somewhere when everybody says so. For centuries our forefathers have been saying the ocean is. So we believe in it.”

Then an old mystic fish got hold of the young fish and said, “You idiot! You are in the ocean. You are the ocean! You are born of the ocean, you will disappear in the ocean and you will live in the ocean. You are just a rather more solid wave, but you will disappear in the ocean.”

This is the ocean in which you are living. Around you there is, just like air, the cosmic consciousness; you can’t see it, but it is continuously nourishing you. Your consciousness is nourished by the cosmic consciousness, just as your heart is beating because of the breathing. The air that you cannot see is continuously giving you oxygen, keeping your body alive.

But you are not only body. Behind the body is your hidden splendor, the consciousness. That too needs nourishment continuously. And all around you just like air… Once you are empty, just wait a little, don’t take any decision. And suddenly you will feel a new rush of energy coming into you, from inside, from outside. You will suddenly feel you are surrounded with consciousness and you are melting into it. And then comes the realization that, “I was just ignorant about myself and the existence in which I am living, which has given me birth and which is going to be my ultimate home. I have to disperse in this home.”

But it always happens that there is a small period when you are very shaky. The other night I was talking to you about Gurdjieff and his method of working on the energy system. He divided energy into the first layer which is very small, enough for day-to-day affairs. The second layer is bigger. If the first layer is finished and you continue, the second layer will suddenly start functioning. And if you continue to exhaust the second layer — which is very difficult, it takes months, sometimes years to exhaust it — then the third layer which is cosmic, inexhaustible, starts functioning. Gurdjieff’s method is very old, very primitive.

But a coincidence happened. Avirbhava was shopping in Singapore that night, and she was feeling tired, utterly tired, and a moment came when she felt she could not go on any more. But she wanted to finish and come back soon, so she went on and on and on. She has come back with eighteen suitcases filled with shopping. She’s the great shopper here… and she shops for me. So she went on and on. Then she suddenly felt a tremendous new energy arising in her that she had never known before, and she was as fresh as the morning dew.

When she came here and related it to Kaveesha, she said, “This is a strange coincidence,” because that night I was talking about these three layers of energy. The energy of the cosmos is surrounding you. All that is needed is a certain emptiness in you. So the emptiness is good; don’t fill it by beliefs, don’t fill it again by another kind of god, another philosophy, some existentialism. Don’t fill it. Leave it clean and fresh, and go deeper.

Soon you will find from both sides, from outside and inside, a tremendous rush of energy, a tremendous rush of consciousness. Then you disappear, you are almost flooded with the cosmos.

You are so small and the cosmos is so vast. You suddenly disappear into it, and that disappearance is the ultimate experience of enlightenment. Then you know you were neither an outsider, nor an insider; you are one with existence. Other than oneness with existence, nothing is going to help you.

But that oneness is so easy, so obvious. Just a little relaxation, just a little turning in — not much effort, not much discipline, not much torture for yourself. It is good that you are feeling an outsider because God is no more filling the space, and you are feeling disconnected with the universe. It is good. It only means false connections have been removed.

It happened one day…

Mulla Nasruddin was sitting in his office waiting for some customers. A man came in, and Mulla Nasruddin started talking to him about the things he was selling. He did not give the man a chance to say anything. He just waved his hand telling him to sit down, picked up the telephone and started talking about millions. “Yes, take it. One million dollars, that’s okay.”

At that moment the man could not resist the temptation. He said, “Wait a minute. I have come from the telephone company to connect the telephone.” The telephone was not connected; it was just show business, that one-million-dollar purchase! You are feeling disconnected because your connections were false. In fact, there were no connections, and you were talking to God — on the phone, direct line! I have suddenly made you aware that your telephone is not connected. To whom are you talking? All your prayers are on a telephone that is not connected. The only way to be connected with existence is to go inwards, because there at the center you are still connected.

You have been disconnected physically from your mother. That disconnection was absolutely necessary to make you an individual in your own right. But you are not disconnected from the universe. Your connection with the universe is of consciousness. You cannot see it, so you have to go deep down with great awareness, watchfulness, witnessing, and you will find the connection. The buddha is the connection!

Osho – ‘God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth’, chapter 3, Question 1
8 February 1989 pm, Gautam the Buddha Auditorium, Pune, India

Also see this video where Osho talks about the activity of believing.