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Culture & Politics » soc.culture.china » God Versus Existence
| God Versus Existence [message #158320] |
Mo, 13 Februar 2006 04:26 |
|
http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=Magazine&Language=Engl ish
Back
Osho,
What is existence? Is it something like what people call God?
Existence is that which is, and God is that which is not. Existence is
a reality, God is a fiction. Existence is available only to meditators,
people of silence; God is a consolation for sick minds, sick psychologies.
Existence is not your production - God is. That's why there is only
one existence, but thousands of gods. Each according to his needs, each
according to his suffering, each according to his expectations, creates a
god or accepts an old belief about God.
God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not a
consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the
religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I
teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within you
and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for you, no
misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a
contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
God is for those who cannot grow in consciousness, who are retarded as
far as consciousness is concerned. It is a kind of toy; retarded people need
it. And the moment I say it is a toy, then it is up to you how you want to
make it - looking like a monkey or looking like an elephant. It is just up
to you whether to give him four hands or one thousand hands. It is your
creation. Strangely enough, man believes God created everything.
The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on
multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
You have to understand the psychology of lying. The first thing about
lying is that you need a good memory because you have to remember. You lie
to someone about something, to somebody else about something else; you have
to remember what you have said to one and what you have said to the other.
Truth needs no remembrance. Truth is always there, just the same. You
don't have to cram it in your memory. Memory gives you a bondage, a prison;
it clings around you, covers you so much, slowly, slowly that you disappear
completely. Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies. And there is a
sudden revelation that you are part of the immense truth I am calling
existence.
You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't
need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a
grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole
life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very depths
of this immense existence.
We are almost like the waves of the ocean - just on the surface, and
the ocean may be miles deep. The Pacific Ocean is five miles deep. But a
small wave on the top will never know the depth - her own depth, because she
is not separate from the ocean. She will cling to her small entity, be
afraid about death, be afraid of losing herself in the vastness, the oceanic
infinity. But the truth is, the death of the wave is not a death, but the
beginning of an eternal life.
God has been invented.
It was people's need; people needed a protector. In the immensity of
the universe, a man feels so alone, so small. The vastness creates trembling
in him. What is your existence?
I am reminded of a story by Bertrand Russell. The archbishop of
England sees in a dream that he has reached the pearly gates of paradise. On
one hand he is immensely pleased, and on the other hand he is very much
troubled, because the pearly gates are so vast, in both directions, that he
cannot see the whole gate. It is so high that it is beyond the capacity of
his eyes to see. And he himself seems to be just like a small ant, compared
to this great gate. He is a little bit afraid. He is no ordinary man, he is
the archbishop of England. He feels humiliated just by the gate, and the
fear arises, "If this is the situation at the gate, what is the situation
going to be inside?"
With fearful hands he knocks on the door, but in the immensity of that
space only he can hear his knock. It takes days for him, but he goes on
knocking harder and harder. Finally a small window opens in the gate and
Saint Peter looks out with one thousand eyes, trying to figure out who has
been making a noise. Those one thousand eyes are so shiny, like stars, that
the archbishop feels even more reduced - almost to a nonentity.
And Saint Peter asks, "Please, whoever you are, wherever you are, come
in front of me."
The archbishop declares himself. He says to Saint Peter, "Perhaps you
don't know me. You can check with Jesus Christ, I am the archbishop of
England."
Saint Peter says, "Never heard of any such thing as England."
The archbishop says, "Perhaps you may not have heard about England,
but you must have heard about our beautiful planet, Earth."
Saint Peter says, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but unless you
give me the index number of your Earth, I cannot figure out what you are
talking about. I will have to go to the library and look - if you give me
the index number - to which solar system you belong, because there are
millions of solar systems and each solar system has many planets."
But the archbishop has never thought that the earth has any index
number. He says, "I don't know any index number, but I am the archbishop.
You just go and tell Jesus Christ."
He says, "You are giving me puzzle after puzzle. Who is this fellow
Jesus Christ?"
The archbishop is very much shocked. He says, "You don't know Jesus
Christ, the only begotten son of God?"
Saint Peter says, "As far as I am concerned, I have never seen God; I
don't know whether he exists or not. I am just a doorkeeper. Perhaps
somewhere in the most interior parts of paradise somebody exists who thinks
that he is God, but I have never come across..."
It is such a shock that the archbishop wakes up perspiring.
The story is significant because it shows how small we are and how big
the universe is. Naturally primitive man was not able to adjust himself to
the idea of this vastness of the universe without giving it some personality
and without making himself in some way related to that personality.
God was an effort of the primitive mind of man to give existence a
personality. Then he becomes God the father. Then you can make some
relationship with him. You may even be against him, but at least there is
someone you can be for, you can be against; there is someone who is greater
than you, who is going to protect you, who is your guarantee.
God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
The people who attained to their inner consciousness and its highest
peak, like Gautam Buddha, denied the existence of God. Anybody who has ever
become inwardly healthy, gone beyond the mind which is basically sick, has
denied God. God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children. They
need it - parables, fables, stories. But very few human beings have gone
beyond the kindergarten school.
God exists because you are not aware of yourself. God exists because
you have not made any contact with your own center. The moment you know
yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God. In fact I am in
absolute support of Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead."
The second part of his sentence is even more significant, "God is dead
and man is now free." That second part has not received much attention from
the philosophers, from the mystics, from the psychologists, but the second
part is the most important; the first part is not much. In fact, the first
part is basically wrong. God cannot die - fictions never die. The moment you
know they are fictions there is no question of their death. Neither are they
born, nor do they die. God was never born in the first place - how can he
die? Death is the other extreme of birth.
So the first part is not very important, but that has been given much
importance by theologians, because they became afraid: "This is
sacrilegious, to tell people that God is dead. That means that now no
religion is needed." They became afraid for their own business. But they
forgot the second part which is more important. It has tremendously
significant implications. It means that God was a bondage, God was a
retardedness, God was out of fear. God was not a treasure, but a heavy,
mountainous weight on your heart and on your growth.
Once God is removed, man's possibility to grow and blossom is
absolutely free.
A God is a despot, a fascist. Without God, the world becomes freedom.
Existence gives a tremendous dignity to every individual. From the smallest
blade of grass up to the greatest star in the universe it gives immense
significance and love; it makes no difference. There is equality and equal
opportunity. And there is no need unnecessarily to pray and waste your time,
to read the holy scriptures, which are the most unholy books in the world.
There is no need to be exploited by the priests. You are certainly and
suddenly free from all these chains. Now you can be yourself.
While God is in existence you can never be yourself. You are just a
puppet, your strings are in the hands of God. The ancient saying in India is
that not even a small leaf of a tree moves unless God's order is received
for it to move. Whatever you are, according to religions you are made out of
mud. The word "human" comes from humus, which means mud. And the word in
Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, is admi - it is used as the name of the first
man, Adam. Admi means the earth. God made man out of the earth and then
breathed life into the puppet.
Now, what kind of freedom do you have? Somebody has breathed life into
you, and it is in his hands to stop breathing life into you any moment.
Whatever you are doing, the religions believe it is your fate, it is written
on your forehead. And there have been many con men who have even been trying
to read what is written on your forehead. Astrologers, palmists, all kinds
of cunning people have been exploiting the simplicity and innocence of
humanity. There are people who are reading your hand, looking at the lines,
telling you what those lines mean. The whole emphasis is that you are not
living a life of your own, you are just a part in a drama, and the part that
you are playing has been decided beforehand.
That was the argument that the Indian God's incarnation, Krishna - in
the great Indian war, Mahabharata - gave to his disciple Arjuna. Seeing the
immense massacre that was going to happen, Arjuna simply lost his nerve. He
was a man of immense courage and great intelligence.
He said, "I don't see any point in this war. Even if I win... and I am
certain I am going to win" - there was no other warrior of his quality -
"But sitting on the golden throne of victory surrounded by the corpses of
all my friends and all my enemies, all the beautiful people, does not appeal
to me at all. The scene makes me feel insane. Rather than fighting, I will
leave it to the other party - who is nobody, another cousin-brother. Let him
rule over the country and I will go to the mountains, to the Himalayas to
meditate, to become a sannyasin. I have lost all interest in fighting."
Krishna tries in every way to persuade him, but Arjuna is a great
intellectual; he goes on arguing against him. Finally seeing no other way,
Krishna takes the last resort and says, "It is written in your destiny.
Going away, you are going away from God. This war is predetermined by God to
destroy those who are not virtuous and only let those survive who are
virtuous." Now there is no argument against it, because Arjuna himself
believes in God and destiny.
Arjuna fought the war. Krishna was responsible, five thousand years
ago, for destroying this country by giving a false argument, absolutely
fictitious, to Arjuna. That war killed so many people. And it is not only
that it killed people, it also destroyed the courage of the country; it
became afraid of any small calamity.
Two thousand years of slavery.... I want to make it absolutely clear
that the people who are responsible for these two thousand years of slavery
are the greatest people of India. The list is headed by Krishna; Arjuna is
just his shadow. Then came Mahavira, who taught people to be nonviolent to
such an extreme that his followers cannot even cultivate, because plants
have life; if you cultivate then you will have to kill the plants when you
reap the crop. Gautam Buddha comes third, who taught people to accept, to be
contented wherever and with whatever they have - poor, hungry, starving,
enslaved, remain utterly contented.
Their teachings were great. This is something to be remembered;
otherwise I will be misunderstood by everyone. Their teachings were great,
but they never thought about all the implications of their teachings. They
never thought that if you teach a country nonviolence, if you teach a
country to drop all weapons, when the whole world is not doing that, then
you are putting that country in a state of being victimized, exploited by
anyone.
And for two thousand years invader after invader came to India,
exploited it and went back. Finally Mohammedans came and they thought, "What
is the need to go back? We can not only exploit people, but rule them and
remain here." And then came the Britishers and the French and the
Portuguese, and they all tried to exploit the country. They all had their
small pockets. Britain proved to be far more clever. But the Portuguese had
their small islands of Diu, Daman and Goa, and the French had a small
portion of the country, Pondicherry. Britain had the whole country.
People have remained starved and hungry, and people have gone on dying
because of hunger, and nobody has ever thought that these great principles
in some way are responsible for this unfortunate situation that for
thousands of years India has had to pass through. And even today nobody is
trying to see all the implications. Every great principle has its own black
cloud behind it. And unless you understand the black cloud also, you are
soon going to be absorbed by the black cloud. If you understand it, you can
avoid it.
God seems to be the greatest principle that has been preached to man
down the ages, but nobody has looked at its implications.
If God created man then man has no individuality of his own, then he
cannot claim any dignity, any freedom.
There is no question of a puppet declaring, "I want to be free." If
God created the universe, then whatever has happened in the universe has had
to happen. It was God's will. No effort on our part was going to change
anything.
And finally you can see, if God created the world, and if he is behind
nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on
man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet. To give the
creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very dangerous.
It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
Hence, my simple understanding of consciousness is that if God did not
die with Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration, then we have to kill him!
Wherever you meet him, there is no need even to say hello. First kill him
and then you can say hello - just to fulfill the formality. But God is not
needed at all. With God above in the sky, man will always remain a slave,
and man will always remain unconscious, and man will never strive to reach
to the peaks of his potential.
With God removed you may feel a little fear - just out of old habit -
but that fear will disappear.
Once you recognize that you are standing on your own feet and you have
to do something to create a better consciousness in you, to create a more
loving heart in you, that prayers are useless, there is nobody to answer
them... Yes, sometimes they have been answered. At least once, certainly....
A poor man asked God for months continually, "Give me fifty dollars. I
don't want much, just fifty dollars."
First he prayed, but then he thought, "Millions of people are praying,
and there is one God and there are millions of prayers. Whether my poor
prayer ever reaches to him... And there must be around him so much noise -
prayers from all the churches, all the mosques, all the synagogues, all the
temples - who is going to take care of me? It is better that I write a
letter."
He wrote a letter saying, "This is to remind you that for months I
have been praying, but the answer has not come. It seems my prayer has not
reached you. I can understand, because of the noise around you of so many
prayers. And great people are praying - the pope and the archbishop and the
shankaracharya - so who is going to take care of my small prayer? And I am
not asking much - no paradise, no heaven, nothing, just fifty dollars.
Finally I decided to write the letter." And he wrote in big letters, "Fifty
Dollars! Remember, it is urgent."
But then he was very much disturbed, because he didn't know the
address, whom to address it to. He thought, "The best way is to address it
to: God, c/o The Postmaster General. If the postmaster general cannot find
his address, who else can?" The letter reached the postmaster general. He
looked, he laughed, and then he felt sad also. He thought, "The man must be
in desperate need - nobody writes letters to God. And he is not asking
much."
So he said to all his friends, "Please look at this poor man's letter.
You all contribute, and we will send those fifty dollars to him. At least
for once let a prayer be answered." They collected the money, but they
collected only forty-five dollars. The postmaster general said, "No harm, at
least we should send this much."
When forty-five dollars reached the man he counted the dollars, and he
looked above and shouted, "God, remember one thing. Next time you send any
money to me, never send it through the post office! Those cunning fellows
have taken out their commission. I have received only forty-five dollars!"
Except this, I have not come across any prayer which has been
answered - and that too not fully. There is no one to answer. Existence has
to be approached in a different way.
God has to be worshipped.
God has to be prayed to.
Existence has to be contacted in meditation.
There are only two kinds of religions in the world: the religions of
prayer and the religions of meditation. You can see my point. The religions
of prayer all believe in God and the religions of meditation don't believe
in any god. Because meditation takes you inwards, and fulfills you, there is
no need to pray, there is no need for any consolation. You are in such a
rejoicing, in such a blissful state; you can bless the whole world.
I teach you existence, and the entry into existence is through your
own being; hence meditation is not prayer - remember, it is against prayer.
Prayer is part of that phony jargon about God, heaven, hell. Prayer is part
and parcel of that whole rubbish. Meditation is simply the only pure way of
coming in contact with existence. And this contact immediately becomes a
merger and a melting. You become existence yourself. Then you are in the
clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the flowers and you are in
the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a drop, you have become the
ocean.
Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God is a
condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is
accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you want
to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you so
crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a freshness
and a beauty and a truth.
Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is simply
fiction.
Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Number 9
Copyright © 2006 Osho International Foundation
|
|
|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #158470 ] |
Mo, 13 Februar 2006 00:00 |
|
dddd, piss off, wil you please ??
The god-bullschit makes me sick...
there IS no god at al !!
just mussels, or is it moslims ?
"dddd" <dd [at] d.com> schreef in bericht news:43ef1bb1 [at] news.starhub.net.sg...
> http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=Magazine&Language=Engl ish
>
>
> Back
>
>
>
> Osho,
>
> What is existence? Is it something like what people call God?
>
> Existence is that which is, and God is that which is not. Existence
> is a reality, God is a fiction. Existence is available only to meditators,
> people of silence; God is a consolation for sick minds, sick psychologies.
>
> Existence is not your production - God is. That's why there is only
> one existence, but thousands of gods. Each according to his needs, each
> according to his suffering, each according to his expectations, creates a
> god or accepts an old belief about God.
>
> God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not a
> consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the
> religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I
> teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within you
> and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for you,
> no misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a
> contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
>
> God is for those who cannot grow in consciousness, who are retarded
> as far as consciousness is concerned. It is a kind of toy; retarded people
> need it. And the moment I say it is a toy, then it is up to you how you
> want to make it - looking like a monkey or looking like an elephant. It is
> just up to you whether to give him four hands or one thousand hands. It is
> your creation. Strangely enough, man believes God created everything.
>
>
> The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
>
> God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
> thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on
> multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
>
> You have to understand the psychology of lying. The first thing about
> lying is that you need a good memory because you have to remember. You lie
> to someone about something, to somebody else about something else; you
> have to remember what you have said to one and what you have said to the
> other.
>
> Truth needs no remembrance. Truth is always there, just the same. You
> don't have to cram it in your memory. Memory gives you a bondage, a
> prison; it clings around you, covers you so much, slowly, slowly that you
> disappear completely. Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies. And
> there is a sudden revelation that you are part of the immense truth I am
> calling existence.
>
> You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't
> need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a
> grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole
> life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very
> depths of this immense existence.
>
> We are almost like the waves of the ocean - just on the surface, and
> the ocean may be miles deep. The Pacific Ocean is five miles deep. But a
> small wave on the top will never know the depth - her own depth, because
> she is not separate from the ocean. She will cling to her small entity, be
> afraid about death, be afraid of losing herself in the vastness, the
> oceanic infinity. But the truth is, the death of the wave is not a death,
> but the beginning of an eternal life.
>
>
> God has been invented.
>
> It was people's need; people needed a protector. In the immensity of
> the universe, a man feels so alone, so small. The vastness creates
> trembling in him. What is your existence?
>
> I am reminded of a story by Bertrand Russell. The archbishop of
> England sees in a dream that he has reached the pearly gates of paradise.
> On one hand he is immensely pleased, and on the other hand he is very much
> troubled, because the pearly gates are so vast, in both directions, that
> he cannot see the whole gate. It is so high that it is beyond the capacity
> of his eyes to see. And he himself seems to be just like a small ant,
> compared to this great gate. He is a little bit afraid. He is no ordinary
> man, he is the archbishop of England. He feels humiliated just by the
> gate, and the fear arises, "If this is the situation at the gate, what is
> the situation going to be inside?"
>
> With fearful hands he knocks on the door, but in the immensity of
> that space only he can hear his knock. It takes days for him, but he goes
> on knocking harder and harder. Finally a small window opens in the gate
> and Saint Peter looks out with one thousand eyes, trying to figure out who
> has been making a noise. Those one thousand eyes are so shiny, like stars,
> that the archbishop feels even more reduced - almost to a nonentity.
>
> And Saint Peter asks, "Please, whoever you are, wherever you are,
> come in front of me."
>
> The archbishop declares himself. He says to Saint Peter, "Perhaps you
> don't know me. You can check with Jesus Christ, I am the archbishop of
> England."
>
> Saint Peter says, "Never heard of any such thing as England."
>
> The archbishop says, "Perhaps you may not have heard about England,
> but you must have heard about our beautiful planet, Earth."
>
> Saint Peter says, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but unless you
> give me the index number of your Earth, I cannot figure out what you are
> talking about. I will have to go to the library and look - if you give me
> the index number - to which solar system you belong, because there are
> millions of solar systems and each solar system has many planets."
>
> But the archbishop has never thought that the earth has any index
> number. He says, "I don't know any index number, but I am the archbishop.
> You just go and tell Jesus Christ."
>
> He says, "You are giving me puzzle after puzzle. Who is this fellow
> Jesus Christ?"
>
> The archbishop is very much shocked. He says, "You don't know Jesus
> Christ, the only begotten son of God?"
>
> Saint Peter says, "As far as I am concerned, I have never seen God; I
> don't know whether he exists or not. I am just a doorkeeper. Perhaps
> somewhere in the most interior parts of paradise somebody exists who
> thinks that he is God, but I have never come across..."
>
> It is such a shock that the archbishop wakes up perspiring.
>
> The story is significant because it shows how small we are and how
> big the universe is. Naturally primitive man was not able to adjust
> himself to the idea of this vastness of the universe without giving it
> some personality and without making himself in some way related to that
> personality.
>
> God was an effort of the primitive mind of man to give existence a
> personality. Then he becomes God the father. Then you can make some
> relationship with him. You may even be against him, but at least there is
> someone you can be for, you can be against; there is someone who is
> greater than you, who is going to protect you, who is your guarantee.
>
>
> God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
>
> The people who attained to their inner consciousness and its highest
> peak, like Gautam Buddha, denied the existence of God. Anybody who has
> ever become inwardly healthy, gone beyond the mind which is basically
> sick, has denied God. God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school
> children. They need it - parables, fables, stories. But very few human
> beings have gone beyond the kindergarten school.
>
> God exists because you are not aware of yourself. God exists because
> you have not made any contact with your own center. The moment you know
> yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God. In fact I am in
> absolute support of Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead."
>
> The second part of his sentence is even more significant, "God is
> dead and man is now free." That second part has not received much
> attention from the philosophers, from the mystics, from the psychologists,
> but the second part is the most important; the first part is not much. In
> fact, the first part is basically wrong. God cannot die - fictions never
> die. The moment you know they are fictions there is no question of their
> death. Neither are they born, nor do they die. God was never born in the
> first place - how can he die? Death is the other extreme of birth.
>
> So the first part is not very important, but that has been given much
> importance by theologians, because they became afraid: "This is
> sacrilegious, to tell people that God is dead. That means that now no
> religion is needed." They became afraid for their own business. But they
> forgot the second part which is more important. It has tremendously
> significant implications. It means that God was a bondage, God was a
> retardedness, God was out of fear. God was not a treasure, but a heavy,
> mountainous weight on your heart and on your growth.
>
>
> Once God is removed, man's possibility to grow and blossom is
> absolutely free.
>
> A God is a despot, a fascist. Without God, the world becomes freedom.
> Existence gives a tremendous dignity to every individual. From the
> smallest blade of grass up to the greatest star in the universe it gives
> immense significance and love; it makes no difference. There is equality
> and equal opportunity. And there is no need unnecessarily to pray and
> waste your time, to read the holy scriptures, which are the most unholy
> books in the world. There is no need to be exploited by the priests. You
> are certainly and suddenly free from all these chains. Now you can be
> yourself.
>
> While God is in existence you can never be yourself. You are just a
> puppet, your strings are in the hands of God. The ancient saying in India
> is that not even a small leaf of a tree moves unless God's order is
> received for it to move. Whatever you are, according to religions you are
> made out of mud. The word "human" comes from humus, which means mud. And
> the word in Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, is admi - it is used as the name
> of the first man, Adam. Admi means the earth. God made man out of the
> earth and then breathed life into the puppet.
>
> Now, what kind of freedom do you have? Somebody has breathed life
> into you, and it is in his hands to stop breathing life into you any
> moment. Whatever you are doing, the religions believe it is your fate, it
> is written on your forehead. And there have been many con men who have
> even been trying to read what is written on your forehead. Astrologers,
> palmists, all kinds of cunning people have been exploiting the simplicity
> and innocence of humanity. There are people who are reading your hand,
> looking at the lines, telling you what those lines mean. The whole
> emphasis is that you are not living a life of your own, you are just a
> part in a drama, and the part that you are playing has been decided
> beforehand.
>
> That was the argument that the Indian God's incarnation, Krishna - in
> the great Indian war, Mahabharata - gave to his disciple Arjuna. Seeing
> the immense massacre that was going to happen, Arjuna simply lost his
> nerve. He was a man of immense courage and great intelligence.
>
> He said, "I don't see any point in this war. Even if I win... and I
> am certain I am going to win" - there was no other warrior of his
> quality - "But sitting on the golden throne of victory surrounded by the
> corpses of all my friends and all my enemies, all the beautiful people,
> does not appeal to me at all. The scene makes me feel insane. Rather than
> fighting, I will leave it to the other party - who is nobody, another
> cousin-brother. Let him rule over the country and I will go to the
> mountains, to the Himalayas to meditate, to become a sannyasin. I have
> lost all interest in fighting."
>
> Krishna tries in every way to persuade him, but Arjuna is a great
> intellectual; he goes on arguing against him. Finally seeing no other way,
> Krishna takes the last resort and says, "It is written in your destiny.
> Going away, you are going away from God. This war is predetermined by God
> to destroy those who are not virtuous and only let those survive who are
> virtuous." Now there is no argument against it, because Arjuna himself
> believes in God and destiny.
>
> Arjuna fought the war. Krishna was responsible, five thousand years
> ago, for destroying this country by giving a false argument, absolutely
> fictitious, to Arjuna. That war killed so many people. And it is not only
> that it killed people, it also destroyed the courage of the country; it
> became afraid of any small calamity.
>
> Two thousand years of slavery.... I want to make it absolutely clear
> that the people who are responsible for these two thousand years of
> slavery are the greatest people of India. The list is headed by Krishna;
> Arjuna is just his shadow. Then came Mahavira, who taught people to be
> nonviolent to such an extreme that his followers cannot even cultivate,
> because plants have life; if you cultivate then you will have to kill the
> plants when you reap the crop. Gautam Buddha comes third, who taught
> people to accept, to be contented wherever and with whatever they have -
> poor, hungry, starving, enslaved, remain utterly contented.
>
> Their teachings were great. This is something to be remembered;
> otherwise I will be misunderstood by everyone. Their teachings were great,
> but they never thought about all the implications of their teachings. They
> never thought that if you teach a country nonviolence, if you teach a
> country to drop all weapons, when the whole world is not doing that, then
> you are putting that country in a state of being victimized, exploited by
> anyone.
>
> And for two thousand years invader after invader came to India,
> exploited it and went back. Finally Mohammedans came and they thought,
> "What is the need to go back? We can not only exploit people, but rule
> them and remain here." And then came the Britishers and the French and the
> Portuguese, and they all tried to exploit the country. They all had their
> small pockets. Britain proved to be far more clever. But the Portuguese
> had their small islands of Diu, Daman and Goa, and the French had a small
> portion of the country, Pondicherry. Britain had the whole country.
>
> People have remained starved and hungry, and people have gone on
> dying because of hunger, and nobody has ever thought that these great
> principles in some way are responsible for this unfortunate situation that
> for thousands of years India has had to pass through. And even today
> nobody is trying to see all the implications. Every great principle has
> its own black cloud behind it. And unless you understand the black cloud
> also, you are soon going to be absorbed by the black cloud. If you
> understand it, you can avoid it.
>
> God seems to be the greatest principle that has been preached to man
> down the ages, but nobody has looked at its implications.
>
>
> If God created man then man has no individuality of his own, then he
> cannot claim any dignity, any freedom.
>
> There is no question of a puppet declaring, "I want to be free." If
> God created the universe, then whatever has happened in the universe has
> had to happen. It was God's will. No effort on our part was going to
> change anything.
>
> And finally you can see, if God created the world, and if he is
> behind nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no
> effort on man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet. To
> give the creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very
> dangerous. It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
>
> Hence, my simple understanding of consciousness is that if God did
> not die with Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration, then we have to kill him!
> Wherever you meet him, there is no need even to say hello. First kill him
> and then you can say hello - just to fulfill the formality. But God is not
> needed at all. With God above in the sky, man will always remain a slave,
> and man will always remain unconscious, and man will never strive to reach
> to the peaks of his potential.
>
>
> With God removed you may feel a little fear - just out of old habit -
> but that fear will disappear.
>
>
> Once you recognize that you are standing on your own feet and you
> have to do something to create a better consciousness in you, to create a
> more loving heart in you, that prayers are useless, there is nobody to
> answer them... Yes, sometimes they have been answered. At least once,
> certainly....
>
> A poor man asked God for months continually, "Give me fifty dollars.
> I don't want much, just fifty dollars."
>
> First he prayed, but then he thought, "Millions of people are
> praying, and there is one God and there are millions of prayers. Whether
> my poor prayer ever reaches to him... And there must be around him so much
> noise - prayers from all the churches, all the mosques, all the
> synagogues, all the temples - who is going to take care of me? It is
> better that I write a letter."
>
> He wrote a letter saying, "This is to remind you that for months I
> have been praying, but the answer has not come. It seems my prayer has not
> reached you. I can understand, because of the noise around you of so many
> prayers. And great people are praying - the pope and the archbishop and
> the shankaracharya - so who is going to take care of my small prayer? And
> I am not asking much - no paradise, no heaven, nothing, just fifty
> dollars. Finally I decided to write the letter." And he wrote in big
> letters, "Fifty Dollars! Remember, it is urgent."
>
> But then he was very much disturbed, because he didn't know the
> address, whom to address it to. He thought, "The best way is to address it
> to: God, c/o The Postmaster General. If the postmaster general cannot find
> his address, who else can?" The letter reached the postmaster general. He
> looked, he laughed, and then he felt sad also. He thought, "The man must
> be in desperate need - nobody writes letters to God. And he is not asking
> much."
>
> So he said to all his friends, "Please look at this poor man's
> letter. You all contribute, and we will send those fifty dollars to him.
> At least for once let a prayer be answered." They collected the money, but
> they collected only forty-five dollars. The postmaster general said, "No
> harm, at least we should send this much."
>
> When forty-five dollars reached the man he counted the dollars, and
> he looked above and shouted, "God, remember one thing. Next time you send
> any money to me, never send it through the post office! Those cunning
> fellows have taken out their commission. I have received only forty-five
> dollars!"
>
> Except this, I have not come across any prayer which has been
> answered - and that too not fully. There is no one to answer. Existence
> has to be approached in a different way.
>
> God has to be worshipped.
>
> God has to be prayed to.
>
> Existence has to be contacted in meditation.
>
> There are only two kinds of religions in the world: the religions of
> prayer and the religions of meditation. You can see my point. The
> religions of prayer all believe in God and the religions of meditation
> don't believe in any god. Because meditation takes you inwards, and
> fulfills you, there is no need to pray, there is no need for any
> consolation. You are in such a rejoicing, in such a blissful state; you
> can bless the whole world.
>
> I teach you existence, and the entry into existence is through your
> own being; hence meditation is not prayer - remember, it is against
> prayer. Prayer is part of that phony jargon about God, heaven, hell.
> Prayer is part and parcel of that whole rubbish. Meditation is simply the
> only pure way of coming in contact with existence. And this contact
> immediately becomes a merger and a melting. You become existence yourself.
> Then you are in the clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the
> flowers and you are in the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a
> drop, you have become the ocean.
>
> Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God is
> a condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is
> accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you want
> to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you so
> crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a
> freshness and a beauty and a truth.
>
> Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is
> simply fiction.
>
>
> Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Number 9
>
>
>
> Copyright © 2006 Osho International Foundation
>
>
>
|
|
|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #215150 ] |
Mi, 07 Juni 2006 14:37 |
|
"dddd" <dd [at] d.com> wrote in message news:...
> http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=Magazine&Language=Engl ish
>
>
> Back
>
>
>
> Osho,
>
> What is existence? Is it something like what people call God?
>
> Existence is that which is, and God is that which is not. Existence
is
> a reality, God is a fiction. Existence is available only to meditators,
> people of silence; God is a consolation for sick minds, sick psychologies.
>
> Existence is not your production - God is. That's why there is only
> one existence, but thousands of gods. Each according to his needs, each
> according to his suffering, each according to his expectations, creates a
> god or accepts an old belief about God.
>
> God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not a
> consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the
> religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I
> teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within you
> and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for you,
no
> misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a
> contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
>
> God is for those who cannot grow in consciousness, who are retarded
as
> far as consciousness is concerned. It is a kind of toy; retarded people
need
> it. And the moment I say it is a toy, then it is up to you how you want to
> make it - looking like a monkey or looking like an elephant. It is just up
> to you whether to give him four hands or one thousand hands. It is your
> creation. Strangely enough, man believes God created everything.
>
>
> The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
>
> God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
> thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on
> multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
>
> You have to understand the psychology of lying. The first thing
about
> lying is that you need a good memory because you have to remember. You lie
> to someone about something, to somebody else about something else; you
have
> to remember what you have said to one and what you have said to the other.
>
> Truth needs no remembrance. Truth is always there, just the same.
You
> don't have to cram it in your memory. Memory gives you a bondage, a
prison;
> it clings around you, covers you so much, slowly, slowly that you
disappear
> completely. Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies. And there is a
> sudden revelation that you are part of the immense truth I am calling
> existence.
>
> You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't
> need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a
> grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole
> life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very
depths
> of this immense existence.
>
> We are almost like the waves of the ocean - just on the surface, and
> the ocean may be miles deep. The Pacific Ocean is five miles deep. But a
> small wave on the top will never know the depth - her own depth, because
she
> is not separate from the ocean. She will cling to her small entity, be
> afraid about death, be afraid of losing herself in the vastness, the
oceanic
> infinity. But the truth is, the death of the wave is not a death, but the
> beginning of an eternal life.
>
>
> God has been invented.
>
> It was people's need; people needed a protector. In the immensity of
> the universe, a man feels so alone, so small. The vastness creates
trembling
> in him. What is your existence?
>
> I am reminded of a story by Bertrand Russell. The archbishop of
> England sees in a dream that he has reached the pearly gates of paradise.
On
> one hand he is immensely pleased, and on the other hand he is very much
> troubled, because the pearly gates are so vast, in both directions, that
he
> cannot see the whole gate. It is so high that it is beyond the capacity of
> his eyes to see. And he himself seems to be just like a small ant,
compared
> to this great gate. He is a little bit afraid. He is no ordinary man, he
is
> the archbishop of England. He feels humiliated just by the gate, and the
> fear arises, "If this is the situation at the gate, what is the situation
> going to be inside?"
>
> With fearful hands he knocks on the door, but in the immensity of
that
> space only he can hear his knock. It takes days for him, but he goes on
> knocking harder and harder. Finally a small window opens in the gate and
> Saint Peter looks out with one thousand eyes, trying to figure out who has
> been making a noise. Those one thousand eyes are so shiny, like stars,
that
> the archbishop feels even more reduced - almost to a nonentity.
>
> And Saint Peter asks, "Please, whoever you are, wherever you are,
come
> in front of me."
>
> The archbishop declares himself. He says to Saint Peter, "Perhaps
you
> don't know me. You can check with Jesus Christ, I am the archbishop of
> England."
>
> Saint Peter says, "Never heard of any such thing as England."
>
> The archbishop says, "Perhaps you may not have heard about England,
> but you must have heard about our beautiful planet, Earth."
>
> Saint Peter says, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but unless
you
> give me the index number of your Earth, I cannot figure out what you are
> talking about. I will have to go to the library and look - if you give me
> the index number - to which solar system you belong, because there are
> millions of solar systems and each solar system has many planets."
>
> But the archbishop has never thought that the earth has any index
> number. He says, "I don't know any index number, but I am the archbishop.
> You just go and tell Jesus Christ."
>
> He says, "You are giving me puzzle after puzzle. Who is this fellow
> Jesus Christ?"
>
> The archbishop is very much shocked. He says, "You don't know Jesus
> Christ, the only begotten son of God?"
>
> Saint Peter says, "As far as I am concerned, I have never seen God;
I
> don't know whether he exists or not. I am just a doorkeeper. Perhaps
> somewhere in the most interior parts of paradise somebody exists who
thinks
> that he is God, but I have never come across..."
>
> It is such a shock that the archbishop wakes up perspiring.
>
> The story is significant because it shows how small we are and how
big
> the universe is. Naturally primitive man was not able to adjust himself to
> the idea of this vastness of the universe without giving it some
personality
> and without making himself in some way related to that personality.
>
> God was an effort of the primitive mind of man to give existence a
> personality. Then he becomes God the father. Then you can make some
> relationship with him. You may even be against him, but at least there is
> someone you can be for, you can be against; there is someone who is
greater
> than you, who is going to protect you, who is your guarantee.
>
>
> God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
>
> The people who attained to their inner consciousness and its highest
> peak, like Gautam Buddha, denied the existence of God. Anybody who has
ever
> become inwardly healthy, gone beyond the mind which is basically sick, has
> denied God. God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children.
They
> need it - parables, fables, stories. But very few human beings have gone
> beyond the kindergarten school.
>
> God exists because you are not aware of yourself. God exists because
> you have not made any contact with your own center. The moment you know
> yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God. In fact I am in
> absolute support of Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead."
>
> The second part of his sentence is even more significant, "God is
dead
> and man is now free." That second part has not received much attention
from
> the philosophers, from the mystics, from the psychologists, but the second
> part is the most important; the first part is not much. In fact, the first
> part is basically wrong. God cannot die - fictions never die. The moment
you
> know they are fictions there is no question of their death. Neither are
they
> born, nor do they die. God was never born in the first place - how can he
> die? Death is the other extreme of birth.
>
> So the first part is not very important, but that has been given
much
> importance by theologians, because they became afraid: "This is
> sacrilegious, to tell people that God is dead. That means that now no
> religion is needed." They became afraid for their own business. But they
> forgot the second part which is more important. It has tremendously
> significant implications. It means that God was a bondage, God was a
> retardedness, God was out of fear. God was not a treasure, but a heavy,
> mountainous weight on your heart and on your growth.
>
>
> Once God is removed, man's possibility to grow and blossom is
> absolutely free.
>
> A God is a despot, a fascist. Without God, the world becomes
freedom.
> Existence gives a tremendous dignity to every individual. From the
smallest
> blade of grass up to the greatest star in the universe it gives immense
> significance and love; it makes no difference. There is equality and equal
> opportunity. And there is no need unnecessarily to pray and waste your
time,
> to read the holy scriptures, which are the most unholy books in the world.
> There is no need to be exploited by the priests. You are certainly and
> suddenly free from all these chains. Now you can be yourself.
>
> While God is in existence you can never be yourself. You are just a
> puppet, your strings are in the hands of God. The ancient saying in India
is
> that not even a small leaf of a tree moves unless God's order is received
> for it to move. Whatever you are, according to religions you are made out
of
> mud. The word "human" comes from humus, which means mud. And the word in
> Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, is admi - it is used as the name of the first
> man, Adam. Admi means the earth. God made man out of the earth and then
> breathed life into the puppet.
>
> Now, what kind of freedom do you have? Somebody has breathed life
into
> you, and it is in his hands to stop breathing life into you any moment.
> Whatever you are doing, the religions believe it is your fate, it is
written
> on your forehead. And there have been many con men who have even been
trying
> to read what is written on your forehead. Astrologers, palmists, all kinds
> of cunning people have been exploiting the simplicity and innocence of
> humanity. There are people who are reading your hand, looking at the
lines,
> telling you what those lines mean. The whole emphasis is that you are not
> living a life of your own, you are just a part in a drama, and the part
that
> you are playing has been decided beforehand.
>
> That was the argument that the Indian God's incarnation, Krishna -
in
> the great Indian war, Mahabharata - gave to his disciple Arjuna. Seeing
the
> immense massacre that was going to happen, Arjuna simply lost his nerve.
He
> was a man of immense courage and great intelligence.
>
> He said, "I don't see any point in this war. Even if I win... and I
am
> certain I am going to win" - there was no other warrior of his quality -
> "But sitting on the golden throne of victory surrounded by the corpses of
> all my friends and all my enemies, all the beautiful people, does not
appeal
> to me at all. The scene makes me feel insane. Rather than fighting, I will
> leave it to the other party - who is nobody, another cousin-brother. Let
him
> rule over the country and I will go to the mountains, to the Himalayas to
> meditate, to become a sannyasin. I have lost all interest in fighting."
>
> Krishna tries in every way to persuade him, but Arjuna is a great
> intellectual; he goes on arguing against him. Finally seeing no other way,
> Krishna takes the last resort and says, "It is written in your destiny.
> Going away, you are going away from God. This war is predetermined by God
to
> destroy those who are not virtuous and only let those survive who are
> virtuous." Now there is no argument against it, because Arjuna himself
> believes in God and destiny.
>
> Arjuna fought the war. Krishna was responsible, five thousand years
> ago, for destroying this country by giving a false argument, absolutely
> fictitious, to Arjuna. That war killed so many people. And it is not only
> that it killed people, it also destroyed the courage of the country; it
> became afraid of any small calamity.
>
> Two thousand years of slavery.... I want to make it absolutely clear
> that the people who are responsible for these two thousand years of
slavery
> are the greatest people of India. The list is headed by Krishna; Arjuna is
> just his shadow. Then came Mahavira, who taught people to be nonviolent to
> such an extreme that his followers cannot even cultivate, because plants
> have life; if you cultivate then you will have to kill the plants when you
> reap the crop. Gautam Buddha comes third, who taught people to accept, to
be
> contented wherever and with whatever they have - poor, hungry, starving,
> enslaved, remain utterly contented.
>
> Their teachings were great. This is something to be remembered;
> otherwise I will be misunderstood by everyone. Their teachings were great,
> but they never thought about all the implications of their teachings. They
> never thought that if you teach a country nonviolence, if you teach a
> country to drop all weapons, when the whole world is not doing that, then
> you are putting that country in a state of being victimized, exploited by
> anyone.
>
> And for two thousand years invader after invader came to India,
> exploited it and went back. Finally Mohammedans came and they thought,
"What
> is the need to go back? We can not only exploit people, but rule them and
> remain here." And then came the Britishers and the French and the
> Portuguese, and they all tried to exploit the country. They all had their
> small pockets. Britain proved to be far more clever. But the Portuguese
had
> their small islands of Diu, Daman and Goa, and the French had a small
> portion of the country, Pondicherry. Britain had the whole country.
>
> People have remained starved and hungry, and people have gone on
dying
> because of hunger, and nobody has ever thought that these great principles
> in some way are responsible for this unfortunate situation that for
> thousands of years India has had to pass through. And even today nobody is
> trying to see all the implications. Every great principle has its own
black
> cloud behind it. And unless you understand the black cloud also, you are
> soon going to be absorbed by the black cloud. If you understand it, you
can
> avoid it.
>
> God seems to be the greatest principle that has been preached to man
> down the ages, but nobody has looked at its implications.
>
>
> If God created man then man has no individuality of his own, then he
> cannot claim any dignity, any freedom.
>
> There is no question of a puppet declaring, "I want to be free." If
> God created the universe, then whatever has happened in the universe has
had
> to happen. It was God's will. No effort on our part was going to change
> anything.
>
> And finally you can see, if God created the world, and if he is
behind
> nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on
> man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet. To give the
> creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very
dangerous.
> It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
>
> Hence, my simple understanding of consciousness is that if God did
not
> die with Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration, then we have to kill him!
> Wherever you meet him, there is no need even to say hello. First kill him
> and then you can say hello - just to fulfill the formality. But God is not
> needed at all. With God above in the sky, man will always remain a slave,
> and man will always remain unconscious, and man will never strive to reach
> to the peaks of his potential.
>
>
> With God removed you may feel a little fear - just out of old
habit -
> but that fear will disappear.
>
>
> Once you recognize that you are standing on your own feet and you
have
> to do something to create a better consciousness in you, to create a more
> loving heart in you, that prayers are useless, there is nobody to answer
> them... Yes, sometimes they have been answered. At least once,
certainly....
>
> A poor man asked God for months continually, "Give me fifty dollars.
I
> don't want much, just fifty dollars."
>
> First he prayed, but then he thought, "Millions of people are
praying,
> and there is one God and there are millions of prayers. Whether my poor
> prayer ever reaches to him... And there must be around him so much noise -
> prayers from all the churches, all the mosques, all the synagogues, all
the
> temples - who is going to take care of me? It is better that I write a
> letter."
>
> He wrote a letter saying, "This is to remind you that for months I
> have been praying, but the answer has not come. It seems my prayer has not
> reached you. I can understand, because of the noise around you of so many
> prayers. And great people are praying - the pope and the archbishop and
the
> shankaracharya - so who is going to take care of my small prayer? And I am
> not asking much - no paradise, no heaven, nothing, just fifty dollars.
> Finally I decided to write the letter." And he wrote in big letters,
"Fifty
> Dollars! Remember, it is urgent."
>
> But then he was very much disturbed, because he didn't know the
> address, whom to address it to. He thought, "The best way is to address it
> to: God, c/o The Postmaster General. If the postmaster general cannot find
> his address, who else can?" The letter reached the postmaster general. He
> looked, he laughed, and then he felt sad also. He thought, "The man must
be
> in desperate need - nobody writes letters to God. And he is not asking
> much."
>
> So he said to all his friends, "Please look at this poor man's
letter.
> You all contribute, and we will send those fifty dollars to him. At least
> for once let a prayer be answered." They collected the money, but they
> collected only forty-five dollars. The postmaster general said, "No harm,
at
> least we should send this much."
>
> When forty-five dollars reached the man he counted the dollars, and
he
> looked above and shouted, "God, remember one thing. Next time you send any
> money to me, never send it through the post office! Those cunning fellows
> have taken out their commission. I have received only forty-five dollars!"
>
> Except this, I have not come across any prayer which has been
> answered - and that too not fully. There is no one to answer. Existence
has
> to be approached in a different way.
>
> God has to be worshipped.
>
> God has to be prayed to.
>
> Existence has to be contacted in meditation.
>
> There are only two kinds of religions in the world: the religions of
> prayer and the religions of meditation. You can see my point. The
religions
> of prayer all believe in God and the religions of meditation don't believe
> in any god. Because meditation takes you inwards, and fulfills you, there
is
> no need to pray, there is no need for any consolation. You are in such a
> rejoicing, in such a blissful state; you can bless the whole world.
>
> I teach you existence, and the entry into existence is through your
> own being; hence meditation is not prayer - remember, it is against
prayer.
> Prayer is part of that phony jargon about God, heaven, hell. Prayer is
part
> and parcel of that whole rubbish. Meditation is simply the only pure way
of
> coming in contact with existence. And this contact immediately becomes a
> merger and a melting. You become existence yourself. Then you are in the
> clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the flowers and you are in
> the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a drop, you have become
the
> ocean.
>
> Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God is
a
> condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is
> accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you want
> to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you so
> crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a
freshness
> and a beauty and a truth.
>
> Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is
simply
> fiction.
>
>
> Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Number 9
>
>
>
> Copyright © 2006 Osho International Foundation
>
>
>
>
|
|
|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #215250 ] |
Mi, 07 Juni 2006 13:02 |
|
God will punish you .
"dd" <dd [at] d.com> wrote in message news:4485f55c [at] news.starhub.net.sg...
>
> "dddd" <dd [at] d.com> wrote in message news:...
>> http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=Magazine&Language=Engl ish
>>
>>
>> Back
>>
>>
>>
>> Osho,
>>
>> What is existence? Is it something like what people call God?
>>
>> Existence is that which is, and God is that which is not. Existence
> is
>> a reality, God is a fiction. Existence is available only to meditators,
>> people of silence; God is a consolation for sick minds, sick
>> psychologies.
>>
>> Existence is not your production - God is. That's why there is only
>> one existence, but thousands of gods. Each according to his needs, each
>> according to his suffering, each according to his expectations, creates a
>> god or accepts an old belief about God.
>>
>> God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not
>> a
>> consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the
>> religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I
>> teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within
>> you
>> and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for you,
> no
>> misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a
>> contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
>>
>> God is for those who cannot grow in consciousness, who are retarded
> as
>> far as consciousness is concerned. It is a kind of toy; retarded people
> need
>> it. And the moment I say it is a toy, then it is up to you how you want
>> to
>> make it - looking like a monkey or looking like an elephant. It is just
>> up
>> to you whether to give him four hands or one thousand hands. It is your
>> creation. Strangely enough, man believes God created everything.
>>
>>
>> The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
>>
>> God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
>> thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on
>> multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
>>
>> You have to understand the psychology of lying. The first thing
> about
>> lying is that you need a good memory because you have to remember. You
>> lie
>> to someone about something, to somebody else about something else; you
> have
>> to remember what you have said to one and what you have said to the
>> other.
>>
>> Truth needs no remembrance. Truth is always there, just the same.
> You
>> don't have to cram it in your memory. Memory gives you a bondage, a
> prison;
>> it clings around you, covers you so much, slowly, slowly that you
> disappear
>> completely. Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies. And there is a
>> sudden revelation that you are part of the immense truth I am calling
>> existence.
>>
>> You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't
>> need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a
>> grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole
>> life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very
> depths
>> of this immense existence.
>>
>> We are almost like the waves of the ocean - just on the surface,
>> and
>> the ocean may be miles deep. The Pacific Ocean is five miles deep. But a
>> small wave on the top will never know the depth - her own depth, because
> she
>> is not separate from the ocean. She will cling to her small entity, be
>> afraid about death, be afraid of losing herself in the vastness, the
> oceanic
>> infinity. But the truth is, the death of the wave is not a death, but the
>> beginning of an eternal life.
>>
>>
>> God has been invented.
>>
>> It was people's need; people needed a protector. In the immensity
>> of
>> the universe, a man feels so alone, so small. The vastness creates
> trembling
>> in him. What is your existence?
>>
>> I am reminded of a story by Bertrand Russell. The archbishop of
>> England sees in a dream that he has reached the pearly gates of paradise.
> On
>> one hand he is immensely pleased, and on the other hand he is very much
>> troubled, because the pearly gates are so vast, in both directions, that
> he
>> cannot see the whole gate. It is so high that it is beyond the capacity
>> of
>> his eyes to see. And he himself seems to be just like a small ant,
> compared
>> to this great gate. He is a little bit afraid. He is no ordinary man, he
> is
>> the archbishop of England. He feels humiliated just by the gate, and the
>> fear arises, "If this is the situation at the gate, what is the situation
>> going to be inside?"
>>
>> With fearful hands he knocks on the door, but in the immensity of
> that
>> space only he can hear his knock. It takes days for him, but he goes on
>> knocking harder and harder. Finally a small window opens in the gate and
>> Saint Peter looks out with one thousand eyes, trying to figure out who
>> has
>> been making a noise. Those one thousand eyes are so shiny, like stars,
> that
>> the archbishop feels even more reduced - almost to a nonentity.
>>
>> And Saint Peter asks, "Please, whoever you are, wherever you are,
> come
>> in front of me."
>>
>> The archbishop declares himself. He says to Saint Peter, "Perhaps
> you
>> don't know me. You can check with Jesus Christ, I am the archbishop of
>> England."
>>
>> Saint Peter says, "Never heard of any such thing as England."
>>
>> The archbishop says, "Perhaps you may not have heard about England,
>> but you must have heard about our beautiful planet, Earth."
>>
>> Saint Peter says, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but unless
> you
>> give me the index number of your Earth, I cannot figure out what you are
>> talking about. I will have to go to the library and look - if you give me
>> the index number - to which solar system you belong, because there are
>> millions of solar systems and each solar system has many planets."
>>
>> But the archbishop has never thought that the earth has any index
>> number. He says, "I don't know any index number, but I am the archbishop.
>> You just go and tell Jesus Christ."
>>
>> He says, "You are giving me puzzle after puzzle. Who is this fellow
>> Jesus Christ?"
>>
>> The archbishop is very much shocked. He says, "You don't know Jesus
>> Christ, the only begotten son of God?"
>>
>> Saint Peter says, "As far as I am concerned, I have never seen God;
> I
>> don't know whether he exists or not. I am just a doorkeeper. Perhaps
>> somewhere in the most interior parts of paradise somebody exists who
> thinks
>> that he is God, but I have never come across..."
>>
>> It is such a shock that the archbishop wakes up perspiring.
>>
>> The story is significant because it shows how small we are and how
> big
>> the universe is. Naturally primitive man was not able to adjust himself
>> to
>> the idea of this vastness of the universe without giving it some
> personality
>> and without making himself in some way related to that personality.
>>
>> God was an effort of the primitive mind of man to give existence a
>> personality. Then he becomes God the father. Then you can make some
>> relationship with him. You may even be against him, but at least there is
>> someone you can be for, you can be against; there is someone who is
> greater
>> than you, who is going to protect you, who is your guarantee.
>>
>>
>> God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
>>
>> The people who attained to their inner consciousness and its
>> highest
>> peak, like Gautam Buddha, denied the existence of God. Anybody who has
> ever
>> become inwardly healthy, gone beyond the mind which is basically sick,
>> has
>> denied God. God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children.
> They
>> need it - parables, fables, stories. But very few human beings have gone
>> beyond the kindergarten school.
>>
>> God exists because you are not aware of yourself. God exists
>> because
>> you have not made any contact with your own center. The moment you know
>> yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God. In fact I am
>> in
>> absolute support of Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead."
>>
>> The second part of his sentence is even more significant, "God is
> dead
>> and man is now free." That second part has not received much attention
> from
>> the philosophers, from the mystics, from the psychologists, but the
>> second
>> part is the most important; the first part is not much. In fact, the
>> first
>> part is basically wrong. God cannot die - fictions never die. The moment
> you
>> know they are fictions there is no question of their death. Neither are
> they
>> born, nor do they die. God was never born in the first place - how can he
>> die? Death is the other extreme of birth.
>>
>> So the first part is not very important, but that has been given
> much
>> importance by theologians, because they became afraid: "This is
>> sacrilegious, to tell people that God is dead. That means that now no
>> religion is needed." They became afraid for their own business. But they
>> forgot the second part which is more important. It has tremendously
>> significant implications. It means that God was a bondage, God was a
>> retardedness, God was out of fear. God was not a treasure, but a heavy,
>> mountainous weight on your heart and on your growth.
>>
>>
>> Once God is removed, man's possibility to grow and blossom is
>> absolutely free.
>>
>> A God is a despot, a fascist. Without God, the world becomes
> freedom.
>> Existence gives a tremendous dignity to every individual. From the
> smallest
>> blade of grass up to the greatest star in the universe it gives immense
>> significance and love; it makes no difference. There is equality and
>> equal
>> opportunity. And there is no need unnecessarily to pray and waste your
> time,
>> to read the holy scriptures, which are the most unholy books in the
>> world.
>> There is no need to be exploited by the priests. You are certainly and
>> suddenly free from all these chains. Now you can be yourself.
>>
>> While God is in existence you can never be yourself. You are just a
>> puppet, your strings are in the hands of God. The ancient saying in India
> is
>> that not even a small leaf of a tree moves unless God's order is received
>> for it to move. Whatever you are, according to religions you are made out
> of
>> mud. The word "human" comes from humus, which means mud. And the word in
>> Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, is admi - it is used as the name of the
>> first
>> man, Adam. Admi means the earth. God made man out of the earth and then
>> breathed life into the puppet.
>>
>> Now, what kind of freedom do you have? Somebody has breathed life
> into
>> you, and it is in his hands to stop breathing life into you any moment.
>> Whatever you are doing, the religions believe it is your fate, it is
> written
>> on your forehead. And there have been many con men who have even been
> trying
>> to read what is written on your forehead. Astrologers, palmists, all
>> kinds
>> of cunning people have been exploiting the simplicity and innocence of
>> humanity. There are people who are reading your hand, looking at the
> lines,
>> telling you what those lines mean. The whole emphasis is that you are not
>> living a life of your own, you are just a part in a drama, and the part
> that
>> you are playing has been decided beforehand.
>>
>> That was the argument that the Indian God's incarnation, Krishna -
> in
>> the great Indian war, Mahabharata - gave to his disciple Arjuna. Seeing
> the
>> immense massacre that was going to happen, Arjuna simply lost his nerve.
> He
>> was a man of immense courage and great intelligence.
>>
>> He said, "I don't see any point in this war. Even if I win... and I
> am
>> certain I am going to win" - there was no other warrior of his quality -
>> "But sitting on the golden throne of victory surrounded by the corpses of
>> all my friends and all my enemies, all the beautiful people, does not
> appeal
>> to me at all. The scene makes me feel insane. Rather than fighting, I
>> will
>> leave it to the other party - who is nobody, another cousin-brother. Let
> him
>> rule over the country and I will go to the mountains, to the Himalayas to
>> meditate, to become a sannyasin. I have lost all interest in fighting."
>>
>> Krishna tries in every way to persuade him, but Arjuna is a great
>> intellectual; he goes on arguing against him. Finally seeing no other
>> way,
>> Krishna takes the last resort and says, "It is written in your destiny.
>> Going away, you are going away from God. This war is predetermined by God
> to
>> destroy those who are not virtuous and only let those survive who are
>> virtuous." Now there is no argument against it, because Arjuna himself
>> believes in God and destiny.
>>
>> Arjuna fought the war. Krishna was responsible, five thousand years
>> ago, for destroying this country by giving a false argument, absolutely
>> fictitious, to Arjuna. That war killed so many people. And it is not only
>> that it killed people, it also destroyed the courage of the country; it
>> became afraid of any small calamity.
>>
>> Two thousand years of slavery.... I want to make it absolutely
>> clear
>> that the people who are responsible for these two thousand years of
> slavery
>> are the greatest people of India. The list is headed by Krishna; Arjuna
>> is
>> just his shadow. Then came Mahavira, who taught people to be nonviolent
>> to
>> such an extreme that his followers cannot even cultivate, because plants
>> have life; if you cultivate then you will have to kill the plants when
>> you
>> reap the crop. Gautam Buddha comes third, who taught people to accept, to
> be
>> contented wherever and with whatever they have - poor, hungry, starving,
>> enslaved, remain utterly contented.
>>
>> Their teachings were great. This is something to be remembered;
>> otherwise I will be misunderstood by everyone. Their teachings were
>> great,
>> but they never thought about all the implications of their teachings.
>> They
>> never thought that if you teach a country nonviolence, if you teach a
>> country to drop all weapons, when the whole world is not doing that, then
>> you are putting that country in a state of being victimized, exploited by
>> anyone.
>>
>> And for two thousand years invader after invader came to India,
>> exploited it and went back. Finally Mohammedans came and they thought,
> "What
>> is the need to go back? We can not only exploit people, but rule them and
>> remain here." And then came the Britishers and the French and the
>> Portuguese, and they all tried to exploit the country. They all had their
>> small pockets. Britain proved to be far more clever. But the Portuguese
> had
>> their small islands of Diu, Daman and Goa, and the French had a small
>> portion of the country, Pondicherry. Britain had the whole country.
>>
>> People have remained starved and hungry, and people have gone on
> dying
>> because of hunger, and nobody has ever thought that these great
>> principles
>> in some way are responsible for this unfortunate situation that for
>> thousands of years India has had to pass through. And even today nobody
>> is
>> trying to see all the implications. Every great principle has its own
> black
>> cloud behind it. And unless you understand the black cloud also, you are
>> soon going to be absorbed by the black cloud. If you understand it, you
> can
>> avoid it.
>>
>> God seems to be the greatest principle that has been preached to
>> man
>> down the ages, but nobody has looked at its implications.
>>
>>
>> If God created man then man has no individuality of his own, then
>> he
>> cannot claim any dignity, any freedom.
>>
>> There is no question of a puppet declaring, "I want to be free." If
>> God created the universe, then whatever has happened in the universe has
> had
>> to happen. It was God's will. No effort on our part was going to change
>> anything.
>>
>> And finally you can see, if God created the world, and if he is
> behind
>> nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on
>> man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet. To give the
>> creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very
> dangerous.
>> It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
>>
>> Hence, my simple understanding of consciousness is that if God did
> not
>> die with Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration, then we have to kill him!
>> Wherever you meet him, there is no need even to say hello. First kill him
>> and then you can say hello - just to fulfill the formality. But God is
>> not
>> needed at all. With God above in the sky, man will always remain a slave,
>> and man will always remain unconscious, and man will never strive to
>> reach
>> to the peaks of his potential.
>>
>>
>> With God removed you may feel a little fear - just out of old
> habit -
>> but that fear will disappear.
>>
>>
>> Once you recognize that you are standing on your own feet and you
> have
>> to do something to create a better consciousness in you, to create a more
>> loving heart in you, that prayers are useless, there is nobody to answer
>> them... Yes, sometimes they have been answered. At least once,
> certainly....
>>
>> A poor man asked God for months continually, "Give me fifty
>> dollars.
> I
>> don't want much, just fifty dollars."
>>
>> First he prayed, but then he thought, "Millions of people are
> praying,
>> and there is one God and there are millions of prayers. Whether my poor
>> prayer ever reaches to him... And there must be around him so much
>> noise -
>> prayers from all the churches, all the mosques, all the synagogues, all
> the
>> temples - who is going to take care of me? It is better that I write a
>> letter."
>>
>> He wrote a letter saying, "This is to remind you that for months I
>> have been praying, but the answer has not come. It seems my prayer has
>> not
>> reached you. I can understand, because of the noise around you of so many
>> prayers. And great people are praying - the pope and the archbishop and
> the
>> shankaracharya - so who is going to take care of my small prayer? And I
>> am
>> not asking much - no paradise, no heaven, nothing, just fifty dollars.
>> Finally I decided to write the letter." And he wrote in big letters,
> "Fifty
>> Dollars! Remember, it is urgent."
>>
>> But then he was very much disturbed, because he didn't know the
>> address, whom to address it to. He thought, "The best way is to address
>> it
>> to: God, c/o The Postmaster General. If the postmaster general cannot
>> find
>> his address, who else can?" The letter reached the postmaster general. He
>> looked, he laughed, and then he felt sad also. He thought, "The man must
> be
>> in desperate need - nobody writes letters to God. And he is not asking
>> much."
>>
>> So he said to all his friends, "Please look at this poor man's
> letter.
>> You all contribute, and we will send those fifty dollars to him. At least
>> for once let a prayer be answered." They collected the money, but they
>> collected only forty-five dollars. The postmaster general said, "No harm,
> at
>> least we should send this much."
>>
>> When forty-five dollars reached the man he counted the dollars, and
> he
>> looked above and shouted, "God, remember one thing. Next time you send
>> any
>> money to me, never send it through the post office! Those cunning fellows
>> have taken out their commission. I have received only forty-five
>> dollars!"
>>
>> Except this, I have not come across any prayer which has been
>> answered - and that too not fully. There is no one to answer. Existence
> has
>> to be approached in a different way.
>>
>> God has to be worshipped.
>>
>> God has to be prayed to.
>>
>> Existence has to be contacted in meditation.
>>
>> There are only two kinds of religions in the world: the religions
>> of
>> prayer and the religions of meditation. You can see my point. The
> religions
>> of prayer all believe in God and the religions of meditation don't
>> believe
>> in any god. Because meditation takes you inwards, and fulfills you, there
> is
>> no need to pray, there is no need for any consolation. You are in such a
>> rejoicing, in such a blissful state; you can bless the whole world.
>>
>> I teach you existence, and the entry into existence is through your
>> own being; hence meditation is not prayer - remember, it is against
> prayer.
>> Prayer is part of that phony jargon about God, heaven, hell. Prayer is
> part
>> and parcel of that whole rubbish. Meditation is simply the only pure way
> of
>> coming in contact with existence. And this contact immediately becomes a
>> merger and a melting. You become existence yourself. Then you are in the
>> clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the flowers and you are in
>> the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a drop, you have become
> the
>> ocean.
>>
>> Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God
>> is
> a
>> condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is
>> accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you
>> want
>> to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you
>> so
>> crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a
> freshness
>> and a beauty and a truth.
>>
>> Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is
> simply
>> fiction.
>>
>>
>> Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Number 9
>>
>>
>>
>> Copyright © 2006 Osho International Foundation
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
|
|
|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #215251 ] |
Do, 08 Juni 2006 06:41 |
|
"lauhelow" <lauhelow [at] hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:4486b24b [at] news.starhub.net.sg...
> God will punish you .
>
He wouldn't dare !
OM
|
|
|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #227693 ] |
Do, 20 Juli 2006 09:30 |
|
another cult on the rise?
"dd" <dd [at] d.com> wrote in message news:44bf2b83$1 [at] news.starhub.net.sg...
> Existence is that which is, and God is that which is not. Existence is a
> reality, God is a fiction. Existence is available only to meditators,
people
> of silence; God is a consolation for sick minds, sick psychologies.
>
> Existence is not your production - God is. That's why there is only
> one existence, but thousands of gods. Each according to his needs, each
> according to his suffering, each according to his expectations, creates a
> god or accepts an old belief about God.
>
> God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not a
> consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the
> religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I
> teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within you
> and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for you,
no
> misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a
> contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
>
> God is for those who cannot grow in consciousness, who are retarded
as
> far as consciousness is concerned. It is a kind of toy; retarded people
need
> it. And the moment I say it is a toy, then it is up to you how you want to
> make it - looking like a monkey or looking like an elephant. It is just up
> to you whether to give him four hands or one thousand hands. It is your
> creation. Strangely enough, man believes God created everything.
>
>
> The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
>
> God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
> thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on
> multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
>
> You have to understand the psychology of lying. The first thing
about
> lying is that you need a good memory because you have to remember. You lie
> to someone about something, to somebody else about something else; you
have
> to remember what you have said to one and what you have said to the other.
>
> Truth needs no remembrance. Truth is always there, just the same.
You
> don't have to cram it in your memory. Memory gives you a bondage, a
prison;
> it clings around you, covers you so much, slowly, slowly that you
disappear
> completely. Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies. And there is a
> sudden revelation that you are part of the immense truth I am calling
> existence.
>
> You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't
> need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a
> grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole
> life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very
depths
> of this immense existence.
>
> We are almost like the waves of the ocean - just on the surface, and
> the ocean may be miles deep. The Pacific Ocean is five miles deep. But a
> small wave on the top will never know the depth - her own depth, because
she
> is not separate from the ocean. She will cling to her small entity, be
> afraid about death, be afraid of losing herself in the vastness, the
oceanic
> infinity. But the truth is, the death of the wave is not a death, but the
> beginning of an eternal life.
>
>
> God has been invented.
>
> It was people's need; people needed a protector. In the immensity of
> the universe, a man feels so alone, so small. The vastness creates
trembling
> in him. What is your existence?
>
> I am reminded of a story by Bertrand Russell. The archbishop of
> England sees in a dream that he has reached the pearly gates of paradise.
On
> one hand he is immensely pleased, and on the other hand he is very much
> troubled, because the pearly gates are so vast, in both directions, that
he
> cannot see the whole gate. It is so high that it is beyond the capacity of
> his eyes to see. And he himself seems to be just like a small ant,
compared
> to this great gate. He is a little bit afraid. He is no ordinary man, he
is
> the archbishop of England. He feels humiliated just by the gate, and the
> fear arises, "If this is the situation at the gate, what is the situation
> going to be inside?"
>
> With fearful hands he knocks on the door, but in the immensity of
that
> space only he can hear his knock. It takes days for him, but he goes on
> knocking harder and harder. Finally a small window opens in the gate and
> Saint Peter looks out with one thousand eyes, trying to figure out who has
> been making a noise. Those one thousand eyes are so shiny, like stars,
that
> the archbishop feels even more reduced - almost to a nonentity.
>
> And Saint Peter asks, "Please, whoever you are, wherever you are,
come
> in front of me."
>
> The archbishop declares himself. He says to Saint Peter, "Perhaps
you
> don't know me. You can check with Jesus Christ, I am the archbishop of
> England."
>
> Saint Peter says, "Never heard of any such thing as England."
>
> The archbishop says, "Perhaps you may not have heard about England,
> but you must have heard about our beautiful planet, Earth."
>
> Saint Peter says, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but unless
you
> give me the index number of your Earth, I cannot figure out what you are
> talking about. I will have to go to the library and look - if you give me
> the index number - to which solar system you belong, because there are
> millions of solar systems and each solar system has many planets."
>
> But the archbishop has never thought that the earth has any index
> number. He says, "I don't know any index number, but I am the archbishop.
> You just go and tell Jesus Christ."
>
> He says, "You are giving me puzzle after puzzle. Who is this fellow
> Jesus Christ?"
>
> The archbishop is very much shocked. He says, "You don't know Jesus
> Christ, the only begotten son of God?"
>
> Saint Peter says, "As far as I am concerned, I have never seen God;
I
> don't know whether he exists or not. I am just a doorkeeper. Perhaps
> somewhere in the most interior parts of paradise somebody exists who
thinks
> that he is God, but I have never come across..."
>
> It is such a shock that the archbishop wakes up perspiring.
>
> The story is significant because it shows how small we are and how
big
> the universe is. Naturally primitive man was not able to adjust himself to
> the idea of this vastness of the universe without giving it some
personality
> and without making himself in some way related to that personality.
>
> God was an effort of the primitive mind of man to give existence a
> personality. Then he becomes God the father. Then you can make some
> relationship with him. You may even be against him, but at least there is
> someone you can be for, you can be against; there is someone who is
greater
> than you, who is going to protect you, who is your guarantee.
>
>
> God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
>
> The people who attained to their inner consciousness and its highest
> peak, like Gautam Buddha, denied the existence of God. Anybody who has
ever
> become inwardly healthy, gone beyond the mind which is basically sick, has
> denied God. God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children.
They
> need it - parables, fables, stories. But very few human beings have gone
> beyond the kindergarten school.
>
> God exists because you are not aware of yourself. God exists because
> you have not made any contact with your own center. The moment you know
> yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God. In fact I am in
> absolute support of Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead."
>
> The second part of his sentence is even more significant, "God is
dead
> and man is now free." That second part has not received much attention
from
> the philosophers, from the mystics, from the psychologists, but the second
> part is the most important; the first part is not much. In fact, the first
> part is basically wrong. God cannot die - fictions never die. The moment
you
> know they are fictions there is no question of their death. Neither are
they
> born, nor do they die. God was never born in the first place - how can he
> die? Death is the other extreme of birth.
>
> So the first part is not very important, but that has been given
much
> importance by theologians, because they became afraid: "This is
> sacrilegious, to tell people that God is dead. That means that now no
> religion is needed." They became afraid for their own business. But they
> forgot the second part which is more important. It has tremendously
> significant implications. It means that God was a bondage, God was a
> retardedness, God was out of fear. God was not a treasure, but a heavy,
> mountainous weight on your heart and on your growth.
>
>
> Once God is removed, man's possibility to grow and blossom is
> absolutely free.
>
> A God is a despot, a fascist. Without God, the world becomes
freedom.
> Existence gives a tremendous dignity to every individual. From the
smallest
> blade of grass up to the greatest star in the universe it gives immense
> significance and love; it makes no difference. There is equality and equal
> opportunity. And there is no need unnecessarily to pray and waste your
time,
> to read the holy scriptures, which are the most unholy books in the world.
> There is no need to be exploited by the priests. You are certainly and
> suddenly free from all these chains. Now you can be yourself.
>
> While God is in existence you can never be yourself. You are just a
> puppet, your strings are in the hands of God. The ancient saying in India
is
> that not even a small leaf of a tree moves unless God's order is received
> for it to move. Whatever you are, according to religions you are made out
of
> mud. The word "human" comes from humus, which means mud. And the word in
> Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, is admi - it is used as the name of the first
> man, Adam. Admi means the earth. God made man out of the earth and then
> breathed life into the puppet.
>
> Now, what kind of freedom do you have? Somebody has breathed life
into
> you, and it is in his hands to stop breathing life into you any moment.
> Whatever you are doing, the religions believe it is your fate, it is
written
> on your forehead. And there have been many con men who have even been
trying
> to read what is written on your forehead. Astrologers, palmists, all kinds
> of cunning people have been exploiting the simplicity and innocence of
> humanity. There are people who are reading your hand, looking at the
lines,
> telling you what those lines mean. The whole emphasis is that you are not
> living a life of your own, you are just a part in a drama, and the part
that
> you are playing has been decided beforehand.
>
> That was the argument that the Indian God's incarnation, Krishna -
in
> the great Indian war, Mahabharata - gave to his disciple Arjuna. Seeing
the
> immense massacre that was going to happen, Arjuna simply lost his nerve.
He
> was a man of immense courage and great intelligence.
>
> He said, "I don't see any point in this war. Even if I win... and I
am
> certain I am going to win" - there was no other warrior of his quality -
> "But sitting on the golden throne of victory surrounded by the corpses of
> all my friends and all my enemies, all the beautiful people, does not
appeal
> to me at all. The scene makes me feel insane. Rather than fighting, I will
> leave it to the other party - who is nobody, another cousin-brother. Let
him
> rule over the country and I will go to the mountains, to the Himalayas to
> meditate, to become a sannyasin. I have lost all interest in fighting."
>
> Krishna tries in every way to persuade him, but Arjuna is a great
> intellectual; he goes on arguing against him. Finally seeing no other way,
> Krishna takes the last resort and says, "It is written in your destiny.
> Going away, you are going away from God. This war is predetermined by God
to
> destroy those who are not virtuous and only let those survive who are
> virtuous." Now there is no argument against it, because Arjuna himself
> believes in God and destiny.
>
> Arjuna fought the war. Krishna was responsible, five thousand years
> ago, for destroying this country by giving a false argument, absolutely
> fictitious, to Arjuna. That war killed so many people. And it is not only
> that it killed people, it also destroyed the courage of the country; it
> became afraid of any small calamity.
>
> Two thousand years of slavery.... I want to make it absolutely clear
> that the people who are responsible for these two thousand years of
slavery
> are the greatest people of India. The list is headed by Krishna; Arjuna is
> just his shadow. Then came Mahavira, who taught people to be nonviolent to
> such an extreme that his followers cannot even cultivate, because plants
> have life; if you cultivate then you will have to kill the plants when you
> reap the crop. Gautam Buddha comes third, who taught people to accept, to
be
> contented wherever and with whatever they have - poor, hungry, starving,
> enslaved, remain utterly contented.
>
> Their teachings were great. This is something to be remembered;
> otherwise I will be misunderstood by everyone. Their teachings were great,
> but they never thought about all the implications of their teachings. They
> never thought that if you teach a country nonviolence, if you teach a
> country to drop all weapons, when the whole world is not doing that, then
> you are putting that country in a state of being victimized, exploited by
> anyone.
>
> And for two thousand years invader after invader came to India,
> exploited it and went back. Finally Mohammedans came and they thought,
"What
> is the need to go back? We can not only exploit people, but rule them and
> remain here." And then came the Britishers and the French and the
> Portuguese, and they all tried to exploit the country. They all had their
> small pockets. Britain proved to be far more clever. But the Portuguese
had
> their small islands of Diu, Daman and Goa, and the French had a small
> portion of the country, Pondicherry. Britain had the whole country.
>
> People have remained starved and hungry, and people have gone on
dying
> because of hunger, and nobody has ever thought that these great principles
> in some way are responsible for this unfortunate situation that for
> thousands of years India has had to pass through. And even today nobody is
> trying to see all the implications. Every great principle has its own
black
> cloud behind it. And unless you understand the black cloud also, you are
> soon going to be absorbed by the black cloud. If you understand it, you
can
> avoid it.
>
> God seems to be the greatest principle that has been preached to man
> down the ages, but nobody has looked at its implications.
>
>
> If God created man then man has no individuality of his own, then he
> cannot claim any dignity, any freedom.
>
> There is no question of a puppet declaring, "I want to be free." If
> God created the universe, then whatever has happened in the universe has
had
> to happen. It was God's will. No effort on our part was going to change
> anything.
>
> And finally you can see, if God created the world, and if he is
behind
> nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on
> man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet. To give the
> creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very
dangerous.
> It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
>
> Hence, my simple understanding of consciousness is that if God did
not
> die with Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration, then we have to kill him!
> Wherever you meet him, there is no need even to say hello. First kill him
> and then you can say hello - just to fulfill the formality. But God is not
> needed at all. With God above in the sky, man will always remain a slave,
> and man will always remain unconscious, and man will never strive to reach
> to the peaks of his potential.
>
>
> With God removed you may feel a little fear - just out of old
habit -
> but that fear will disappear.
>
>
> Once you recognize that you are standing on your own feet and you
have
> to do something to create a better consciousness in you, to create a more
> loving heart in you, that prayers are useless, there is nobody to answer
> them... Yes, sometimes they have been answered. At least once,
certainly....
>
> A poor man asked God for months continually, "Give me fifty dollars.
I
> don't want much, just fifty dollars."
>
> First he prayed, but then he thought, "Millions of people are
praying,
> and there is one God and there are millions of prayers. Whether my poor
> prayer ever reaches to him... And there must be around him so much noise -
> prayers from all the churches, all the mosques, all the synagogues, all
the
> temples - who is going to take care of me? It is better that I write a
> letter."
>
> He wrote a letter saying, "This is to remind you that for months I
> have been praying, but the answer has not come. It seems my prayer has not
> reached you. I can understand, because of the noise around you of so many
> prayers. And great people are praying - the pope and the archbishop and
the
> shankaracharya - so who is going to take care of my small prayer? And I am
> not asking much - no paradise, no heaven, nothing, just fifty dollars.
> Finally I decided to write the letter." And he wrote in big letters,
"Fifty
> Dollars! Remember, it is urgent."
>
> But then he was very much disturbed, because he didn't know the
> address, whom to address it to. He thought, "The best way is to address it
> to: God, c/o The Postmaster General. If the postmaster general cannot find
> his address, who else can?" The letter reached the postmaster general. He
> looked, he laughed, and then he felt sad also. He thought, "The man must
be
> in desperate need - nobody writes letters to God. And he is not asking
> much."
>
> So he said to all his friends, "Please look at this poor man's
letter.
> You all contribute, and we will send those fifty dollars to him. At least
> for once let a prayer be answered." They collected the money, but they
> collected only forty-five dollars. The postmaster general said, "No harm,
at
> least we should send this much."
>
> When forty-five dollars reached the man he counted the dollars, and
he
> looked above and shouted, "God, remember one thing. Next time you send any
> money to me, never send it through the post office! Those cunning fellows
> have taken out their commission. I have received only forty-five dollars!"
>
> Except this, I have not come across any prayer which has been
> answered - and that too not fully. There is no one to answer. Existence
has
> to be approached in a different way.
>
> God has to be worshipped.
>
> God has to be prayed to.
>
> Existence has to be contacted in meditation.
>
> There are only two kinds of religions in the world: the religions of
> prayer and the religions of meditation. You can see my point. The
religions
> of prayer all believe in God and the religions of meditation don't believe
> in any god. Because meditation takes you inwards, and fulfills you, there
is
> no need to pray, there is no need for any consolation. You are in such a
> rejoicing, in such a blissful state; you can bless the whole world.
>
> I teach you existence, and the entry into existence is through your
> own being; hence meditation is not prayer - remember, it is against
prayer.
> Prayer is part of that phony jargon about God, heaven, hell. Prayer is
part
> and parcel of that whole rubbish. Meditation is simply the only pure way
of
> coming in contact with existence. And this contact immediately becomes a
> merger and a melting. You become existence yourself. Then you are in the
> clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the flowers and you are in
> the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a drop, you have become
the
> ocean.
>
> Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God is
a
> condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is
> accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you want
> to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you so
> crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a
freshness
> and a beauty and a truth.
>
> Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is
simply
> fiction.
>
>
> Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Number 9
>
>
>
> Copyright © 2006 Osho International Foundation
> http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=Magazine&Language=Engl ish
>
>
|
|
|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #227868 ] |
Fr, 21 Juli 2006 01:32 |
|
In other words,you knew nothing about the meaning of the word"God"in
English.
God is a Almighty Being,a Person who created everything for his own
pleasures and goodwill.
We know of Him as one who has Powers and great wisdom.His qualities is Good
and Kind,but fearsome when He became Angry.
It is the most fearful thing to be an enemy wih God.
"dd" <dd [at] d.com> wrote in message news:44bf2b83$1 [at] news.starhub.net.sg...
> Existence is that which is, and God is that which is not. Existence is a
> reality, God is a fiction. Existence is available only to meditators,
> people
> of silence; God is a consolation for sick minds, sick psychologies.
>
> Existence is not your production - God is. That's why there is only
> one existence, but thousands of gods. Each according to his needs, each
> according to his suffering, each according to his expectations, creates a
> god or accepts an old belief about God.
>
> God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not a
> consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the
> religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I
> teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within you
> and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for you,
> no
> misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a
> contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
>
> God is for those who cannot grow in consciousness, who are retarded
> as
> far as consciousness is concerned. It is a kind of toy; retarded people
> need
> it. And the moment I say it is a toy, then it is up to you how you want to
> make it - looking like a monkey or looking like an elephant. It is just up
> to you whether to give him four hands or one thousand hands. It is your
> creation. Strangely enough, man believes God created everything.
>
>
> The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
>
> God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
> thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on
> multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
>
> You have to understand the psychology of lying. The first thing about
> lying is that you need a good memory because you have to remember. You lie
> to someone about something, to somebody else about something else; you
> have
> to remember what you have said to one and what you have said to the other.
>
> Truth needs no remembrance. Truth is always there, just the same. You
> don't have to cram it in your memory. Memory gives you a bondage, a
> prison;
> it clings around you, covers you so much, slowly, slowly that you
> disappear
> completely. Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies. And there is a
> sudden revelation that you are part of the immense truth I am calling
> existence.
>
> You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't
> need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a
> grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole
> life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very
> depths
> of this immense existence.
>
> We are almost like the waves of the ocean - just on the surface, and
> the ocean may be miles deep. The Pacific Ocean is five miles deep. But a
> small wave on the top will never know the depth - her own depth, because
> she
> is not separate from the ocean. She will cling to her small entity, be
> afraid about death, be afraid of losing herself in the vastness, the
> oceanic
> infinity. But the truth is, the death of the wave is not a death, but the
> beginning of an eternal life.
>
>
> God has been invented.
>
> It was people's need; people needed a protector. In the immensity of
> the universe, a man feels so alone, so small. The vastness creates
> trembling
> in him. What is your existence?
>
> I am reminded of a story by Bertrand Russell. The archbishop of
> England sees in a dream that he has reached the pearly gates of paradise.
> On
> one hand he is immensely pleased, and on the other hand he is very much
> troubled, because the pearly gates are so vast, in both directions, that
> he
> cannot see the whole gate. It is so high that it is beyond the capacity of
> his eyes to see. And he himself seems to be just like a small ant,
> compared
> to this great gate. He is a little bit afraid. He is no ordinary man, he
> is
> the archbishop of England. He feels humiliated just by the gate, and the
> fear arises, "If this is the situation at the gate, what is the situation
> going to be inside?"
>
> With fearful hands he knocks on the door, but in the immensity of
> that
> space only he can hear his knock. It takes days for him, but he goes on
> knocking harder and harder. Finally a small window opens in the gate and
> Saint Peter looks out with one thousand eyes, trying to figure out who has
> been making a noise. Those one thousand eyes are so shiny, like stars,
> that
> the archbishop feels even more reduced - almost to a nonentity.
>
> And Saint Peter asks, "Please, whoever you are, wherever you are,
> come
> in front of me."
>
> The archbishop declares himself. He says to Saint Peter, "Perhaps you
> don't know me. You can check with Jesus Christ, I am the archbishop of
> England."
>
> Saint Peter says, "Never heard of any such thing as England."
>
> The archbishop says, "Perhaps you may not have heard about England,
> but you must have heard about our beautiful planet, Earth."
>
> Saint Peter says, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but unless you
> give me the index number of your Earth, I cannot figure out what you are
> talking about. I will have to go to the library and look - if you give me
> the index number - to which solar system you belong, because there are
> millions of solar systems and each solar system has many planets."
>
> But the archbishop has never thought that the earth has any index
> number. He says, "I don't know any index number, but I am the archbishop.
> You just go and tell Jesus Christ."
>
> He says, "You are giving me puzzle after puzzle. Who is this fellow
> Jesus Christ?"
>
> The archbishop is very much shocked. He says, "You don't know Jesus
> Christ, the only begotten son of God?"
>
> Saint Peter says, "As far as I am concerned, I have never seen God; I
> don't know whether he exists or not. I am just a doorkeeper. Perhaps
> somewhere in the most interior parts of paradise somebody exists who
> thinks
> that he is God, but I have never come across..."
>
> It is such a shock that the archbishop wakes up perspiring.
>
> The story is significant because it shows how small we are and how
> big
> the universe is. Naturally primitive man was not able to adjust himself to
> the idea of this vastness of the universe without giving it some
> personality
> and without making himself in some way related to that personality.
>
> God was an effort of the primitive mind of man to give existence a
> personality. Then he becomes God the father. Then you can make some
> relationship with him. You may even be against him, but at least there is
> someone you can be for, you can be against; there is someone who is
> greater
> than you, who is going to protect you, who is your guarantee.
>
>
> God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
>
> The people who attained to their inner consciousness and its highest
> peak, like Gautam Buddha, denied the existence of God. Anybody who has
> ever
> become inwardly healthy, gone beyond the mind which is basically sick, has
> denied God. God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children.
> They
> need it - parables, fables, stories. But very few human beings have gone
> beyond the kindergarten school.
>
> God exists because you are not aware of yourself. God exists because
> you have not made any contact with your own center. The moment you know
> yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God. In fact I am in
> absolute support of Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead."
>
> The second part of his sentence is even more significant, "God is
> dead
> and man is now free." That second part has not received much attention
> from
> the philosophers, from the mystics, from the psychologists, but the second
> part is the most important; the first part is not much. In fact, the first
> part is basically wrong. God cannot die - fictions never die. The moment
> you
> know they are fictions there is no question of their death. Neither are
> they
> born, nor do they die. God was never born in the first place - how can he
> die? Death is the other extreme of birth.
>
> So the first part is not very important, but that has been given much
> importance by theologians, because they became afraid: "This is
> sacrilegious, to tell people that God is dead. That means that now no
> religion is needed." They became afraid for their own business. But they
> forgot the second part which is more important. It has tremendously
> significant implications. It means that God was a bondage, God was a
> retardedness, God was out of fear. God was not a treasure, but a heavy,
> mountainous weight on your heart and on your growth.
>
>
> Once God is removed, man's possibility to grow and blossom is
> absolutely free.
>
> A God is a despot, a fascist. Without God, the world becomes freedom.
> Existence gives a tremendous dignity to every individual. From the
> smallest
> blade of grass up to the greatest star in the universe it gives immense
> significance and love; it makes no difference. There is equality and equal
> opportunity. And there is no need unnecessarily to pray and waste your
> time,
> to read the holy scriptures, which are the most unholy books in the world.
> There is no need to be exploited by the priests. You are certainly and
> suddenly free from all these chains. Now you can be yourself.
>
> While God is in existence you can never be yourself. You are just a
> puppet, your strings are in the hands of God. The ancient saying in India
> is
> that not even a small leaf of a tree moves unless God's order is received
> for it to move. Whatever you are, according to religions you are made out
> of
> mud. The word "human" comes from humus, which means mud. And the word in
> Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, is admi - it is used as the name of the first
> man, Adam. Admi means the earth. God made man out of the earth and then
> breathed life into the puppet.
>
> Now, what kind of freedom do you have? Somebody has breathed life
> into
> you, and it is in his hands to stop breathing life into you any moment.
> Whatever you are doing, the religions believe it is your fate, it is
> written
> on your forehead. And there have been many con men who have even been
> trying
> to read what is written on your forehead. Astrologers, palmists, all kinds
> of cunning people have been exploiting the simplicity and innocence of
> humanity. There are people who are reading your hand, looking at the
> lines,
> telling you what those lines mean. The whole emphasis is that you are not
> living a life of your own, you are just a part in a drama, and the part
> that
> you are playing has been decided beforehand.
>
> That was the argument that the Indian God's incarnation, Krishna - in
> the great Indian war, Mahabharata - gave to his disciple Arjuna. Seeing
> the
> immense massacre that was going to happen, Arjuna simply lost his nerve.
> He
> was a man of immense courage and great intelligence.
>
> He said, "I don't see any point in this war. Even if I win... and I
> am
> certain I am going to win" - there was no other warrior of his quality -
> "But sitting on the golden throne of victory surrounded by the corpses of
> all my friends and all my enemies, all the beautiful people, does not
> appeal
> to me at all. The scene makes me feel insane. Rather than fighting, I will
> leave it to the other party - who is nobody, another cousin-brother. Let
> him
> rule over the country and I will go to the mountains, to the Himalayas to
> meditate, to become a sannyasin. I have lost all interest in fighting."
>
> Krishna tries in every way to persuade him, but Arjuna is a great
> intellectual; he goes on arguing against him. Finally seeing no other way,
> Krishna takes the last resort and says, "It is written in your destiny.
> Going away, you are going away from God. This war is predetermined by God
> to
> destroy those who are not virtuous and only let those survive who are
> virtuous." Now there is no argument against it, because Arjuna himself
> believes in God and destiny.
>
> Arjuna fought the war. Krishna was responsible, five thousand years
> ago, for destroying this country by giving a false argument, absolutely
> fictitious, to Arjuna. That war killed so many people. And it is not only
> that it killed people, it also destroyed the courage of the country; it
> became afraid of any small calamity.
>
> Two thousand years of slavery.... I want to make it absolutely clear
> that the people who are responsible for these two thousand years of
> slavery
> are the greatest people of India. The list is headed by Krishna; Arjuna is
> just his shadow. Then came Mahavira, who taught people to be nonviolent to
> such an extreme that his followers cannot even cultivate, because plants
> have life; if you cultivate then you will have to kill the plants when you
> reap the crop. Gautam Buddha comes third, who taught people to accept, to
> be
> contented wherever and with whatever they have - poor, hungry, starving,
> enslaved, remain utterly contented.
>
> Their teachings were great. This is something to be remembered;
> otherwise I will be misunderstood by everyone. Their teachings were great,
> but they never thought about all the implications of their teachings. They
> never thought that if you teach a country nonviolence, if you teach a
> country to drop all weapons, when the whole world is not doing that, then
> you are putting that country in a state of being victimized, exploited by
> anyone.
>
> And for two thousand years invader after invader came to India,
> exploited it and went back. Finally Mohammedans came and they thought,
> "What
> is the need to go back? We can not only exploit people, but rule them and
> remain here." And then came the Britishers and the French and the
> Portuguese, and they all tried to exploit the country. They all had their
> small pockets. Britain proved to be far more clever. But the Portuguese
> had
> their small islands of Diu, Daman and Goa, and the French had a small
> portion of the country, Pondicherry. Britain had the whole country.
>
> People have remained starved and hungry, and people have gone on
> dying
> because of hunger, and nobody has ever thought that these great principles
> in some way are responsible for this unfortunate situation that for
> thousands of years India has had to pass through. And even today nobody is
> trying to see all the implications. Every great principle has its own
> black
> cloud behind it. And unless you understand the black cloud also, you are
> soon going to be absorbed by the black cloud. If you understand it, you
> can
> avoid it.
>
> God seems to be the greatest principle that has been preached to man
> down the ages, but nobody has looked at its implications.
>
>
> If God created man then man has no individuality of his own, then he
> cannot claim any dignity, any freedom.
>
> There is no question of a puppet declaring, "I want to be free." If
> God created the universe, then whatever has happened in the universe has
> had
> to happen. It was God's will. No effort on our part was going to change
> anything.
>
> And finally you can see, if God created the world, and if he is
> behind
> nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on
> man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet. To give the
> creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very
> dangerous.
> It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
>
> Hence, my simple understanding of consciousness is that if God did
> not
> die with Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration, then we have to kill him!
> Wherever you meet him, there is no need even to say hello. First kill him
> and then you can say hello - just to fulfill the formality. But God is not
> needed at all. With God above in the sky, man will always remain a slave,
> and man will always remain unconscious, and man will never strive to reach
> to the peaks of his potential.
>
>
> With God removed you may feel a little fear - just out of old habit -
> but that fear will disappear.
>
>
> Once you recognize that you are standing on your own feet and you
> have
> to do something to create a better consciousness in you, to create a more
> loving heart in you, that prayers are useless, there is nobody to answer
> them... Yes, sometimes they have been answered. At least once,
> certainly....
>
> A poor man asked God for months continually, "Give me fifty dollars.
> I
> don't want much, just fifty dollars."
>
> First he prayed, but then he thought, "Millions of people are
> praying,
> and there is one God and there are millions of prayers. Whether my poor
> prayer ever reaches to him... And there must be around him so much noise -
> prayers from all the churches, all the mosques, all the synagogues, all
> the
> temples - who is going to take care of me? It is better that I write a
> letter."
>
> He wrote a letter saying, "This is to remind you that for months I
> have been praying, but the answer has not come. It seems my prayer has not
> reached you. I can understand, because of the noise around you of so many
> prayers. And great people are praying - the pope and the archbishop and
> the
> shankaracharya - so who is going to take care of my small prayer? And I am
> not asking much - no paradise, no heaven, nothing, just fifty dollars.
> Finally I decided to write the letter." And he wrote in big letters,
> "Fifty
> Dollars! Remember, it is urgent."
>
> But then he was very much disturbed, because he didn't know the
> address, whom to address it to. He thought, "The best way is to address it
> to: God, c/o The Postmaster General. If the postmaster general cannot find
> his address, who else can?" The letter reached the postmaster general. He
> looked, he laughed, and then he felt sad also. He thought, "The man must
> be
> in desperate need - nobody writes letters to God. And he is not asking
> much."
>
> So he said to all his friends, "Please look at this poor man's
> letter.
> You all contribute, and we will send those fifty dollars to him. At least
> for once let a prayer be answered." They collected the money, but they
> collected only forty-five dollars. The postmaster general said, "No harm,
> at
> least we should send this much."
>
> When forty-five dollars reached the man he counted the dollars, and
> he
> looked above and shouted, "God, remember one thing. Next time you send any
> money to me, never send it through the post office! Those cunning fellows
> have taken out their commission. I have received only forty-five dollars!"
>
> Except this, I have not come across any prayer which has been
> answered - and that too not fully. There is no one to answer. Existence
> has
> to be approached in a different way.
>
> God has to be worshipped.
>
> God has to be prayed to.
>
> Existence has to be contacted in meditation.
>
> There are only two kinds of religions in the world: the religions of
> prayer and the religions of meditation. You can see my point. The
> religions
> of prayer all believe in God and the religions of meditation don't believe
> in any god. Because meditation takes you inwards, and fulfills you, there
> is
> no need to pray, there is no need for any consolation. You are in such a
> rejoicing, in such a blissful state; you can bless the whole world.
>
> I teach you existence, and the entry into existence is through your
> own being; hence meditation is not prayer - remember, it is against
> prayer.
> Prayer is part of that phony jargon about God, heaven, hell. Prayer is
> part
> and parcel of that whole rubbish. Meditation is simply the only pure way
> of
> coming in contact with existence. And this contact immediately becomes a
> merger and a melting. You become existence yourself. Then you are in the
> clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the flowers and you are in
> the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a drop, you have become
> the
> ocean.
>
> Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God is
> a
> condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is
> accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you want
> to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you so
> crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a
> freshness
> and a beauty and a truth.
>
> Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is
> simply
> fiction.
>
>
> Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Number 9
>
>
>
> Copyright © 2006 Osho International Foundation
> http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=Magazine&Language=Engl ish
>
>
|
|
|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #227891 ] |
Fr, 21 Juli 2006 03:11 |
|
FRANKIE LEE wrote:
> In other words,you knew nothing about the meaning of the word"God"in
> English.
>
> God is a Almighty Being,a Person who created everything for his own
> pleasures and goodwill.
>
> We know of Him as one who has Powers and great wisdom.His qualities is Go=
od
> and Kind,but fearsome when He became Angry.
>
> It is the most fearful thing to be an enemy wih God.
There is no soul, no heaven, no hell, and no god. Religion is a clutch
for the weak mind. The biggest sell of religion are miracles, and life
after death. There are no miracles, and there are no life after death.
In the old, old days, human dead bodies were food for other animals.
We are more civilized today, we buried our dead so the animals will not
eat them up..
>
>
> "dd" <dd [at] d.com> wrote in message news:44bf2b83$1 [at] news.starhub.net.sg...
> > Existence is that which is, and God is that which is not. Existence is a
> > reality, God is a fiction. Existence is available only to meditators,
> > people
> > of silence; God is a consolation for sick minds, sick psychologies.
> >
> > Existence is not your production - God is. That's why there is only
> > one existence, but thousands of gods. Each according to his needs, each
> > according to his suffering, each according to his expectations, creates=
a
> > god or accepts an old belief about God.
> >
> > God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not=
a
> > consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the
> > religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I
> > teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within =
you
> > and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for yo=
u,
> > no
> > misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a
> > contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
> >
> > God is for those who cannot grow in consciousness, who are retarded
> > as
> > far as consciousness is concerned. It is a kind of toy; retarded people
> > need
> > it. And the moment I say it is a toy, then it is up to you how you want=
to
> > make it - looking like a monkey or looking like an elephant. It is just=
up
> > to you whether to give him four hands or one thousand hands. It is your
> > creation. Strangely enough, man believes God created everything.
> >
> >
> > The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
> >
> > God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
> > thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on
> > multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
> >
> > You have to understand the psychology of lying. The first thing ab=
out
> > lying is that you need a good memory because you have to remember. You =
lie
> > to someone about something, to somebody else about something else; you
> > have
> > to remember what you have said to one and what you have said to the oth=
er.
> >
> > Truth needs no remembrance. Truth is always there, just the same. =
You
> > don't have to cram it in your memory. Memory gives you a bondage, a
> > prison;
> > it clings around you, covers you so much, slowly, slowly that you
> > disappear
> > completely. Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies. And there is a
> > sudden revelation that you are part of the immense truth I am calling
> > existence.
> >
> > You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't
> > need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a
> > grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole
> > life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very
> > depths
> > of this immense existence.
> >
> > We are almost like the waves of the ocean - just on the surface, a=
nd
> > the ocean may be miles deep. The Pacific Ocean is five miles deep. But a
> > small wave on the top will never know the depth - her own depth, because
> > she
> > is not separate from the ocean. She will cling to her small entity, be
> > afraid about death, be afraid of losing herself in the vastness, the
> > oceanic
> > infinity. But the truth is, the death of the wave is not a death, but t=
he
> > beginning of an eternal life.
> >
> >
> > God has been invented.
> >
> > It was people's need; people needed a protector. In the immensity =
of
> > the universe, a man feels so alone, so small. The vastness creates
> > trembling
> > in him. What is your existence?
> >
> > I am reminded of a story by Bertrand Russell. The archbishop of
> > England sees in a dream that he has reached the pearly gates of paradis=
e=2E
> > On
> > one hand he is immensely pleased, and on the other hand he is very much
> > troubled, because the pearly gates are so vast, in both directions, that
> > he
> > cannot see the whole gate. It is so high that it is beyond the capacity=
of
> > his eyes to see. And he himself seems to be just like a small ant,
> > compared
> > to this great gate. He is a little bit afraid. He is no ordinary man, he
> > is
> > the archbishop of England. He feels humiliated just by the gate, and the
> > fear arises, "If this is the situation at the gate, what is the situati=
on
> > going to be inside?"
> >
> > With fearful hands he knocks on the door, but in the immensity of
> > that
> > space only he can hear his knock. It takes days for him, but he goes on
> > knocking harder and harder. Finally a small window opens in the gate and
> > Saint Peter looks out with one thousand eyes, trying to figure out who =
has
> > been making a noise. Those one thousand eyes are so shiny, like stars,
> > that
> > the archbishop feels even more reduced - almost to a nonentity.
> >
> > And Saint Peter asks, "Please, whoever you are, wherever you are,
> > come
> > in front of me."
> >
> > The archbishop declares himself. He says to Saint Peter, "Perhaps =
you
> > don't know me. You can check with Jesus Christ, I am the archbishop of
> > England."
> >
> > Saint Peter says, "Never heard of any such thing as England."
> >
> > The archbishop says, "Perhaps you may not have heard about England,
> > but you must have heard about our beautiful planet, Earth."
> >
> > Saint Peter says, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but unless =
you
> > give me the index number of your Earth, I cannot figure out what you are
> > talking about. I will have to go to the library and look - if you give =
me
> > the index number - to which solar system you belong, because there are
> > millions of solar systems and each solar system has many planets."
> >
> > But the archbishop has never thought that the earth has any index
> > number. He says, "I don't know any index number, but I am the archbisho=
p=2E
> > You just go and tell Jesus Christ."
> >
> > He says, "You are giving me puzzle after puzzle. Who is this fellow
> > Jesus Christ?"
> >
> > The archbishop is very much shocked. He says, "You don't know Jesus
> > Christ, the only begotten son of God?"
> >
> > Saint Peter says, "As far as I am concerned, I have never seen God=
; I
> > don't know whether he exists or not. I am just a doorkeeper. Perhaps
> > somewhere in the most interior parts of paradise somebody exists who
> > thinks
> > that he is God, but I have never come across..."
> >
> > It is such a shock that the archbishop wakes up perspiring.
> >
> > The story is significant because it shows how small we are and how
> > big
> > the universe is. Naturally primitive man was not able to adjust himself=
to
> > the idea of this vastness of the universe without giving it some
> > personality
> > and without making himself in some way related to that personality.
> >
> > God was an effort of the primitive mind of man to give existence a
> > personality. Then he becomes God the father. Then you can make some
> > relationship with him. You may even be against him, but at least there =
is
> > someone you can be for, you can be against; there is someone who is
> > greater
> > than you, who is going to protect you, who is your guarantee.
> >
> >
> > God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
> >
> > The people who attained to their inner consciousness and its highe=
st
> > peak, like Gautam Buddha, denied the existence of God. Anybody who has
> > ever
> > become inwardly healthy, gone beyond the mind which is basically sick, =
has
> > denied God. God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children.
> > They
> > need it - parables, fables, stories. But very few human beings have gone
> > beyond the kindergarten school.
> >
> > God exists because you are not aware of yourself. God exists becau=
se
> > you have not made any contact with your own center. The moment you know
> > yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God. In fact I am=
in
> > absolute support of Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead."
> >
> > The second part of his sentence is even more significant, "God is
> > dead
> > and man is now free." That second part has not received much attention
> > from
> > the philosophers, from the mystics, from the psychologists, but the sec=
ond
> > part is the most important; the first part is not much. In fact, the fi=
rst
> > part is basically wrong. God cannot die - fictions never die. The moment
> > you
> > know they are fictions there is no question of their death. Neither are
> > they
> > born, nor do they die. God was never born in the first place - how can =
he
> > die? Death is the other extreme of birth.
> >
> > So the first part is not very important, but that has been given m=
uch
> > importance by theologians, because they became afraid: "This is
> > sacrilegious, to tell people that God is dead. That means that now no
> > religion is needed." They became afraid for their own business. But they
> > forgot the second part which is more important. It has tremendously
> > significant implications. It means that God was a bondage, God was a
> > retardedness, God was out of fear. God was not a treasure, but a heavy,
> > mountainous weight on your heart and on your growth.
> >
> >
> > Once God is removed, man's possibility to grow and blossom is
> > absolutely free.
> >
> > A God is a despot, a fascist. Without God, the world becomes freed=
om.
> > Existence gives a tremendous dignity to every individual. From the
> > smallest
> > blade of grass up to the greatest star in the universe it gives immense
> > significance and love; it makes no difference. There is equality and eq=
ual
> > opportunity. And there is no need unnecessarily to pray and waste your
> > time,
> > to read the holy scriptures, which are the most unholy books in the wor=
ld.
> > There is no need to be exploited by the priests. You are certainly and
> > suddenly free from all these chains. Now you can be yourself.
> >
> > While God is in existence you can never be yourself. You are just a
> > puppet, your strings are in the hands of God. The ancient saying in Ind=
ia
> > is
> > that not even a small leaf of a tree moves unless God's order is receiv=
ed
> > for it to move. Whatever you are, according to religions you are made o=
ut
> > of
> > mud. The word "human" comes from humus, which means mud. And the word in
> > Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, is admi - it is used as the name of the fi=
rst
> > man, Adam. Admi means the earth. God made man out of the earth and then
> > breathed life into the puppet.
> >
> > Now, what kind of freedom do you have? Somebody has breathed life
> > into
> > you, and it is in his hands to stop breathing life into you any moment.
> > Whatever you are doing, the religions believe it is your fate, it is
> > written
> > on your forehead. And there have been many con men who have even been
> > trying
> > to read what is written on your forehead. Astrologers, palmists, all ki=
nds
> > of cunning people have been exploiting the simplicity and innocence of
> > humanity. There are people who are reading your hand, looking at the
> > lines,
> > telling you what those lines mean. The whole emphasis is that you are n=
ot
> > living a life of your own, you are just a part in a drama, and the part
> > that
> > you are playing has been decided beforehand.
> >
> > That was the argument that the Indian God's incarnation, Krishna -=
in
> > the great Indian war, Mahabharata - gave to his disciple Arjuna. Seeing
> > the
> > immense massacre that was going to happen, Arjuna simply lost his nerve.
> > He
> > was a man of immense courage and great intelligence.
> >
> > He said, "I don't see any point in this war. Even if I win... and I
> > am
> > certain I am going to win" - there was no other warrior of his quality -
> > "But sitting on the golden throne of victory surrounded by the corpses =
of
> > all my friends and all my enemies, all the beautiful people, does not
> > appeal
> > to me at all. The scene makes me feel insane. Rather than fighting, I w=
ill
> > leave it to the other party - who is nobody, another cousin-brother. Let
> > him
> > rule over the country and I will go to the mountains, to the Himalayas =
to
> > meditate, to become a sannyasin. I have lost all interest in fighting."
> >
> > Krishna tries in every way to persuade him, but Arjuna is a great
> > intellectual; he goes on arguing against him. Finally seeing no other w=
ay,
> > Krishna takes the last resort and says, "It is written in your destiny.
> > Going away, you are going away from God. This war is predetermined by G=
od
> > to
> > destroy those who are not virtuous and only let those survive who are
> > virtuous." Now there is no argument against it, because Arjuna himself
> > believes in God and destiny.
> >
> > Arjuna fought the war. Krishna was responsible, five thousand years
> > ago, for destroying this country by giving a false argument, absolutely
> > fictitious, to Arjuna. That war killed so many people. And it is not on=
ly
> > that it killed people, it also destroyed the courage of the country; it
> > became afraid of any small calamity.
> >
> > Two thousand years of slavery.... I want to make it absolutely cle=
ar
> > that the people who are responsible for these two thousand years of
> > slavery
> > are the greatest people of India. The list is headed by Krishna; Arjuna=
is
> > just his shadow. Then came Mahavira, who taught people to be nonviolent=
to
> > such an extreme that his followers cannot even cultivate, because plants
> > have life; if you cultivate then you will have to kill the plants when =
you
> > reap the crop. Gautam Buddha comes third, who taught people to accept, =
to
> > be
> > contented wherever and with whatever they have - poor, hungry, starving,
> > enslaved, remain utterly contented.
> >
> > Their teachings were great. This is something to be remembered;
> > otherwise I will be misunderstood by everyone. Their teachings were gre=
at,
> > but they never thought about all the implications of their teachings. T=
hey
> > never thought that if you teach a country nonviolence, if you teach a
> > country to drop all weapons, when the whole world is not doing that, th=
en
> > you are putting that country in a state of being victimized, exploited =
by
> > anyone.
> >
> > And for two thousand years invader after invader came to India,
> > exploited it and went back. Finally Mohammedans came and they thought,
> > "What
> > is the need to go back? We can not only exploit people, but rule them a=
nd
> > remain here." And then came the Britishers and the French and the
> > Portuguese, and they all tried to exploit the country. They all had the=
ir
> > small pockets. Britain proved to be far more clever. But the Portuguese
> > had
> > their small islands of Diu, Daman and Goa, and the French had a small
> > portion of the country, Pondicherry. Britain had the whole country.
> >
> > People have remained starved and hungry, and people have gone on
> > dying
> > because of hunger, and nobody has ever thought that these great princip=
les
> > in some way are responsible for this unfortunate situation that for
> > thousands of years India has had to pass through. And even today nobody=
is
> > trying to see all the implications. Every great principle has its own
> > black
> > cloud behind it. And unless you understand the black cloud also, you are
> > soon going to be absorbed by the black cloud. If you understand it, you
> > can
> > avoid it.
> >
> > God seems to be the greatest principle that has been preached to m=
an
> > down the ages, but nobody has looked at its implications.
> >
> >
> > If God created man then man has no individuality of his own, then =
he
> > cannot claim any dignity, any freedom.
> >
> > There is no question of a puppet declaring, "I want to be free." If
> > God created the universe, then whatever has happened in the universe has
> > had
> > to happen. It was God's will. No effort on our part was going to change
> > anything.
> >
> > And finally you can see, if God created the world, and if he is
> > behind
> > nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on
> > man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet. To give the
> > creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very
> > dangerous.
> > It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
> >
> > Hence, my simple understanding of consciousness is that if God did
> > not
> > die with Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration, then we have to kill him!
> > Wherever you meet him, there is no need even to say hello. First kill h=
im
> > and then you can say hello - just to fulfill the formality. But God is =
not
> > needed at all. With God above in the sky, man will always remain a slav=
e,
> > and man will always remain unconscious, and man will never strive to re=
ach
> > to the peaks of his potential.
> >
> >
> > With God removed you may feel a little fear - just out of old habi=
t -
> > but that fear will disappear.
> >
> >
> > Once you recognize that you are standing on your own feet and you
> > have
> > to do something to create a better consciousness in you, to create a mo=
re
> > loving heart in you, that prayers are useless, there is nobody to answer
> > them... Yes, sometimes they have been answered. At least once,
> > certainly....
> >
> > A poor man asked God for months continually, "Give me fifty dollar=
s=2E
> > I
> > don't want much, just fifty dollars."
> >
> > First he prayed, but then he thought, "Millions of people are
> > praying,
> > and there is one God and there are millions of prayers. Whether my poor
> > prayer ever reaches to him... And there must be around him so much nois=
e -
> > prayers from all the churches, all the mosques, all the synagogues, all
> > the
> > temples - who is going to take care of me? It is better that I write a
> > letter."
> >
> > He wrote a letter saying, "This is to remind you that for months I
> > have been praying, but the answer has not come. It seems my prayer has =
not
> > reached you. I can understand, because of the noise around you of so ma=
ny
> > prayers. And great people are praying - the pope and the archbishop and
> > the
> > shankaracharya - so who is going to take care of my small prayer? And I=
am
> > not asking much - no paradise, no heaven, nothing, just fifty dollars.
> > Finally I decided to write the letter." And he wrote in big letters,
> > "Fifty
> > Dollars! Remember, it is urgent."
> >
> > But then he was very much disturbed, because he didn't know the
> > address, whom to address it to. He thought, "The best way is to address=
it
> > to: God, c/o The Postmaster General. If the postmaster general cannot f=
ind
> > his address, who else can?" The letter reached the postmaster general. =
He
> > looked, he laughed, and then he felt sad also. He thought, "The man must
> > be
> > in desperate need - nobody writes letters to God. And he is not asking
> > much."
> >
> > So he said to all his friends, "Please look at this poor man's
> > letter.
> > You all contribute, and we will send those fifty dollars to him. At lea=
st
> > for once let a prayer be answered." They collected the money, but they
> > collected only forty-five dollars. The postmaster general said, "No har=
m,
> > at
> > least we should send this much."
> >
> > When forty-five dollars reached the man he counted the dollars, and
> > he
> > looked above and shouted, "God, remember one thing. Next time you send =
any
> > money to me, never send it through the post office! Those cunning fello=
ws
> > have taken out their commission. I have received only forty-five dollar=
s!"
> >
> > Except this, I have not come across any prayer which has been
> > answered - and that too not fully. There is no one to answer. Existence
> > has
> > to be approached in a different way.
> >
> > God has to be worshipped.
> >
> > God has to be prayed to.
> >
> > Existence has to be contacted in meditation.
> >
> > There are only two kinds of religions in the world: the religions =
of
> > prayer and the religions of meditation. You can see my point. The
> > religions
> > of prayer all believe in God and the religions of meditation don't beli=
eve
> > in any god. Because meditation takes you inwards, and fulfills you, the=
re
> > is
> > no need to pray, there is no need for any consolation. You are in such a
> > rejoicing, in such a blissful state; you can bless the whole world.
> >
> > I teach you existence, and the entry into existence is through your
> > own being; hence meditation is not prayer - remember, it is against
> > prayer.
> > Prayer is part of that phony jargon about God, heaven, hell. Prayer is
> > part
> > and parcel of that whole rubbish. Meditation is simply the only pure way
> > of
> > coming in contact with existence. And this contact immediately becomes a
> > merger and a melting. You become existence yourself. Then you are in the
> > clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the flowers and you are =
in
> > the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a drop, you have become
> > the
> > ocean.
> >
> > Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God =
is
> > a
> > condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is
> > accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you w=
ant
> > to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you=
so
> > crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a
> > freshness
> > and a beauty and a truth.
> >
> > Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is
> > simply
> > fiction.
> >
> >
> > Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Number 9
> >
> >
> >
> > Copyright =A9 2006 Osho International Foundation
> > http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=3DMagazine&Language=3D English
> >
> >
|
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|
| Re: God Versus Existence [message #228009 ] |
Fr, 21 Juli 2006 09:37 |
|
"FRANKIE LEE" <phebelee [at] singnet.com.sg> wrote in message
news:e9ovnb$q2o$1 [at] reader01.singnet.com.sg...
> In other words,you knew nothing about the meaning of the word"God"in
> English.
>
> God is a Almighty Being,a Person who created everything for his own
> pleasures and goodwill.
>
> We know of Him as one who has Powers and great wisdom.His qualities is
> Good and Kind,but fearsome when He became Angry.
>
> It is the most fearful thing to be an enemy wih God.
>
No wonder the pawns of the gods are killing each other. Until one of the
gods dies, there is no end to it. Oops, should be, until all the gods die,
there is no end to it.
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