But it seems that something has happened that
has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men
have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened
before that men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money,
and Power, and what they call
Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, and what have we to do but
stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively
backwards?
T.S. Eliot - Choruses from 'The Rock'
YES, SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED that has never happened
before: for the first time in the evolution of human consciousness man stands alienated
from God. Man stands separated from existence. Man stands lonely, with no companion, in
great darkness, with no light to lead him, guide him. Man has never been in such despair,
man has never been in such a state of homelessness.
T.S. Eliot is right: "Something has happened that has never happened before."
And why has it happened? How has it happened? It is difficult to pinpoint it but not
difficult to understand it in a vague way. These things are not very tangible and they
don't happen in a certain moment. they happen so gradually, so slowly, that one never
becomes really aware of when, where, how; but a few things can be understood.
MAN HAD ALWAYS LIVED with nature. To live with nature is to live
with God in an indirect way, because nature reflects God in a thousand and one ways. The
growing trees and the faraway call of the cuckoo and the winds in the pine trees and the
rivers moving towards the ocean and the proud mountains standing in the sun and the starry
night, and it is impossible not to be reminded of some invisible hands. It is impossible
not to see that existence is not dead but alive. The ocean heaves, breathes; the whole
existence is a growing phenomenon. It is not dead, it cannot be dead. Everything is
growing.
Because of this growing experience man has remained constantly aware of some invisible,
mysterious force behind it all. That force is called God. God is not a person, let me
repeat, but just a presence. Still when you go deep into the Himalayas, you again start
feeling a kind of reverence, awe, wonder. Again you start feeling something that was very
easily available to the primitive man.
The civilized man has lost something because now we live in the man-made world where it
is almost impossible to find any signature of God. How can you find God on asphalt roads?
They don't grow, they don't breathe. How can you find God in cement structures? They are
not alive! How can you find God in machines, in technology?--although it is great, even
the greatest machine cannot give you the sense of the mysterious, of the miraculous. Even
facing the greatest machine you cannot feel awe, you cannot feel reverence, you cannot
feel like falling on your knees and praying. And if you cannot feel like falling on your
knees and praying once in a while, how can God remain a part of your being? How can you
remain alert, aware of the divine?
Yes, "... something has happened that has never happened
before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where." It is difficult to
pinpoint the exact date and time when God died -- at least in our consciousness -- when
God disappeared from our world. And with him disappeared all poetry, and with him
disappeared all dance. With him disappeared all that is beautiful and sacred. With him
disappeared all for which one can live and die; now we don't have anything worth living or
worth dying for. We are simply dragging our existence, burdened, seeing no point in it
all, just carrying on somehow because the other alternative is suicide -- that too seems
pointless. To live seems pointless, to die seems pointless.
MAN IS FACING a tremendous flood of meaninglessness for the first time. Everything
seems to be utterly insignificant, and the reason is simple: without God there can be no
significance, without God there can be no grandeur, without God there can be no splendor.
Life can have meaning only in the context of something that surpasses life. The meaning
always comes from the context; now man stands without a context. The meaning comes only
when you can look upwards to something bigger than you, something greater than you. When
you feel related with something greater, holier, your life has meaning. When you feel
unrelated, uprooted, how can you feel meaning?
THE FIRST THING is that man has left nature and has created an
artificial world of his own. That has been the most shattering phenomenon which has
disrupted man, unbridged man from God and all that is implied in God: meaning,
significance, majesty, love, prayer, meditation, all that is valuable, precious. Man has
never been such a beggar as he is today.
And the irony is, man has never been so rich, so affluent as he is today. Both things
have happened together: the inner has become poorer and poorer and the outer has become
richer and richer. We have more money than any other society before, we have more medical
facilities than any other society before, we have in every way more power than any other
society ever had before, and still no society has ever felt such meaninglessness, no
society has ever felt such a great suicidal desire, longing.
SECONDLY, WE HAVE cultivated reason too much and we have become
lopsided. God is a feeling, God is not a thinking. You cannot think about God because God
is not an object to think about. Science thinks, religion feels. Science functions from
the head, religion from the heart. And because we have become too much obsessed with the
head -- our whole education, our whole civilization, is obsessed with the head because the
head has made all kinds of technological advances -- we think that's all.
What can the heart give to us? Yes, it cannot give you great technology, it cannot give
you great industry, it cannot give you money. It can give you joy, it can give you
celebration. It can give you a tremendous feeling for beauty, for music, for poetry. It
can guide you into the world of love, and ultimately into the world of prayer, but those
things are not commodities. You cannot grow your bank balance through the heart; and you
cannot fight great wars, and you cannot make atom bombs and hydrogen bombs, and you cannot
destroy people through the heart. The heart knows only how to create and the head knows
only how to destroy. The head is destructive, and our whole education has become trapped
in the head.
Our universities, our colleges, our schools, are all destroying humanity. They think
they are serving but they are simply befooling themselves. Unless man becomes balanced,
unless the heart and the head both grow, man will remain in misery and the misery will go
on growing. As we become more and more hung up in the head, as we become more and more
oblivious to the existence of the heart, we will become more and more miserable. We are
creating hell on the earth and we will create more and more of it. Paradise belongs to the
heart.
That is the second thing that has happened: the heart is completely forgotten, nobody
understands that language any more. We understand logic, we don't understand love. We
understand mathematics, we don't understand music. We become more and more accustomed to
the ways of the world and nobody seems to have the guts to move into the unknown paths,
the unknown labyrinths of love, of the heart. We have become very much attuned to the
world of prose, and poetry has simply become non-existent.
THE POET HAS DIED, and the poet is the bridge between the scientist
and the mystic. The bridge has disappeared. On one hand stands the scientist -- very
powerful, tremendously powerful, ready to destroy the whole earth, the whole of life --
and on the other hand, far and few between stand a few mystics -- a Buddha, a Jesus, a
Zarathustra, a Kabir. They are utterly powerless in the sense that we understand power,
and immensely powerful in a totally different sense -- but we don't know that language at
all. And the poet has died; that has been the greatest calamity. The poet is disappearing.
And by poet I mean the painter, the sculptor. All that is creative in man is becoming
reduced to producing more and more commodities. The creative is losing its grip and the
productive is becoming the goal of life.
GOD CAN BE APPROACHED only through the creative. Why? -- because He is the creator. If
you want to know God you will have to have something similar, because only the same can
meet the same. You will have to learn a little rhythm of creativity. When the musician is
really in a creative mood, in a creative space, he disappears; God starts playing on his
flute. Suddenly his flute is no longer in his own hands, it is in Krishna's hands. And
then the flute brings something from the beyond, something virgin, something utterly new.
When the painter disappears then his hands are just instruments for God.
God is the creativity, so if you really want to enter into the
world of God you will have to learn the ways of creativity -- and that has disappeared.
Instead of creativity we value productivity: we talk about how to produce more. Production
can give you things but cannot give you values. Production can make you rich outwardly but
it will impoverish you inwardly. Production is not creation. Production is very mediocre;
any stupid person can do it, one simply needs to learn the knack of it.
CREATIVITY IS INTELLIGENCE. The deeper you go in creativity the more meditative you
become.
And the poet has died, the poet exists no more. What exists in the name of poetry is
almost prose. What exists in the name of painting is more or less insane. You can see
Picasso, Dali and others -- it is pathological! Picasso is a genius, but ill,
pathological. His painting is nothing but a catharsis; it helps him, it is a kind of
vomiting. When you have something wrong with your stomach the vomiting relieves you. It
helped Picasso; if he had been prevented from painting he would have gone mad. Painting
was good for him, it saved him from becoming insane, it released his insanity onto the
canvas. But what about others who will be purchasing those paintings, hanging them in
their bedrooms and looking at them? They will start becoming ill at ease.
It is a totally different creativity I am talking about. A Taj Mahal... just watching
it on a full moon night, and great meditation is bound to arise in you. Or the temples of
Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri -- just meditating on them and you will be surprised that all
your sexuality is transformed into love. They are miracles of creativity. They were not
created by pathological people, they were created by those who had attained.
The great cathedrals of Europe -- they are the longings of the earth to reach to the
sky. Just seeing those great creations, a great song is bound to arise in your heart, or a
great silence is bound to descend on you. Man has lost the poetic, the creative urge, or
it has been killed. We are too interested in commodities, in gadgets, in making more and
more things. Production is concerned with quantity, and creation is concerned with
quality. The quality has disappeared and with the quality, God has disappeared -- because
God is the ultimate quality of creation.
You will have to bring the heart back. You will have to be aware again of nature. You
will have to learn to watch roses, lotuses again. You will have to make a few contacts
with the trees and the rocks and the rivers. You will have to start a dialogue with the
stars again. Otherwise God cannot be brought back to humanity, and without God humanity is
doomed, is lost.
Yes, T. S. Eliot is right: "... something has happened that
has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men
have left GOD not for other gods..."
That was very usual in the past; people used to move from one god to another. That was
really very significant, it was an evolution. The God of Moses is less sophisticated than
the God of Jesus, naturally; there are thousands of years between these two enlightened
persons. Moses was as enlightened as Jesus, but Moses had to talk the language which could
be understood by his people, and those people were very primitive. Hence Moses
spoke in the language of law, commandments: do this, don't do that. Law was his central
emphasis.
By the time Jesus arrived man had evolved. Jesus talked about love, not about law. Love
was his law. Now love is a higher value than law, certainly holier than law. Law is
mundane. The God of the Jews was a jealous god... because we make our God in our own
image. The God of the Jews was a very angry god; for small reasons he would destroy
cities. A person just commits a sin -- and what is sin in the ancient concept? He just
disobeys a certain commandment -- and God can destroy the whole town! It was a very angry,
violent god.
It was not really the god that was violent and angry, it was the people. Their eyes
were full of violence and anger, they could not see the real God.
Remember this: God is always the same. It was exactly the same when Moses was alive, it
was exactly the same when Jesus was alive, it is exactly the same when we are alive; it
will remain the same. God is always the same, but our eyes change.
Jesus could see God as love, as compassion. God was growing because man was growing.
And man was changing one god for another, for a higher conception of god. Man has always
been changing gods, and that's perfectly right. When we change, how can our rudimentary
ideas of God remain the same? When our eyes change everything changes.
There is a very beautiful story....
There was a great saint, Ramdas. Thousands of years after Rama walked on the earth,
Ramdas was reciting his story again -- after thousands of years. The way he used to tell
the story of Rama was so enchanting, so magnetic, so charismatic, that it is said that
Hanuman, the absolute devotee of Rama, who had seen everything with his own eyes, used to
come to listen to Ramdas, of course, in disguise. He would sit in the crowd and listen,
and he enjoyed it very much.
Sometimes it happens that when you are involved in the action itself you can't see the
whole thing, the perspective cannot be that big. You are involved in the thing, you are
doing your thing, and there are a thousand and one things going on; you cannot be watchful
of all.
Now the story was finished, completed. Ramdas was telling his disciples the story of
Rama, and Hanuman was very happy, utterly glad to come, to listen. Many things that he had
only heard through rumors he was listening to again from an authentic source.
But one day a problem arose. Ramdas was describing when Rama's wife, Sita, was stolen
by Ravana. He kept her on Sri Lanka in a beautiful garden; the garden was full of white
flowers. Ramdas was telling that part of the story -- that Ravana kept Sita in a beautiful
garden which was full of white flowers.
Now this was too much, because Hanuman had visited Sita in the garden and he had not
seen a single white flower; he had seen red flowers. So he stood up. He forgot that he
should not interfere, that he was not expected to be there at all. He stood up and he
said, "Please, everything is okay, but this information you got wrong. You change it!
There was not a single white flower, all the flowers were red, bloody red."
Ramdas said, "You sit silently! Who are you to correct me?"
In anger, Hanuman threw his blanket. He was a monkey god, so with his tail and
everything he appeared out of the blanket, and he said, "You ask me who I am? I am
the Hanuman about whom you are talking! And I was the man who went to the garden, and you
never went, you were never there. After thousands of years you are telling the story, and
you have got some nerve! You are telling me to keep quiet! I cannot keep quiet! Change the
story! The flowers were red, absolutely red!"
But Ramdas said, "Don't be stupid! In the first place you are not expected here.
In the second place, you may have gone, but I cannot change the story. I know for sure
that the flowers were white."
Now this was too much. Hanuman was an eye-witness, and this man, after five thousand
years, was writing a story, and he seemed to be much too stubborn. Not only that, he
called Hanuman stupid!
He said, "You be silent! Don't be monkeyish! I know who you are -- you just keep
quiet!"
Hanuman said, "I cannot allow this. You will have to come with me. I will take you
to Rama. Only Rama can decide now -- and this has to be decided."
So Hanuman took Ramdas on his shoulders, flew back to heaven, reached Rama, really
angry, and said, "Look at this man! After five thousand years he is writing a story.
About everything else I have not objected because I was not an eye-witness. And I love his
story; he is a beautiful story-teller. But about things which I was involved in he is not
ready even to listen to me. You tell him to change his story. The flowers were all red,
and he goes on insisting that they were white. Not only that, he calls me stupid, and he
tells me 'Be quiet, and don't disturb and don't interfere!' And I say again, the flowers
were red! What do you say?"
Rama said, "Hanuman, Ramdas is right, the flowers were white. But you were so
angry because my wife was stolen, your eyes were full of blood; hence you saw the flowers
as red. You should not interfere. When persons like Ramdas say something, it cannot be
changed. It is not a question of time -- five thousand or fifty thousand years, it doesn't
make any difference. For a man like Ramdas there is no time. He has entered into eternity,
all time has disappeared. When he is telling the story he is not only telling the story,
he is seeing it too. For him there is no question of time. It is not something of
the past."
This was too much! Hanuman said, "You also were not present there! And this is
being partial, unjust. It is unfair! I was present there! You had not gone into the
garden, so who are you? Ask Sita; she was there, and I hope that she will not be
unfair."
And Sita started laughing and said, "Hanuman, you simply apologize. The flowers
were white; you were just so angry that you could not see the white flowers. You imposed
your anger, you were so blood-thirsty! You just apologize to Ramdas. And make it a point
that in the first place you need not go, and if you go then keep hiding and don't
interfere. Nothing can be changed. Whatsoever Ramdas is saying is right, because he has a
more aloof, distant witnessing than you can ever have. You were too much involved in
it."
That's how it has been. When Moses talked about God, he talked about the God which the
Jews of his time could have understood. When Jesus talked about God, of course, three
thousand years had passed, man had grown, had come of age; it was possible to talk about
love. At least a few people could understand him -- not many, but a few. Hence he was
crucified; because the many could not understand yet.
In the past people have been changing their god.
One of the Indian incarnations of god is Parashuram. He killed millions of people, his
whole life was that of a killer. Another incarnation of god is Buddha. He was absolutely
non-violent; he would not kill even an ant. Between the time of Parashuram and Buddha much
water had flowed down the Ganges. Buddha brings a new concept of God, a new vision. It is
the same god, but he gives you new eyes.
In the past people had been changing gods: "Men have left God not for other
gods..." But in the present day something else has happened: Man has not left God for
other gods -- that would have been okay -- "they say, but for no God." Man has
dropped the whole idea of God, the whole idea of a divine presence in existence, the whole
idea of any meaning, the whole idea that existence is alive, conscious: And now we are
standing empty and we are feeling empty.
BUT MAN CANNOT remain empty; it is difficult to remain empty. Just as nature abhors a
vacuum, so is it the case with the inner nature too. So a new phenomenon is happening:
"Men both deny gods and worship gods." They have created their own gods. They
don't worship God the Father and the Holy Ghost and Jesus Christ any more; they have
changed that old trinity. They worship Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin -- a new
trinity. Now this is very ordinary; to worship Karl Marx or Engels or Lenin is to worship
something very ordinary. And remember, whatsoever you worship you will become, because
your worship is your longing deep down.
"Professing first Reason..." -- and because man cannot remain empty
for long, he replaced it first with reason; reason became god, the head became god.
Anything that is proved by reason is truth, anything that is not proved by reason is
untruth. Now this is nonsense! Reason is limited, it cannot prove many things.
For example, it cannot prove the beauty of a rose, but the beauty exists; reason is
impotent to prove it. Reason cannot prove the existence of love, but love exists; reason
is inadequate to prove it. If you ask reason about music it will say it is only noise. It
may be arranged in such a way that it gives you an illusion of melody, but there is no
melody, only noise; it cannot see the melody. Reason is blind. Yes, it has certain
qualities, but only certain qualities. The whole of existence is not available to it.
And then money became god; millions of people worship money as god. And you will be
surprised to know that this country, India, which goes on bragging about its spirituality,
which goes on bragging that it is destined to lead the whole of humanity towards
spirituality, worships money more than any other country. It actually worships! There is a
festival, the Festival of Lights, Diwali, when people worship money-notes, coins; they
actually worship! -- money is god. In other countries they may not actually be
worshipping, but the worship is there unconsciously.
And power has become a god. The politician has become the most important person in the
world. The dirtiest politician is thought to be something superhuman. We have denied God,
but how can we deny our emptiness? We have rejected God, and we had to stuff something in
the empty space, so we stuff it with political power, with money, with reason, with race,
with dialectics -- if you cannot find anything else, then dialectical materialism, the
philosophy of communism, fascism, nazism.
Man cannot live without religion. Man cannot live without God. If the true God is not
available man is bound to create home-made gods.
"The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, and what have we
to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances
progressively backwards?"
Yes, T.S. Eliot is right.
Osho: The Guest, Discourse 7