Is There A God: Osho
Acharya Rajneesh, also known as Osho, was a twenty-first-century Indian thinker, mystic, spiritual teacher and also leader of The Rajneesh Movement. Considered “the most dangerous man since Jesus” by Tom Robbins, he took the world by storm by his radical ideas on spirituality, religion and carnal desires. Famously Osho had declared,
“I know for sure God does not exist, and thank God…He does not exist.”
Osho believed that the very hypothesis of God, was necessary and convenient to account for the World’s Creation. However, going by the nature of God, Creation is bound to be perfect and complete. If that is so, then the scope for evolution is nullified. And if evolution becomes impossible, life loses all meaning. So, Osho deduced, the idea of god kills the very meaning of life.
Drawing a rigid dichotomy between God and Existence, Osho believes it is the latter that is real while the former is a mere fiction. That is why there is just one Existence and so many Gods, created to suit disparate purposes, interests and needs. The belief in God merely gives humans a false sense of security, a fragile contentment with the pitiable conditions of their lives. It makes them blind to the injustices they might be witnessing because they are secure in the illusion that the “all knowing God” has already planned this. In the acceptance of wrongs in the name of predetermination, Osho smells a slavishness in man to accede to a falsity and escape the responsibility of reality. “God”, stated Osho, “is a condemnation of our intelligence.”
As per Osho: man, facing the burden of living, is in such desperate desire for a support, a cushion, a consolation that God becomes to him, a “psychological projection” of the mother/father figure. The helpless man waits for help but sadly, no help ever comes. Even Jesus Christ on the Cross sought help in vain and finally asked, “Father, have you forsaken me?” Osho was convinced that Jesus, must have died in utter disillusionment and he(Osho), in not harbouring any illusions is rather protecting the self from disillusions. God, he believed, is one such illusion that has no basis in reality. This servitude to the God-construct, in rendering man a puppet at the hands of the puppeteer-God, inevitably kills man’s very freedom to act. To be responsible for his action.
Interestingly, despite his dismissal of god’s presence, Osho did not call himself an atheist. He acknowledged the presence of a life force that gives us energy, calling it “pure consciousness”. He believed that to call this energy God would be erroneous as the moment one makes it a noun, one kills it since nouns do not evolve. This is why Osho did not fully subscribe either to the ideals of the western school of Existentialism or any form of Atheist Materialism, because unlike them, he believed in the world being more than just matter.
Hence, Nietzsche’s proclamation that, “God is dead, therefore man is free”, was only half the picture, as per Osho. One’s freedom needs to be rooted in meditation lest it could result in the insanity from disillusionment that characterized Nietzsche’s last days when he had dismissed the consolation that the idea of God provides humans.
Therefore, Osho maintained, freedom from the idea of God would be rendered meaningless if that freedom is not utilized to awaken inner godliness. For that, a relationship with Existence through meditation needs to be cultivated. Existence, as per Osho, is the source of all love, knowledge and power. Unlike the gods we pursue, true godliness resides within us. And a merger with it, makes us one with the cosmos that was never created by an outside agent. It was always enough unto itself.
Meditation, Osho emphasized, unlike prayer, does not need consolation. It takes one inwards into bliss, where “I” melts and merges with Existence to become Existence itself. From a mere droplet to the endless Ocean, where all droplets unite. Free from consolations. Free from Gods.
“Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it. That’s what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you.”
Originally published at spiritualliving.co on August 7, 2017.
