Tag Archives: GOD

What is GOD ??

What is God?

God is not a person. That is one of the greatest misunderstandings, and it has prevailed so long that it has become almost a fact. Even if a lie is repeated continuously for centuries it is bound to appear as if it is a truth.

God is a presence, not a person. Hence all worshipping is sheer stupidity. Prayerfulness is needed, not prayer. There is nobody to pray to; there is no possibility of any dialogue between you and God. Dialogue is possible only between two persons, and God is not a person but a presence – like beauty, like joy.

God simply means godliness. It is because of this fact that Buddha denied the existence of God. He wanted to emphasize that God is a quality, an experience – like love. You cannot talk to love, you can live it. You need not create temples of love, you need not make statues of love, and bowing down to those statues will be just nonsense. And that’s what has been happening in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques.

Man has lived under this impression of God as a person, and then two calamities have happened through it. One is the so-called religious man, who thinks God is somewhere above in the sky and you have to praise him to persuade him to confer favors on you, to help you to fulfill your desires, to make your ambitions succeed, to give you the wealth of this world and of the other world. And this is sheer wastage of time and energy.

And on the opposite pole the people who saw the stupidity of it all became atheists; they started denying the existence of God. They were right in a sense, but they were also wrong. They started denying not only the personality of God, they started to deny even the experience of God.

The theist is wrong, the atheist is wrong, and man needs a new vision so that he can be freed from both the prisons.

God is the ultimate experience of silence, of beauty, of bliss, a state of inner celebration. Once you start looking at God as godliness there will be a radical change in your approach. Then prayer is no more valid; meditation becomes valid.

Martin Buber says prayer is a dialogue; then between you and God there is an “I-thou” relationship – the duality persists. Buddha is far closer to the truth: you simply drop all chattering of the mind, you slip out of the mind like a snake slipping out of the old skin. You become profoundly silent. There is no question of any dialogue, no question of any monologue either. Words have disappeared from your consciousness. There is no desire for which favors have to be asked, no ambition to be fulfilled.

One is now and here. In that tranquility, in that calmness, you become aware of a luminous quality to existence. Then the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the people are all surrounded with a subtle aura. They are all radiating life, and it is one life in different forms. The flowering of one existence in millions of forms, in millions of flowers.

THIS experience is God. And it is everybody’s birthright, because whether you know it or not you are already part of it. The only possibility is you may not recognize it or you may recognize it. The difference between the enlightened person and the unenlightened person is not of quality – they both are absolutely alike. There is only one small difference: that the enlightened person is aware; he recognizes the ultimate pervading the whole, permeating the whole, vibrating, pulsating. He recognizes the heartbeat of the universe. He recognizes that the universe is not dead, it is alive.

This aliveness is God!

The unenlightened person is asleep, asleep and full of dreams. Those dreams function as a barrier; they don’t allow him to see the truth of his own reality. And, of course, when you are not even aware of your own reality, how can you be aware of the reality of others? The first experience has to happen within you. Once you have seen the light within you will be able to see it everywhere.

God has to be freed from all concepts of personality. Personality is a prison. God has to be freed from any particular form; only then he can have all the forms. He has to be freed from any particular name so that all the names become his.

Then a person lives in prayer – he does not pray, he does not go to the temple, to the church. Wherever he sits he is prayerful, whatsoever he is doing is prayerful, and in that prayerfulness he creates his temple. He is always moving with his temple surrounding him. Wherever he sits the place becomes sacred, whatsoever he touches becomes gold. If he is silent then his silence is golden; if he speaks then his song is golden. If he is alone his aloneness is divine; if he relates then his relating is divine.

The basic, the most fundamental thing is to be aware of your own innermost core, because that is the secret of the whole existence. That’s where the Upanishads are tremendously important. They don’t talk about a God, they talk about godliness. They don t bother about prayer. their whole emphasis is on meditation.

Meditation has two parts: the beginning and the end. The beginning is called dhyana and the end is called samadhi. Dhyana is the seed, samadhi is the flowering. Dhyana means becoming aware of all workings of your mind, all the layers of your mind – your memories, your desires, your thoughts, dreams – becoming aware of all that goes on inside you.

Dhyana is awareness, and samadhi is when the awareness has become so deep, so profound, so total that it is like a fire and it consumes the whole mind and all its functionings. It consumes thoughts, desires, ambitions, hopes, dreams. It consumes the whole stuff the mind is full of.

Samadhi is the state when awareness is there, but there is nothing to be aware inside you; the witness is there, but there is nothing to be witnessed.

Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is.

It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to live it – that is the only way to know it.

~ OSHO

Waiting !!

Love waits, love can wait infinitely, only love can wait. If you love, you have such trust that you can wait. And god comes only to those who know how to wait. God never comes through desiring, he comes through waiting. Waiting is a passive desiring: you desire and yet you don’t desire; you desire and yet you don’t say ‘right now!’ You say, ‘Whenever it happens, I am happy and I am contented. Whenever you decide, that’s the right moment: this life or another life, it doesn’t matter. I will be waiting, I will wait forever!’

Time becomes irrelevant for one who can wait; hurry is no more there. And when there is no hurry and no time-consciousness, in that very instant god happens. God can happen this moment. We just need to be utterly silent and waiting. So this is the paradox: if you ask that he should happen right now you will have to wait very long… maybe forever; if you are ready to wait forever he can happen right now. In fact if you can wait he has already happened in that very waiting. He comes so silently, even the footsteps are never heard.

So meditate over it and allow that feeling of waiting….

~ OSHO – Far Beyond the Stars

GOD comes through Watching!!

Watching anger, anger disappears. Watching hate, hate disappears. If you can watch anything, immediately a new dimension has penetrated into it. The watcher has come in, and the watcher is the greatest phenomenon in the world. God comes through your watching, not through your actions.

~ OSHO – Returning to the Source CHAPTER 2. THROW IT OUT!

Just KNOW Yourself !

Q: Guruji, what has God got to do with spirituality? Can I not believe and still be spiritual?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Yes! Do you know, in the six Darshanas (schools of India Philosophy), the first three Darshanas do not even talk about God –Nyaaya, Vaisheshika, Sankhya. Nyaaya Darshana by Gautama Maharishi deals with knowledge – whether your knowledge is correct or not. Knowing the means of knowledge whether it is correct or not, this is Nyaaya Darshana. For example, from your senses you see the Sun setting and the Sun rising. But Nyaaya Darshana says, ‘No, you cannot just believe what you see, you have to go beyond and find out, does the Sun really set or is the Earth moving?’. We think that Copernicus found out that the earth is going around the sun, but that is absolute false. He definitely found out, but before that, in India, people already knew a long time ago that the Earth is going around the Sun. Nyaaya Darshana talks about all that. It talks about perception and the correction of perception! And then Vaisheshika Darshana – this is a count of all the things in the universe – Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Ether, and then all the objects and subjects, and all that analysis. This is Vaisheshika Darshana. In this, they talk about the mind, consciousness, intellect, memory and all that. Then is Sankhya Darshana. So, these three Darshanas do not talk about God, but they talk about Consciousness. Only in the Yoga Sutras, which is the fourth Darshanas they talk about God as one topic. So you do not have to feel compelled to believe in God, but you have to believe in something. You have to at least believe in the Consciousness. Usually when we think of God, we think of somebody who is sitting out there in heaven, who created the creation, and then went away from the creation and started trying to find fault in everyone. Whatever you are doing, he is trying to take a stick and punish you. This is not the type of God that we have ever spoken of. God is the existence! The entire universe is made up of a stuff called Love, and that is what God is! You are inseparable from God. Nothing ever exists outside God; everything has to exist inside God only. So it is beyond good, bad, right, wrong, and all that. Pleasant and unpleasant is all immaterial. The One thing that exists, that One whole if you need to call it something, you can call it God. Or you do not have to worry, just know yourself.

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The Fish in Water is not Thirsty

THE FISH IN WATER IS NOT THIRSTY . — but man is. Man lives in God, and is absolutely unaware of it. Man is born in God, breathes in God, and one day will dissolve in God. MAN IS GOD, made of the stuff called God, and yet completely oblivious of the fact

~ OSHO – The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty : Talks on Kabir

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