Transcript [EN]: ''There Is No God. (But I Found Something Else)'' | Osho

My beloved ones, I see you are gathered here again, seeking, searching, knocking on doors that do not exist, hoping that someone from the inside will open them. But let me tell you the very first truth of this communion. There is no one inside to open the door. And there is no door. You are standing under the open sky, shivering in your own imagined prison. waiting for a god to come and liberate you. You have come to me with a question that has haunted humanity for 10,000 years. It is not just a question. It is a wound. It is a deep anxiety that vibrates in your very soul. You ask me, if there is no God, are you an atheist? Listen to the question. Feel the texture of it. It comes from a mind that is trapped in the binary. The mind that knows only day or night, black or white, yes or no. The mind is a machine of opposites. It cannot conceive of a reality that transcends the two. If I say no god, your mind immediately jumps to the other pole. It says, "Aha, so he must be an atheist. He must be with Karl Marx. He must be with Charvaka. But you have to understand one thing which is very fundamental. Life does not believe in your binaries. Existence is not divided into your logical categories. There is no God. I say it with absolute authority with the authority of my own experience. Not because it is written in a book. There is no God. But and this is a tremendous but that does not mean that I am an atheist. To understand this you have to drop your prejudices. You have to put aside your catechisms, your Gas, your Qurans. You have to sit with me in a space of naked silence because what I am going to say requires you to be vulnerable. Certainly I am not a theist. I am saying there is no God. But that does not mean that you jump to the opposite. The atheist. The atheist also says there is no God. When I say there is no God and the atheists like Charvaka, KL Marx, Lenin, Epicurus. When these people say there is no God, there is a tremendous difference between my statement and their statement. The words are the same. No god. But the meaning, the music, the intent, they are worlds apart. The statements are absolutely dissimilar. Why? What is the difference? Because I say at the same moment that there is godliness. Charvaka would not agree on that point. Epicurus, Marx, other atheists will not agree on that point. To them, denying God means denying consciousness. To them denying God means the world is simply matter and nothing more. They reduce you. They reduce this magnificent mysterious existence into dead machinery. They say that whatever you see as consciousness, your love, your poetry, your silence, your meditation is only a byproduct of certain matters put together. Just a byproduct. Do you understand what a byproduct is? It is accidental. It has no soul. It has no eternity. Take those things apart and the byproduct disappears. Let me give you an illustration, a very ancient one. So you can see the poverty of the atheist mind. It is just like a bulock cart. You see a bulock cart moving on the road. It has wheels. It has an axle. It has a yoke. It has a frame. Now bring the scientist, bring the logician, bring the atheist. You take the wheels away. You remove them and you ask, "Is this the bulock cart?" Certainly the answer will be, "It is not. A wheel is just a wheel. It is not the cart." Then you take the other parts away. You take the wooden planks. You take the yolk. And each time you remove a piece, you ask, "Is this the bulock cart?" No part is the whole. You can take by and by each part and remove the whole and no single part was the bulock cart. And in the end when the ground is empty when you have dismantled everything, you can be asked now where is the bulock cart because we have not removed the bulock cart. We have only removed the wheels. We have only removed the wood. You never said at any point that the bulock cart is being removed but the cart is gone. So the atheist concludes bulock cart was only a combination. It had no existence of its own. It was a byproduct. This is the standpoint of the materialist. This is what Markx means when he says consciousness is an epiphenomenon. An epipen phenomenon means something that appears like a shadow having no substance of its own. Mark says, "Remove the body. Remove the brain. Remove all that constitutes a man's being. You cut the man open. You find blood. You find bones. You find nerves. You find gray matter. But do you find the soul? Do you find the eye? Do you find the love?" Mark says, "You will not find anything like consciousness." And when you have removed everything, it is not that consciousness will be left behind. It was only a combination. You have taken the combination apart. So when the body dies, you are finished. There is no future life. There is no past life. There is no eternity. You are just dust dancing for a moment in the sunlight and then falling back into the dust. This is a very cold, a very dark and a very meaningless approach to existence. It takes away all dignity from human life. It reduces you to a thing. So when I say there is no god, I am not agreeing with marks or epicurus. I am not saying you are a machine. I am saying you are a mystery. But I am certainly not agreeing with Jesus, Krishna, Moses, Muhammad when they say there is God. Why? Why can I not agree with them? They seem to be religious people. They seem to be talking about the spirit because they use God as a person. And this is the greatest lie that has ever been told to humanity. Now to think of God as a person is just your imagination. It is a projection. You are looking at the sky and painting your own face on the clouds. Have you ever noticed the god of the Chinese has a Chinese face? High cheekbones, yellow skin. And the god of the negroes has a negro face, curly hair, thick lips, black skin. And certainly the God of the Jews must have a Jewish nose. It can't be otherwise. Man creates God in his own image. It is not that God created man in his image. It is exactly the opposite. Man is the creator of God. And if horses think about God and they must be thinking they are very contemplative animals. Their God will be a horse, a supreme eternal omnipotent horse. So this is just projection. Giving personality to God is your projection. When I say there is no God, I am denying personality to God. I am destroying your projection. I am taking away your toy. I know it hurts. You have been clinging to this toy for centuries. When it is dark, you hug your teddy bear, your god, and you say, "Father, protect me." But there is no father. I am saying God is not. But there is tremendous godliness. Try to feel the shift. God is a person. Godliness is a quality that is an impersonal energy, pure energy. It is like electricity. You do not call electricity uncle. You do not pray to electricity. Please light up my house today and I will be a good boy. No, it is a law. It is an energy. If you know the way to connect with it, the light comes. If you don't know, you remain in darkness. It has no personality. It does not choose. It does not say this is a sinner's house. I will not light his bulb. To impose any form on it is ugly. You are imposing yourself on it. Jesus is calling God father. Jesus must have a certain idea of what father means. He is imposing on God the same idea. Perhaps he had a good father. Perhaps Joseph was a nice man. But what about the person who had a terrible father? The word father will not create reverence. It will create fear. It will create trauma. Now there are in India religions which believe not in a father god but in a mother goddess. The statue of their god is of a woman, the most beautiful woman that they can conceive. But it is a Hindu woman wearing a sari, wearing jewelry. Centuries have been going on, passing. Religions have been born, died, disappeared. Their gods have disappeared naturally. Where are the gods of ancient Egypt? Rah, Osiris. They were powerful gods once. People trembled before them. People sacrificed their lives for them. Now nobody cares. They are just museum pieces. Where are the gods of ancient Greece? Zeus, Apollo, they have become literature. Nobody worships them. Why? If God is eternal, how can he die? But gods die. They die when the people who projected them die. There is a place in India, Mohenjodaro. It has been found to be the most ancient city in the world. If you go there, you will stand in silence and see the foolishness of human history. There are seven layers in Mohenjodaro. It seems that civilization had to face some calamity seven times. Imagine a city grows. People live, they love, they fight, they pray, they build temples, they create a god to protect them. And then a flood, an earthquake, a war, something happens. The city is destroyed. The people die and their god dies with them. Then fresh people come. They build a new city on top of the ruins. The second layer, they bring new gods. When the first layer was found, it was thought that this is all we have found. Moenjjo Daro. That was determined to be 7,000 years old. But a little more digging and another city was found underneath the first city which must have been 10,000 years old. Then the work continued. The people who were working on the excavation went on digging and city after city. Seven cities have been found in Moenjodaro. The seventh seems to be at least 20,000 years old. They have temples. They have statues of God. Those civilizations have disappeared. Those people have disappeared. Their religions have disappeared. Their gods have disappeared. Listen to me. The Christian God will disappear the moment Christianity disappears. The Hindu gods will disappear the moment Hinduism disappears. Do you see what I mean to say? It is your projection. If you go on projecting it, it is there. If you are not there to project it, if the projector is not there, the god disappears. It is like a movie. You go to the cinema, you see a beautiful romance on the screen or a great tragedy. You cry, you laugh, but if the electricity goes off, if the projector stops, the screen is empty. The tragedy is gone. The romance is gone. Was it real? I am not in favor of such gods which have been projected by the tiny mind of man. And of course, the tiny mind of man is bound to give qualities to God which are its qualities. You are jealous. Your God is jealous. You are angry. Your God is angry. You are possessive. Your God is possessive. The Jewish God in the Talmud says, "I am an angry God. I am not nice. I am not your uncle." Just look at the arrogance of this projection. I am an angry God. Now, this is perfectly meaningful in a Jewish context. The Jewish history has been a history of suffering, of struggle. There God reflects that roughness. But to a Hindu God saying that I am an angry God is a sheer impossibility. For a Hindu God is such a tanand truth, consciousness, bliss. How can bliss be angry? How can truth be angry? Anger and God they cannot meet. If there is anger, there is no God. If there is God, there is no anger. But the Jewish God is perfectly angry. It is very Jewish, very human. And if you don't worship him, if you go against him, he will destroy you. He destroyed two cities because the people of those two cities were behaving in a sexually perverted way and he was very much against it. Sodom and Gomorrah, these two cities he completely destroyed. What kind of god is this? A peeping tom watching through the keyhole what people are doing in their bedrooms and then getting so angry that he burns the whole city. This is not God. This is a neurotic projection of a repressed society. This will not appeal to a Hindu. It is impossible. It will not appeal to the Muhammadan because the Muhammadan prays every day God the compassionate one. Rahman Raheim. Compassion is the very innermost quality projected by him towards God. Now God can only be compassion. Nothing else. The Muhamadans pray that just accepting your sin will be enough because God is compassionate. You will be forgiven. Look at Omar Cayam. He was a Sufi, a mystic, a great poet. He danced with this idea of compassion. He says, "Don't prevent me from drinking wine, enjoying women because God is compassionate." He says to the priests, "Don't tell me that I am committing sin. Let me commit as many sins as possible. His compassion is far greater than all my sins combined together." He is challenging the arithmetic of the priests. He says, "My sins are finite. I am a small man. How much sin can I commit? But God's compassion is infinite. If I stop sinning, I am doubting his infinity. To stop a certain activity in the fear that you will be punished by God is to disbelieve in his compassion. Now, this is a different attitude, but these are all human attitudes. The angry God, the compassionate God, the mother god, the father god, these are masks. And I want you to take the mask off. Before we go further, I want you to pause. Take a deep breath. Look at your own mind. What kind of god are you carrying? Is it a judge? Is it a helper? Is it a terrifying figure? If you are brave enough to drop this weight, if you are brave enough to explore what lies beyond the mask, then you are ready for what I have to tell you next. I am not here to give you a new mask. I am here to expose your original face. If you are feeling a stirring, a rebellion against the old concepts, let it happen. Subscribe to this channel not to follow me but to follow your own awakening. Share this video with those who are still worshiping the masks. Now, so when I say there is no God, I am saying there is no person like God. All personality is human projection. I want you to take away the personality and let God be free. Free from the bondage of personality that you have imposed upon him. Free God from being a he or a she. Free God from being Jewish or Hindu. Free God from your churches and your temples. I am not an atheist. To me, the whole universe is full of the energy of God and nothing else. This is where the leap happens. You have to understand one thing which is very fundamental. The world consists of verbs not of nouns. Nouns are a human invention necessary for language, necessary for the marketplace, but after all a human invention. But existence consists of verbs, only of verbs, not nouns and pronouns. Look at this. Look around you right now. You are seeing a flower, a rose. To call it a flower is not right. It is a linguistic error. Because it has not stopped flowering. It is still flowering. It is a verb. It is a flow. The juice is running through it. The color is changing. The fragrance is spreading. It is an activity. It is not a thing. Calling it a flower, you have made it a noun. You have killed it. You have taken a snapshot of a moving process and called it reality. You see the river, you call it a river. You have made it a noun. It is rivering. If you go to the river, the water you see now is not the water you saw a second ago. It is constantly changing, constantly moving. It would be more accurate to the existential to say that it is rivering, flowing, and everything is changing, flowing. The child is becoming a young man. The young man is becoming old. Life is turning into death. Death is turning into life. Where is the line? Where is the wall that separates the child from the youth? Everything is in continuity. Continuous change. It is a continuum. There never comes a stop. A full stop. It comes only in language. In existence, there is no full stop. Think about your own life. Do you remember when you stopped being a child? Can you pinpoint the date, the hour? On Tuesday at 400 p.m. I stopped being a child and became a man. No, it is absurd. When at what point came the stop and you became a young man? There is no place, no demarcation, no full stop. The child is still flowing in you. If you just close your eyes and look within, do it now. You will find everything that has been is still there flowing. Your childhood is not dead. It is still alive in your deeper layers. Your innocence, your wonder, your tears, they are all there. You have been absorbing more and more. But all that has been is still there. It is like the Ganges. The river is becoming big. New rivulletes are joining it. But the original is still there. If you have seen the Ganges in India, one of the most beautiful rivers, you can understand it. At the point where it arises, Gango tree, it is so tiny, it is just a trickle, a face of a cow of course of stone. The face of a cow carved into stone is enough. Through that cow's face, the Ganges falls starts its journey. so small. But that smallness contains the potential of the ocean. And when you see it near the ocean, when it is reaching to meet the ocean, it looks almost like the ocean itself, so vast. But that small current falling in Gangotri far away, thousands of miles away in the Himalayas from the stone mouth of a cow, that current is still there. It has not been lost. It has expanded. So many rivers have come and fallen into it and have made it oceanic. It is still alive. Even while it is falling in the ocean, it will remain alive. It will go on moving. Perhaps it will become a cloud. Perhaps it will rain again. It will go on and on. Existence goes on and on and on. It never stops. There is no rest period. There is no Sunday in existence. God does not rest on the seventh day. That is a Jewish fairy tale. Energy never sleeps. There is no place where you can demarcate that something has come to its end. Nothing comes to its end. You cannot find the beginning. You cannot find the end. It is an everflowing process. Now apply this to God. When you say God, you are using a noun, something static, dead. You put him on a throne, you put him in a heaven, you fix him. And anything that is fixed is dead. When I say godliness, I am using a verb for something alive, flowing, moving. So these points have to be clear to you. I am not a theist like Jesus or Muhammad or Krishna because I cannot agree with a dead god. I want a God who dances. I want a God who grows. I want a God who is as alive as the leaf trembling in the wind. But the theologians, the philosophers, they want a perfect God, an absolute God. And here lies the trap. I am reminded of one of my professors. He is a very beautiful man, Professor SS Roy. He was the head of the department of philosophy at Alahabad University. An authority on Bradley and Shankara. Bradley from the west, Shankara from the east. Both believe in the absolute. That is their name for God. The absolute. It sounds very grand, doesn't it? Very solid. The first day I joined his class, he was explaining the concept of the absolute. I stood up and I asked him one thing which made me very intimate to him and he opened his whole heart to me in every possible way. I just asked is your absolute perfect? Has it come to a full stop or is it still growing? Think about this. If God is perfect, can he grow? If it is still growing, then it is not absolute. It is imperfect. Only then can it grow. Growth needs imperfection. Growth means there is something yet to be achieved. Something more is possible. Some more branches, some more flowers, then it is alive. But if it is complete, entirely complete, that's the meaning of the word absolute. Now there is no possibility for growth. Then it is dead. So I asked him, "Be clear. Is your God alive or dead? You have to answer me this question." He was stunned. He was really an honest man. He said, "Please give me time to think." He had two doctorates, one from Oxford, one from Bernarez. He had written books. He had taught his whole life. I said, "Has nobody ever asked you such a simple question?" He said, "Nobody ever asked me." Not only that even I have never thought about it that certainly if something is perfect then it has to be dead. Anything alive has to be imperfect. This idea has never occurred to me. This is the blindness of the intellect. It spins complex webs of words absolute omnipotent omnisient but it forgets the simple truth of life. Life is a flow. Life is change. I gave him time. I said you can take as much time as you want. I will come every day and ask the same question. And I did for five six days. Every day I would enter the class. He would come in shaky. He was trembling. Not out of fear but out of the shattering of his lifelong belief. Finally he said please forgive me. I cannot decide. Both ways there is difficulty. I cannot say God is imperfect. I cannot say God is dead but you have conquered my heart. He took me to his home. He said all my degrees you have cancelled. He realized that his absolute was a coffin. God perfect, absolute, omnipotent, omnisient, omnipresent. These are the words used for God by all the religions. Is dead, cannot be alive, cannot breathe. No, I reject such a God because with such a dead God, this whole universe will be dead. If the center is dead, the circumference cannot be alive. So if God is dead and if the materialists know God is empty, then where does that leave us? It leaves us at the threshold of the most significant discovery of your life. I have told you what God is not. I have told you the error of the atheist. I have told you the error of the theist. But the question remains, what is? If you are ready to drop the nouns and embrace the verbs, if you are ready to move from the dead god to the living godliness, then you must listen to what comes next. Because we are about to enter the dimension of the agnostic and then the dimension beyond even that. We are about to enter the fourth category, the unnamed, the truth. Stay with me. The journey has just begun. Now let us go deeper. We have seen the failure of the theist and we have seen the failure of the atheist. We have left the dead absolute of the philosophers behind. So where does that leave us? There is a third term, a third alternative that the intellectuals love to play with. It is called agnostic. Socrates, Bertran Russell, people like these are agnostics. The word sounds very sophisticated. It sounds very humble. Agnostic means someone who says I don't know whether God is or God is not. They stand on the fence. They say the evidence is inconclusive. They are the skeptics. They are the rationalists. And in a way, I have a certain respect for them. These agnostics are at least more honest than your so-called theists in the churches, in the synagogues, in the temples, in the mosques. Why do I say they are more honest? Because the theists are all phony and hypocrites. Look at the priest. Look at the rabbi. Look at the imam. They are not knowing what God is and still bowing down. They are performing gymnastics. They are bending their bodies but their souls are stiff. Their hearts are empty. Their prayers are phony. They don't mean what they are saying and doing. Watch them. They are just imitating their forefathers. They are just puppets in the hands of tradition. They are hypnotized by their society, culture, civilization. They are sleepalkers. They are conditioned by the teachers, by the priests, by their parents. What they are saying is not their own. It is borrowed. And a borrowed truth is worse than a lie. At least a lie is your own invention. A borrowed truth is a dead weight on your soul. I am reminded of a story, a very human story. I had a friend. He was an average human being. I mean, just an idiot. Don't laugh. To be an average human being is to be an idiot. It is to be asleep. It is to be a part of the herd. This friend was in university with me. All the students were continuously talking of falling in love with girls and this and that. But he was very cowardly, nervous. You cannot conceive of the conditions in India at that time. Even in the university, the girls and the boys sit separately. They cannot talk openly. They cannot meet openly. It was a sexually repressed society. And repression creates obsession. His heart was beating. He was coming of age. He wanted to love, but he was paralyzed by fear. One day he came to me because he thought I was the only person who had never laughed at him. He knew I would not judge him. He told me that seeing a girl, he would start trembling. Actually trembling. You could see his pajamas shaking and persspiring. Even if it was winter and cold, he would start persspiring. He closed the door and said, "Only you can help me. What can I do?" I would like to love a girl, but I cannot even say a single word to a girl. Suddenly I lose my voice and I start trembling and persspiring. So I had to train him. I had to become his guru in love. I knew a girl who was in my class and I told her you have to be a little helpful to this poor man. I told her just be a little kind and compassionate and when he persspires don't mention it. Rather you should say people say that you start persspiring seeing girls but you are not persspiring and I am a girl. Have you forgotten? I told her to tell him and you are not shaking. And he will be shaking but you have to say you are not shaking. This is hypnosis. And I had to write love letters for him. Can you imagine? He is in love but the words are mine. He would send those letters and the girl was prepared by me and just because I had told her she would answer him, she would answer the letters and he would come running to show me the letter. He was so happy just with the letters. He thought she loves me. Look at these beautiful words. He did not know that the game was fixed. And again I said now you start on your own. He said, "No, no, you write so well." I said, "How long am I to be writing letters for you? And you know, I have also written the other letter because the girl says, "I don't love him. How can I write? So you please do this one too." And she shows your letter to me and you show her letter to me and I am the one who is writing both letters. It was a perfect circle of deception. And this phony business, this love affair, this is exactly what is happening in all the synagogues, temples, churches. Your prayers are written by somebody else perhaps thousands of years ago, years. You are reciting the words of David or the words of Tulidus or the words of some ancient mystic. But they are not your words. They are not part of your being. They have not arisen from you. They don't carry any love from you. They don't have your heartbeat. You are just a parrot. And the worst part, you don't know whom you are addressing whether anybody exists on the other side or not. That too is written in the same book from which you have taken the prayer that he exists. It is a very circular thing. The same book says God exists. The same book gives you the prayer. The same book says that if you do this prayer, you will receive this answer. It is a closed system. It protects itself against reality. And if you are really hypnotized and millions, almost all are hypnotized. They start receiving the answer, the same answer. No Hindu receives the answer which a Christian receives. Strange, isn't it? Even once in a while, no mistake, no error happens. Shouldn't the lines get crossed sometimes? Shouldn't a Hindu praying to Krishna suddenly hear Jesus say, "Hello?" It never happens. The Christian receives the Christian answer. Why? Because the answer is coming from his own conditioned mind. It is not coming from the sky. It is an echo. The question is borrowed. The answer is borrowed. The prayer is somebody else's. The answer is somebody else's. And you are carrying on a phony love affair. How can it satisfy you? It is like making love to a plastic doll. It looks like a woman, but it is cold. It has no life. What fulfillment is possible out of it? None. You will remain empty. You will remain thirsty. This is why I say the agnostic is at least far more honest than your so-called theists. The agnostic admits I don't know. And I don't know is a very potent state. It is the beginning of wisdom. However, the agnostic is also more honest than your so-called atheists because these atheists also have not taken any trouble to search and seek and then say there is no god. They are just lazy. They have read it in Epicurus. They have read it in Karl Marx. They say Markx says religion is opium so there is no god. finished. Case closed. Nor has Karl Marx taken any trouble to find out whether God really exists or not, whether there is something in it or it is all fiction. No, he has borrowed from other atheists, from Epicurus, from Ditto. It is a lineage of denial just as theism is a lineage of belief. Now look at the world today. The whole communist world which is now almost half of the world, Soviet Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, half of Germany, Poland, China, Vietnam, Korea, almost half of the world is now atheist. Do you think these people have searched for God? Do you think half the human population suddenly became enlightened and realized there is no God? No, they are sheep. They they were all theists just as other people are theists. Russia was one of the strongholds of the Christians, the most Orthodox Christians of the world. The Russian church was far more Orthodox than the Vatican. They were fanatics. They would die for their icons. And what happened to all those Christians? They simply disappeared. They disappeared just like dew drops in the early morning sun. not even leaving a trace behind. The moment the Bolsheviks took power, the moment the Zar fell, the Christianity evaporated. Why? Because they were phony. Their religion was just a social habit. It was a garment they wore, not their skin. And what they have now accepted is again phony. First it was the church and the zar the government the powerful people who were imposing and they were believing them. Now it is the communist party the communist presidium which is imposing the idea that there is no god. The priests have been replaced by the commisaars. The bible has been replaced by das capital but the structure is the same. The blind following is the same. Each small child is being taught that there is no god. It is brainwashing. One of my friends Rahul Sriti Aayana went to Russia to teach Sanskrit. He was a great scholar, a Buddhist monk. He fell in love there and married a Russian woman. Love knows no borders, no ideologies. But when his term was over, they did not allow his wife and his two children to come back with him to India. He was very broken when he came back. He was a destroyed man. He said, "They have spoiled my whole life." I asked, "Why have they not allowed it?" He said, "For a simple reason. My child learns in school that there is no God, that religion is the opium of the people, and I am a religious man." He was a Buddhist monk and his wife was an atheist. The government said we cannot allow it in India. They will be spoiled. Their minds will be filled again with the opium that there is God. They were protecting the children from the virus of religion. And he told me a very strange thing which was confirmed by other friends later on who came from Soviet Russia. They have many kinds of societies for small children, kindergarten, school children. They have a youth communist league which spies on their parents and informs the communist party what they are doing. This is the ultimate corruption of humanity, turning children against their parents because they are suspicious of these people coming from the outside. They must be theists. They must be praying. So these small children function as detectives. They informed the Communist Party office, "Our father is praying. He has a Buddha statue hidden behind his bookshelf." Imagine the scene. The father is hiding, trembling, trying to steal a moment of prayer. And his own child is watching him, not with love, but with the eyes of a spy. And the Communist Party people came and they found the Buddhist monk's only treasure, a small statue that his master had presented to him exactly where the children had informed them. Otherwise, there was no way for them to know it was hidden behind the books. The wives are spying on the husbands. The wives have their own communist league. The husbands are spying on the wives. Everybody is spying on everybody else. This is not a society. This is a concentration camp, a psychological concentration camp. Now within a few years, the whole of Russia, China, Korea all became atheist. They had to. It was survival. Theism became a laughingstock. Rahul Sanritayana told me that he asked a school boy when he first reached Russia, do you believe in God? The boy laughed. He said, what are you saying? It is a primitive idea. The boy lectured the Buddhist monk. He said, "When people were absolutely primitive, when even fire was not discovered, there was so much fear that out of fear they started believing in God. We don't see any need for it. Do you believe in God?" And Rahul said to me, I could not look eye to eye with that small child. He felt ashamed. Not because he was wrong, but because he saw the absolute certainty in the child's eyes. A certainty born of ignorance, just like the theists certainty. I said to him, "The reason is that your religion is also borrowed just as his religion is borrowed. Your parents have forced it upon you. His government has forced it upon him. Neither of you have looked into it on your own. Throwing all that others have given to you, cleaning your mind completely of all rubbish and crap and just going directly without anybody interfering with you. This is the key. You have to go directly. Whoever he is, Jesus or Marx, Krishna or Confucious, Muhammad or Mahavira, not bothering about him but just going directly into reality, watching it, seeing it and finding it. This is my message to you. Do not be a Christian. Do not be a communist. Be a seeker. If you don't find God, you say there is no God. That is authentic. That has dignity. If you are still searching, you can say I am still searching, seeking, hence I cannot answer the question with yes or no. Then you are an agnostic. But I don't think Bertrand Russell is a right or an honest agnostic. He has just argued against all the proofs of God. And it is very simple to argue. And he has argued against all the arguments against God. That too is very simple. Logic is a It can go with anyone. You can prove anything with logic and you can disprove anything with logic. Seeing that both the arguments are invalid, that the theist and the atheist both are talking nonsense, he declares himself to be an agnostic. I will not take any position. But this is an intellectual position. It is not an existential experience. I am not an agnostic. I am very strange in a way because you cannot categorize me. These are three categories. There is no fourth category. And I belong to the fourth, the unnamed category. I have looked, I have searched, I have not just argued, I have dissolved myself into the mystery. I have not found God true. I have found no person sitting on a golden throne. I have found no one to judge you. I have found no one to write your destiny. But I have found something far more significant. Godliness. Godliness. I am not an atheist. I am not a theist. I am not an agnostic. My position is absolutely clear. What is this godliness? It is the quality of the universe. When the rose flowers, that is godliness. The redness of the rose is godliness. The fragrance is godliness. When the bird takes flight, the movement is godliness. When you look into the eyes of a child, the innocence is godliness. When you sit in silence and your thoughts disappear, the space that remains, that is godliness. Godliness is a verb. It is a dance. God is a dead noun. Godliness is a living verb. God is separate from the universe. The creator and the creation. That is the old duality. Godliness is not separate. The dancer and the dance are one. The universe is not made by God. The universe is godliness. It is vibrating, pulsating, breathing godliness. This changes everything. If there is a god, you have to worship him. You have to be a slave. You have to follow commandments. If there is godliness, you have to live it. You have to become it. You have to participate in the festival of existence. You don't need to go to a church. The forest is your church. The river is your Bible. The sun is your priest. You don't need to pray. You need to be loving. You need to be aware. You need to be joyous. To be happy is to be religious. To be miserable is to be irreligious. The priests want you to be miserable because miserable people go to church. Happy people dance in the street. I want you to dance in the street. I want you to be so filled with life that you overflow. That overflowing is godliness. So when I say there is no god, do not be sad. I am removing a cancer from your soul. I am removing a dictator. I am giving you total freedom and with total freedom comes total responsibility. You are responsible for your joy. You are responsible for your life. There is no one to blame. This is the path of the courageous. This is the path of the lion. Are you ready to be a lion or do you still want to be a sheep in the herd? The choice is yours. But remember, the sheep live in fear. The lion lives in freedom. The sheep die many times before their death. The lion dies only once. I invite you to the life of the lion. I invite you to the life of godliness. Look at the sky tonight. Don't look for a face. Look for the vastness. That vastness is you. Look at the trees. Don't look for a creator. Look for the green energy flowing through the veins of the leaf. That energy is you. You are not a stranger here. You are not an outsider. You are the very heart of existence. Wake up to this dignity. Wake up to this glory. And then you will not need to ask is there a god? You will know, you will feel, you will be. There is no god but there is godliness. And you are that tatwami. Thou art that. Enough for today. My friends, my fellow travelers. If these words have struck a bell in your heart, if they have shattered even a single brick of the prison wall that surrounds you, then this communion has been meaningful. I do not want your belief. Belief is cheap. I want your inquiry. I want your fire. If you're ready to burn your prejudices and discover the truth for yourself, then signify your commitment. Subscribe to this channel, not as a follower, but as a friend. Share this video, not as a doctrine, but as a provocation. Comment below. Tell me, are you ready to drop the noun and live the verb? Let the dialogue continue. Let the silence deepen until we meet again. Be alive. Be loving.