Question 1

Is god really dead? the very idea of his death creates intense anxiety, fear, dread and anguish.

 

 

The way I look at things, God has never been there, so how can he be dead? He was never born in the first place. It was invented by the priests, and it was invented for exactly these reasons: because man was in anxiety, man was in fear, man was in dread, man was in anguish.

 

When there was no light, no fire -- just think of those days of humanity -- wild animals all around, and the dark night, no fire, the intense cold, no clothes, and the wild animals searching for their food in the night, and people were hiding in caves, sitting on the trees just to avoid... In the day, at least they could see that a lion was approaching, they could make some effort to escape. But in the night, they were completely in the hands of the wild animals.

 

And then they found that a time comes, people become old for no reason, and one day somebody dies. They could not understand what was happening. This man was talking, breathing, walking, was perfectly okay. Suddenly he was no longer breathing, he was no longer talking. It was such a shock to the primitive man that death became a taboo: Don't talk about it. Even talking about it created fear, fear that sooner or later you would be standing in the same queue, with the queue becoming smaller and smaller every moment. Somebody dies and you come closer to death; another dies, you come even closer to death.

 

Even to talk about death became a taboo, and not only to ordinary primitive people, even to the most sophisticated. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, could not tolerate the word `death'. No one was allowed to mention the word in front of him, because just at the mention of the word `death' he would fall into a fit, he would become unconscious and start foaming. Such was the fear of the man who founded psychoanalysis.

 

Once Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, another great psychoanalyst, were traveling from Europe to America to deliver lectures on psychoanalysis to many universities. On the deck of the ship, Carl Gustav Jung mentioned death. Immediately Sigmund Freud fell on the deck. That was the reason Sigmund Freud expelled Jung from the psychoanalytic movement, and he had to found another school. He called it analytical psychology. Just a different name, but it is the same process. But the reason for his expulsion was the mention of death.

 

Two things have been taboos in the world, and those two things are two polarities of the same energy. One is sex, which has been taboo, "Don't talk about it"; another is death which is taboo, "Don't talk about it." Both are connected: in the beginning is sex, in the end is death; it is sex that brings death in.

 

Only one animal does not die, that is the amoeba. And you know that perfectly well because Poona is so full of amoebas. I have chosen this place specially, because amoebas are immortal beings. And their immortality depends on the fact that they are not sexual beings. They are not the by-product of sex, so there is no death. Sex and death are absolutely connected. Just try to understand.

 

Sex brings you into life, and life finally ends in death. Sex is the beginning, death is the end. In between is what you call life.

 

The amoeba is a non-sexual animal, the only celibate monk in the whole world. It reproduces in a very different way. God must be immensely happy -- if he is there -- with the amoebas; they are all saints. They simply go on eating and becoming fatter and fatter, and at a certain point they divide into two. When one amoeba becomes so fat that it becomes impossible for him to move, he divides in two.

 

This is a different way of reproduction. But because there is no sex involved, there is no male, no female. Both the amoebas start eating again. Soon they will be fat enough to divide again. So it is by a very mathematical method that they create. There is no death, an amoeba never dies -- unless he is murdered! He can live from eternity to eternity if medical science does not murder him. But their immortality depends on the fact they are not the by-product of sex. Any animal who is born of sex is going to die, he cannot be immortal in the body.

 

So these two things have been taboos in the world: sex and death. Both have been kept hidden.

 

I have been condemned all around the world, simply because I talked about every taboo without any inhibition, because I want you to know everything about life from sex to death. Only then can you rise beyond sex and death. In your understanding you can start approaching something which is beyond sex and beyond death. That is your eternity, that is your life energy, pure energy.

 

By sex your body is born, not you.

 

By death your body dies, not you.

 

So it is absolutely unnecessary to make those taboos. But religions have a great investment in creating in you anxiety, fear, dread and anguish, and nature was already producing it.

 

Religions, and particularly the priests all over the world, whatever their denomination, have exploited man's fear, have given him God, a fiction, a lie -- which at least temporarily covers the wound. "Don't be afraid, God is taking care of you. Don't be in any dread or anxiety, there is God, and everything is okay. All that you have to do is believe in God and believe in the representative of God, the priest, and believe in the holy scripture that God has sent to the world. All that you have to do is to believe." And this belief has been covering your anxiety, fear, dread, anguish.

 

So when you hear God is dead, the very idea of his death creates intense anxiety. That means your wound has been uncovered. But a covered wound is not a healed wound; in fact for the healing process it has to be uncovered. Only then in the sun's rays, in the open air, will it start healing. A wound should never be covered, because covering it you start forgetting about it. You want to forget about it. Once it is covered, not only do others not see it, you yourself don't see it. And under the cover it goes on becoming a cancer.

 

Every wound has to be healed, not covered. Covering is not the way. God was the cover, that's why the very concept that God is dead creates fear. Whatever comes to your mind, intense anxiety, fear, dread, and anguish -- these were the things priests were covering with the word `God'.

 

But by their covering, they have stopped man's evolution towards buddhahood, they have stopped man's healing process, they have stopped man's search for truth. A lie was handed to you as truth; naturally you need not search for truth, you have it already.

 

It is absolutely necessary that God should be dead. But I want you to know my understanding. It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead. I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction.

 

Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly -- seventy years will be gone soon.

 

Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears.

 

But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth -- not a belief -- is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.

 

So if God is removed and you start feeling fear and dread, and anxiety and anguish, that simply indicates God was not the medicine. It was just a trick to keep your eyes closed. It was a blinding strategy to keep you in darkness, and to keep you hoping that beyond death there is paradise. Why beyond death? It is because you are afraid of death, so the priest creates a paradise beyond death, just to take away your fear. But it is not taken away, it is only repressed in your unconscious. And the deeper it is repressed the more difficult it is to get rid of it.

 

So I want to destroy all your belief systems, all your theologies, all your religions. I want to open all your wounds so they can be healed. The real medicine is not a belief system; the real medicine is meditation. Do you know that both the words come from the same root: medicine and meditation? Medicine heals the body, meditation heals your soul. But their function is the same, healing.

 

Once you drop the God, you are certainly free. But in this freedom you will be filled with anxiety, fear, dread, anguish. Unless you start moving inwards to find your authentic being, your original face, your buddha, you will be trembling, your whole life will be destroyed, you may become insane, the way Friedrich Nietzsche became insane.

 

And he is not the only person who became insane. There are many philosophers who have committed suicide because they found there was nothing in life, and they never looked inwards. Because they found there was no meaning, no sense... why go on living?

 

One of the great novels, perhaps the greatest novel in all the languages, is Fyodor Dostoevsky's, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. It is far more important to read it than the Holy Bible, or holy Koran, or holy Gita, or all three combined. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV has such a deep insight into everything... but Fyodor Dostoevsky became mad.

 

He created the greatest novels in the world, but he himself lived a very miserable, very sad, very afraid life. He was not a man of joy, but he had tremendous insight -- intellectual -- into every problem that man is bound to face. All problems he has tackled. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is such a big novel that nowadays nobody reads it; people like just to watch the television. It is perhaps nearabout one thousand pages, and with intense argument.

 

The youngest brother -- there are three brothers -- is very pious, believing, god-fearing, and wants to become a monk and move to a monastery. The second brother is absolutely against God, absolutely against religion, and in a discussion with his younger brother they are continuously discussing all these problems. He says, "If I ever meet God, the first thing I am going to do is to give him the ticket back, and tell him, `Keep it. I don't want your life, it is meaningless. Just show me the way out, I don't want to be in the world. I just want to get out of existence; death seems to me to be more peaceful than your so-called life. Just take the ticket back, I don't want to travel in this train. And you never asked me; it is against my wishes. You have forced me on this train, and now I am suffering unnecessarily. I had no freedom of choice. Why did you give me birth?'"

 

That's what he said he was going to ask if he met God: "On what grounds did you give me birth? Without my permission you created me. Now this is perfect slavery. And one day, without asking me, you will kill me. You have planted every kind of sickness in me, you have planted every kind of sin in me for which I am condemned, and you are the reason."

 

Who has planted sex in you? It must be God, who created man, and who told Adam and Eve to go into the world and multiply, create as many children as you can. Obviously he has made them sexual, and he created the couple.

 

Ivan Karamazov, the atheist brother, says, "If I find him" -- and who knows, he may still be living and Friedrich Nietzsche may be wrong -- "then I am going to kill him. I will be the first to make the whole of humanity free from this dictator who on the one hand implants sex, violence, anger, greed, ambition, all kinds of poisons in man, and on the other hand, whose representatives go on hammering at you that sex is sin, you should be celibate. Strange."

 

George Gurdjieff used to say, "All religions are against God." There is meaning in his statement. He was not a man to make any statement without a deep, intense understanding. When he says all religions are against God, he is saying God gives you sex, and religions teach you celibacy. What do they mean? God gives you greed, and religions teach you no greed. God gives you violence, and religions teach you no violence. God gives you anger, and religions say no anger. It is such a clear-cut argument, that all religions are against God.

 

Ivan Karamazov said, "If I meet him anywhere I am going to kill him, but before killing him I am going to ask all these questions."

 

The whole novel is a tremendous argument. The third brother is not their real brother. He is born of a woman who was not the wife of their father, who was only a servant. The third brother is kept out of the eyes of society, so he remains retarded. He is almost like an animal: he eats, drinks, and lives in a dark place in the vast palace of the Karamazovs. Certainly his life is absolutely meaningless.

 

And Ivan Karamazov said, "Think about our cousin-brother, illegitimate, who God also created. What is the meaning of his life? He cannot even come out in the sun, in the air. Our father keeps him shut in darkness. Nobody ever comes to see him, nobody ever comes to greet him. Nobody is his friend in this whole earth. He knows nobody else. He cannot speak well because he has never spoken to anybody. His whole life is just like an animal: eating, drinking, sleeping; eating, drinking, sleeping.... He will never know any woman, he will never know any love. What will happen to his sex instinct?"

 

It is a very intense argument about all the problems any intelligent man is going to face. Ivan is bringing all those problems: "What do you believe God says about my cousin-brother? What is his meaning? Why has he created him this way? If anybody is responsible, he is responsible, and I am going to take revenge. Just let me find him! And I hope," Ivan Karamazov says, "that Nietzsche is not right, that he is not dead. Otherwise I will miss the chance to murder him. I want to murder him so that the whole of humanity becomes freed from him."

 

But once you make humanity free... freedom for what? For fear? For death? For suicide? For murder? For theft? Freedom for what?

 

One of the existentialist novels says that a young man is brought before a court because he has killed a stranger on the beach, someone whose face he has not even seen. He came up behind this man, who was sitting looking at the sunset, pushed a knife in his back and killed him. And he has not even seen who he was.

 

It was a very strange case. You don't kill unless you have some enmity, some anger, some revengefulness. But they were not even known to each other, they were not even friends. You can kill friends -- friends are always killing each other -- but he was not even a friend, what to say about an enemy? You can make somebody an enemy only if you make him first your friend. That step is necessary: first friend, then enemy. You cannot make somebody an enemy directly. Some acquaintance, some friendship is needed to create an enemy.

 

The court was at a loss. The judge asked the man, "Why did you kill a stranger whose face you had not seen, whose name you did not know?"

 

The man said, "It does not matter. I was feeling so bored I wanted to do something, something that would get my photograph in all the newspapers. It has happened; I feel a little less bored. And anyway there is no meaning in life. What was that idiot doing? What was he going to do if I had not killed him? Just repeat the same things that he has done already many times. So what is the fuss? Why have I been brought into the court?"

 

The magistrate seemed absolutely puzzled: there is no eyewitness, except this man himself who says, `I have killed that man, but without witnesses you cannot punish me. I may be lying, who knows? There are no witnesses."

 

Then circumstantial witnesses were brought into the court. One neighbor said, "This man is strange. His mother died on Sunday, and when he was informed he said, `That woman would always create trouble -- and inevitably on a Sunday. Sunday is a holiday, could she not die on Saturday or Friday? But I knew perfectly well from the very beginning that that woman, who has been a torture my whole life, was going to destroy one of my holidays. And it has come true.'

 

"And when asked, `Why are you feeling so angry?' he said, `I am feeling angry because I have purchased tickets for my girlfriend and me, to go to the movie, and this woman could have died any other day. What is the point of dying on a Sunday? I don't understand at all. But I know her mind.'"

 

Another man came and said, "He buried his mother and then he was dancing in a disco that very evening with a very young, beautiful woman. And when someone said, `Your mother has died just this morning. It does not look right that you should dance in the evening in a disco,' he said, `What do you mean? Now every time I dance it will be after the death of my mother, so what does it matter whether it has been twelve hours, twelve days, or five years? It will always be after the death of my mother. Do you want me never to dance because my mother has died?'"

 

He is absolutely logical, but inhuman.

 

So these witnesses went on saying things about him: "This man is strange. He can do anything, without relevance." But the man said, "I don't see any relevance in life itself. What is the crime in killing a man? I am simply freeing him from bondage. I am not committing a sin, I am not committing a crime. I am simply helping a man who was too cowardly to commit suicide."

 

A negative philosophy will bring these results. A negative philosophy basically will lead humanity into madness, and its ultimate conclusion can only be to commit suicide.

 

A great negative philosopher of Greece, Zeno, actually preached his whole life that suicide is the only way out. Thousands of his disciples committed suicide. He said, "Life is meaningless, of no significance. It is only through cowardice that people continue to live. They cannot gather courage enough to take a jump and be finished. Don't be a coward. Only suicide can prove that you are not a coward."

 

He was very convincing. It seems convincing if somebody says to you, "Only suicide can prove that you are not a coward, because what is the point of living? What have you done up to now? Half of life you have lived, with what result? What is the outcome? You will live the same way the remaining half, and will die like an animal. At least have the dignity to commit suicide!"

 

That man was saying that birth was not in your hands, but at least don't let death also be your master. Be master of your death, commit suicide. His arguments are very profound. He was saying, "You were helpless as far as birth was concerned, you could not do anything. It has to happen, but about death there is a possibility: either you die like an animal, or you commit suicide like a man. Suicide gives the dignity to man that he is free to choose his death." He convinced many young people and they committed suicide.

 

Just before he died at the age of ninety somebody asked, "Thousands of people have committed suicide according to your philosophizing and argumentation, why have you not committed suicide? Why have you lived a long life?"

 

The man said, "I had to live, just to teach my philosophy. It was a burden, but out of compassion I had to live! Otherwise, who was going to teach? The only right approach towards life is death. I have suffered my whole life. I have dropped my own dignity by not committing suicide, because I had to take care of my fellow citizens, particularly my disciples. I am perfectly happy that they have all committed suicide. Now I can die in peace, I have done my work."

 

Negative philosophy is going to bring such conclusions. Zen is the only living alternative, positive alternative, because it gives you a sense of direction, a sense of fulfillment, a sense of eternity, and a sense of going beyond birth, death, body, and of being one with this beautiful existence which is immensely intelligent.

 

-Osho, "God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth, #1"