Ordinarily people understand God to be some person that they will meet face-to-face. This is a false notion. God is not a person that you will meet and you will interview. God is a state. As you approach nearer to that state you will go on becoming more and more godly. The day you become totally absorbed by that state you will be God. There is no one else there to meet, you yourself will become godly.
To see God means to become godly because it is a state. It is the ultimate peak of consciousness. It is the ultimate flowering of the seed that is hidden within you. It is the manifestation of the one that was hidden.
Godliness is a state. This is why it is a better word than God because godliness is a state, not a person. It is divine. Instead of calling the ultimate state God or bhagwan or the brahman, call it godliness or divinity. But man has a great difficulty: his languages change everything into symbols or analogies, and he does that with everything.
When we were fighting for independence in India a photo of “Mother India” was hanging in every house. There is no Mother India, but the photographs showed Mother India bound in chains with an Indian flag in her hand. Shouting “Long live Mother India!” most people forgot that there was no such thing as Mother India, it was just a symbol. The symbol is poetic and sweet but it is not a fact. God is also a symbol: there is no one sitting somewhere as God. Hence the real search for God is the search to become godly. As long as you do not become godly your search will continue because that is the ultimate search and the ultimate thirst.
It is like a seed in the earth struggling to sprout, waiting for the rain. If there are pebbles and stones in its way, that delicate seed will move them away or will try to find its way around them to the light, to come out of the earth and rise upward. And as long as the flowering does not happen, its journey will continue.
Man is a seed. You can say that he is a seed of existence or of divinity, of godliness, and as long as he does not blossom into a flower of godliness, his restlessness will continue. This restlessness is creative. Without it you will go astray. That is why those who are full of spiritual discontent are fortunate and those who are not discontented at all and are saying, “We don’t need anything,” are the most unfortunate.
-Osho, “The Message beyond Words, #7”