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.
- Osho, "God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth, #1, Q1"