If the fear comes up, that means you have to face it; it is in no way going to help you to cover it by the idea of God. You cannot have faith again, that is destroyed.

 

Once you have met me you cannot have faith in God, because doubt is a reality, and faith is fiction.

 

And no fiction can stand before a fact.

 

Now God is going to remain a hypothesis to you; your prayer will be useless. You will know it is a hypothesis, you cannot forget that it is a hypothesis.

 

Once you have heard a truth it is impossible to forget it.

 

That is one of the qualities of truth, that you don't need to remember it.

 

The lie has to be remembered continually; you may forget. The person habituated to lies needs a better memory than the person who is habituated to truth, because a true person has no need of memory; if you only say the truth there is no need to remember. But if you are saying a lie, then you have to continually remember, because you have said one lie to one person, another lie to another person; something else to somebody else. To whom you have said what you have to categorize in your mind and keep. And whenever a question arises about a lie you have to lie again, so it is a series. The lie does not believe in birth control.

 

Truth is celibate, it has no children at all; it is unmarried in fact.

 

Once you have understood, only once, that God is nothing but a hypothesis created by the priests, the politicians, the power elite, the pedagogues -- all those who want to keep you in psychological slavery, who have some vested interest in your slavery.... They all want to keep you afraid, always afraid, trembling deep inside, because if you are not afraid, you are dangerous.

 

You can either be a person who is a coward, afraid, ready to submit, surrender, a person who has himself no dignity, no respect for his own being -- or you can be fearless. But then you are going to be a rebel, you cannot avoid that.

 

Either you can be a man of faith or you are going to be a rebellious spirit.

 

So those people who don't want you to be rebels -- because your being rebellious goes against their interests -- go on enforcing, conditioning your mind with Christianity, with Judaism, with Mohammedanism, with Hinduism, and they keep you trembling deep inside.

 

That is their power, so anybody who is interested in power, whose whole life is nothing but a will-to-power, has tremendous use for the hypothesis of God.

 

If you are afraid of God -- and if you believe in God you have to be afraid -- you have to follow His orders and commandments, His holy book, His messiah, His incarnation; you have to follow Him and His agents. In fact He does not exist, only the agent exists. This is a very strange business.

 

Religion is the most strange business of all. There is no boss, but there are mediators: the priest, the bishop, the cardinal, the pope, the messiah, the whole hierarchy -- and on top there is nobody.

 

But Jesus derives his authority and power from God -- His only begotten son. The pope derives his authority from Jesus -- His only true representative, infallible. And it goes on and on to the lowest priest... but there is no God; it is your fear

 

You asked for God to be invented because you could not live alone.

 

You were incapable of facing life, its beauties, its joys, its sufferings, its anguishes. You were not ready to experience them on your own without anybody protecting you, without somebody being an umbrella to you. You asked for God out of fear. And certainly there are con men everywhere. You ask and they will do it for you. You asked and they said, "We know God is, and you have just to do this prayer....“ [....]

 

if you have faith that does not prove that there is a God. But your faith can give you a certain integrity, a certain strength. But the faith has to be very innocent. They were not hiding any fear behind it. They had not gone to any church to learn the prayer, they had not asked anybody, "What is God? Where is God?" -- nothing. They were simply innocent people, and out of innocence was their faith.

 

That faith does not prove that God is; that faith simply proves that innocence is a power.

 

It is only a story, but innocence is a power. Yes, you can walk on water, but out of innocence; and out of innocence if there is faith.... But that very rarely happens, because every parent and every society destroys your innocence before you are even aware that you had it. They go on forcing some belief on you, and that belief you accept because of fear. In darkness the mother says, "Don't be afraid; God is there looking after you. He is everywhere present."

 

I have heard about a Catholic nun who used to take a shower with her clothes on inside the bathroom. Other nuns became a little worried: "Has she gone Oregonian or something?"

 

But the poor nun said, "It is because I have heard God is everywhere, so He must be in the bathroom too. And to be naked before God does not look right." This woman may look foolish but she has a certain innocence. And out of this innocence, if faith arises, then it doesn't matter in what the faith is.

 

Innocence gives power, but innocence is destroyed, and this is what I am trying to bring back to you, so that you become innocent again. And to become innocent again you will have to pass through these stages.

 

You will have to drop this idea of God which helps you to remain unafraid.

 

You will have to pass through fear and accept it as a human reality.

 

There is no need to escape from it. What is needed is to go deep into it, and the deeper you go into your fear, the less you will find it is.

 

When you have touched the rock bottom of fear you will simply laugh, there is nothing to fear.

 

And when fear disappears there is innocence, and that innocence is the summum bonum, the very essence of a religious man.

 

And that innocence is power.

 

That innocence is the only miracle there is.

 

Out of innocence anything can happen, but you will not be a Christian out of that, and you will not be a Mohammedan out of that. Out of innocence you will become simply an ordinary human being, totally accepting your ordinariness, and living it joyously, thankful to the whole existence -- not to God, because that is an idea given by others to you.

 

But existence is not an idea.

 

It is there all around you, within and without.

 

When you are utterly innocent, a deep thankfulness -- I will not call it prayer because in prayer you are asking for something, I will call it a deep thankfulness -- a gratitude arises. Not that you are asking for something, but thanking for something that has already been given to you.

 

So much has been given to you.

 

Do you deserve it? Have you earned it?

 

Existence goes on pouring so much over you that to ask for more is just ugly. That which you have received, you should be grateful for it.

 

And the most beautiful thing is that when you are grateful, more and more existence starts pouring over you. It becomes a circle: the more you get, the more you become grateful; the more you become grateful, the more you get... and there is no end to it, it is an infinite process.

 

But remember -- the hypothesis of God is gone; the moment you called it a hypothesis the idea of God has been already dropped. Whether you are afraid or not, you cannot take it back; it is finished.

 

Now the only way left is to go into your fear.

 

Silently enter into it, so you can find its depth.

 

And sometimes it happens that it is not very deep.

 

A Zen story is: a man walking in the night slipped from a rock. Afraid that he would fall down thousands of feet, because he knew that place was a very deep valley, he took hold of a branch that was hanging over the rock. In the night all he could see was a bottomless abyss. He shouted; his own shout was reflected back -- there was nobody to hear.

 

You can think of that man and his whole night of torture. Every moment there was death, his hands were becoming cold, he was losing his grip... and as the sun came out he looked down and he laughed: there was no abyss. Just six inches down there was a rock. He could have rested the whole night, slept well -- the rock was big enough -- but the whole night was a nightmare.

 

From my own experience I can say to you: the fear is not more than six inches deep. Now it is up to you whether you want to go on clinging to the branch and turn your life into a nightmare, or whether you would love to leave the branch and stand on your feet.

 

There is nothing to fear.

 

-Osho, "From Ignorance to Innocence, #16"