Osho – Bliss is equivalent to god. ‘God’ is a beautiful word but it has become ugly because of wrong associations. It has fallen into wrong company. The priests have exploited it so much that I appreciate very much Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that god is dead and man is free. In fact he is saying the god of the priests is dead because he only knew about the god of the priests. He had no idea about the god of the buddhas because the god of the Buddhas has nothing to do with any super-human person; it is a state of bliss. One need not believe in god at all.
Buddha himself never believed in any god, he was as atheistic as one can be, and yet there has never been such a holy man on earth as he was: so godless and so godlike. His godlikeness is superb, unique. Nobody even comes close to him.
Jesus is beautiful, Zarathustra is beautiful, Mahavira is beautiful, Lao Tzu is beautiful, Moses is beautiful, but Buddha has some tremendous beauty around him, some inexplicable grace, something very much of the beyond. And it became possible only because he never believed in the stupid idea of god. He went directly into the search, into the enquiry of the existence of bliss. And because he became blissful he became divine. He knew that god is, not as a person but as a quality.
It is as when the sun rises — the same quality. It is as when the cuckoo starts calling from the distance — the same quality. It is there in a rose flower. It is in the eyes of two lovers. It is there when a dancer loses himself in the dance, when the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. Once you have experienced it you will find it everywhere. You will stumble upon god from all sides. Wherever you will go you will encounter him. It is impossible then to avoid him.
Since I have known him I have not been able to avoid him for a single moment. Even if you are alone in your room he is inside you. He does not leave you alone: even if you go to the bathroom he is there’ Even if you are asleep in your bed he is sleeping with you. Once you have known, he is always there, in your very breathing, in your very heartbeat. But seek him through bliss, otherwise there is a danger of becoming just a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. And I want my sannyasins to be aware of all those pitfalls.
There is only one way to find truth and that is through bliss. A miserable person cannot find truth. He can theorise about truth, he can think about truth, he may create great systems of philosopher. But all those are just sandcastles or palaces made of playing cards: just a small breeze and the whole palace collapses. All great systems of philosophy have no foundations because the person who created them had no experience of truth. Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Vico, Feverbalh, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bertrand Russell — all these people have created beautiful theories, but they are all words; they are not sustained by any experience..
There have existed two rivers of consciousness: One is of the philosophers Aristotle in the West is the father of that, the originator. The other is of the mystics. That is a totally different kind of river. It has nothing to do with philosophising, it is rooted in existential experience. And it has almost always happened that whenever there was a great mystic his followers always became divided between these currents. The real ones, those who have understood the master, those who have really loved the master, became mystics. And those who have understood only the words of the master have become very knowledgeable; they became the philosophers.
Socrates was a mystic. Plato was his disciple but he lost track; he became a philosopher. Aristotle was Plato’s disciple. When Buddha died thirty-six systems of philosophy were born amongst his followers — thirty-six! Almost all kinds of possibilities are exhausted by those thirty-six systems. In fact there cannot be more than thirty-six systems. That is all the possible combinations, the whole world of philosophy exploded.
And the real people… Mahakashyapa, one of Buddha’s most authentic disciples, remained silent, he didn’t say anything. He started a totally different tradition, the tradition of the mystics. He transmitted his experience not through words, not through scriptures, but through a totally different kind of communion: the communion of the master and the disciple.
It is through Mahakashyapa that the tradition of Zen was born. He was the first, and very great mystics followed. But it is a totally different world: there is no argument about god, no argument about truth, no argument at all. mere, argumentation is not the way but meditation, not mind but meditation. These people became more and more silent. And as you become silent your inner source of blissfulness start exploding. It is the words and theories and the philosophies which function like rocks and don’t allow your springs of bliss to flow.
So from this very first moment remember it, that my way is the way of a mystic, not of a philosopher. I believe in bliss, not in theories about bliss. And I want you to taste it, not just to think about it. It is pointless to go on thinking about food — it won’t nourish you. It is stupid to go on thinking about water. Why? — when the river is flowing? You can drink and you can quench your thirst and you can swim in the river and you can become the river and go to the sea.
There are foolish people who are standing or sitting on the bank and thinking about water, theorising about water, finding what water consists of and dying of thirst’ So don’t be a thinker, don’t be a philosopher, be a mystic. My sannyasins have to be mystics, existential experiencers. It is a part of realisation.
Source – Osho Book “The Golden Wind”