What is the search for God?

Osho, what is the definition of God?

Words are very small. If you say God is light, then what of darkness? The scriptures have said that God is light. Suppose we accept this as a definition—then what about darkness? Where will darkness go? Darkness is too; in fact it is far more than light. Light sometimes is and sometimes is not; darkness is always, eternal. Where will you place darkness? If you say God is light, darkness is left out. If you say God is darkness, then light is left out. If you say God is both darkness and light, a contradiction arises: they cannot be together. Try to have both darkness and light in the same room. If you bring in light, darkness disappears; if you preserve darkness, you cannot have light. Then how can both be together? That becomes an impossibility. So you cannot say “both” either. Then the fourth device is to say: it…

Question: The first question: Osho, I want to find God. Where should I look? Vidyadhar! The very idea of searching for God is wrong. Seek yourself, and you will find God. Seek yourself, and God will seek you. If you do not seek yourself, you can bang your head a thousand times in the hunt for God—you may find many things, but God you will not find. One who does not know himself is not qualified to know God; he has no worthiness. First become worthy. Self-ignorance is the greatest unworthiness. It is the only sin. All other sins are shadows of that supreme sin. And people fight all those other sins—fight anger, fight lust, fight greed, fight hatred, fight pride and jealousy—and they forget one thing: inside there is darkness. Snakes and scorpions breed in that darkness. What is needed within is light, illumination, self-knowing.

A friend has asked: Osho, if creation and the creator are one, and if we ourselves are God, then isn’t the very idea of attaining or seeking God incongruous?

Certainly it is incongruous. There is no greater mistake than someone setting out to search for God. You can only search for what you have lost. What you have never lost, there is no way to search for it. But the search is incongruous only when it has become clear that “I am God”; before that, it is not incongruous. Before that, you will have to search. The search will not give you God; through seeking you will only discover that what you are looking for is nowhere out there—it is where the seeker is. It is the futility of seeking that brings you to God, not the success of seeking. This may be a little difficult to understand, but try to understand it. Here the seeker is the very one who is being sought. What you are looking for is hidden within. Therefore, so long as you keep seeking,…

Beloved Osho, is it really true that god is also searching for me? Can I wait for him to find me?

Have you ever heard in any religion, in any country, a story that God expelled a few trees out of the garden of Eden? Or a few animals, or a few birds? It is only man who is expelled. The story is significant. It simply means that the whole of existence is rooted in God. Only because man has a thinking mind, he has wandered far away. Mind is capable of wandering anywhere -- you can be sitting here and your mind may be wandering somewhere in America or somewhere in Germany, or somewhere in Japan, or maybe on the moon.... There are all kinds of lunatics. It is very rarely that you are here, very rare to be in the place where you are. Your mind is always wandering somewhere else. It is never here, it is never now. This wandering mind has taken you away from your own…

Osho, what is the fundamental anguish of human life?

There is only one anguish: that a human being cannot become what he was born to be. There is only one anguish: that the seed remains a seed and does not bloom like a flower; that it cannot scatter its fragrance to the infinite winds; cannot converse with the moon and stars; cannot offer its colors to the sky; cannot be expressed. If the poem within the poet cannot be revealed—anguish. If the painter cannot paint—anguish. If the dancer cannot dance—if chains lie on his feet—anguish. Anguish means only this: that what we are meant to be—our innate nature and destiny—does not come to fruition, and we are forced to be something else. Then anguish is born. Then melancholy gathers over life. And all those countless people you see burdened with sorrow, living in a kind of hell—the reason is only this: each has come carrying the seed of becoming…