Where should I look to find God?

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.

Osho, where is God? If we are to seek, where should we seek?

Is it a boat or the moon’s shadow upon the ocean’s waters? When will that boat of light touch the shore of night? Is that untouched lunar shade a frolicsome ripple, A fleeting kiss of light on parched, impatient lips? Dream, or ideal, or resolve—call it what you will— A jewel of a ray, a blossom on the body of dusk! Beyond the reach of clay—are all things false there? Are eyes, fixed on limits, chained to the horizon’s bar? How can literate eyes read what the heart hums within— What fragrance once inscribed as verse upon the gentle breeze! Let the unreachable become reachable—this is the abyss’s longing; Made vocal, written upon the deep heart of the ocean! What is that song of the Unseen the moon keeps writing— Boundless love on the boundless grief of the bounded! The quarters beat the drum, the sky is sound, Time sings,…

Osho, God does not appear to me anywhere. What should I do?

Anand! Open your eyes. You are trying to see with your eyes shut, trying to hear with your ears closed, with the doors of the heart barred—then it is impossible to see God. When the eye is open, there is light. The very opening of the eye is light. Keep the eye closed and even if not one but a thousand suns were to rise, there will still be darkness, a moonless night. But this is not only your mistake; it is almost everyone’s. When God does not appear, people conclude: perhaps there is no God—hence He is not seen. Rarely does someone wonder: perhaps my eyes are closed—hence I do not see. Those rare ones, sooner or later, become able to see the Divine. So the first and the last sutra is this: drop the search for God; learn the alchemy of opening your eyes. Eyes open in two…

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,…

Question: A friend has asked: Osho, where is God? Do not ask this. First, find yourself. And I tell you, the one who finds himself never again asks, “Where is God?” Because wherever the self is found, there God is found as well. I have heard a story. I have heard that when the earth was made, everything was created, man was created—and the moment man was made, God became worried. He asked the gods, “I am in great trouble. I have created man, but he will stand at my door every day with a thousand questions. I want to avoid this. Tell me a place where I can hide and this man cannot reach me.” The gods said, “Go hide on Everest.” God said, “You don’t know—very soon a Hillary will be born, a Tenzing will be born; they will climb Everest.