According to Osho, there are few seekers of God because people have not completed their exploration of the world; until personal experience proves its futility, the divine quest cannot begin. Priests pluck people unripe, peddling fraudulent renunciation and spiritual greed. Real seeking arises only after inner ripening through lived experience and transformation, not borrowed beliefs or outer changes.
People rarely seek God because they haven’t fully tasted life and found it empty for themselves, so fake, reward-seeking religion replaces genuine inner change.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, why are there so many confusions in philosophy?
There is no confusion in darshan; in shastra there will be confusion. Shastra itself means confusion. Shastra means: doctrines, arguments, words. Darshan is simple and direct. Darshan means vision—the capacity to see—the eye. When the eye is empty, void of ego, free of thought, when the mind does not interfere, what happens then is darshan. To see what is, just as it is—that is darshan. Remember the difference between darshan and darshan-shastra. Darshan-shastra is not darshan; darshan-shastra is speculation, intellectual tussle. Darshan is vision, experience. In philosophy there will be entanglement. In philosophy a single question will carry a thousand questions, and from each answer a thousand more will arise. And in philosophy no question ever gets resolved. In five thousand years of history, philosophers have not solved a single question. For five thousand years they have asked many questions, but not given a single answer. They cannot. A philosopher…
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, 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…
Osho, with birth there is hunger, sleep, thirst—but not the thirst for God!
A religion-opposed, benumbed society That thirst, that hunger, is within all of us from birth, yet it does not awaken. There are many reasons. The biggest reason is simply this: the vast crowd around us has no such thirst. And if it arises in someone, he suppresses it, because it feels like madness. Where everyone around is consumed by the thirst for wealth and fame, the thirst for religion looks like insanity. Those around become suspicious: “Has he gone off his head?” The person presses it down. It cannot rise, it cannot wake; suppression comes from all sides. And the world we have made leaves no place for God—for, as I said, it is dangerous to leave room for God; we have left no room for him. A wife fears that God might enter her husband’s life—for with God’s arrival the wife may be eclipsed. The husband fears God might…