A God in the sky is a false God. Not that the sky is without God, no; the sky is as full of God as the earth. But the first understanding of God is going to be rooted in the earth. The first understanding has to be of the roots, and out of those roots your understanding will grow and spread to the farther corners of existence. But the journey starts at home. It starts deep within you. The first glimpse of God has to be in the innermost shrine of your heart.
If you have not seen Him there, you can go on talking about Him, but you will not ever be able to see Him anywhere. The first encounter has to happen within you. Once it happens, you will be surprised that you start seeing God everywhere. Once you have seen Him within your heart, how can you miss Him. — because everywhere the heart is throbbing with Him.
The tree is full of Him and the rock also, and the river and the ocean, and the animals and the birds, everywhere. Once you have felt His pulse, once you have felt Him circulating in your own blood, once you have had an experience in your own marrow, then everywhere, wherever you look you will find Him. But, it cannot happen otherwise.
If you are empty of His experience, you can go to the farthest corner of the world; your travelling will be in vain. You will never reach His temple because you missed the very root of it. You missed Him at home. If your own house does not become His temple, then no temple can be His abode. If your own house has become His temple, then all houses are His abode.
When the Bauls say that one has to be very earth oriented, they don't mean that the sky is empty of God. But they say, "If the earth is not full, then the sky is absolutely empty. If even the earth is not full, how can the sky be full of Him? If He is not here, how can He be there? If He is not this, how can He be that? If He is not today, how can He be tomorrow? If He is not in this life, how can He be in the next?" Their logic is simple and irrefutable.
But man has created a God in the skies. Why? This God is not a real God, it is a substitute — because you are missing Him here, and you are missing Him so tremendously that you have to put Him somewhere or other. Otherwise you will feel very alone. You will feel so lonely that you will miss the meaning of life. And it is good to put Him very far away, because then there is no hurry.
The journey is so far that you cannot complete it today. Even this life is not enough, so enough space to postpone, enough space to say, "Yes, one day I will do," enough space to pretend that you are interested in Him and continuing to be of the world, and going on talking at the same time about God. This is the double-talk, the double-bind of ordinary humanity.
People talk about God and live according to the devil. They go to the temple but they never reach. They read the Bible, they read the Koran, but they never listen. These are pretensions, only on the surface. This is how the hypocritical humanity is born — a false, pseudo-humanity.
Man feels very alone without God, and to find the real God is arduous. It is very easy to create a pseudo-God which looks like God, which appears like God. It at least gives consolation that you are not alone. Have you watched your concept of God? Has it arisen out of the experience of your own being, or has it arisen out of your experience of your loneliness?
This is the criterion: if you believe in God because you feel lonely, your God is going to be false; if you believe in God because you have experienced Him in your aloneness, if it has come out of your own being, then the God is real. Then let Nietzsche declare that God is dead; your God can never be dead. Your God is alive in you. How can Nietzsche declare that God is dead? But he could declare, and not only declare; his declaration became a prophecy.
The God that exists in the temples is not a real God. That God that exists in the sky is your projection; the real God is within you. That which you are seeking is not somewhere else, it is in your very seeking. It is in the very seeker — the sought is in the seeker. You are the truth, alive, in flesh. God is reborn in you, God is incarnated in you, God has taken a body in you. Where are you seeking, where are you going? The Bauls say, "Wait, listen, go within."
OSHO
FROM : …..