Osho on Experience of God, Experiences and Drugs

Osho – Veet means beyond, anubhavo means experience. God is beyond all experience. You cannot experience God because he is not separate from you. You can live God, you can be God, but you cannot experience him. We can experience things only when they are separate from us. You cannot see yourself, and God is your innermost core — you cannot see God either.

So people who search for God as if God is an object are on a wrong journey from the very beginning. They will be frustrated, and out of frustration they can start creating hallucinations too. Because when one has worked for thirty years and meditated and prayed and has gone to the monasteries and remained celibate and has wasted one’s whole life and sees frustration, then the mind starts giving consolation prizes: the mind gives you hallucinatory experiences.

If you are a Hindu you see Krishna standing before you, and that is just an hallucination. If you are a Christian you see Christ. The Christian never sees Krishna, the Hindu never sees Christ; the Mohammedan is blissfully unaware of both. You see only that which you are projecting. Because down the ages God has been thought of as a person, hallucinations become possible. Because he was thought of as something that can be experienced, people went on wrong journeys and wasted their lives.

God cannot be experienced, cannot be searched for, cannot be seen, because you are it. You are already it, so what is needed is not search; all that is needed is to start celebrating. You are God! There is no need to postpone your celebration even for a single moment, because in the next moment also you will be God, as much as you are right now. Yesterday also you were as much a God as you are right now or will ever be. You are the same God always. Just a little daring is needed to celebrate it, a little daring to accept this tremendous truth of “I am God!”

It is very difficult because the so-called saints have been teaching you that you are a sinner, that you are unworthy, that you will be thrown into hellfire — that’s where you belong. How can you suddenly believe that you are a God? It seems outrageous, outlandish, but it is the truth, and truth is always outlandish. Lies are conventional, truth is always outlandish. People live in lies, they accept lies because lies are very consolatory. Truth is very shattering.

To recognize yourself as God does not mean that you are God and others are not God. To recognize yourself as God means that everything is divine, even your enemy. Not only is Jesus God but Judas too! That is very shattering… that is very difficult. Not only is the beautiful person God, but the ugliest, he too is God because nothing else exists. God is synonymous with existence.

So never search for experiences. All experiences are false and of the mind. It makes no difference whether you go into an experience through a drug or through yoga — it makes no difference, basically there is no difference. One can get high through LSD, marijuana, or, if one is conventional, through alcohol; one can get high through certain postures, through certain breathing exercises, standing on one’s head. These are also ways to change your inner chemistry, subtle ways to change your chemistry.

LSD does it in a gross way, yoga does it in a subtle way, but both are changing your body chemistry. Fasting also does it in a subtle way: it changes your chemistry, certainly, because you stop taking food which was always needed. Your chemistry inside has to change; it has to adjust to your non-taking of food.

A few elements disappear, a few elements gather too much; the old balance is lost. After a thirty-day fast you can be as high, as stoned, as on any drug. These are conventional drugs but the search is the same. The person who is in drugs is searching for experiences and the person in yoga is also searching for experiences.

My approach is that we are not searching for experiences here. We are trying to know the one who experiences all experiences. Our search is for the witness. Who is this observer? Who is this consciousness? Sometimes it feels sad, sometimes it feels happy; sometimes it is so high, flying in the sky, and sometimes so down. Who is this watcher of all these games? — high and low, happy, unhappy, in heaven and hell. Who is this watcher?

To know this watcher is to know God. And you are already it — just a little awakening is needed… no search but only awakening.

Source – Osho Book “God’s Got a Thing About You”