Discover the Making of Osho: Wild Childhood Behind the Mystic

In fact, when they first conceived the idea, they counted exactly as many gods as there were Indians—at that time I mean. At that time too they were not a small population; thirty-three crores, that means three hundred and thirty million, or it may not be so. But it will give you some idea of the Hindus. They believed that each single individual had to have a god of his own. They were not dictatorial, very democratic, in fact too much so.

I mean the previous Hindus. Thousands of years have passed since they conceived the idea of a parallel divine world, with as many beings as there were on earth. And they did a great job. Even to count three hundred and thirty million gods—and you don’t know the Hindu gods! They are everything that a human being can be: very cunning, mean, political, in every way exploitative. But somehow, somebody at least managed to have a census.

Hindus are not theistic in the Western sense. They are pagans; but they are not pagans as Christians want to use the word. Pagan is a valuable word, it should not be allowed to be misused by the Christians, Jews and Mohammedans. These three religions are all basically Jewish; whatsoever they say, their foundations were laid down long before Jesus was born, and Mohammed was heard of.

They are all Judaic. Of course the God you have heard about is a Jew, he cannot be otherwise. That’s where the secret lies. If he were a Hindu, he himself would have fallen into three hundred and thirty million pieces, what to say of creating a world? Even if there was already a world, these three hundred and thirty million gods would have been enough to destroy it.

The Hindu God—no such word can be used because there are only gods in Hinduism, not a God—is not a creator. He himself is part of the universe. By ‘he,’ I mean the three hundred and thirty-three million gods. I have to use your word, he, but Hindus always use ‘that.’ ‘That’ is a big umbrella, you can hide as many gods under it as you want. Even the unwanted ones can have a little space at the back.

It is almost like a circus tent—vast, big and capable of having every kind of god that can be imagined. The Jew God really did a great job. Of course he was a good Jew, and he created the world in only six days.

This whole mess is what Albert Einstein, another Jew, calls ‘the expanding universe.’ It is expanding every second, becoming bigger and bigger, like a pregnant woman’s belly, and of course faster than that. It is expanding at the same speed as light, and that is the greatest speed yet conceived. Perhaps someday we may discover speedier things, but right now it still remains the highest as far as speed is concerned.

The world is expanding with the speed of light, and it has been expanding forever. There is no beginning and no end, at least in the scientific approach. But the Christians say it not only began, but was finished within six days. And of course Jews are there and they are branches of the same nonsense. Perhaps just one idiot created the possibility for both religions.

Don’t ask me his name; idiots, particularly perfect ones, don’t have names, so nobody knows who created the idea of creating the world in six days. At the most it is just worth laughing at. But listen to a Christian priest or a rabbi, and see the seriousness with which they are talking about the genesis, the very beginning.

I was wondering only because I cannot even finish my story in six days. I’m only on the second day, and that too because I have left so much unsaid, thinking that it is not important. But who knows?—it may be. But if I start saying everything without choosing, then what about poor Devageet? I can see that he will have so many notebooks he will go crazy looking at them.

It will be as if he is standing by the side of the Empire State Building in New York, looking at his own notebooks and thinking, ‘Now who is going to read them?’ And then I think of Devaraj who has to edit them. Whether anybody reads them or not, at least you will have one reader, that is Devaraj. Another, that is Ashu; she has to type them.

In the story of God’s creation, there is no editor, no typist. He just created it in six days, and was so finished that nothing has been heard of him since then. What happened to him? Some think he has gone to Florida, where every retired person goes. Some think he is enjoying himself at Miami Beach—but this is all guesswork.

God does not exist at all. That’s why existence is possible, otherwise he would have poked his nose in—and a Jewish nose is meant for that. Rather than thinking of God, it is better to forget him, and forgive him also; it is time. It may sound a little strange, to forget and forgive God, but only then do you begin.

His death is your birth.

Excerpt from the book The Glimpses of a Golden Childhood by OSho

Penguin Random House