Osho,
Alan Watts once described the universe by saying, “It is as if God is playing a game.” If there is no God, who is playing and what is the game?

“Alan Watts was a nice guy but that statement he made was stolen from Hindu mythology. That’s what he was doing his whole life, although to the West it appeared as if he was giving original insights.

“Basically he was trained as a Christian priest and, like every Christian priest, acquired a certain knowledge about all the religions so that he could prove Christianity to be the best, the highest, the truest religion.

“But Alan Watts – that’s why I say he was a nice guy – seeing the Hindu religion could not say that the Christian religion was the highest religion that had happened on earth. He was an honest man.

“He renounced his priesthood and remained almost a beggar his whole life. But he was tremendously impressed by Eastern religions – emphatically with the Hindu idea of God playing a game. In Hinduism it is called leela. That is one of the contributions of Hinduism to world thought.

“All other religions believe that God is creating the world; it is a serious affair. Only Hinduism makes it non-serious. Hinduism says it is just a play, a game of hide-and-seek. It is God who is hiding, it is God who is seeking; it is God in men, it is God in women. To Hinduism, existence is made of the stuff called God, and it is not a creation. The concept of creation has implications which Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism are incapable of answering.

First: why in the first place should God create? What is his need? One creates something because of a certain need.

“You create a house because you need a shelter. You create because there is a certain desire to be fulfilled. Is God full of desires? Then what is the difference between man and God? Is God in need? If even God is in need then there is no possibility of a state where you will be free of need: need is going to follow you like a shadow wherever you go, and you can never be free from it – and unless you are free from need, desire, wanting, you are a slave, and you will remain a slave.

A God who has a certain need to create is a slave.

“The implications are very significant. Was it compulsory for him to create, or was it optional? If it was compulsory, then God is not all-powerful. Somebody above him orders him to create, and there is no option, He has to do it. Or if you say it was optional, then the question arises, why does He choose to create rather than not to create? There must be some reason for choosing to.

“What reason can God have to choose creation? Then that reason becomes more important than God himself. If even God has to follow rationality, then why should you have to bother about God? You should think about being reasonable, following reason, which even God cannot throw away.

“Why did God create at a certain moment, at a certain time? What was he doing before that? For eternity he was unemployed.

What was that fellow doing all that time? Sleeping? In a coma? Drunk, or what?

“And suddenly one day he starts creating. There is no reason that Christian theology, Mohammedan religion, or Judaism can supply as to why, at a certain moment, there was this urge to create. In fact the urge to create is something biological, sexual. Sexual energy is your creative energy….

“Why does God have to create? Either God is not he but she….

Then God is a woman, and this whole universe is her womb. But then you are bringing God down to the same level of biology as man, as animals, as anybody else….

“Or, God is a man but feels somehow inferior to some woman about whom we don’t know anything. With which woman is he feeling competitive? There must be a woman in his life, and he feels incompetent, inferior. By creating this whole universe he wants to prove to the woman, ‘Look, this is creation.’ But then God is no longer God: he is just as human, as animal as we are. ‘Creation’ is indefensible.

“And what kind of creation has he made? If he is serious – and creation has to be serious – then this life with so much misery, so much suffering, which finally ends in death and darkness, has no meaning at all.

If he wanted to create, there was no need to create such a miserable existence, full of anguish, suffering, agony: an existence which is more a curse than a blessing.

“One of Dostoevsky’s characters in his greatest work, The Brothers Karamazov is perhaps the greatest novel in the whole world, in any language. One of the Karamazovs – there are three brothers – one of them says, ‘If I meet God, all that I want is to return my ticket and for him to tell me where the exit is. Everywhere I see the entrance, but where is the exit? And who is he, that without asking me, produced me, created me? On what authority? I was not even asked whether I want to be created; I was not given any alternative.’

“This is totalitarian, absolutely dictatorial. God seems to be some magnified Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. You were not asked, and yet you have to suffer. You were not asked, and you have been given instincts for which you will suffer here and perhaps hereafter.

The same theologians, the same priests, go on telling you to destroy your instinctive life completely. God gives instincts to you: he is responsible.

“If anybody has to suffer in hell it is only he alone; nobody else is responsible for anything.

“A murderer comes with the instinct to murder. A rapist comes with the instinct to rape. Who is responsible for all this? Yet these religions go on telling you that you are responsible. God is the creator and you are responsible? – and you were not even asked, What instincts do you want?

“If you had chosen to be a rapist, a murderer, then of course it would be your responsibility and you would have to suffer the consequences. But you simply come with an inbuilt program, so whoever programs you, only he and nobody else is responsible.

“Alan Watts understood very clearly that he could not answer this question which has been raised in the East again and again. Hinduism has found an answer; at least it appears to be an answer. Certainly it is better than the idea of creation, but it has its own problems – which Alan Watts was not aware of because he was not well trained in the Eastern roots of religion. It appealed to him – the idea of leela, play, seemed to be far better. Life is nothing serious; it is just a game, a play, a drama.

In a drama you may become a thief; that does not mean that you have become a thief – you just play the role.

“In a drama you may become an incarnation of God, Rama, Krishna; that does not mean that you have become an incarnation of God, but on the stage before the audience it is accepted without any question. Questioning it would be absolutely foolish: everybody knows that everybody is playing a role.

“Hinduism says that this whole existence is just a drama and God is just playing a game. The word leela, playfulness, takes away seriousness and its implications. But it brings in new implications: Why can’t God sit silently? – because the people who teach that God is playing a game also teach, ‘sit silently in meditation.’

Why can’t he sit silently in meditation and stop all this nonsense?

“But Alan Watts could not ask that question; it may not have occurred to him, but it can occur to me: What is the point of all this nonsense? All Hindu sages are teaching: sit silently, unmoving, without any thought, utterly silent, then only will you taste what religion is. It seems God has never tasted religion – he is continuously playing.

“At least in creation there was one thing; that is, in six days he was finished.

On the seventh day, Sunday, he rested, and we don’t know what happened after that.

“But the Hindu God has to be constantly playing. Now, there is a time to play and there is a time to study – or so each child is being told – and there is a time to sleep.

“But this mad Hindu God… no time to sleep, no time to study, no time for anything else: just playing and playing and playing. He seems to be obsessed. And what a big play! – infinite, eternal. And why should he go on playing? Is he not tired? And the same game….

“What is God’s difficulty? Why does the same game go on and on? And is he still entertained? He must be an idiot. If this is entertainment, even an idiot will start feeling bored: the same type of people continue being born, the same love affairs, the same children, again and again – and the wheel goes on moving. The same spokes come up and go down; again they come up and again they go down. It is the same wheel, the same spokes.

I am not worried about the wheel, I am worried about the man who goes on moving it – for what purpose?

“Of course you cannot ask Hindus about the purpose as you can the Christians – not with the same emphasis, because it is a play. But I still ask: play is okay, if once in a while he plays, it is understandable, but this continuous play, this repetitive play…?

It seems that we are in the hands of a mad God.

“And then these same Hindu sages go on saying that you will suffer the consequences of your acts. Strange: God is playful and yet we are going to suffer for our acts – which are God’s play! If he wants me to play the role of a thief, okay, but why should I suffer the consequences? The same people on the other hand say, ‘It is God’s playfulness.’ Great! Accepted – but what about the players? They should be completely freed from any consequences – it is God’s play. You play cards: you get defeated, or you become victorious– you win, or you lose – but do you think something happens to the king and the queen and the joker of the cards? Whoever wins or whoever loses does not matter to them at all; they are just playing cards.

We are just kings, queens, and jokers – mostly jokers. Why should we suffer?

“In Hinduism there cannot be these two things together. That was my constant conflict with Hindu sages, shankaracharyas, Hindu pandits: if existence is out of playfulness then it is too much to say that we should be thrown into hellfire. If it is somebody else’s play and He is never thrown into hellfire, why should we be? Both these concepts put together are absolutely opposed to each other. There is no way to make them complementary. I have tried my best – they cannot be made complementary.

If it is God’s play, all the consequences are his: We are just puppets in His hand.

“Then the law of karma is simply crap. With a playful God, what is the meaning of worship? – you can’t be serious….

“If God himself is playful, you have to be playful….

“On the one hand God is playful, but Hindus don’t allow man to be playful. With whom is he playing? If he is playing he will need another party also to be playful; or is he playing football alone, taking both sides? Then he must have scored millions of goals… and there is no problem because he is alone on the field. But then it seems stupid.

No, to me there is no God.

I cut the problem from the very root so there is no question of creation and no question of playfulness.

“Alan Watts has simply borrowed the idea from Hinduism. He shocked Christians, but to me it is nothing: it is just another kind of theology. To him it was new and very revealing, but to me nothing is very revealing: I know all the theologies. They may give different explanations but basically the same questions are relevant to all explanations. If you ask why God created the world, you can ask why does he need to play? Can’t he relax? Just take a hot bath and relax? And just for his play, so many people are suffering. Is this God’s playfulness? – Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers…. Must be, because Hindus say, ‘Without his will not even a leaf can move.’

So how can Adolf Hitler put millions of Jews in gas chambers? Not without His support… perhaps his playfulness.

“But now playfulness becomes more serious than creation….

“Just now in Bhopal a gas plant exploded. Is this God’s play? Three thousand people immediately died; and it was not an easy death. I have just seen a film on it – it was terrible. Those people were just like fish thrown onto hot sand. They could not rest: the gas was making them writhe about, churning something inside them. They died the most terrible death you can conceive; and one hundred thousand people are still waiting to die in the hospitals.

Is this God’s play? No. If this is play then what can crime be? What can sin be?

“I reject God completely because God is simply a problem which idiots have invented thinking that He will solve all your problems. God has become the only problem which cannot be solved. Whatsoever you do with him, he remains a question mark – unnecessarily.

I simply want to cut the very root: There is no God. There is no creation. There is no play going on.

“Existence is enough unto itself; it does not need any outside agency. It has its own energy, it has its own intelligence, it has its own life. Existence needs no hypothetical God. And God doesn’t help anything. Remember one fundamental principle of all sane thinking: Don’t bring in a hypothesis which doesn’t help to solve anything. On the contrary, because of the hypothesis a thousand other problems start arising. A hypothesis is brought in to solve problems, not to increase them.

God is the most useless hypothesis ever propounded by man.

“Because of him there has been so much trouble, so many crusades, so many butcherings, so many people slaughtered, so many women raped – in the name of God. Please just flush him down the toilet. Forget about God.

Existence is enough unto itself. That’s what I teach. And then we cannot throw the responsibility on anybody’s head: there is no God, then the whole responsibility falls on us.

“That is my hidden desire.

“Why am I throwing God down the toilet? Because I want man to understand that he is responsible. Because man has the highest consciousness in the whole of existence, you should accept the greatest responsibility. Stars, trees, animals, birds are far below you; you cannot throw the responsibility on them.

To be conscious means you are mature enough now to accept all responsibility for yourself and for the existence that surrounds you.”

END

Excerpted and abridged from:

Osho, From Personality to Individuality, Talk #11 – God: The Phantom Fuehrer

To download the audio book of this complete talk, click here.