What is God?
Birthday of Irish Novelist and Poet Samuel Beckett
13th of April is the birthday of Samuel Barclay Beckett. He was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known work is his 1953 play Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Company, Worstward Ho these are also some of his works.
Samuel Beckett was also depicted on an Irish commemorative coin celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Osho has mentioned Beckett’s most popular play waiting for Godot several times in his discourses. Osho says a rationalist will be more like Samuel Beckett — absurd. Samuel Beckett’s plays go on, move in absurdity, because the whole of life is absurd. There is no possibility of any coherence, meaning. All is mad. So somebody asks you about A and you talk about B; that too is okay because there is no way to know what is okay. There is no way to judge what is what. It is a chaos.
You ask me: if God is not a hypothesis, if God is not an idea, then what is God?
It is not a hypothesis because there is no way for science to discover God. Science does not move inwards, it moves outwards, and there you will find the world of things. If you want to know consciousness, that center is within. So God is not a hypothesis. God is not an idea because an idea is a philosophical concept, and philosophers only go on weaving thoughts, ideas, rationalizations — and they create great systems of thought….If you look into their systems of thought you will be immensely impressed. For example, Hegel or Kant… if you are not alert, you will be surprised at what a palatial system they have made — but there is no base. And it is not a palatial building either; if you come closer you will find it is made of playing cards. A little breeze and the whole palace falls down, because there is no base to it.
Philosophy is baseless. It makes castles in the air. Ideas are just ideas. You can project any idea you like, nobody can prevent you; and once you project the idea you can find all kinds of rationalizations to support it. There is no difficulty…God is not an idea, although philosophers have tried… because philosophers are trespassers; they simply don’t believe that any territory is not their territory. They will enter into every direction, into every dimension, and they have some idea for everything. A philosopher never says, “I don’t know.” He knows! And not only does he know, but he will give you all the arguments and proofs that his knowledge is valid. So how can they leave out such an important area like God?
They have discovered four arguments for God. Christians have accepted those four arguments, but none of those four arguments has any validity. They are all bogus.
The first argument I have talked to you about is that everything needs a creator; hence God is needed. Now it is clear that this is not an argument. Immediately the question is shifted back — who created God? And then there is no end to it. But this is thought to be the most important argument brought in by philosophers in support of God. It has been so easy for the atheists to laugh at these philosophers and these theologians: “What kind of arguments are these people giving?” But atheists have not been very different either.
One very famous atheist, Diderot, was speaking and he stood up and told the audience, “If God exists and you say He is all-powerful then let Him stop the clock, this very moment. I will wait one minute.” He waited one minute. The clock did not stop. He said, “Now you see He is not powerful. He cannot even stop the clock. He is not even courageous enough to accept my challenge.” But are these arguments? Some cunning person can manage to fix the clock so that at nine it will stop. And when it reaches nine, he stands up and says, “God, prove yourself If you are real let the clock stop within one minute; otherwise it will prove that you don’t exist.” And the clock stops; God is proved…. These are arguments? Neither the stopping of the clock nor the not stopping of the clock can make any substantial contribution to the proof of God. Hence I say God is not an idea.
You ask me: Then what is God?
It is simply a word, a meaningless word, hollow inside, with no substance in it.
Samuel Beckett has written his masterpiece, WAITING FOR GODOT, a very small piece of tremendous importance. Two persons are sitting under a tree. Both are hobos. One hobo says, “It is getting late and he has not come yet.”
The other says, “I also think that he must be coming.” They are waiting for Godot who has never said to them, “I will be coming.” Nobody knows who this Godot is. They have never met him, but just to pass time they have invented this idea of Godot, because those two hobos, what are they going to do the whole time? So they sit and they wait, and they argue, “I don’t think he is a man of his word.”
The other says, “No, I know perfectly well that if he has promised he will come. He may be a little late but he will come, don’t be worried.” This conversation continues, and then one becomes fed up and says, “I am going. It is enough. Now I cannot wait.”
The other says, “Then I am also coming with you; we will wait there together, wherever you go. Anyway what is the point? Do you think you will meet him there? We don’t know where he is.”
When I first came across this small booklet, I thought perhaps Godot is German for God — these Germans are just such crackpots that they can make anything out of anything — that they must have made God a Godot. But I enquired of Haridas. Haridas said, “No. In Germany we don’t call God Godot, we call him Gott.”
So I said, “I was not very far off: G-o-t-t, Gott.” I said, “You have come very close to Godot. It is perfectly okay. My guess was not absolutely wrong, I was on the right lines that it must be some German idea of turning God into Godot.”
But whether you call Him God or Gott or Godot, it doesn’t matter because the word means nothing — so you can call Him anything. It is simply a word without any meaning at all, so you can play with it. And in fact that’s what Samuel Beckett was doing. He means God. He doesn’t say so, but it is a clear-cut indication — waiting for God; but then it would have lost some beauty. When he makes it waiting for Godot, you know who Godot is yet you cannot say that you are speaking against God. Nobody has seen Him. Nobody has met Him. Nobody has heard Him. Still everybody is waiting for Him… that now He must be coming, that it is time, He should be here.
What are the Jews doing? Waiting, waiting. And they were angry when Jesus said, “I have come.” He was disturbing their waiting. Just think if you had gone to those two hobos and you had said, “Okay, I have come…. They would have both killed you — “You think you are Godot? Do you know who Godot is? Are you trying to deceive us?” They would have loved…. Even if Godot himself had come, they would not have believed that he was Godot — because how he can prove that he is Godot? They don’t have any photograph. They don’t have any address, a phone number. How can they recognize him? They have not seen him before.
That’s one thing which should be clearly understood. When Moses sees God, nobody asks him, “How did you recognize Him? — because you have not seen Him before.” Recognition needs you to have seen Him before; otherwise some charlatan or somebody may be deceiving you. “How, on what grounds…?” When Jesus hears voices of God, or Mohammed hears them, how do they recognize that those voices are God’s? Have they heard Him before? Their recognition is not valid. They may have heard some voices, many mad people hear them. They may have seen somebody, many mad people see somebody. You can go into any madhouse and you will see a madman alone talking to another who is not there, and not only talking, but answering also from his side.
There is a game of cards that one man can play. In trains, once in a while, I came across a person… because I would not speak in the trains. That was my only time to be silent, otherwise in the cities with five meetings a day…. So only between two cities, on the train, was the time when I would be silent and rest. But I saw people playing cards, alone. I was puzzled: this was a great religious game! They had a partner, and for that partner’s side they also played; they knew both sides and they knew both hands of cards.
Those two hobos were not doing anything new. All these religions for centuries have been doing just that, waiting for Godot, because waiting at least keeps you hoping that tomorrow… if not today, then tomorrow — but it is going to happen. And when so many people are waiting, somebody must know, somebody must have heard, somebody must have seen — he must have spoken to somebody! And then there are people who say, “He has spoken to me.”
I used to receive… and even now, but I don’t see the letters because I stopped looking at all this rubbish, I used to receive letters — and still they come but Sheela simply reports to me: “Fifteen or twenty letters of this type have come, saying that they have seen God and they want to meet You so that You can see whether their realization is true or not.”
“They have seen God,” I said, “they should have asked Him. Why should they bother me? I am absolutely unconcerned with you and your God; why should you bother me? If you have seen God then what is the suspicion? Why should you need a certificate from me?”
Just pure hallucinations, imagination, continual listening to idiotic sermons… millions of people waiting with great expectation — the imagination fires up: just a little effort and you will see God. But remember, whatever you see is not you. Whatever you see is some object. And religion’s basic concern is not objective. Its basic concern is your subjectivity. When all seeing disappears, all hearing disappears, and all thinking disappears… when all your senses are silent, in that silence it transpires.
Source:
Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.
Darshan Diary: From Ignorance to Innocence Chapter #17
Chapter title: Jesus, the only forgotten son of god
16 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove
References:
Osho has spoken on eminent poets and writers like Byron, Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Ghalib, Heinrich Heine, John Ruskin, Kahlil Gibran, Kalidas, Keats, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Milton, Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Rumi, Rudyard Kipling, Shakespeare, Shelley, William Blake, Wordsworth and many more in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:
- The Book of Wisdom
- The Sword and The Lotus
- Returning to the Source
- Light on the Path
- The Secret
- The Hidden Splendour
- The New Dawn
- Beyond Enlightenment
- Come Follow To You, Vol 1
- Beyond Enlightenment
